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

by Hal Porter

  Time is being pumped away, galloped away, howled away, echoed away, ticked away by the drawing-room clock and the kitchen clock and the clock of bisque china in Mother’s bedroom and the frost clicking its needles as it knits itself to itself on the sheets of corrugated iron of the roof. Since I am fundamentally more realistic than imaginative, and inclined, at this stage, to find words more convincing than anything else, it is the words of a school song that most clearly express my feeling.

  While, from his platform, Mr. Daniel Samuel Treagus, beaked and saturnine, beats time with a dark long hand enriched by its home-grown glove of glossy black hairs, the class clasps its dirty hairless hands before it, and dolefully sings:

  ‘Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,

  The rapids are near, and the daylight’s past. . . . ’

  ‘The stream runs fast,’ I say to myself. ‘The stream, the stream, the stream runs fast.’ I am, in short, for the first time, aware of getting older. I no longer hear my voice squealing and shouting on The Common at twilight, although the voices of the others now and then swing like vocal shadows across the pages of the books I am reading: Robinson Crusoe, Chums, The Last of the Mohicans, A Tale of Two Cities, The Sorrows of Satan, the Bible, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, Grandfather Porter’s books on Japan, Quo Vadis, The Boy’s Own Paper, The Girl’s Own Paper, Chatterbox, The Stones of Venice . . . anything. I am indiscriminate because I have no power of discrimination. I am lost and drugged.

  ‘Bookworm,’ says Mother—there is her pride in me somewhere, her tone suggests. Father looks, ‘Bookworm!’ at me—there is his contempt of me somewhere, his look suggests.

  I go foundering on.

  I no longer hear myself singing, ‘Oh where and oh where has my little dog gone?’

  Would I sing if Mother were to ask, or has that singer gone with the little boy and the Teddy Bear into the blue world behind the glass pane? I do not know. Since she does not know that I do not know whether I would sing, she does not test acceptance or refusal by asking me to sing. When does she last ask, and I last sing? I cannot remember. Why does she ask no more?

  There are now five children. The shawls that were mine when I was the solitary and adored king are showing their age, yellowing like ivory, and growing thinner, on the latest baby. Still, Mother has not played that silly song for my brothers and sisters to sing. Some delicatesse in the mother-eldest son relationship? I doubt if I should have cared had she played my song for the others; but I merely doubt; I am far from sure. It is, anyway, one of Mother’s fine touches that she does not give the same sort of love to each of us any more than she gives the varying plants in her garden the same kinds of care. When I am three and four and five and six Mother points out the constellations to me: Orion, The Whale, The Hare, The Scorpion, The Cup, The Southern Cross. I look up and up, so earnestly and for so long, at her finger stirring the broth of gems, that I become dazzled and giddy enough to conceive myself staring downwards into bottomless beauty. I know by name the stars and planets she knows by name, and have since learned no more than what she teaches when I am a child.

  Not once do I catch her at the same exquisite exercise with the others: perhaps an eldest son exhausts a mother’s fire, burns out the last of her virginal flames with the more outrageous flames of the newer, untried masculinity that supplements and at the same time destroys the father’s older, tried-out and chewed-over masculinity. Nor, I say, do I catch her playing the stupid song at the Renardi which, older now, its keys no longer sacred under a strip of camphor-scented flannelette, sounds younger as my sister works with mechanical determination on Czerny’s Exercises, ‘The Merry Peasant’, ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland’, ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘Partant pour la Syrie’. In this last particularly, but in them all, I hear too the trickling away of time, and State School 754, and, month by month, week by week, hour by hour, my tenth year.

  As my tenth year slides backwards under my happily and slowly opening mind and my happy and wary heart, it bears away much that is ordinarily seasonal and will slide in again for a few more years on the flood-tide of other years: the wire-netting fences furry with thistle-down, the spiders’ webs trapping beads of water into their own pattern from out of the Scotch mists, the fire-bell clashing theatrically through the blast-furnace air of bush-fire days, the springtime paddocks smelling of vanilla from the purple drifts of Chocolate Lily, the steel-lined bleatings of crows as they gorge on the crickets infesting the crevices of the midsummer ground crackled like Ming, the hush-hush-hush sweeping sound as rusted water-carts spray the dusty roads.

  The same tide, too, tugs away, as the flood did the humiliated and dying rooster on the barn-door, things and beings and situations I am never to see or hear or touch or experience ever again, except in recollection. Regret somewhat tenderizes recollection of much that is not, really, worthy of regret or recollection or record.

  Nigger’s death seems worthy of record. He dies, fully conscious of his dying, content to die, and behaving with the flawless farewell manners Mother and Father could well have taken a death-bed lesson from. Tears are shed, largely by me and Mother who have used Nigger most, and for a longer period, as a warm means of entertainment and solace. Mother pleases me by shedding tears at the same time as I do, and in quantity proportionate to the fifteen years she has known Nigger; I understand her sorrow enough to be not impressed by this display. I am astounded, in much the same way as I am when she does not bewail Grandfather Porter’s death, by her next move. She buries Nigger’s clumsy, doom-heavy body which is movingly worn bare in patches, like an old carpet, against a trellis and, immediately—the distressing thing—plants sweet pea seeds above it so as not to waste the richness of its decay. Although the succeeding years of enormous and almost vibrant blooms are called Nigger’s Sweet Peas, and become the smelly animal’s fragrant memorial, this is by no means Mother’s intention. Her tears shed, her sorrow expressed, she thinks and acts on Waste not, want not. The world, I perceive, has two faces. I am putting my lips near the rim of the beaker brimmed with disillusion. Without ever drinking too deeply I am nevertheless to find my lips near this draught again and again.

  A travelling troupe playing Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to town. It sets up its marquee, weather-dirtier, smaller, more torn and more patched than any circus tent I have so far seen, in Main Street, on the weedy space in front of the Rechabite Hall. The Fire Brigade building is next door. It is therefore on this area, every Thursday evening, that the firemen are to be seen vehemently racing about in their flannel under-shirts and withered braces, or writhing in Laocoon-like and muddy entanglements with the writhing and spirting boa-constrictor of a hose while their well-Brassoed, golden helmets hang neatly and peacefully as saucepans on the inside walls of the Fire Brigade Hall.

  When I pay my threepence for a Saturday matinee place on the cheapest benches, my feet in the firemen’s weeds, it is impossible to realize that I am paying threepence for a first experience from which the ripples ringing outwards are to affect so considerably some years of my later life that I am, for a while, to make the theatre my profession. Since these ripples are to have some effect almost immediately, it is interesting to note that I am, while engrossed in and enticed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also very disillusioned. As a whole it strikes me as a deceitful business. Although rich in serenity, I am poor in money. Or, rather, my parents blandly admit themselves poor—an uncomplaining attitude I cherish. I do not like Mother and Father being taken down. It is on their behalf less than my tougher own that I mentally disparage Topsy’s husky and offhand singing of something like:

  Ching-a-ring a-ring a-rick-ed,

  I is so berry wick-ed;

  Ps de gal dat nebber was born,

  Larkin’ all de day from early morn. . . .

  As she gyrates and capers stiffly, I know that she does not care if we payers-of-threepences really believe her to be Topsy. I know she is bored, and not in earnest. She sounds old. Her burnt-corking is patchy, and much more nondece
iving than that I have often seen on the Adams boys and girls who are dabs at blackened faces, tow wigs and horsehair moustaches. It is this non-deceiving that I find deceitful, the lack of illusion disillusioning. I have paid my parents’ money to have illusion and be deceived. Eliza, a plump woman, squeezing a bundled-up doll to her melon breasts, and hopping with wooden noises among ice-floes of kerosenetins painted white, proves to me nothing but doll, bare planks, and kerosene-tins; the pack of hounds baying in the wings, which are painted with black-grained, cocoa-brown panelling, convince me of two men; Eva has a nose much resembling my arrogant own and, instead of a rose-bud mouth, a long thin curling one. Disillusion, however, has its cause as much in the shabby antics of these run-down and already out-moded barn-stormers as in my own suddenly awakened vanity. Although I say nothing to anyone, least of all to Mother and Father who must be spared my disillusion, and scarcely even to myself lest I unwittingly give away the secret I tell myself, it is clear to me that I can outbay the man-hounds, devise more floe-like kerosene-tin floes, write more dramatic dialogue, blacken myself blacker than Topsy and Uncle Tom, and act her and him and Little Eva and Simon Legree himself off the stage. In fact, delicious poison has been sipped from a cracked and dirty cup.

  Some weeks later, I have an opportunity to sip again. It must be in August or September because there is reason to remember that the Silver Wattles are in full furry bloom. Another touring company, rather less seedy, comes to Bairnsdale. This company’s production is called a Chatauqua. To the exact nature of this entertainment memory provides few clues. It is held in the Lux Theatre, which is also called by older locals Payne’s Hall, a vast, railway-station-like structure of brick. Here, on Wednesday and Saturday nights, moving pictures are shown. Miss Vogt, whose taken-off bangles are revealed lying in a glinting pile on the piano-top at interval, when she invariably plays her entr’acte repertoire of ‘La, la, Paris!’, ‘Little Grey Home in the West’ and ‘Joseph, oh, Joseph’, is the cinema pianist. Nearest her and the screen, still in the tradition of legitimate theatre, are the dearest seats, the front stalls. The less eye-cutting back stalls, which are not separate seats as the front stalls are but long squeaky benches, are occupied by the less prosperous citizens. The pictures flutter and wince as snowy-faced actors and actresses with heavily kohl-rimmed eyes mime and mouth in jerky haste behind a sort of pale rain. On other nights than Saturday and Wednesday the Lux Theatre houses, from time to time, bazaars, flower shows, baby shows, roller-skating, evangelist meetings, conjurers, mind-readers, ventriloquists, acrobats, school operettas, church cantatas, and the Bairnsdale Dramatic Society’s productions of The Patsy, Nothing but the truth and Are you a Mason?

  Of the Chatauqua performers I most vividly recall a woman who sings songs I cannot recall. She remains in my mind as one of the three females who, in half a century, impress me as having incandescent, overpowering and final beauty. The other two are Greta Garbo, and the nameless little Kensington girl who haunts me like Lucy Gray, like all the lost children of ballads and life. The singing woman is called Sylvia and, it is now certain, owes her radiance to a china-doll make-up, to her blindingly bare shoulders and spine and bosom, to the seeming millions of stage-lights, and an evening gown of black sequins fitting her unstinted undulations as tightly as fish-scales of luminous jet. Her white white arms and white velvet neck ravish me to disbelief as she gracefully stirs the air with an immense fan of yellow ostrich feathers (how much more loin-warming than Aunt Rosa Bona’s hat), and sings higher and higher and unbelievably higher with a piercing spun-glass voice in front of a rippling back-cloth of bulbous white marble balustrades and Corinthian pillars cuddled by pillar-box-red roses. I ecstatically watch from the wings through the slits in my wombat mask. I am a wombat. I am an actor with two lines to speak.

  The Chatauqua producer, obviously a shrewd racketeer well aware of the audience they will draw, has cajoled sixty children, costumes provided, from the Headmaster of State School 754, to take part in an Australian fantasia called, I think, Dot and the Kangaroo or Someone and the Bunyip. There are certainly a kangaroo and a bunyip, and groups of wombats, platypuses, goannas and koalas. These are boys in shoddy disguise. Bigger girls are Gum-nut Fairies in grimy pink tutus of cheese-cloth. Little girls, among whom is my sister, are Wattle Fairies in yellow tutus, and wearing wreaths of real wattle blossom picked along the river bank. Dick Verco, the school caretaker widow’s son, fourteen, and the oldest and most hulking boy in Grade Six, is King Bunyip. He wears a rather doggy mask, fanged and ferocious in a half-wit way. He sits, up-stage, centre, on a rustic throne, while the unrememberable plot proceeds in front of him. To his left huddle the ten wombats, I, as First Wombat in the foreground, the smallest and youngest in the class, awaiting the moment of glory, the moment of legitimized skiting. It comes.

  King Bunyip, in whom, by now, I almost believe, turns his crazy-dog mask with its papier-mache fangs towards the wombats. Under my stuffy and sour-smelling headpiece I exquisitely suffer an excitement, a corrupting/mjow.

  ‘Ow, Wom-bats, heark-en!’ says King Wombat in a singsong broken voice. ‘Say, moi subjects, is ower roil decision roight?’

  I start into life. I move. I advance with calculatedly dramatic slowness from among the sweating, stinking, halfblinded wombats—one, two, three paces. I drop to one knee, the down-stage knee. A shrill and affected voice I have never heard in my life before comes from me as of its own unsanctified volition:

  ‘Ai pray that your august maj-es-tee will permit mai brothah wombats to confer on this mattah.’

  After an unrehearsed and mind-jolting pause, during which I observe with irritation and shame that my Wattle Fairy sister is scratching her elbow in an unfairylike manner, the caretaker’s fatherless bunyip-son says:

  ‘Yes, ow, wombat, we give ower permission.’

  Upon this I rise over-gracefully, poise itself, and—the difficult bit—back towards and, alas, into the wombats. I turn, as though on conference bent. We all nudge and bump our cardboard heads together, acting like a group of Garricks. We chatter, ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb!’ and stop as abruptly as though decapitated.

  In the silence I turn, retrace my three paces, and kneel. Once again the high-pitched voice produces itself:

  ‘Your maj-est-ee, mai brothah wombats and Ai have conferred. We one and all applaud your august decision.’

  My moment is over, a moment too petty for anyone but me to remember; it is of the past; it is gone; the petty moment is now for others: ‘Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!’ raggedly shout my brother wombats in voices unlike wombats, boys or anything. To our dismay King Bunyip’s mask slides from his face to reveal the sweating, the glistening, the suddenly wrinkled face of Dick Verco with its faint moustache.

  The next time I recall seeing that face thirty years have passed. I am now a man—at least, a man of sorts—too much a man, too little a man. I have travelled, been married, been divorced, have talked too much here and too little there, have taken my part in experiments with many lives and many bodies, have had dispassionate or stormy adventures in lying, in drunkenness, in adultery, in pederasty, in being charming and kindly, in being vile-tempered and arrogant, in being cruel, in being self-sacrificing, in being human and too human, in being inhuman and too inhuman. After many years, many of them showily enough public, I have returned to Bairnsdale to scout and spy on the setting of my childhood, and to walk, in hand-made shoes costing eighteen guineas, with a sense of walking through an old dream, the streets I once ran through barefoot. I turn a corner. It amazes me that, instantly, without hesitation or the faintest doubt, I recognize the man loping towards me, down-at-heels but lusty, deeply wrinkled, large-bellied, going bald, grey at the temples—it is King Bunyip. A Catherine Wheel of questions indicative of a peculiar shyness rather than a vanity fizzes into existence in my mind. Will he have read my poems and stories? Of course not, I think, as I stroll, for stroll is what I find myself doing with conscious, almost self-conscious, nonchalance. Will
he have read, or heard, of me and the Hutchins School, Hobart, scandal? Will he have read what I say about Australians in Occupation Japan as I step with a Manila hangover on to the tarmac at Mascot Aerodrome out of the aeroplane from Iwakuni? Shall I raise my voice, and fruitily speak my pretty piece, all smiles and heart-warming handshakes, ‘My God! Dick Verco! After all these years! How marvellous to see you, dear boy! How absolutely marvellous!’ I decide nothing. He will not know me. The two middle-aged men draw level, are passing.

  ‘’Ullo, ’Arold,’ says Dick Verco, King Bunyip, whom I have not seen for thirty years.

  ‘Hullo, Dick,’ I say, as though I have seen him every day for thirty years. No more than that. We go our ways. I am, as it were, home again. I am with those who knew me when I was to be known. I am with those who knew me as a boy: to them my scandals and hand-made shoes and foreign travel and footloose life and miniature fame and addition of years are no more than a form of fancy-dress, to be admired or not admired, but making little difference to me, and none—none at all—to them.

  ‘’Ullo, ’Arold!’ is perhaps what I ultimately use up my eyes and ears and hours for.

  My two forays into the world of grease-paint and illusion now stir me into activity of a kind unusual to me. After a little shrewd day-dreaming, itself unusual enough, I write a play: Briar Rosebud or The Sleeping Beauty. I write it, in violet ink, across the pencilled cones and pannikins and geometric patterns and sprays of coprosma in an old drawing-book. Knowing much of human vanity from observation of myself, Mother, Father, my brother and sister and everyone, it does not enter my head to be surprised when other boys and girls make no objection to rehearsing, dressing up and, ultimately, performing on a dray lent by the Queen’s produce-merchant father in the side-paddock of the King’s father’s orchard. It does surprise me—now, this very moment—that, at the age of ten, it is possible for me to abandon, abruptly and decisively, my public vagueness for high-handed actor-manager behaviour: a foretaste in myself of what I am, decades later, to denigrate in others. This means, of course, that I play Prince Charming, first, because I consider myself the best actor, second, because I have induced a cattle-breeder’s pretty daughter to enact Briar Rose, The Sleeping Beauty, so that I can kiss her awake. This is not the reward I have primarily set the theatrical machinery in motion to get. Something inescapable, and really not-to-be-desired, has set me in motion as engineer of the machinery. Nevertheless, the kiss seems to become the reward because the Sleeping Beauty does not like me, and will not let the kiss be rehearsed. All else about the production falls into a foreseen pattern of success, because I have not the imagination to foresee failure, nor the impatience necessary to attempt something that will lead to failure. The kiss, therefore, remains the one thing to accomplish.