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

by Hal Porter

  Cattilic (Proddy) dogs jump like frogs

  in a pool of water.

  When the Proddies (Cath’lics) ring the bell,

  all the Catholics (Proddies) go to hell!

  We are, moreover, prepared for whatever may come. The town, for example, so far as we know, is Jewless, but we have long been ready with:

  Ikey Moses, King of the Jews,

  Sold his wife for a pair of shoes.

  When the shoes began to wear,

  Ikey Moses began to swear.

  When the swear began to stop,

  Ikey Moses bought a shop.

  When the shop began to sell. . . .

  And so on, endless verses.

  It is suggested that adults teach children. I suggest that children teach children, and that the ‘playing’ they do for adults is not the real masks-off playing they do for themselves. Not until I am myself an adult do adults attempt to teach me sin. Too late. Children do not have to teach each other sin: they merely swap sins as they swap postage-stamps or dolls.

  At this distance of years it interests me to recall that two, especially, of the odd-people-out at whose backs—always backs and always far-off—we shrill out what are virtually exorcisms, are hard-working citizens. To vilify them we use the formula we use for all our victims: ‘Silly old swaggie!’, ‘Silly old drunkie!’, ‘Silly old blackie!’, ‘Silly old dago!’, ‘Silly old Ching Chong Chinaman!’ and the more lacerating, ‘Silly old hoppy-go-quick!’, ‘Silly old four-eyes!’, ‘Silly old duck’s bum!’

  To us, one of these two honest-to-God workers is a nearwitch, the other as untouchable as a Japanese Eta.

  The witch is Nurse Mawdsley, the midwife. Except for a long rabbit-skin coat she wears hail and shine, blazing January or soaking October, she seems normal enough, a two-legged woman of authentic rubbery curves, shapely large white hands, a pink and white face on which glistens a young golden moustache, and a loudly melodious voice which, for some reason, sounds purple to me.

  When Mother’s fourth and, several years later, fifth babies are born, there Nurse Mawdsley is, the doctor in his brass-bound motor-car on her heels, there she is in the house, her rabbit-skin coat with its lining of frayed nut-brown brocaded silk possessing the hallstand beside her navy blue silk hat in the stiff crown of which are innumerable holes punched by her two black glass hatpins. There she is, bossing Mother into keeping to her bed, into eating stewed apricots and junket, and reading Charles Garvice novels. This latter Mother does with, I have no doubt, one eye, while the other and her two ears range the kitchen, and the biscuit tins, and our bowels, and the weeds and slugs stealing a march on the garden. There Nurse Mawdsley is, making tea differently from

  Mother, making it, as Father says behind her back, pale as ant’s piddle, making it on weekdays in the Sunday-sacred crested silver teapot that was Grandmother Ruff’s, and slopping the milk in first and too much but, to our amazement, putting nothing in her own except a slice of lemon which she later eats with refinedly outcurled fingers and rabbity nibblings. This oddity of behaviour, and the fact that she reads The Bairnsdale Advertiser and smokes scented cigarettes in the lavatory, seem somehow to confirm that she really is the absurd she who grows babies under cabbages, and after whom we screech, ‘Silly old Mother Mawdsley!’

  I am sixteen before I know, and then neither perfectly clearly nor correctly, the facts about conception and birth. I think this fairly usual for the class, generation, continent and country town I was brought up in. My parents tell me nothing of sex ever. During the numerous, often elaborate and, to me, increasingly boring, unrewarding and time-wasting sexual interchanges I have in barns, behind hedges and in the Renardi’s piano-case with little girls and other little boys, it never enters my head that what we are up to has anything to do with fathers, mothers, babies or me. It is merely a furtive game I have been asked to share in, most often à deux, sometimes à trois, once a retrospectively funny à quatre. Although I am, during those years, a born watcher who has not outgrown watching, I never observe Mother large with child; Mother’s waistline being, it seems, not the sort of thing I go in for watching. I am, of course, not yet ten, but the blind spot persists until much later. I am prepared to admit that the subject of babies as an aftermath of sex could have come up; my ear, as so often to this day, is doubtless elsewhere listening to time passing, to myself and the world dying, and the voices of the dead prophetic poets soaring above the unnecessary noises men let men make. Without a chart and without an informative whisper therefore, I assume that Nurse Mawdsley, in some sort of unimaginable but dull collusion with the doctor, is responsible for landing Mother with a new and uninteresting brother or sister. I seek no reason for this tiresome largesse; the fact of it suffices. When, cheerfully sinister, and jocularly dangerous with her purple voice, her fingers hooked away from her cup of ant’s piddle, Nurse Mawdsley is fifteen-sixteenths of the household, I do watch her warily. The designs on the wallpaper seem smaller and dimmer; my brothers and sisters seem flatter, as cut from a material without depth; boiled eggs are runny, and have not been wiped clean before cooking. I watch, and keep my mouth shut. When, however, the rabbit-skin coat no longer hangs like a sad beast on the hallstand, and Nurse Mawdsley’s furry and majestic bulk is, some time later, seen several safe blocks away, I, in the encouraging company of a First and Third Murderer, am moved to open my mouth wide: ‘Silly old Mother Mawdsley! Silly old Mother Mawdsley!’ What am I, with the others of my age, shouting against? What atavistic fear? I do not know then, can only guess now.

  The untouchable is the night-man, the lavatory-man, the dunny-man, outcast of outcasts. Most often he does come at night to carry away our excrement, degradation in the dark, but, often enough, shamelessly in full daylight. Heralded by a stench and the clashing of metal doors and galvanized iron, his horses pace slowly into the street. Windows are closed. Eyes are averted, and breaths held. As all tradesmen’s horses of that era do, the butcher’s, the baker’s, the grocer’s, the milkman’s, his horses move from house to house, from tradesman’s entrance to tradesman’s entrance, without being directed. They stop; they pause waiting for their drivers; they move on, at exactly the right moment, as though by clockwork, Calvanistically long-faced with resignation, their manes in girlish plaits, their eyelashes covered in dust. In summer they wear straw hats through slots in which their ears protrude like hairy leaves. They draw what we call the night-cart or, less prissily, the dunny-cart, a two-storeyed van of metal cubicles each containing a dunny-can. I see the pariah now, entering our drive-gate with an empty can, and leaving with a full one, his naked, conspicuously muscular arms holding the shame-weighted container on his head in the manner of Rebecca holding the water-pitcher at the well in Mother’s Child’s Bible. The night-man wears a hat, decidedly for practical reasons, but also because, in those days, no man—indeed, nobody—goes out of doors without headgear. To do so lays one open as much to social condemnation as to the imagined dangers of sun, rain, falling dew, changes in weather, moon, night air, twilight air or mere air. Hatlessness is more than unhealthy and vulgar, it is capricious to the point of lunacy. When, in 1927, Dick Currie, a handsome and god-like footballer, takes to wearing nothing but his curls on his head, the town is shocked to gossip. Not even the most headstrong of his fans dares follow his peculiar lead.

  The top of the night-man’s hat is squashed so dead-flat that it appears his skull must also be. His arms are enmeshed in a knitting of flies, and so is his face, his moveless face. He can make no gesture to swipe off the mask of creatures. He does not wince under their abominable little feet as his horses do. He patiently wears the insects as though he has been dipped in them, a baptism setting him permanently apart.

  Once, one December, I am in the lavatory; I have lifted the lid from the hole, and am dreamily undoing my braces, when I hear the trapdoor open and, my modesty disturbed, myself struck to unmoving breathlessness, see through the hole the full can slide scrapingly away, and the empty one pushed into i
ts place. Then, taking me utterly aback, and shocking me as something macabre, a hand appears through the hole, five-fingered, human, flexible, with clean square finger-nails, and finically drops a little card on the seat. It then withdraws in its moveless mitten of flies. The trapdoor closes. I can breathe and move. I take up and read the card on which is printed:

  Enjoy Christmas as best you can,

  And don’t forget the Dunny Man.

  I rush this mystery to Mother. She is unimpressed. Silly boy, it happens every year. A Christmas-box of half a crown will be left. Crikey! Half a crown! On the seat? Yes, on the seat. In a matchbox? No, in an envelope. Wouldn’t a matchbox be better?

  Mother, who is boiling Christmas Pudding threepences and sixpences to sterilize them, suddenly places her hands in an attitude of prayer, rolls her eyes piously ceiling-wards and, at the same time crossing them, sings in a burlesque choir voice, very tremolo:

  ‘Hark, the herald angels sing,

  Beecham’s Pills are just the thing,

  Peace on earth and mercy mild,

  Two for a man, and one for a child’

  Since the other children and I cry out against the midwife and the night-man, it is not surprising that we cry out at those who have less reason for our respect and silence. When we are alone, each of us is niminy-piminy silent, angelic as a story-book character, imitating humanity, incapable of egging self to viciousness. However, in pairs, in threes, in groups, we are without fear of deriding the spastic scraping and jerking along like an out-of-gear mechanical toy; of white-faced Miss Read lifting and thumping, lifting and thumping and dragging her giant boot with its foot-thick sole across The Common; of the monstrously fat jelly of a woman who works in Mason and Carter’s, Newsagent and Fancy Goods; of Mrs. Rich the pawnbroker who has a little grey goatee; of the pea-picking Dagoes and maize-growing Hindus; of Paddy Power the dwarf who lives by himself in a dwarf hut, and resembles all the dwarfs since seen, in waddle and desperately alert expression; of the old, old, old, black-be-capped and black-slippered Chinkies, the dying Chows, the skin-and-bone last of the Amoy Chinese from the worn-out gold-fields, who sit with swollen eyes on the disintegrating verandas behind the plumed and dusty weeds of the Pearson Street hovels, and are believed to be wealthy, to eat cats, smoke opium, put their big yellow things in little white girls’ things, and keep threepences in their ears. ‘Don’t,’ cry mothers and cries Mother, ‘don’t put that dirty, filthy, revolting threepenny bit in your mouth. It’s been in a Chinaman’s ear.’ What Yellow Peril canard, filtering through to frontier town Bairnsdale, could make stick to be widespread this frivolous accusation against senile escapees from Tzu-Hsi, the Dowager Empress, I cannot guess unless ear is a euphemism for another orifice in which the badgered secrete their wealth in times of peril. Anyway, we do not attempt to disbelieve the furphy. We are only too happy to see the fingerprints of the devil on all who are too large or too small or the wrong colour or crippled.

  We are suspicious of a devil’s simplicity and directness in the hunchback, in the man with the birth-mark that colours his face half-mulberry, half-white, like a mediaeval tabard, in the many women who, because of a mineral deficiency in Bairnsdale’s bland, sweet water, have eyes like Pekingese, and goitrous throats ranging from Burne-Jones to pelican. So we scream our counter-charms at them to warn whatsoever possesses them that we are suspicious and superstitious.

  Superstitions and fallacies are stock-in-trade, and keep us constantly wary. Though willing enough occasionally to test blasphemy, and find that, as guessed, no thunderbolt strikes the blasphemer, and no voice from heaven booms through a display of lightning, ‘I heard what you said about Me,’ we prefer to keep on the safe side of sacrilege.

  Yet, other minor perils season our dish of days. Warts are caused by licks from dogs, or from handling toads which we inflate to great size by blowing down hollow grass-stalks stuck up their holes. Lockjaw, which we translate as meaning eternal dumbness, occurs instantly—absolutely instantly—that the skin between thumb and forefinger is cut. Lizard and goanna bites may appear cured, but break out, year after year, at the same minute of the same hour of the same day they are inflicted. Each sigh made means a drop of blood lost from the heart, and a day cut from life. One’s grandmother dies if one deliberately steps on a crack in asphalt. A guinea-pig’s eyes drop out if the animal is held up by its tail. A snake, if permitted to cross one’s glance with its evil, lidless own, hypnotizes one to nightmare immobility. A snake, if its back be broken, even before noon, and it be apparently dead, is unable to die until sunset. A snake, if caught unawares, hastily gulps down its young, circles itself into a hoop, tail in mouth, and bowls itself away from danger. To see a white horse sets one snapping out, ‘First luck, white horse!’ and gabbling the numbers from one to ten, which done, one spits on a forefinger, and marks a wet cross on one’s dusty boot or dirty foot. Just as a four-leafed clover is good magic, so is a wishbone, a nautilus shell, a potato with a face, a philippina, a stone with a hole in it, and a white horse. A cast horseshoe is not good magic. It is necessary to pick up the sinister thing, to spit on it and, then, hurl it as far behind as possible over the left shoulder, the eyes meantime being squeezed shut, and the ears covered by the hands, to prevent oneself knowing where and when it comes to earth.

  Mortality scents many of our superstitions. Death is an engaging topic, particularly when we have played ourselves to a standstill physically and emotionally in one of the more chilling games such as, Who’s going around my house, tonight? or, Sheep, sheep, come home! and twilight has become night, and fate is visible in our own dying voices and unseen faces.

  Death is a riddle to which, in these moods, we question the answers we have been given, and make up many more of our own answers to question. None is convincing. None is satisfactory, not even the possibility of arriving in heaven (which we do not question), as by a later train at a celestial railway station, to be greeted by those who have taken an earlier train. For me the flaw in this alluring notion of which I hear from Mother, and at Sunday School, and Religious Instruction at Bairnsdale State School No. 754, and generally, is the irritating difficulty the older dead and the newer dead will have to face in recognizing each other as they gather by the beautiful, the beautiful, the river, over the ranges, on the golden shore, beyond the sunset or just across the bridge of gold. What, I chatter voicelessly to myself, picking at a scab, what of the young mother who dies and leaves a little baby which lives on, and grows into an old man before it dies? How will the young mother recognize the old man? And he, who was a memory-less baby when she died, how will he recognize her whom he has never seen? What will my Grandmother Ruff, who died when I was a baby she used to nurse, expect of me when I die? What if Mother dies, today, right now, and I live on and on to be a long-bearded hundred before joining her? This, of course, is ridiculous country to be running in: my dying is something I simply do not believe in. Nor do I believe for one moment in Mother’s dying.

  She is clearly not marked down for death. She is too entangled in life, too busy, too lively, too noisily chatterbox, and has, altogether, too many imperfections disqualifying her from death. I have long since gathered that, apart from the historically wicked Rasputin who is recent, and King John, and Attila, the Scourge of God, who are old, the dead require to be noble, truthful, religious, patient, sweet-natured, and altogether morally larger than life. They possess, in short, all the graces the living do not, and Mother patently does not. Mother is oh-you-tee.

  She smacks me and my siblings about the legs with a little soft leather strap which nevertheless stings, and which she calls her cat-o’-nine-tails although it is cut at the end into only four small tails. She never goes to St. John’s Church of England except for christenings, other people’s weddings and, sometimes, at Easter.

  When she drops a gravy boat or scorches a batch of scones she uses her favourite oath, ‘Hell and Tommy!’ She sometimes swears like a man—as youngest pet daughter of a boisterously happy-go-
lucky family well-endowed with shootin’ and fishin’, if not huntin’, brothers she has had every opportunity to acquire a striking vocabulary. Worst of all to me, she is at times coarse—‘Lord Muck of Turd Island!’ she says almost contemptuously of some pompous fool. Thank God I have caught some of her coarseness; I should be utterly insufferable without it.

  As she splashes in the bath with her long translucent bar of glycerine soap or, on state occasions, with the sphere of pink soap that has the same ravishing scent as her talcum powder, Wild Geranium, she sings with blasphemous loudness, ‘For those in peril on the sea. . .

  She steals cuttings of plants through picket-fences, not only as fearlessly as a hardened criminal but also on Sundays, in lull view of the afternoon strollers in their navy-blue suits and ox-blood boots, wheeling cane-and-sennett baby-carriages quivering sensitively aloft on high, fragile wire wheels.

  She picks up cutlet bones from her plate to gnaw them bare.

  She is charming as a royal princess to my sister’s music teacher, Miss Brewer, and presses upon her a pot of Pear Ginger, a bunch of zinnias, and a little bouquet of parsley, but says, ‘I can’t bear that woman. Airs and graces! Dressed up like a sore toe, but hasn’t had a bath for weeks. Dirty English! Dirty flashness! I shudder to think of her . . . her underneath.’ Then she smiles, not revealing her teeth, with the equivocal, dangerous smile of a Becky Sharp by Greuze. ‘That Pear Ginger,’ she says, ‘was your Aunt Mary’s recipe!’