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

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The Watcher on the Cast - Iron Balcony - an Australian Autobiography Page 6

by Hal Porter


  At the other end of the street, two doors and a roads-width away from our house, are the Tannies. The Tannies are several acres of land set apart by civic pioneers, who had foreseen all but Progress, to be Botanical Gardens. Under the retrogressions of Progress the scheme has faltered but the small forest of pines, oaks, elms, birches and poplars has grown of its own simple account to a magnificent miniature of Windsor Great Park, an open aviary for thornbills, silver-eyes and magpies.

  In its direction death for a boy is equally available: to plummet forty feet from the top of a nest-riddled European tree to the summer-hard Australian ground pierced by cicada holes, to be felled by a falling oak limb gnarled and mighty as Gog’s leg, to sink mouth-over in the Tannies’ swamp which is rumoured to be quicksand, and smells of stale mud and smart-grass, to be venereally poisoned by trying to blow up into balloons the French-letters which the provincial lovers and adulterers of spring and summer abandon on the grass they have flattened like hare forms by their nocturnal activities.

  Until my fervour for climbing, fishing, bird-nesting, mushrooming, fruit-stealing and bodily recklessness runs dry, I embrace every one, and others beside, of these opportunities for doom, and come through with little but bee-stings, miniscule Great Britains of scars on my knees, and bare-foot soles impervious as pigskin.

  Mitchell Street connecting these two perilous and enchanting areas is a tunnel of elms. Its gravelled roadway, weedy edges, grassy footpaths, open drains of mossy brickwork crossed by red-gum foot-bridges, all seem to me to compose a perfectly situated street in which our house is perfectly situated four doors away from a Chinese joss-house no longer in use, and diagonally opposite The Common.

  Mother, no sooner have we left the train, and the station chockablock with milk-cans and crates of ducks, and the sleepier, springier, country cab, makes her nest again. This occurs with the speed of miracle: the cab draws up—hey presto!—the house is furnished, and the kettle boiling. I have what is surely an illusion that the first thing packed in Kensington, in that house with its number, is the first thing unpacked in the country house that has and needs no number: the most useless machine in the building, the Renardi. The piano-case is put in the stable. The shabby stable for which we can never afford the rich kernel of a horse remains the piano-case’s, and is one of the fascinating unsuburban things I endlessly, noiselessly discuss with myself as though tracking down the mystery of creation: the differences between Kensington and Bairnsdale. How these differences stimulate me who suffers nothing from them!

  There is no porcelain kitchen-sink. Mother now uses a tin washing-up dish, stacking the wet dishes on a large japanned tray. Hot water comes from an enormous iron boiler with a brass tap which sits perpetually murmuring on the perpetually lit wood-fire stove, and contains a marble which has a practical reason but which I believe is there to make the boiler sing.

  There is the rustic refinement of two sorts of water, tap-water from the river, tank-water from the rain. Outside the back door, on a wooden platform beneath which naked jade-and-jet little frogs with pulsing throats and golden eyes live in a jungle of three sorts of mint, stands the corrugated-iron tank which receives the overflow from heaven and the rain-gutters along the eaves. The satin-soft liquid is used, after the wriggling mosquito larvae have been caught in a muslin filter, for little else except washing my sister’s and Mother’s hair.

  There is no door with coloured glass panels, a deprivation to be borne regretfully, but there are other doors whose differences from doors known have their consolations: the half-door of the stable, the squealing fly-wire doors, the trapdoor to the little cellar in the pantry, the lavatory door with a crescent moon and two stars cut out in its planks.

  There is no path of encaustic tiles, merely tracks footworn through shaggy lawns populated, in their season, by dandelions, pimpernel and cape-weed or mushrooms and puffballs; no veranda enclosed in cast-iron, but wider, longer verandas on three sides of the house; no indoor copper set in brick, and wearing a chimney, but an outdoor copper in an iron tripod, no pine wash-troughs but a graduated set of huge oval washtubs of galvanized iron. The inside of one of these is stained by the bluing water.

  What Kensington lacked Bairnsdale has, what Bairnsdale lacks Kensington had. Bairnsdale lacks a sewerage system.

  Beyond the greengage, the cherry plum, the peach and apple trees and the piano-case’s stable, at the extreme end of the backyard, coated a foot deep in dolichos which Gipps-landers call lavatory-creeper, and overhung by a loquat tree, is the lavatory, the weather-board dunny for which the modish names of the period include such as Aunt Mary, Houses of Parliament, The Little House, Down-the-back, Lawy and Shouse. Its floor is covered with chrysanthemum linoleum from the Kensington front bedroom. A bottle of Phenyle, a blue enamel candlestick and a box of matches, a small fringed green mat, and the two texts hung on the whitewashed walls, complete the furnishings. The texts once hung in the Kensington kitchen; looking back, I find their presence in the lavatory an indication of Mother’s oblique ridicule. The beloved of the Lord, states one text encircled in mock orange, shall dwell in safety. The other, interlaced with jasmine, states, Without me ye can do nothing. The necessity to make this kind of tangential comment on life never changes in Mother when much else does. It is a form of mental reservation, even of cynical silence, at the core of which must lie an unfulfilled dream of lashing out verbally and with brilliant indecorum.

  In the country Mother changes. Or rather, so far as I am concerned, she appears as another kind of Mother.

  Since the time I wholly saw her first, lifting the spotted veil back from her powdered face under the winged hat, the cloud earlier concealing her has thinned, shredded away, vanished. She is now a woman almost always in an apron of black Italian cloth, her blouse sleeves rolled back above her beautiful forearms which turn day by day from white to country brown, a woman labelled with the names of days.

  She is Monday as she helps the washerwoman whose hands are as pleated and bleached and sodden as some tripe-like fungus, a hook-nosed, hook-chinned, toothless woman as witch-like in appearance as behaviour as she prods with the pot-stick through the smoke and steam at the outdoor copper of boiling garments.

  She is Tuesday as she sprinkles pillow-slips, Father’s shirts, my sister’s starched sun-bonnets, and the boys’ cotton sou’westers, for her flat-irons. These have already been clashed down on the top of the kitchen range so hot that a mirage almost forms above its blackleaded surface. While the irons are heating, a peaceful overture to the rites begins. Mother and the washerwoman take each bedsheet separately and, one gripping the bottom edge, one the top, retreat backwards from each other, straining the sheet horizontally taut in a version of domestic tug-o’-war, inclining their heads to scan it for signs of wear, then, this done, mincing towards each other with uplifted arms to begin the folding. On the day of this grave pavane we invariably have for dinner a succulent hash made from Sunday’s cold joint. This Mother calls a German Fry—a dish her Switzer father badgered her English mother into learning how to make.

  She is Wednesday, her hair concealed beneath a worn, old-fashioned head-dress, once her mother’s, and called a fascinator, as she shakes the little fringed furry mats that lie before each inside door, as she mops fluff from under beds, sprinkles damp tea-leaves on the Brussels carpet before brushing it, sweeps the verandas, hunts cobwebs, polishes the brass taps and door-handles, rearranges dust with a feather duster.

  She is green-fingered Thursday, and happiest, dividing her violet and primrose plants; manuring her five precious azaleas with the horse-droppings I have shovelled from the road, or cow-droppings from The Common; making a scarecrow that, wearing Father’s old clothes, subtly resembles him, and to which, hopping about like a Pearlie Queen, she sings in imitation cockney, ‘I wouldn’t leave my little wooden hut for you-oo-oo . . .’; crushing a handful of lemon verbena leaves or eau-de-Cologne mint between her palms, and inhaling the scent of her hands which must smell also of earth an
d thyme and toil and happiness. Thursday reveals most of all that she is country-bred, and that her passion for the country imbues her too deeply for denial: she knows a thousand delicately brutal tricks to circumvent birds and caterpillars, wasps and slugs, frost and midsummer, from despoiling her rows of peas, her lettuce and Frau Karl Druschki roses, her Lazy Wife beans and maiden-hair fern, her hydrangeas and carrots and Sweet William and chives and almost sacred camellia tree. Her bible is Mrs. Rolf Boldrewood’s The Flower Garden in Australia (A Book for Ladies and Amateurs dedicated by permission to the Countess of Jersey). Her favourite seeds come from Vilmorin-Andrieux et Cie, Marchands-Grainiers, Quai de la Megisserie 4, Paris. So absurd is nostalgia and my persisting desire to complete the circles of experience that when, years later, I visit Paris, I eschew the Tour Eiffel and other turismo lures first to find the Quai de la Megisserie where I compel myself not to cry.

  She is Friday, curling-pinned, slap-dashing vivaciously and deftly through domesticity so that she can dress herself up, flee from her family into the after-dinner twilight, and go shopping. Friday is late shopping night. What she shops for on these evenings is nothing essential, nothing mundane.

  The baker, the bloody butcher in a nimbus of flies, the milkman, canter into Mitchell Street daily; the grocer, the fishmonger, the rabbit-oh, the John Chinaman greengrocer and fruiterer, the iceman and the egg-woman appear once or twice weekly; the knife-grinder, the tinker, the chimneysweep, the clothes-prop man, the old do’ man, the clothes-peg gipsy and the Afghan pedlar drift through as regularly on time as the seasons, and the dust-laying water-waggon, and the ice-cream carts, and the swallows or their children which build their demi-cups of mud under the wooden shade over my bedroom window. Powdered and scented (eau-de-Cologne or Lily of the Valley), in her best earrings and gloves and dazzling polished shoes, her enamelled watch pinned to her bust, chewing a Sen-sen or a clove, Mother goes shopping for . . . for what? The tumpti-tiddily-tumpti of the Shire Band aloft in the hexagonal bandstand at the end of Main Street? The displays of xylonite hairpin boxes of imitation tortoise-shell? The Gaby Deslys figurines with thistle-down hair? The celluloid kewpies dressed in Bairnsdale football colours? The elegantly cruel spurs and plaited whips in the saddler’s? The dusty witch-balls and fuchsia-coloured paper bells suspended over the soda-fountain and marble table-tops of Russo’s? The glamour of gaslight, and electric light, and the passing and repassing between the wax dummies in the shop-windows and the spurred and slouch-hatted blokes rolling cigarettes and spitting with neat good manners between their feet as they lean against every Main Street veranda-post?

  She returns home at nine-thirty sharp, her eyes glittering, refreshed by artificial light or moonlight or starlight, exhilarated to girlishness, crying out gaily, ‘Tea! Tea! Tea!’ and, taking off her shoes now filmed with the dust of roads and adventure, ‘My corn is giving me Larry Dooley!’ ‘I heard a mopoke,’ she says, prodding the fire, removing the stove-lid, and pushing the kettle over the hole. ‘I saw a falling star. Someone is dead,’ she says, or, ‘I sneaked a piece of that variegated honeysuckle over Coster’s fence: I think it’ll strike,’ or, ‘The band was playing “The Blue Danube” tonight,’ and, ‘One, two, three. One, two, three,’ she sings whirling in her beautifully darned stockinged feet. She reveals what she has bought, other than excitement, from among the moustache cups and hurricane lamps and enamel bowls and winceyette night-gowns and glass-rubied gilt studs of Main Street. Maybe there are liquorice straps or blood oranges or little china canaries we children are to fill with water and, then, blowing down their hollow tails, make bubbling music. Whatever she buys is for us children: transfers, packets of compressed bits which expand to Japanese flowers on the surface of saucers of water, marbles of which I once knew the names, a bag of sugar-coated Paris Almonds, white and pink—simple gifts, payment that haunts now, for her several hours of freedom for the weekly promenade.

  Once only does she lose her head, and buy herself a hideous white china rose, beautiful, for some reason, to her. ‘When you dance tonight,’ I hear her sometimes sing—oh, mockingly—as she lifts the atrocity—oh, gently, gently—to dust about it, ‘wear a rose of white. ’Twill show you forgive me again. . . .’ What is she really saying in song, for she is saying something?

  She is Saturday and, breakfast over, a sergeant-major. Before breakfast, each child has had its weekly dose of Gregory Powder, a nauseous gunpowder-coloured purgative. Now, purged and fed, each child has its Saturday task. Her voice heightened, her movements brisk, she hurries about chivvying us, less because we are really of much help than that our being made to do something has its moral and disciplinary value, and is, moreover, a custom of that class in that era. Mother’s humble hoard of real silver, and the electroplated silver, is cleaned with Goddard’s Plate Powder and methylated spirits: the tea service, the salt-cellars and mustard-pot, the two cruets, the spoons and forks, the four biscuit-barrel rims and lids and handles, the salt spoons, soup ladles, fish-slice, cake pedestals, the rose-bowl and the trumpet vases. The fire-irons and fender are polished, and the steel knives are burnished with a sort of gritty cocoa rubbed on with a large cork set in a wooden handle like a drawer-handle. Butcher’s paper is scissored into squares for the lavatory, and into cut-out filigree resembling Richelieu embroidery for the pantry shelves. Howsoever good I am, howsoever rapidly and competently I perform my part in these duties, I burn to escape and race reinless into the elm-lined streets, the Tannies, the river-flats, the miles-wide paddocks surrounding Bairnsdale.

  Saturday afternoon is for baking. This is a labour of double nature: to provide a week’s supply of those more solid delicacies Australian mothers of those days regard as being as nutritiously necessary as meat twice daily, four vegetables at dinner, porridge and eggs and toast for breakfast, and constant cups of tea. Empty biscuit-barrels and cake-tins being as unthinkable as beds not made before eleven a.m., Mother, therefore, constructs a great fruit cake, and a score or more each of rock cakes, Banburies, queen cakes, date rolls and ginger nuts. These conventional solidities done, she exercises her talent for ritual fantasy, for the more costly and ephemeral dainties that are to adorn as fleetingly as day-lilies the altar of the Sunday tea-table. Now appear three-storeyed sponge cakes mortared together with scented cream and in whose seductive icing are embedded walnuts, silver cachous, glace cherries, strawberries, segments of orange and strips of angelica. Now appear cream puffs and éclairs, creations of the most momentary existence, deliberately designed neither for hoarding against a rainy day nor for social showing-off. Sunday tea is the frivolous and glittering crown of the week; there is the impression given of throwing away money like delicious dirt; there is the atmosphere rather than the fact of luxury; Sunday tea is, above all, my parents’ statement to each other and their children that life is being lived on a plane of hard-earned and justifiable abundance. I watch abundance which means that I watch Mother, its actual as well as its symbolic impulse.

  At this stage, astute within a vague placidity, so head-over-heels am I in harum-scarum content that my inner eye drifts away from observation of myself so that I become as blurred in outline to myself as my parents once were to me. In this mood, lasting years which all seem the same year,

  I appear, now, looking back, to have catalogued Mother more than any human being even though that catalogue must have been made in a by-the-way fashion. This may be a natural habit of eldest sons, or mere sons. It may only be the habit of sons who are driven by their natures to write. I suspect so, but am unsure. I do not even know if an eldest son, writer or shearer’s cook or accountant, be the best or worst judge of his mother. I never shall know. I am discovering as I write these words that my autobiography, at this period, is my mother’s biography. Outside her formal pattern of Monday as washing-day, Tuesday as ironing-day, et cetera, Mother is constantly making time almost in the same way as she makes Cornish Pasties. She makes it, between the crevices of her daily plan, in many patterns, and lays it aside, lays a
side tangible and visible samples of the hours: a mound of darned socks, a dozen jars of quince jelly, a dead-straight line of weeded onions, a varnished meat pie decorated with a pastry rose and its serrated pastry leaves. Sometimes, as men and boys do, as Father and I do, she fills in time. She too fishes in the river, comes mushrooming and blackberrying, shrieks and splashes and dog-paddles at beach-picnics. This filling-in is, however, apparent only: the picnic-hamper holds the too much she has made to eat, there is always time’s essence in blackberry tarts and blackberry jam, a dish of stewed mushrooms and jars of dried ones, or a platter of fried bream. In making time thus three-dimensional in many forms she creates the illusion of abundance for us.

  She sings still, as constantly, as cheekily, the same songs but whereas, before, the song seems foremost and she a vaporous shape gesturing through some task behind the melody, now it is she and the task that fill the foreground, piling up riches, weaving, like a spider, from the threads of her own strength of will, and love, and ability to serve, a web of plenty. She knows that we can scarcely afford to keep up with the Joneses, let alone impress them. She sees to it that we afford to impress ourselves.

  Abundance! Plenty!

  To me, now, the years between six and ten are cards of the same suit. The total impression remaining is this one of copiousness. Never for one second do I realize that what I count as such is not so to many. Not only does it seem so in my dreamily watchful, belly-filled, soft-bedded, unruffled home life, it seems more so in that country town outside the family walls, and in the country outside the country town. It is a magnification of Dr. Moss’s pittosporum with its bees and butterflies and blossoms and gusts of scent. From waking to sleeping, from January to December, from year to year, it is impossible for me not to be aware of fecundity: the grass thicker than wool and gorged with globules of dew or matted with frost; the late twilight air flowing in currents of moths and Christmas beetles and cockchafers as we play on The Common under a sky closely gravelled with planets and stars; the footpaths and paddocks glaring yellow with cape-weed through which we paddle until boots or bare feet are mustard-coloured with pollen; the birds gibbering and squealing and squeaking a million-fold in every elm in every street at sunrise and sunset, and, late, late at night, when one is in bed, and the candle blown out, the crowing of roosters from every direction, from near, from nearly near, from over the hills and far far away, cry answering cry repeatedly in sounds so threadlike, so distant, so weary, as to be almost the cry of silence itself. I see fecundity everywhere—the seed-boxes of poppies shaking out their pepper, the winter-defrocked trees blotted with nests, the summer trees bearing billions of leaves, the vast mushroom-rings, the grapelike bunches of blackberries overhanging the paths and ditches along the river, Mother’s fingers and mine stained emerald with the green blood of uncountable aphides we have squashed from the buds of the rose-bushes.

 

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