The Watcher on the Cast - Iron Balcony - an Australian Autobiography

by Hal Porter

  ‘Stick one up! Stick one down!

  Stick one in the dead man’s ground!’

  The pencil pecks down softly and bluntly on the slate. My eyes, pretending merely to open, exaggeratedly strain wide open. When Mother adds the figures thus picked out, I win. I always do. I am aware she does not care a rap about winning. Nor, really, do I, but, since I think it will be cruel to her as well as giving myself away to tell her that I know she lets me win, I let her let me win. The fire crumbling apart like incandescent cake, the kettle on the hob droning itself to silence, the lamp exhaling itself and an era towards extinction, I feel, in memory, that Mother’s face is never more peaceful. But it is unseen, unrecallable, alas, unrecallable. To be not able to recall that face of peace, at that moment, and yet to recall her face in death and not at peace, is an invitation to regret I dare not accept. Better far to regard the moments of lamp-lit peace as an accidentally charming illustration of mother-and-child indicative of nothing except nothing better to do, and displaying nothing except that mothers cannot help enacting motherhood nor sons sonliness.

  Mother is, however, generally too vital and noisy, too young and on the go, to participate often in such scenes of family quietude. She is constantly singing. Years after, heart and head deep in children, her vivacity tampered with, she can still sing. Even on her deathbed she sings.

  Her singing is, as often as possible, a comment on the situation of the moment. She chooses a song of which the words, in reference to the situation, have a touch of mockery, of sardonicism, even of sly larrikinism.

  For example, the red-and-white ice-cream cart, and its horse wearing a palm-leaf hat from which dangles a fly-veil, and the velvet-trousered Italian with his little brass bell, are still in sight and hearing, two or three doors away, when Mother begins to sing, with a clarity and vigour implying a larky motive:

  ‘Oh, oh, Antonio, he’s gone away,

  Left me alone-io, all on my own-io. . . .’

  With her O-Cedar mop flourishing in a burlesque of housewifery—I can now understand that she is imitating a lick-and-polish slavey—she polishes on each side of the Axminster runner in the passage. The wind-bells tinkle, and she sings:

  ‘I dreamt that I dwe-elt in ma-ah-arble walls

  With vassals and serfs at my si-i-ide. . . .’

  She is ironing: camisole ribbons, Father’s shirts striped like exercise books, my sailor-collared blouses, starched petticoats of broderie anglaise, Richelieu table-cloths for occasional tables. As she bashes one flat-iron down on the gas-stove, and takes up the next, and rubs it with beeswax, she sings:

  ‘She lives in a mansion of aching hearts,

  She’s one of a restless throng,

  And the diamonds that glitter around her brow. . . .’

  She mocks thus the diamonds on her own brow, the diamonds of sweat; she comments thus on the ancestresses on the side of her mother’s family who surely wore diamonds.

  Once I hear her and Aunt Rosa Bona wrangle on and on for what seems a long time about an entertainment at Aunt’s that Mother has no wish to go to. Her mild, ‘No, Bona, really, dear,’ becomes by stages a less and less mild negative. It reaches, ‘I said, “No!” and I mean, “No!”’ From under her tormented wheel of yellow feathers Aunt persists in nagging. Suddenly, Mother begins to sing, softly but with a cold impertinence bordering on insult:

  ‘I don’t want to play in your yard,

  I don’t like you any more. . . .’

  Aunt Rosa Bona stops in her tracks, puts down the eclair, picks up her gloves, and is gone, shutting the front door with such deliberate noiselessness that, in suggesting a slam of explosive violence, it almost outmatches Mother’s own obliquity.

  ‘The saucy little bird,’ Mother sings, ‘The saucy little bird on Bona’s hat’

  Other people’s words provide Mother with the means to express feelings at a tangent, to veil in song the fact that she suffers fools reluctantly. She is fearless enough to utter directly and cuttingly but prefers not to. It is often a means also of blunting her mockery of herself. Yet her singing does not always scoff or have a double edge. She burns away her feelings in a song that, however cheap, runs parallel enough to the moment’s emotion, however lofty or sorrow-charged or airy-fairy.

  Sometimes she takes me to the front room, opens the piano as one opening a coffin, lifts the camphor-scented strips of flannelette from the keys, removes her rings and flexes her fingers in the manner of a concert pianist, and plays with the prissiness of her convent training but with dash ‘Rustle of Spring’ or ‘The Double Eagle March’. I am to discover that she plays very badly. Next, she plays the song she has taught me to sing, while I sing it affectedly, and know I am singing affectedly without understanding why I must.

  ‘Oh wheah and oh wheah has mai little dog gone?

  Oh wheah, oh wheah is he?

  With his ears cut short, and his tail cut long,

  Oh wheah, oh wheah can he be?’

  I sing this several times with increasing affectation, mouthing and mincing insufferably in a style entirely my own.

  I never hear, and am never to hear, Father sing, although he is probably capable of the National Anthem or ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ at Masonic gaudies or Country Week Cricket smoke-nights.

  Mother sings as she fills the kerosene lamps; she sings knitting a tam-o’-shanter, polishing the brass front doorstep, mixing my Saturday morning Gregory Powder (‘Just before the battle, mother’) or slicing lettuce, in the fashion of the time, as fine as mermaid’s hair. Sometimes, as when she is darning, the hole stretched taut over the mouth of one of the two wine-glasses mysteriously in the house, and used for nothing but darning, Mother’s singing is saccharine and melancholy, ‘Poor babes in the wood’ or something similar, a lullaby to the fingers weaving the needle over-under-over, under-over-under. Sometimes, the song is wordless. She reclines on the sofa, her head hanging backward under a burden of pain, her hands pressing the hair away from her white temples which I rub with the little pillar of menthol that lives in a delicate acorn of pale wood. As I rub, she drones with a sort of scarcely audible wildness. Sometimes, when the late summer is soaked through and through with the smell of tomato sauce being boiled, and the kitchen seems littered with bloody colanders and wooden spoons, Mother’s singing is way-up-yonder, operatic singing. Women, then, seem always to sing about the house: singing and aprons go together, the rolling-pin and ‘Bonny Mary of Argyle’, the scrubbing-brush and ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’.

  On each side of 36 Bellair Street live hearable singers. There is Mrs. Easom on one side (34? 38?) and Mrs. Richmond on the other (38? 34?). At this moment the ear in my mind catches them still at it; Mrs. Easom, loud and rapid as a dictator, committing a tuneful barking into which silences drop arbitrarily to smash like the thick china bowls I conceive her smashing in a series of domestic rages; Mrs. Richmond mewling ceaselessly as though she crouches on her hunkers, not happy, not unhappy, under large, floppy, furry leaves the colour of cigars. There is an impression of unblinking bird’s eyes.

  Of Mrs. Easom little else remains but the memory of modulated yapping. No face. No shape. No gesture. Tall? Short? Nothing is remembered but her iron-coloured hair screwed around curling-pins of the same colour. The hair aches. I possess the untraceable information that she is a widow. This knowledge, another first experience for me, intimates that she disregards some rule of life by being Misterless, and is consequently more powerful than usual women like Mother, and not to be trusted. She has a daughter Elsie who is, I know, fat and warm although absolutely invisible to me now despite the fact that she takes me to my first cinema matinee at Newmarket. I must walk with this cosy space called Elsie, almost certainly holding vacancy’s hand, under the plane-trees and lamp-posts, past the Town Hall with its veronica bushes, privet hedge and municipal lawns protected by dead cannon. The crimson plush edging the dress circle has the texture of my Teddy Bear. London, Hobart, Nice, Bombay, the plush on theatre balustrades h
as the same Teddy Bear texture—how could I not keep on remembering? I remember also two scenes from that first film I see in 1915. Because a house is on fire, red film is used; the actors jerk about in the ruddiness to the cinema pianist’s violent music. Another scene is on blue film to point up the fact of night in which a surface of water reflects a moon to the long ripples of music from the front of the cinema. I yearn, as I do when watching through the coloured panes, to be immersed in that red or blue. I yearn for what an inbuilt cynicism forewarns me I shall never have: entree to any world of imagination.

  Of Mrs. Richmond there remains the feeling that she is, until her thorns show, safer than Mrs. Easom. An invisible but indubitable Mr. Richmond surrounds her like a scent. She is, as all adults are in my Kensington recollections, physically nebulous, but so vivid an impression persists of unwinking bird’s eyes and sparrow-brown that it is safe to wager her small and intense. In time, very soon in time, she is to present me with the sentence of words that will unveil to me, for the first time, that adults can assume an attitude which seems one of distinction yet contains threats without definition, and perils to be skirted on deceitful tiptoe. This attitude, my parents, in those days, have neither the time, talent nor inclination to display. They may be foolish. They may be wise. They can be accused of stupidity or omniscience. Speaking charitably, their interests may be elsewhere, in, for example, their physical love for each other.

  As I write this I mock the superstitious fear that the voices of my parents are pleading just beyond the frontiers of consciousness, ‘Oh, forget us, forget us . . .’ and, magnanimously or fervently, on my behalf, ‘Don’t give away your own secrets, my son, my son.’ They plead, if they plead, without avail. Forget my father and my mother? I am them. I gush with a million others from the man’s body, and become sole victor—while the man and woman still writhe and exult in each other—in a deadly Armageddon at the gateway of the woman’s womb. I am ingrained, soaked, veined through and through with their overflow of virtue and sin from which I have bred my own evils and purities. And since, to augment their donations and my own manufactures, I have borrowed lavishly from the inescapable world, I have as many faults and graces as the world, as meagre a supply of graces and faults as the world. Forget? Forget them and thus forget myself and the world? Not yet, not yet.

  As for giving away secrets: they are not secrets, and not worth keeping. If secrets, they are not mine. They are what someone else, somewhere else, at all times, knew, knows or will know.

  Mrs. Richmond, bird-small or not, owns Pearlie and Victor. Pearlie is some age, perhaps eight or nine, which makes her a foreigner, a big girl, an arrangement of not predictable enough actions. She is a female, raw, undulcified by years or maternity. She is bossy, has large green-striped snapping teeth and a hairlike cascade of hair-coloured hair which sometimes conceals and contorts itself in curling-rags made from strips of old sheeting, but mostly undulates down from an enormous puffed-out bow of ribbon, usually workaday navy blue, ceremonially a shade of mauve that has the effect on my senses that biting a lemon has on my teeth. Victor is a horse of a different colour. Victor is my age. Victor is my first playmate and, though scarcely a friend and scarcely loved, is a first reading for the first rehearsal for the first scene of the first act in the long comedy of friends I am still stumbling through.

  It is inevitable, it advances autobiography minutely and effortlessly, to come to another and yet another first experience. Even with memory patching what reality must have breached, it is certain that my cocoon is wearing, here and there, thin enough to permit intrusions on a good boy. These intrusions never really more than brush my goodness, though they tear the sheath surrounding it. They do nothing to innocence, for I have never possessed innocence. They give edges to intelligence, they refresh watching eyes. Victor is, for a time, They. Victor is many first experiences.

  He is, for example, at eye-level. He is the right size, my size. He is easier to look at than ants and cockchafers. He is much more visible than adults. Whatever Mother and Father, and Aunt Rosa Bona auntishly doting and chirruping under her platter of feathers, may believe, I have never really seen their faces. I have seen no face until Victor’s. It is one I can intimately examine for signs of his soul’s and emotions’ weather. Hitherto, I have caught the climate of people from the rays vibrating out of the space they make animate, from the colours of a voice, from the quality of their silences, even from the manner in which they inhabit the realm of their dark night and their sleep which is, to me, a mere shire in the realm of my dark night and my sleep.

  Victor’s is the first face to interpose its planes and complexities between me and instinct. This puts instinct on its mettle. We stare face to face at each other. I smell the saplike scent from his nostrils. What I view, far far back, eternities back, behind the brilliant, curved jellies of his eyes is the future. We know instantly that we have only in common what every human has. Our confrontation is essentially a confrontation of primitive and unashamed warinesses; it could have been the meeting of sophisticated centenarians with nothing to lose and every hope of gaining. Do I gain? I gain indelible information, outside my power, then, to express in words, information on the beauties, surprises, tricks, evasions, lures and lunacies of the mobile mask. I find intimations of his and my and the world’s mortality in the pinked edges of his teeth, the wet curling-open or the brutal pressing-together of his lips, the dark grape-like bloom about his eyes, the seeds of yellow wax in his ears, the flushings or wanings of blood under the envelope of skin. Intuitively I know all this will rot like a peach.

  Because he is the same marvellously convenient size as I, we understand each other’s eases and difficulties of locomotion, and hopes of levitation. We can therefore examine each other’s machinery with no more and no less curiosity than we examine our own. We move from the revealed to the concealed.

  Peter is the word current then, in our class, for penis. We barter Peters. Since we are similarly pink and white, the only new knowledge I gain is that I am not unique in construction or behaviour, and that Mr. and Mrs. Richmond, as represented by Victor’s penis, are not as civilized as my parents as represented by mine. He has smegma. I have been taught to wash. These exchanges are conducted with directness and busy relish. They are also conducted in what goes for deep secrecy, behind the castor-oil plant in Victor’s backyard or the latticed fernery overrun with smilax at the side of our house. Nothing has been said ever to me about the possibility of this sort of amusement occurring but I realize that it is one forbidden to adults. Between each incident I, at least, do not suffer from guilt. Once my trousers are on again my mind is with my body and eyes wherever elsewhere is. Guiltlessness and secrecy avail nothing. When, days or hours later, I am what is called ‘playing with Nigger’, Mrs. Richmond is suddenly there, above me. ‘I know,’ she says, ‘what you and Victor have been doing.’ I have met my first dangerous adult. Fathers and mothers rarely seem adult to their children, merely older, distorted by time, and dirty with the soot of years. As children themselves do, they condemn with a blow or praise with an embrace. I realize, quick as a flash, that Mrs. Richmond’s attitude has no more end to it than her sentence has. The messing-about believed to be secret and sacrosanct to little boys is knowledge to her. Her sin and danger are that she adds nothing, neither dismay nor sympathy, horror nor explanation. Has Victor broken a child law and talked? Has God uttered? Has Mrs. Richmond spied and, having spied, waited to get me, to get me alone, to tell me that she knows what I knew?

  Despite this sudden disclosure that there is an adult who is sinful enough not to punish sin, I do not waver or cringe. An atavistic extra eye opens within me. I almost shrug in an adult fashion. I certainly go on doing what I am doing—‘playing with Nigger’—deliberately cruelly trying to lever a saliva-slimy chop bone from between his worn-down teeth. He is pretending to be an amiable old dog about it but is really wearily angry, not because I am after the bone which neither of us cares about, but because he smells
my nastiness of manner.. He would like to savage me for this although he loves me.

  I have been able to read Nigger since I could crawl. I begin to read adults more warily after Mrs. Richmond. I read much about all men as I turn the pages of Victor’s nature. But Victor and all men are a mere fraction.

  Mother teaches me to whistle ‘My home in Tennessee’ and ‘Cockitee kissed the Quaker’s wife’, and to play ‘Chopsticks’ badly on the piano. I learn to stand on my head, carry vessels of liquid without spilling, and to compel obedience from objects once intractable: bootlaces, button-hooks, braces, door-handles, my bath-sponge and toothbrush, my water-colour brush, knots, drawers and Venetian blinds. Time is giving me, one by one, the skills by which I shall be able to work myself efficiently to death.

  My older visible loves, the hand-washing fly, the modest violet, the busy bee, the Blessed Virgin in the antirrhinum, are joined by others such as the swallow, the cricket, the case-moth and the praying mantis. Mother introduces them and their puritanical but charming morals as though they are persons. To supplement these visibles she sings or recites or tells into existence an unending train of beings: Bo Peep, Moses in the bulrushes, Hansel and Gretel, the Knave of Hearts, God, King Bruce and the spider, Rumplestiltskin, Mother’s own Swiss pioneer father waving a cutlass at aborigines and crying out, ‘Gut ’em! Slash ’em!’, Puss-in-Boots, Grace Darling, Jesus Christ and the loaves and fishes. In this transplendent assemblage the more virtuous are less transplendent than the less virtuous; the animals behaving like human beings are more engaging than the human beings behaving like well-trained animals. Fairies are about, and indicate their presence by replacing with threepence one of my milk teeth left in a tumbler of water.