Mick comes out of the house, smiling and bouncing as if life simply couldn’t be better. Maybe I should think more kindly of him. Perhaps he really is here to look out for me. Others would think I’m in need of it. He is in jeans and joggers, and a shirt without a collar. He obviously doesn’t think we’re going to Ascot. And we’re not. There will be men there in ties, and some even in coats, alongside dudes in shorts and thongs.

My father was a punter, in a very coat-and-tie way. In fact, he did everything in a sports-coat-and-wool-tie manner. My family has always had horses: stock horses, polo ponies, and even a couple of draught horses. It was an accepted matter of status that the Martin family always had several top-quality racehorses. The ‘old’ families always did. My grandfather had paddocks of them, and employed a man whose only job was looking after them.

For Dad, the best thing you could possibly do was to go to the races at one of the big-name city tracks and watch your own horses run. In my memory, Mum never went with him. She told me she used to go when they were young, but after a while she got bored by it. My father never did. He liked to play polo, but he loved everything about the races: the horseflesh, the bloodlines, the people, the punting, the drinks. It was the time when he was the most relaxed and happy. At the races he was always that man on our verandah: the man he wanted to be.

I never liked him. Not for any particular reason. I just didn’t. He wasn’t a hard man, not for his time anyway, but he wasn’t a man to share what he felt. He believed in enduring. Expressing emotion except through laughter was for the weak and the feminine. If you fell or failed or fucked up, you laughed it off. I cannot remember a time when he put his arms around me, but he must have when I was little. I don’t suppose any country men hugged their sons in those days. I wouldn’t have known what to do if he had.