by Hal Porter
Is she the bear-like bunioned woman in the electric train to a cheap suburb, eyes closed, hairs coiling from the mole above her lips? Is she the drunken nagging voice and the spike heels in the midnight corridor of the sleepless nasty hotel? Is she the corseted harpy haggling over the P. and O. railing with the bum-boat boys at Port Said? Is she death and nowhere, the petal pressed in the monumental black book? Is she . . . oh, let us walk on, let the two wraiths walk on together, she in her grey velvet with the torn lace, she with the most beautiful face in the world, down the slope of jewelled dirt, over Bellair Street, taking to the air above the roofs and towers and spires and trees, while, below in 36 Bellair Street, the Renardi is packed into the zinc-lined piano-case.
The Renardi is packed first. The house then comes apart. The wind-bells are taken down and packed in the bread-crock with other fragilities. Patty pans, gravy-strainers, paste-cutters and egg-whisks are packed in the coal-scuttle. Carpets are rolled up. Linoleum is peeled from the floor: there are newspapers underneath. I find a pin with a black china head. Footsteps, footsteps, footsteps, and tea-chests everywhere, tell me that the house is nothing but a box filled with boxes. Oh, wheah and oh wheah has my little past gone? Mother sings:
‘My old man said, “Follow the van!
Don’t dilly-dally on the way!”’
She smacks me often in an en passant manner but none the less hard, and swears and cries when Father says she may not pack all her pot-plants. She packs them. Father says not to scrub the bloody house. Mother scrubs, saying, ‘I’m not going to give that women the chance of saying. . . .’
Nigger takes to his kennel as to a sick-bed. The kennel is packed: pot-plants replace Nigger. I console him with consciously sympathetic huggings. He is dubious, even inclines to fear, but affects world-weariness. With subdued red lights in his eyes he permits consolation and is grateful, although aware that my consoling him is, in fact, my consoling me. He licks more consolation on me.
The luggage pantechnicon comes. Moustached men in baize aprons add their footsteps to the house filled with footsteps. The beds are taken apart.
The wasp-coloured door of 36 Bellair Street is closed.
We are out in nowhere, adrift, without a spoon, a fireplace, a lavatory, a jug to put milk in or a wall to hang texts on.
Mrs. Richmond thrusts out a pink-knuckled hand from her brown shade and takes the key. I turn, horrified, to look at my view. Victor’s eyes appear slap-bang in front of mine. The emptiness of a kind of shock in his eyes reflects the emptiness of the shock in mine. As the cab-horse clatters to a halt, Victor and I are made to kiss: I retain to this second the conviction that he has just finished eating boiled mutton shanks.
Dressed to kill, we are in the cab. Like an insignia of eldest sonship are Father’s umbrella and three parasols of Mother’s, rolled and strapped into a rug, which I am embracing.
DO NOT SPIT says the blue lettering on one of the tiles in the wall of the white-tiled tunnel at Flinders Street Station. We are through the tunnel, have walked along the country platform, and are in our compartment, sorted out and seated, before my distress begins.
I have not yet learned the value of telling lies and have therefore told none, although I am infinitely artful in committing lies by keeping my small mouth precisely shut. Now I am in difficulties. Because I am in my best clothes, in public and an unknown place, I wish to commit the lie of manliness and impassivity while, at the same time, committing the lie of being a happy-go-lucky child not really aware of what is going on, and therefore not subject to emotional disarrangement. I wrestle with myself and the shock of the shock in Victor’s eyes, the painful rage which I can no longer guard or watch as closely as I should. It strives against restraint like a living body in mine.
On the platform, Aunt Rosa Bona beneath her hat of turbulent feathers is gaily arguing with Mother who is gaily arguing back, important facts disguised as nothings. Uncle Martini-Henry and Father return along the platform from not convincing Nigger who is, I know without being told and without ever having seen inside a luggage-van, standing in the luggage-van defiantly terrified and wishing for younger teeth and less training in good behaviour. The two men are briefly saying nothings to each other that sound like abrupt practicalities. The train yelps. A bell begins to ring. Uncle and Father shake hands. Aunt and Mother cry out sentences they have forgotten to chatter earlier. Father comes along the corridor, and enters taking out his tobacco pouch. The air is filled with many cries, and a god-like voice soaring above all noise, ‘Gippsland train! All aboard!’ We are ready. The train is ready. I fight desperately with the body within me. The train begins to move. Like a page from a book the scene on the platform is ripped from view.
‘Good-bye, Melbourne Town! Melbourne Town, goodbye! I am leaving you today,’ sings Mother, oh, happily, happily.
I can lie no more. I erupt in tears. That they are the first tears I shed cannot be true. That they are the first tears I remember shedding is true. Equally true is that they are the first tears I shed for the impermanence of physical things and material things, for the world and its people, for shapes and their shadows, for sounds and their shadows, for life and its shadows, running and pouring away like water from a tap not to be turned off. Useless, useless, angry tears.
‘But,’ says Mother, not guiding me to lie a bellyache for my tearful torment of rage, not offering a suggestion of being over-tired, or needing to do number one, for me to snatch at, ‘but, Laddie, you’ll love the country.’
She leans across and gropes in my pockets for a handkerchief not there. She hands me her own, a composition of lace and eau-de-Cologne. While I soak up distress with this frivolous scrap, Mother smooths my hair with her gloved hand, a firm gesture expressing, ‘Stop your nonsense! Stop this minute!’ but also, ‘Mother understands.’ Whether she understands is doubtful: she is returning to the country she loves deeply; I am being plucked by the scruff from the asphalt streets, from the asphalt schoolyard, from beside the ever nameless, ever beautiful girl in the grey velvet dress and the lace collar in which there is an incurable wound, from out of Victor’s eyes, from beneath Dr. Moss’s hedge pulsating with wings, from the balcony edged in cast-iron.
If the tap cannot be turned off, tears can. Lace has my tears. My freckles are scented with eau-de-Cologne, and there are no tears left.
‘Blow your nose,’ says Mother. I blow it, observing as I do from my window-seat that we are decorously but busily hastening through a cutting draped in mesembrianthemum and decorated here and there with agave. I hand back the handkerchief and look about with my washed, my scalded and scoured eyes and, for the first time, enclosed in that small, cushioned, luxurious cell, see my flesh and blood as outsiders might see them.
Little brother and smaller sister occupy the two seats next to me. My sister’s short, fat, gaitered legs stick out horizontally as her doll’s legs beside me. Sister and brother are as clear-cut and unimportant to me as ever. I obediently love them. I do not much like them. There is nothing new in them. Their heartlessness at the destruction of 36 Bellair Street is what I know of them. They live without watching. They do not remember. They do not care. If I am not careful, if I make one false sniff, my brother is going to stop carefully trying to unpick his tin railway engine, and say, high and clear, intending offence, his tone pointing up insult, ‘Laddie was crying.’
Father is smoking his best pipe, a cricketing prize rimmed by silver, which he only smokes with slippers on at 36 Bellair Street. There is no 36 Bellair Street. He wears his tan boots and his pepper-and-salt suit, his second best. I am shocked that he has taken off his hat in a public place. He wears a ring with a golden shield on it. His eyes are blue, not watchful, and affect a secret twinkle intimating that he has a disdainful thought he will not share. His mouth moves about the stem of the pipe in a manner pretending wryness, in a self-browbeaten manner. He is glad that everything is over, he and his pipe. He closes his eyes as mine reach his. So that man is Father. I cannot guess th
at, at one stage of my life, I am going to look very like that man.
In the seat on his right sits Mother’s lever-hasped bonnet box of ginger-coloured tin, formerly her mother’s, and stands leaning the rug-rolled umbrellas.
In the window-seat on his left, opposite me, sits a woman.
This is she, this is Mother.
At what age does one actually see, rememberably, one’s mother, the full-length portrait? Whatever may be said by others, I write now that, with the small suburban backyards of Richmond and Hawksburn and Armadale slipping backwards, each with its lemon tree, and clump of chrysanthemum or Michaelmas daisy, I receive my first complete visual picture of her, and can find no reason not to believe myself.
During the years before I enter that compartment of that train and, with the unquestioned right of a selfish eldest son, sit in that window-seat, I have collected many jigsaw bits of Mother: the corn on each little toe, the ‘filbert’ finger-nails, the ear-ring piercings in her lobes, the four deep vaccination impressions, like bestial thumb-prints, on her left upper arm, the hair that lets down to her waist, the milk-white breasts with fragile sprays of blue veins on them at which I have seen two babies suckled.
Now my salt-peeled eyes see a woman wearing a dark grey travelling costume frogged with black braid, and a black toque on one side of which two crow-black wings stand up in a vee shape. Watching me watching her she unbuttons her black kid gloves, gentles them off, and smiles. Her teeth are white and strong. A minute semi-circular piece is chipped from one tooth. She loosens her veil, an almost invisible net spotted with flossy pill-sized pompons. She lifts it up over the front of the toque. I see the smile, which is occupying itself with slight variations of itself, more clearly, and that the Swansdown Adhesive Powder and the dry rouge have been used. I see her eyes, greenish-brown with lighter streaks and pinprick speckles of black raying from pupil into iris. These eyes are offering me something they have always offered and will continue to offer.
As though accepting for the first time what I have already accepted and shall continue to accept, I smile. It is V first performance of that sort of smile, and means nothing except awareness that I have given away myself and my tears for nothing new, that I am years older, though still six, and less wise. If a subject has been changed no words have been used to change it. I therefore cannot know if Father and Mother know more about me than I do, or nothing at all.
Mother opens the tin of Swallow and Ariell’s Cream Wafers Aunt Rosa Bona gave her at Flinders Street, when I was years younger half-an-hour ago.
My brother and sister stir like serpents, and raise sugary voices, and stretch out their still-clean hands, plump and quivering delicately with greed.
In Mother’s eyes the illimitable and never-to-be-withdrawn offer, which is about to be shuttered by more widely social and practical expressions, retains its intensity for a personal second more as she holds the Cream Wafers towards me.
Were I not bereaved she would give me the tin, saying, ‘Pass the tin to the others, Laddie. One each. One. And mind you take the nearest.’
Since I am bereaved she extends the tin towards me as to a visitor capable of refusing.
Since I am bereaved I eschew good manners and, to my own horror, take three. Will Mother say, ‘Greedy guts! There are others. Your eyes are bigger than your belly.’? She says nothing but says it so clearly that I blush. The train screams.
Eight hours later I am a country boy.
Eight hours later, and 170-odd miles from Melbourne, eastward over the horizon of my Kensington view, I am in a shire town, a Gippsland town, Bairnsdale, which is to be the scene of my petty comedy for the next ten years. It is one of those districts of which is said, ‘The Scots have the land, the Irish have the pubs, and the English have the accent’. Here, I am to continue to foster placidity almost to the degree of smugness, to hasten neatly and evasively but happily, untouched and ever watchful, seeing everything and nothing, through the shadows I do not see of other people’s lives.
To reach Bairnsdale we travel in a first-class smoking compartment which seems to me a miracle of ingenuity, and luxurious to a degree. Once my tears are dried, and my heart merely sore, everything entrances me: the bevelled looking-glasses, three a side, above the green leather seats with buttons deeply set in; the varnished jalousies sticky as honey; the hinged arm-rests the shape of eclairs; the nickelled art nouveau hat-pegs that reproduce the two too too sinuous curves terminating in hearts like leaves or leaves like hearts on the stamped metal ceiling; the foot-warmers; the corridor-door that slides sideways into a slot edged with green plush; the morocco-inset table-top that lives under the seat, and can be attached to the wall to make a legless table; the overhead racks of metallic net supporting our portmanteaux and dress-baskets; the two spittoons, shallow copper funnels set into the jleur-de-lis of the carpet, through the holes in the bottom of which my father unmissingly flicks the spent wax Vestas that nurture his pipe. None of us spits: in an era of spitters we are not a spitting family.
We pass through a colonial landscape composed, alternately, of almost untouched landscapes older than history, of hills older than the wind and trees older than the British Empire, and of landscapes no older than seventy years— miles of paddocks grid-ironed by hawthorn or boxthorn hedges, and Anglicized by them and haystacks, hedge-elms, windbreaks of pine, clumps of oaks, willow-edged rivers with my first-witnessed cows wading the shallows, spillings of buttercup and dandelion, Bo Peep sheep, turnip-fields, maize-paddocks, houses and fences shawled with Banksia roses and honeysuckle. Symbols of nostalgia, names of the Old World are cried out by blue serge porters ringing bells above the geranium-beds, or outside the refreshment rooms and bars, of gravelled or macadamized platforms: Oakleigh, Berwick, Beaconsfield, Trafalgar, Herne’s Oak, Rosedale, Sale, Stratford (on Avon), Bairnsdale. We see no kangaroos or emus, those creatures from sixpences or insurance company letterheads, which most Australians, of that year as this, see as frequently as most Englishmen see lions or unicorns. The milestones are blue-enamelled rectangles advertising Griffiths’ Tea in white enamel. Mile after mile of post-and-rail fences are lettered with injunctions to use DR. MORSE’S INDIAN ROOT PILLS, FLUXITE, SHINOLEUM, SILVER STAR STARCH, VELVET SOAP, WITCH SOAP (NO TOIL, ONLY BOIL) and KEEN’S MUSTARD.
To leave behind a minutely engraved and intricately tinted plan, to be compelled by adult practicality to leave it behind unfingered, seems one of the disadvantages of childhood. How many shadows of broken desires must haunt and flicker among the shadows haunting and flickering in streets and lanes and cul-de-sacs children glimpsed, and yearned to walk to the end of, and never did. To be offhandedly presented with another, a newer, differently embellished plan is one of the advantages.
My first sight of Bairnsdale strikes me breathless and still and smaller.
Space! Infinity! Light!
In Kensington, stuck on an asphalted suburban ridge at the rim of a panorama, I had seemed taller to myself, a spy suspended above luminosity. In Bairnsdale, I feel myself let loose at the centre of an immeasurable sphere. Pure light gushes and surges and soars away from my minuteness in every direction, upwards and ever upwards, inhabited by slicing swallows and creaking swans and stock-still hawks and pinprick larks; outwards to arch over the northern mountains in the thick blue of which are half-forgotten, tumble-down gold-mining towns occupied by mere handfuls of hill-billies incestuous as cats; outwards and east to curve for a century of miles over the farthest eucalypts and their sumless tons of glistening morocco leaves; outwards and southwards over the river-mouths, the swan-haunted lakes, the very South itself, and the world’s felloe.
I seem no longer to look through a window or a microscope ; I am in the window and under the microscope. That this new universe is no wider than the one I have seen in Victor Richmond’s eye is too true to be good, and something, even now, yet to be learned again and again and again. That this immensity is seeming only, and a cage to escape from, and return to, and escape from to
return to, will, in course, appear. I am Hardly old enough to be unsophisticated: I am still six. I am still sophisticated seven or eight or nine or ten.
Set in that immensity exploding and geysering out in all directions we have a street and a house. In one respect only does Mitchell Street, Bairnsdale, resemble Bellair Street, Kensington: it is a shortish street on the way to nowhere. Rump-steak-scented smoke adorns its chimneys; to the sound of pianos making Dardanella or Traumerei huge candle-lit silhouettes on the holland blinds peel off their daytime layers to reveal the sad formlessnesses beneath.
Two blocks away, at one end of the street, are the river-cliffs overrun by buffalo grass, ivy and wild honeysuckle. Below, wide and olive-green, the heron-and-kingfisher-and-cormorant-peopled river moves slowly as blood south to the lakes. On the town side it is lined with weeping willows, horse chestnuts, red gums, plane-trees and apple orchards. On the farther side stretch the river-flats chess-boarded by hawthorn hedges, and stuck here and there with cowled hop-kilns of veal-pink brick or thin boards weathered brittle and the tint of platinum. Around these kilns stand conventions of
Blessed Thistle and Heraldic Thistle tall as men, or platoons of maize taller than Aztec priests, among which the Hindu farmers with beaked noses and long ivory teeth stroll in earth-coloured Western hand-me-downs and exquisitely folded turbans of exquisite pinks.
In that direction lies every opportunity for a boy to meet death; by drowning in the bream- and mullet-choked currents sleepy as death yet concealing snags and plumbless depths, by hurtling through the rotten upper floors of the kilns, by eating raw toadstools instead of raw mushrooms, by a surfeit of blackberries or stolen apples, by snakes or scorpions.