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

by Hal Porter

  Into the midst of well-to-do fairies, talking cats, multiplying loaves and gingerbread cottages, floats a hat that is to cause the first quarrel I ever hear.

  Mother takes the lid from the cylindrical hatbox of satiny white cardboard. Next, she lifts out sheet after sheet of tissue paper; the bedroom is animated by the snowy rustling, a sound that perfectly favours the texture, and the breathing and floating movements of the paper. I watch, and appreciate, the tenderness of the gesture with which she finally lifts out the hat. It is a thing of fragilities: fragility of colour, fragility of skeleton, fragility of material. Huge poppies of half-transparent silk, opalescently grey and pink, poise as though just alighted on one side and under the brim. Mother puts it on my outstretched hands to prove that this ghost of wire and chiffon is as light as air. Its price must be far heavier for, later, I hear Father swearing at Mother about hats and money. She swears back. Father swears again, more violently, and leaves the house, most violently slamming the front door. The wind-bells jangle hysterically.

  ‘Hell and Tommy!’ I hear Mother crying out to herself in two sorts of anger, one of showy and unconvincing noise, the other of pure rage, ‘Hell and Tommy! The beast! The brute beast! The fiend from hell!’

  From the living-room where I am calmly painting a rosella parrot in my painting-book, I hear her footsteps moving about quickly in many directions while the wind-bells restore themselves to stillness. There is a pleasurable sense of more to come. The footsteps peck decisively to where, neatly dipping the point of my brush in crimson lake and listening like a dog, I await the next move.

  Mother’s hand descends from heaven, jams a hat on my head, and yanks me from the chair. I make a well-mannered squeak about my painting.

  ‘Not a word,’ says Mother, dressed for the street. ‘Not a word. I shall buy you a new paintbox. I shall buy you a parrot. That man is a brute beast. He is a bastard.’

  She rattles down her wedding and engagement rings into the plate holding the jardiniere containing the maiden-hair fern in a pot.

  ‘A bastard!’ she pants. Without knowing what she means I find the new word interesting, and her noisy game exhilarating.

  ‘I am leaving that man,’ she says. ‘I am no longer Mrs. Porter. I am Ida Ruff, Miss Ida Ruff. You and I and baby will live with Aunt Bona. Or on the beach.’ This is more exhilarating a game. The tone of her voice tells me that we shall never live on beaches. To prove this so the front door opens, the wind-bells rattle off a glassy amused phrase, down the passage comes Father. He stands there.

  ‘Keep the bloody hat,’ he says flatly to hide an elation in winning by magnanimously losing.

  Mother snatches up her rings openly as one snatching up cough-drops, and begins to weep while laughing, a weeping that is not for any reason such as pain or sorrow or even happiness but for femaleness.

  The hat? Mother is never magnanimous. She keeps it. It goes back into its box, and is never worn, at least not publicly. Is this Mother’s wicked way of also winning by losing? Does she sometimes, in after years, when she is alone in the house, and has some moment to herself in the crack-like interval between some task just finished and some other task just about to begin, lift it (that tender, tender gesture) from the tissue paper? Put it on? Examine her older face in the looking-glass, older under the new old-fashioned object that remains, paid for and unused, as a memento of two stubbornnesses? When she dies it is still in the box, and still beautiful. It may have been too beautiful ever to wear. I doubt that. Mother was a woman.

  If I have time on my hands I have also time at my heels.

  I cut myself, apparently deeply, between the forefinger and middle finger on my left hand. How? I do not know. Father carries me on his shoulders to Dr. Moss’s at the corner of our block. The scar of two stitches is still on my hand. Blood? Pain? Stitching? I recall nothing. I do recall the undulating journey, Father acting the part of a nice camel smelling of tobacco, the plane-tree leaves stroking my head, the head of the tallest person in the world. I remember seeing, far below in the drain, the spent and broken carbide sticks from the swinging road lamps. I remember the Three Wise Monkeys in brass, and a brass pen tray with antlers, on Dr. Moss’s table. Dr. Moss? No.

  Father takes me to the barber to have my hair cut really short. When Mother dies there is found among her collection of keepsakes an envelope containing a cutting of the earliest floss from my head, and a lock from this more ruthless shearing of which adventure nothing remains with me but the memory of an advertisement for Milo Cigarettes which shows a woman smoking, and shelves lined with shaving-mugs of all sorts with the names of their owners pasted below them. The knowledge that Father carries back the clipping of hair to Mother is knowledge arousing curiosity. Does he ask the barber for it in a you-know-what-women-are way? Does he slyly pick it up from the barber’s floor, and slip it in his vest pocket? One knows too much about one’s parents to know all the truth.

  My hair is cut like a schoolboy’s. I go to school.

  It indicates the placidity of my nature that it is an easy business, at least for me. For Mother?

  Almost certainly dressed to the nines, absolutely certainly wearing a new pale blue linen hat, its starched brim upturned, elastic holding it on, I walk to school with Mother. Eldest sons must have many first experiences at the same time that mothers have theirs: almost always it is the grown woman who is more mangled by the experience. The walk must have wrenched some of the greener leaves from the foliage of Mother’s nature. It kindles me almost to skipping. On my left the airy prospect I have watched for years swings away, with its empty streets silent for ever, and for ever alluring to one side of my being. I carry a brown paper parcel. Newspaper parcels are common, and are not publicly carried. My genteel package contains no Woman’s Magazine selection of vitamin-impregnated scraps but, wrapped in a table napkin, beef-and-pickle sandwiches, two slices of thickly-iced currant cake, a large black-and-white humbug, and a small bunch of grapes from the backyard vine. I carry also a blue enamel mug.

  It is a sunny morning.

  When we reach Dr. Moss’s house and monkey puzzle tree on the corner, his pittosporum hedge is creamed over with blossom, sizzling with bees, shimmering with butterflies. Three cabbage moths spar with each other making jagged graphs above the seething hedge. Here we turn right, and begin to climb up the slope. We cross over several asphalt roads and basalt-cobbled back lanes. We reach the brick-walled schoolground. It is, metaphorically, a longer journey upwards than I think; for my mother, returning amputated, it must be a bitterly short one downhill—the uterus torn out, the cheeks of the heart flushed with resentment. Men, even little boys (which are what most men scarcely develop beyond), know more about women than women know about men or little boys. Men and little boys are more secretive than women, prostitute or nun, mother or virgin. I know Mother will be crying, or will have been crying, when I reach home.

  I reach home. She has been crying. This is patent, yet she bothers to tell me so, and begins to cry again. She has told me of her tears to prove her motherhood and deprivation, as well as to start me into revealing what she does not know: did I behave like a manly little fellow and not cry, or did I behave like her own flesh’s flesh and cry? She desires not either but both. Since I do not tender freely and, in an attempt to divert her, begin chattering about the pink chalk tick on my slate, she must ask. Did I cry? Somehow, and dreadfully, blind as Oedipus but wide awake as Odysseus, I stop her in her tracks. I feel her tears hiss dry like blood splashed on a stove. I sense some tender fibre violently strain and snap in the recesses of the woman who is pouring tea for me into a cup decorated with a gilt clover leaf, and on the saucer of which rest two arrowroot biscuits.

  It is not until over thirty years later, my mother nearly twenty years dead, that my father accidentally lets me know what has happened to brake her. As she adds milk to the tea for the cropped warrior son returned from battle, for the bright son from the muddy fields, for My Son the King from his tour of assassin-r
iddled streets, have I, pleads Mother without pleading, have I cried?

  ‘Fuck,’ I say, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  My sixty-odd-year-old father, relating this, chuckles with dirty reminiscence, his face meantime creasing itself older, and looking too humanly ugly like one of Hieronymus Bosch’s. Mother, who dies long before she learns the despicable rules of frankness, that subtlest dishonesty and deputy for truth, has said nothing ever of this incident.

  No, I have not cried.

  I have had a wonderful time.

  I have been injected—deliberately, I now suppose, by some coarse rascal of an older boy—with the word meaning absolutely nothing to me except—oh, truth!—except that I guess it to be a word of the world, a masculine insult that is portable and powerful, an initiation ceremony word, an umbilicus cutter.

  A wonderful, wonderful time! Mother can hardly have half-descended her slope of tears before I am in a jubilant and unusual fit of rage. I kick a schoolmistress many times on the shins. My subconscious now tells me she is grey-haired, and skinny to fragility, and that there are cloth-covered buttons on her skirt. In directing me to do something she must have touched me with professional kind firmness. Rage is instant. The shock of malevolent toecaps against innocent older bone immediately calms me to regret and pity which I cannot express to her. I have never kicked a shin since.

  There is an odour of children, underhand, tepid, and vegetable. There is the dry sliding and clicking of wooden beads along the wires of counting-frames. There is the squeal of pencils on slates as we draw parallel upright lines, an introductory exercise in handwriting. Mother, armouring me against the world, and hoping for my glory to be displayed, has long before taught me to write far beyond this infantile stage. I act the amateur. If I tell Mother, which I shall not, she will not understand my instinctive duplicity. She will be appeased, and will over-act on my behalf her real pleasure in teacher’s pink chalk tick which I bear home to her on my slate with as much wily care as I bear home the filthy word. Tick may, in her final totalling, balance ‘Fuck!’ for, after all, the damage has been done before I parrot out the gross word; a crack must have run across the pattern of her reality as she retraces her high-heeled steps along the streets she has led her son through on the way to rites she would like to save him from but would fight like a lioness rather than have him denied.

  At midday, the blue enamel mug loses itself or has itself stolen. It is the first thing I ever lose. Sometimes, in dreams, on beds in strange countries, I almost . . . almost . . . find it again. To replace the mug I find a silver bar brooch with an owl made of forget-me-not blue stones sitting on it. The day is altogether iridescent and heady and unforgettable.

  What drives fever to its crisis is the abundance, an abundance as of Jesus’s loaves and fishes, of other children. There seem millions, all of my height, and with my flexibility and speed and wildness. It is like discovering a frantic, sly, new tribe of me-sized and Victor-sized creatures. For some seconds after we are let out at afternoon playtime there is an atmosphere of cringing, of sidelong glances, deadly and assessing. Each instantly perceives on others the bridle-marks of that larger, less knowledgeable tribe that owns them, and that they own. But the hands of the tribe of couples, of mother and father, mummy and daddy, mumma and dadda, mum and dad, ma and pa, are nowhere on the reins. Movement in any and every direction, flight to the corners of the earth, is possible. We do not fly, but we move. We stroll. We hop. We dart. We run. Brilliant-eyed, cold-eyed and hot-breathed, we begin to race, to course in faster and faster circles, not touching each other but just not touching each other. The invisible tendrils streaming from us brush electrically against those streaming from others. As I race I smoulder, flame, burst into love with the other animals flashing by me . . . no, not love . . . I flare fervently into an accord with them. Eyes dilate. Faces redden. Mouths open. There is the reek, dangerous and ruthless and cool under the delirium, of innocence. This, my lack, I recognize in those who possess it. Galloping the horses of our natures we wheel faster. We permit ourselves to touch. We begin to laugh, soundlessly and senselessly, each to itself. We begin to screech and scream. Now and again, as I speed about the brick-walled asphalt, Victor Richmond’s face blazes towards me and past me. Although I know he and his face are as unfaithful as birds, familiarity gives him and his face greater beauty than the others. Victor and I tear open our mouths to shrill at each other. I see his crimson tongue, pointed and glistening at the tip, farther back swollen and vibrating with noise. It is noise itself in the form of flesh. I am enraptured.

  This rapture with the tribe and Victor abates, of course, the next day and the day after and the day after that.

  The days pass.

  As part of a pack, I watch the pack and its monstrous rules. I perceive what I am not to see objectively until I am a man, that the pack practises pure evils men have civilized themselves from, cruelties not watered down by pity, truths not damped down by discretion. I watch. I commit nothing too much, and decidedly not myself, and watch.

  I do not stay at Kensington State School for many months. Above my head, behind my back and outside my watching, my parents are up to something that is to leave me with Kensington and 36 Bellair Street set out in a corner of my mind for the rest of my life, a sketch never to be coloured in, everything arranged for a game never to be played.

  Of these months at school not much except happiness appears to have been considered a place in the luggage of the six-year-old. The Great War still in progress, Union Jacks proliferate. Two larger silk ones appear, crossed, behind the eight-day American clock on the living-room chimney-piece. Others protrude from vases. Lord Kitchener is on calenders. Mother has a Joffre blue blouse. There is a school bazaar. Pearlie Richmond and even bigger girls, disguised as Red Cross nurses, with trays hanging on halters from their necks, sell coconut ice, toffee apples, penwipers made from old flannel shirts, and heart-shaped pincushions of tomato-coloured velveteen. I get a little rolled-up Union Jack from the sawdust of the Penny Dip.

  Along with ‘Piggy-wig and Piggy-wee’ and ‘Now the day is over’, we in the Infant Class are taught to sing ‘Men of Harlech’ and:

  Anzac! Anzac! Long live that glorious name!

  Anzac! Anzac! That’s where they play the game!

  And when the war is over,

  And peace again there’ll be,

  You’ll find one name on the scroll of fame,

  That’s A, N, Z, A, C.

  As well, we learn a set of verses beginning:

  On the twenty-fifth of April,

  Far across the sea,

  Our brave Australian soldiers

  Stormed Gallipoli.

  Do I understand any of this? I think not. Even inklings are doubtful. The war, with its Kaiser Bill, with its Huns brandishing aloft babies spitted on bayonets, or boiling down Allied soldiers to make soap, is no more than an engrossing fairy-tale like Jack the Giant-killer. Two lines of doggerel somehow remembered from a broadsheet somehow in the house:

  Der old Dutch king sits on der pump to vatch vhich vay der cat villyump,

  have the same sort of meaning to me as ‘Humpty Dumpty’.

  But, of course, words such as Anzac and Gallipoli and digger, dropping into my mind and vocabulary as into the minds and vocabularies of all Australians, are the seed-words of a new growth. As overtones and implications and prides swell and burst, my generation and the generation it breeds are inevitably showered with the pollen from these explosions of Australian nationalism.

  While huge banners are flapping and cracking ruddily over the horizon, and peppering down their dust of blood and glory and lies not to be disbelieved, while Mother and Father are planning to transplant me, I fall in love. The expression is absurd yet there seems no other. I am already involved in forms of love with Mother and Father, school, Angel and the Little Clowns in my weekly comic paper, with lightning and stars and the colour yellow, with the view from the front veranda, with my Teddy Bear, with an infi
nity of things. Any difference in the degree of love or its quality is imperceptible; there is merely difference in direction. How am I to tell, as much now as then, which of these emotions all called love, is of most value?

  Now I am in love with a little girl.

  Name?

  Nameless.

  Perhaps I never knew her name for its seems illogical to remember the names of people whose physical appearance is unrecallable—Mrs. Easom, Elsie Easom, Dr. Moss, Mrs. Rule the pastry-cook who makes me a cake with crystallized violets on it for my fifth birthday, Mrs. Richmond—and yet have no name for one whose appearance is far more vivid to me than that of someone I saw last week.

  About my height she can be presumed to be also about my age. She wears a grey velvet dress with a lace collar spreading over her shoulders. The collar contains an extra hole on the right shoulder that is larger than, and not, a lace-hole. This distresses me, on her behalf, as though it were a wound that can give her pain. From under a straw hat, four long cylindrical curls pour richly and blackly down over the school-bag on her back. Daisies with woolly yellow centres ring the crown of the hat. Her button boots and ribbed stockings are black. Together we walk down the sloping street from school. We walk with a slowness that is exquisite and treacherous for the more slowly we move the more my ecstasy increases, and increase will make my loss greater when Dr. Moss’s corner is reached, and we must part. What do we say? Or are we talking to ourselves in the crystal cages of our hearts as we walk downwards on the strip of unasphalted ground between the asphalted roadway and the drain. This strip is sprinkled with thousands of minute fragments of broken glass and china which catch the light and mysteriously sparkle. I shall never again see such a carven and tender face, never such a white skin, never such ink-blue polished eyes and sooty lashes, never such a circular mole as sits above her lips. It is like a spot from a moth’s wing. We walk, and I watch us walk, with trance-like gravity, mildly on out of each other’s lives, giving up, as we part, two facsimile wraiths that remain together and continue walking together.