by Hal Porter
So engrossed am I with Briar Rosebud or The Sleeping Beauty and its promised kiss that the tide of time whirls the last days, the last day and the four long, long, long and wonderful years of contentment at State School 754 away from me almost unnoticed and in a trice. The last bell rings. The stream runs fast. The rapids are near. The afternoon grows old and golden. The last bell stops ringing. I hurry home with my prizes, one of which is irritatingly another copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and the same prize I get in Grade Five the year before. I hurry home, no longer a State School boy, to hand Mother the prizes which give her much more pleasure than they give me. Does she remember, I wonder, my return on my first day of State School life, in Kensington, centuries ago? Does she remember the first pink tick and the mouthful of dirty words? The big brown china teapot awaits, and the plate of pikelets, and the safety.
Taking advantage of Mother’s expressed pleasure and her happiness-weakened condition, I press her (‘Don’t talk with your mouth full, you wretched child!’) into sewing the three curly blue ostrich feathers she has saved from a pre-marriage hat on to my princely cap, a never-worn smoking-cap she made for Father of ruby-coloured velvet heavily embroidered in gold thread. Biting off the final thread she planks the glamorous object deliberately back-to-front on her own head, crosses her eyes, and sings with nasal fruitiness:
‘I’m Gilbert the filbert,
The knut with the k,
The pride of Piccadilly,
The blase roue . . .
Oh, hades, the ladies
Who leave their wooden huts
For Gilbert the filbert,
The kernel of the knuts.’
This, I know, is somehow mockery of me, as though, while happy to be possessed of a son with a different set of tricks to the men who are her brothers and the man who is her husband, she is also wary of the full value of the different set of tricks, and is deviously suggesting that I keep open a wary eye too.
Next Saturday, no one comes to the performance except the five or six or seven, the uncountable younger Adams children.
The cast, and I, have expected no audience at all. We have all sold penny or threepenny tickets, printed by hand on rectangles of butcher’s paper, to whom we can beguile—parents, big brothers, silly old ladies and reluctantly softhearted shopkeepers. The twenty-eight shillings, a preposterous sum, is audience enough for us, for we are heartlessly realistic, and want the adults’ ratification only in cold cash, not their presences which would rouse us to embarrassment, and make us into parents’ children when all we want to be, in this more elaborate game, is children’s children.
The Adams audience arrives like Brown’s cows, but bickering professionally and hoarsely without looking back at whom they are bickering with. Some are in a sort of fancy dress with the straw jackets from lager bottles tied about their legs like the gaiters of Japanese peasants. Their mouths and tongues are, one and all, black with liquorice. They bring their own haloes of flies. Several skinny dogs follow them as following a rubbish cart.
This audience, however scruffy, is perfect, and eggs us to fearless overacting, for we are gratefully enraptured by their black gaping mouths which show they find us almost unrecognizably gorgeous in gold-paper crowns, numberless strings of beads, Christmas tinsel, mothers’ opera cloaks, our lips and cheeks reddened with geranium petals.
Zealously, and with perfect justice, the audience applauds most their sister Christobel Veronica who plays the Bad Fairy with such conviction and dash that I forget not to forgive her her impromptu additions to the script. At last the moment for my own appearance approaches. Briar Rosebud, the cattle-dealer’s daughter, the exquisite princess, squeals, ‘Lo! I have pricked my snowy finger on the evil spindle!’ and subsides into sleep, while everyone else on the dray also affects heavy slumber. Holding my hand on a tin sword stuck in my sash, I count ten to myself; I come from behind the clothes-horse screened by tarpaulin where I have waited watching in my cloak of old chenille curtains, and the smoking-cap decorated with blue feathers.
‘O-o-o-o-o-oh!’ The Adamses, crawling with flies, sigh long and rapturously under the pear trees. I restrain a bow, or even a glance in their direction. I move to the Sleeping Beauty who is slumped, mouth agape and eyes screwed tight, on a deck-chair hung with lace curtains. I say the one line I have created for myself. It is by far the longest line in the play.
‘I, Prince Charming, have voyaged through many climes. The hedge of thorns attempted to bar my path. It was bewitched to lovely roses as I turned my trusty sword upon it. Lo, who sleepeth here? Oh, indeed, thou art very very beauteous, oh, lovely princess. I shall press mine Ups on thine.’
Ah!
I bend to press. The Sleeping Beauty’s eyelids quiver like moth’s wings. Her lips push themselves together. Pity instantly infects me. She doesn’t like me, I think. Her posture suggests helplessness. I eschew my reward. Instead of kissing her on the mouth, I touch my lips—-just, no more—to her jaw. Her eyes open abruptly, too abruptly. I see in them an expression I do not like, and seem to recognize the dislike I fully expected to see. She sits up. She says her line, the last in the play:
‘Thou hast broken the dread charm, oh, Prince Charming. We shall live happily ever after. Let all in the palace rejoice.’
Upon this, all who have lain for twenty seconds sleeping their hundred years’ sleep, awake, arise, advance to the edge of the dray and, facing the Adamses and the dogs, sing all the verses of:
Briar Rosebud was a fair princess,
a fair princess, a fair princess,
Briar Rosebud was a fair princess,
Long, long ago. . . .
She dwelt up in a lonely tower,
a lonely tower, a lonely tower,
She dwelt up in a lonely tower,
Long, long ago. . . .
As we sing, the Adams audience, still on its hunkers in the frizzled grass, joins us. The reiterated, ‘Long, long ago . . becomes sweeter and sadder, verse by verse.
To look back on that group of twenty children in their out-of-date shabbiness or fake finery, opening and closing their geranium- or liquorice-stained mouths to make ardent noise, is to look back and trick oneself into a sentimental curiosity. Are they, as they sing themselves into a dimension a little above the earth and a little out of the hour, aware of which future is beginning to sprout or has already sprouted within them? Or do they not know and not watch themselves and their prophetic hearts at all but merely sing and sing and, having sung, descend from the dray, and walk from the orchard, careless of their destinies? The Queen with her gold- paper crown, diamante bracelets on her freckled arms, and alive with idiotic rippling giggles, commits suicide twenty years later. War swipes out of sight the King, the Court Jester (‘Dost thou know, thou august majesties, when is a door not a door?’) and some of the audience. Years later I listen to the Bad Fairy, Christobel Veronica, already ravaged by the cancer that is to destroy her, talking and talking, and unable to stop talking of bad weather and sickness, a middle-aged cow-cocky’s wife in a scarred and dirty Chevrolet jammed with her children who could easily be herself and her brothers and sisters of long ago—of long, long ago.
Briar Rosebud or The Sleeping Beauty is almost over. One thing yet remains for me to learn, and one thing yet to do.
A few days later, the day hot and the elm-leaves flaccid, the Sleeping Beauty, reverted to the cattle-dealer’s pretty daughter, appears, apparently accidentally, at the base of an oak tree in the Tannies. I am on a bough collecting the brittle husks from which the cicadas have elbowed their way on their journey from a hole in the ground to flight in the burning air. This will be the last time I collect these fragile carapaces containing nothing, the last time I will be up a tree, humming to myself on a bough.
‘Hello,’ says the Sleeping Beauty. ‘Come on down. I want to talk to you. A bonzer secret.’ We are all affecting the new words brought back from the Great War.
I climb down, warning myself of something I cannot pinpoint.
There are children playing everywhere about, in and under the trees, as many, as busy as the children in Breughel’s Children’s Games.
‘This is a bonzer secret,’ she says. ‘Come over behind the box thorns.’
‘No,’ I say, getting an erection, for I have been behind the boxthorns with other children, but certainly not in the full blaze of December mid-morning with eyes everywhere. ‘No, I don’t want to.’
‘I don’t want to see your thing,’ she says. The erection gets harder. ‘It’s only a secret. Cross my heart, hope to die, it’s only a bonzer secret.’
I walk with her behind the boxthorns.
Arrived there, she says, sharply as an old woman, ‘The secret is: why didn’t you kiss me?’
So! I consider pretending that I have no idea of what is going on but realize that, since this appearance of hers is not accidental, it is not worth my while to begin an involuted game she will not play. She has a purpose not to be thwarted. There is nothing to say but a truth I know is not a truth.
‘I did kiss you.’ I cannot look at her and her terribly clean flounced dress, and her patent leather shoes. I wish I had no erection, and that I did not have Bathurst Burrs hooked into a design on my oldest, patched flannel shirt. I wish I had my boots and socks on, and trousers I was not growing out of. ‘I did kiss you.’
‘Not properly. You didn’t kiss me there’
‘I did,’ I lie.
‘Not therey you didn’t.’
‘Where?’ I say.
‘You know where?’ she says, and touches her lips. ‘You didn’t kiss me there, after you asked so much.’
‘I did.’ The he is becoming monotonous, even to me.
‘You didn’t. Oh, no you didn’t. Don’t you want to kiss me?’
I have my opportunity to tell the truth. I select another he. ‘Of course, yes, of course.’ I wish she would go away. I wanted the kiss that was withheld, not this confrontation of words about kisses no longer wanted.
‘Well, you can kiss me ten times. You can kiss me there. But only ten times, as a secret.’
I want no kisses, but I kiss. We do not touch each other with anything but our everted mouths. My erection subsides. Her lips are wet. I want to wipe my mouth but dare not. Each time our lips part, she counts. Nine!
‘This is the last one,’ she says. ‘Only ten, I said, see.’
Only ten!
Anxious to be done with this cold-blooded, fully lit and socially dangerous nonsense, I incline towards her for the tenth time, my lips, wet from hers, pursed well forward. As her face approaches mine, something lights up in her eyes, and then clouds over. It is as though someone is walking there behind the glaze. I sense danger but not danger’s nature. With a swift, sharp snapping, she bites my lips, hard. Tears spring to my eyes, and my hands go out to hit. She whirls away, untouched and wicked and mad, runs, runs screeching in her starched flounces and patent leather shoes, screeching, ‘That’ll teach you! That’ll teach you!’
She is right. I learn what I think is only something about a little girl of eleven or twelve. I do not know, then, that I am learning something about women, and that little girls are women.
I am appalled when Mother says, ‘What’s wrong with your lip? It looks as though someone has been biting you.’
I go red or white, I cannot see which or tell which, and put on my shadowed expression, my ever-ready mask of the absent-minded dreamer which serves when I have not a suitable lie at hand.
‘I bit myself,’ suddenly seems a brilliant and simple He because it is, in a sense, true.
‘Oh?’ says Mother, not ‘Oh!’ but ‘Oh?’ My expression grows more shadowed.
‘Your little friend with the tip-tilted nose came to see you,’ says Mother, and I know she is looking at me.
‘Oh!’ I say, realizing immediately that ‘Oh?’ would have been safer.
‘I told her I thought she’d find you in the Tannies. Did she find you?’
I do not answer. I have picked up a book and taken up the attitude of one lost to the world, a bookworm, a vague one, a dreamer.
‘Harold!’ This is dangerous, very. ‘Did the little girl find you?’
‘No,’ I say. Bugger Mother and Briar Rosebuds and women!
‘Indeed,’ says Mother. ‘In-deed, oh, indeed.’ She starts to whistle ‘Cockitee kissed the Quaker’s wife’. I sit tight and go on staring at the book. Engrossed as one turning a tablet of the Ten Commandments, I turn a page.
As aftermath of my first theatrical production there remains one thing to do.
In one of Father’s tobacco-tins I carry the twenty-eight shillings to Miss Rodda, the Deaconess. It is to be a donation to some mission. Miss Rodda lives at, maybe even runs, the Church of England Girls’ Hostel, an institution which, at this moment of recollection, I am unable to guess a reason for in the Bairnsdale of those days. It cannot, surely, have been filled with spinster Deaconesses and Sub-deaconesses.
The Hostel, nevertheless, is there. It overlooks the river and the river-fiats, and is a spread-out stone house among vast ex-lawns with curving swathes scythed in them, and tangled herbaceous borders, and beds of degenerating sown flowers. A latticed octagonal summer-house is being unpicked by and, at the same time, sustained in a swaddling of bougainvillea near a waterless fountain overflowing with periwinkle. Half-drunk with charity, carrying my offering as horizontally as the Host, scrubbed and polished and starchily crackling as a good boy, I walk up the wide terracotta-tiled path. I skirt the oval bed overrun with cannas and docks and bindweed in front of the ascent of slate steps. At the door, I pull the white china knob. Far-off, behind baize-covered doors, a bell tinkles. It is still vibrating when Miss Rodda appears from out of the slippery, Turkey-carpet-patterned linoleum, and recognizes with a flattering flutter, as though greeting St. John himself, the dear, good, clean, clever, well-mannered, bread-and butter-faced child who can say Corinthians 13, without taking a breath, at St. John’s Church of England Sunday School. The delicate crane’s-bill scissors, the keys, the silver propelling pencil and the corkscrew hanging on a chained ring from her belt rattle in a religious way as she invites me in. Dear-kind-thoughtful-good-little-boying me, she takes me into the front room. Before settling down to counting the money packed in the tobacco-tin, and writing a receipt at a roll-top desk in one corner, she makes me sit in a heavily breathing and gently wheezing leather arm-chair which contains a suede cushion, its wide hem cut into fringes, and on which is stencilled a squat peacock with a perfectly circular tail and that slight squint, sinister and lunatic, that the toys made by Girl Guides and Country Women’s Association members seem always to have.
From out of a shallow bowl of Benares brass she selects a stale apple a little less bruised and speckled than the other apples.
Holding it—Portrait of Country Boy with Apple—and my Panama hat which is attached to the front of me by a cord clippea on to my blouse, I stare at the marble chimney-piece which I am to wet with tears of agony eight years later.
When the mother of Briar Rosebud, the giggling Queen with the freckled arms, the produce-merchant’s daughter, descends from the dray to walk out of the orchard to suicide, I descend in sword, sash and feathers to begin my walk towards the room in which my mother is to die. The room in which I sit, trying not to move so that the leather will not wheeze, and holding the imperfect apple I am never to eat, and not listening to the Deaconess’s bright platitudes, is the room in which I am to stand listening and listening to Mother’s ill-chosen dying words.
I return home with the receipt, and a cutting of woodbine the Deaconess gives me for Mother who is, once again and for the eighth last time, sterilizing sixpences and threepences, a thimble, a silver ring, and the tiny china babies with black polls that are all to go in the Christmas Pudding. Neither she nor I knows that I have just come from the last room she is to enter in the physical world. I do not know that by next Christmas I shall believe in Santa Claus no longer, in people far less, and shall have in myself as m
uch more faith as I have lost in others.
Mother does not know that I have much innocence to acquire for she, as a victim of her motherhood, has forgotten what she knew as a child, and considers me innocent.
Intelligence is never innocent.
I know that, soon, oh, soon, in five weeks, four weeks, three, two, one, in no time at all, I shall be the youngest boy in Bairnsdale High School.
In 1922 Bairnsdale has five schools which are disposed throughout the town so as to form, accidentally, the plan of a cross, one school at each extreme, one at the intersection of the arms of the cross. Three of the five schools are in Main Street.