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

by Hal Porter

  I catch on.

  Mother cannot bear Aunt Mary either.

  ‘Zin-ni-ahs, oh, zin-ni-ahs,’ says Mother in a lah-di-dah manner. I recall that she calls zinnias Old Age.

  I recall also that Mother has told me that to give parsley to another woman means that Nurse Mawdsley and the doctor will bring the woman a baby. Obliquely as ever, Mother is wishing Miss Brewer some female ill, is putting the mozz on her.

  When the Canon is perceived to be at the front door, ‘Oh, bugger, bugger, bugger bugger, bugger,’ whispers Mother from the pantry where she is hiding. ‘Tell him I’m out. The man’s a crashing bore. Tell him I’m out, Laddie. Tell him I’m in Timbuctoo. Tell him I’m dead.’ Yet Mother smacks me—hard—if I attempt to get away with a lie myself.

  Indeed, indeed, Mother has few of the qualifications for death.

  Immortal as I see her, her death as impossible as my own, implicated in full-time living as she is, she is nevertheless a gourmet of those side-dishes death lavishly provides.

  She loves to feed all of us children, but especially me who listens more feverishly, what she herself loves: tales of death. She ranges from Cock Robin to Hero and Leander, from Lucy Gray to Greyfriars Bobbie, from Babes in the Wood to walled-up nuns, from Mary, Queen of Scots and Edith Cavell to the bride who playfully hid in the chest that locked itself upon her and all her wedding finery.

  I am easily able to spring the fact that Mother has less appetite for these samples of doom, albeit tasty, because she is not herself involved in their making. She is fearfully hungrier for those portents of death which are all about her, and which come near enough to her for her to imagine them part of her own experience. Dogs howling late at night in a certain manner (‘Hark!’ says Mother theatrically. ‘Listen! Those dogs! When they howl like that. . . .’ Her eyes dilate. ‘. . . death!’); a meteor streaking down the slope of heaven; a black moth or a bat entering the house; three ominously spaced and resounding midnight knocks on a door, and emptiness, nothing, no one there, when it is opened; to Mother all these foretell death or have foretold it truly to her friends or to time-out-of-mind great-aunts and second cousins. Just as I believe (almost) that snakes cannot die until the sun goes down, so Mother believes (almost?) that Great-uncle Tom died in Sierra Leone just as the sun went down or—I forget which—just as the tide turned or the moon set or the last leaf fell. In her scrambled repertoire of songs, which includes many about the kind of prettified nineteenth-century wars Grandfather Porter painted, is a song illustrating this belief. The few recallable lines go something like this:

  One held a lock of thin grey hair,

  One held a lock of brown,

  Closing their eyes to the earth and skies,

  Just as the sun went down.

  One thought of mother, at home alone,

  Feeble and old and grey,

  One of his sweetheart he’d left in town,

  Happy and blithe and gay. . . .

  Of Great-uncle Tom, who had sent her a sleeping doll large as a two-year-old human, its body of pink kid dressed in the most delicate embroidered muslins edged with lace, from which its china face and limbs white-and-rosily emerged,

  Mother says, ‘I was sitting, quiet as a mouse, on my little stool under the pomegranate tree by the well. I was nursing Charlotte. I called her Charlotte, you see. There I was, quiet as a mouse, and there wasn’t a sound anywhere. And I was thinking of Uncle Tom, the way one does. The sun was just setting.’ (It may have been the moon setting, or the tide turning. This detail eludes me.) ‘And, as I sat there thinking of Uncle Tom, Charlotte suddenly twisted about in my arms. As though she were in pain. Of course, I didn’t think anything much about it at the time, very strange as it was. But, months later, when we heard of Uncle Tom’s death in Sierra Leone, it all came back to me in a flash. I remembered. And it was at the very moment that Charlotte had moved that poor Uncle Tom. . . .’

  You can guess the rest of Mother’s nonsense.

  Were I to be hounded into presenting, before some unimaginable tribunal, illustrations of Mother displaying her love, I should ultimately present what I have here and now chosen to present to the tribunal of myself. Doubtless, in an ultimate analysis, whatever I consider pertinent, and attempt to present dead-pan, and as objectively as possible, turns out to be as sentimental and nostalgic as the rather twee picture of Mother playing Tit-Tat-Toe with me by far-off lamplight or, with the engine of yet another day at last turned off, drowsily suckling a baby—now a broken man older than Mother ever becomes—by the dregs of a fire, three coals like carnations, in a kitchen smelling of peace and a cut lemon.

  This Mother is the same Mother who excitingly chills our blood by whispering to us as we sit on the side veranda watching the owls swoop by in the twilight:

  ‘In a dark dark land there’s a dark dark town; in the dark dark town there’s a dark dark road; in the dark dark road there’s a dark dark street; in the dark dark street there’s a dark dark lane; in the dark dark lane there’s a dark dark house; in the dark dark house there’s a dark dark room; in the dark dark room there’s a dark dark coffin; in the dark dark coffin there’s . . . a dark dark GHOST!’

  Her telling us children these tales, this rubbish, is part and parcel of a never-pausing and never-ending expression of her love; she shares with us her own fervour for, and genuine half-fear of, the supernatural and the ghostly and ghastly and completely absurd, just as freely and directly as she shares herself from Archer to Zany, her private derisive vulgarity and exquisite public manners, her blowtorch temper and cool, deep reservoir of patience, her blind honesties and trivial dishonesties, her charm and her stupidity, her fantasy and her practicality, her pretty ideas and her silly whims.

  Unlike Father, who has nothing of himself to give, or only the shadows of virtues, and weaknesses not fit for children tough as children, Mother is perpetually generous with herself. This is either because she can freshly remake herself, good and bad, and therefore inexhaustible, or because she is by nature indestructible.

  No! Mother’s chance of death is so poor as to make death for her unbelievable. She has none of the marble nobilities, none of the bronze-laurelled virtues. She is too human.

  Grandfather Porter’s death is, however, quite believable and, though with a different intonation, for the same reason. He is too human.

  His death, long expected, nevertheless catches the family napping circa 1920. It is enacted solo, informally, and with a modesty edging on secrecy. These are unlooked-for and outrageously unexpected tactics in a man of stubbornly military character who has lived for a number of years on little more than reading, port wine, cigar smoke and imperial behaviour. Defrauding his ten children and his second wife, an exbeauty and ex-crack-rifle-shot called Katherine Hayes, of a rip-roaring death-bed scene, Grandfather is one moment alive in his wheel chair, smoking a cigar and nagging away about a paper-knife for which Aunt Kate (Grandfather’s second wife Katherine), Aunt Gwendoline (Father’s halfsister) and Auntie Nell (Father’s spinster sister Helen) are searching in other parts of the house. The next moment Grandfather is dead, and in no need of the knife for which people are fruitlessly searching—it is under the wheel chair—selfishly dead, without giving proper notice.

  Upon hearing the news which arrives by dramatic telegram I am disappointed to witness no tears from Father or even Mother, and none of the cries (‘Alas! Woe is me! Gone, gone, gone!’) books have led me to expect. I am rattled also to observe that my parents seem too illiterate to know what they can do in lieu of more articulate expression of emotion. They do not blanch, bite their lips, press hands to hearts, or clench their jaws. Father begins to strop his razor, talking of trains as though there were fifty a day to the city instead of two, the early morning and the afternoon two-thirty. Mother begins to pack Father’s portmanteau with the South African labels on it, addressing stern remarks to underpants (‘I was sure I’d darned you, you nasty thing’), and starched collars, and Father, who addresses replies to his ow
n lathered face in the looking-glass.

  ‘Oh, Curly! You can’t, you can’t wear this black tie,’ cries Mother at the tie, glaring at the tie. ‘It’s frayed to billy-oh. Get a new one at Buckley and Nunn’s.’

  ‘Have to do,’ says Father to the face he is slicing foam from. ‘Buckley and Nunn’s. It won’t take any more than a quarter of an hour. A half-hour at most. Before you get the train to Williamstown. Get a good silk poplin.’ Her voice becomes aerated. ‘And while you’re in town you can get me a packet of verbena seeds.’

  Father says nothing so deliberately that Mother says, ‘Verbena seeds!’ sharply as a slap.

  ‘Going to a funeral,’ says Father. ‘No time for traipsing through. . . .’

  ‘Listen carefully, man. I’ve put your corn-cure—are you listening, Curly?—your corn-cure under your handkerchiefs. No, I think two packets. Pretty things, verbenas. There’s a new strain out called . . . called. . . . There, I’ve forgotten the name. But I’ll write a list.’

  So this is death and bereavement!

  Observing the bereaved I am not convinced, despite the potency of the telegram, of Grandfather’s death.

  However, something impressive does happen. A week later Father returns enriched by a new black tie, silk poplin,

  Buckley and Nunn’s, and a black armband. This latter really is something. In the absence of tears and wailings, in the absence of a blood-curdling recital from Mother whom I expected to seize the opportunity of an authentic bereavement as inspiration, but who, when nudged in the direction of clarifying doom, says no more than, ‘The dear old man has gone to join the angels in heaven. He’ll meet Grandmother Porter. Eat up your swede, it’s got nutmeg in it. Which you like,’ the new tie and the armband are the only proofs to convince me that Grandfather really is dead.

  More convincing proofs arrive some weeks later, four of Grandfather’s paintings of enchanted and blood-free battle, and one of a Moorish interior alive with mild, minute Arabs with eyes the size of pin-heads. The Arabs are wrapped like parcels in robes with papery folds. Some are striped like humbugs. Some Arabs stand, some incline, some half-kneel, some are flat on their faces, among the slender pillars, and under the archways shaped like playing-card Spades. Each head is turbaned differently, as if the painting illustrated Twenty Ways to wind your New Turban.

  ‘Hell and Tommy!’ says Mother, and puts the paintings in the spare room where they almost cover the walls, and induce a feeling of claustrophobia.

  There also arrives a case containing books, and a note in curly backhand:

  For Laddie. I hope he gets as much pleasure and benifit from these as his dear grandfather did. How is Owen? K.P.

  Owen is Father’s second name.

  I feel pretty sure, now, that Grandfather’s wife, my father’s stepmother, Aunt Kate, clearing the Williamstown house with its wind-gnawed chimneys of the dead’s lumber, decides fortuitously on me as donee a split second before the rubbish-man arrives. In her world of whist, rifle-shooting, spicy gossip, crayfish suppers and horse-race gambling, books are junk which she transforms into a gesture of uplifting affection for the gilt-headed and cat-smug boy she dislikes because he talks in polysyllables, writes poetry about sunsets, and paints in water-colours the flags of the world, regimental badges and the guild signs of London, all copied from ‘Chums’.

  ‘Why did Aunt Kate send Grandfather’s books to me?’ I wastefully ask Father.

  ‘It’s about time you went to the barber,’ says Father.

  ‘Because she can’t read, can she—O-wen?’ says Mother unpacking the books, and bursting into, ‘I’m called little Buttercup. . . .’

  ‘She can’t spell benefit,’ I say of the woman who, in handing on Grandfather’s books to me, hands on the very material that is ultimately to quicken in me the infusion of footloose blood Grandfather has himself handed on to me. The books are calf-bound. Cigar-ash is spilt here and there between the lithographs and woodcuts and steel engravings. The pages have been cut with the paper-knife lost under the dead man’s chair. Among the books are works later to have much effect on my life: Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, Bird’s Unbeaten tracks in Japan, Mac Farlane’s Japan and Reed’s Japan. It is natural to assume that the old man with the tobacco-stained moustache whom I did not like, who gave me the bronze Goddess of Mercy, loved Japan as I love it.

  Father’s black insignia of tear-less mourning, the oil-paintings in the spare room, and the books indicating my idea of earthly Paradise, are certain enough proofs of Grandfather’s death but the clincher is the fact that, overnight, Grandfather becomes gloriously ennobled. He has hitherto been, I have been thrilled to overhear, a selfish old scoundrel wasting his time with books and paint-brushes, improvident, a bore, a know-all, a blatherskite, shrewd as a bagful of monkeys, a malingerer, ungrateful, always half-seas-over and, in some undefined fashion beyond the reach of law, responsible for that dear, sweet woman’s, his first wife’s, death, Aunt Frances’s stammer, Auntie Nell’s weak ankles and nervous twitch, and Father’s meagre finances. Now, though not worthy of tears and cries of sorrow, he is no longer worthy of abuse. The prickly bushes of his petty failings and capital sins explode into blossoms of virtues I try to avoid overhearing accounts of. He is a witty old boy, a brave soldier brave to the last, and a thorough—a fine—old English gentleman, an exemplary husband to his first wife—that virago and flibbertigibbet who could not keep a servant longer than a day, a kindly father without whose inspiration and patience Aunt Frances would never have spoken a word or Auntie Nell—Aunt Helen—ever have walked a step.

  He becomes, in fact, more boring dead than I ever found him alive, when I dutifully repaid his reasonable boredom with me by my unreasonable boredom with him.

  How ruthless and hard and vile and right the young are.

  I am as happy, during the four years, between the ages of six and ten, that I spend at State School 754 in the country, as I briefly was in the suburban state school. I love facts, and the excitement and processes of getting facts. In short, I love school, and am, fortunately, hurried from grade to grade—once passing through two grades in one year—at a speed fast enough not to have my ardour for supplies of brand-new information, and more intricate problems, and more decorative knowledge, whittled down to boredom. I perceive, absolutely without surprise and almost without interest, that I am younger and much more clever than the other boys and girls in the class, that is much more clever, and for a space of several years only, at school work. Much of this variety of cleverness sticks about me like a nimbus of fuzz, until the storms of puberty unpick it, and I become intellectual rather than intelligent.

  It never enters my head to consider that this short period of being convinced by what I am told, of being swift in perception, and retentive of memory, is my fault or my crown. I am loudly informed from the platform, by accredited adults I have no reason to doubt, that seven eights are fifty-six, that Berlin is on the Spree, that Henry the Eighth had six wives, and that William Wordsworth was an English poet, and decorously and unquestioningly adopt this information. Teacher says so: that is that. All I have to do is to sit with my hands clasped behind my back, and listen, and remember. I do. It is dead easy. This a-rose-is-a-rose-is-a-rose attitude to primary education serves me well.

  Once, but never again, my passion for abundance and mental industry tempts me to greed, and I learn all the verses of ‘Harry Dale the Drover’ instead of the one verse asked for as a night’s homework. I discover, next day, less by directer means than a kind of pricking of the thumbs, that this showiness is a dirty indiscretion, a traitor’s ploy, and socially offensive.

  I immediately cotton on to the fact that intelligence thus lightly used, and one-upmanshipishly displayed, is a birthmark giving me a two-coloured face, is goitre, a hump on the back, webbed toes, and makes me stink like the night-man. Once again, I learn what I knew on my very first day at Kensington School, and have carelessly forgotten, that it is more intelligent to appear less intelligent. I hence
forth rein myself in, and publicly give back only what I have been given—fifty-six for seven-eights. It is incomprehensible to me that others have time enough to proffer fifty-four or sixty-three or silence, responses striking me as perverse, undisciplined, and as elaborate tricks. I do not realize, then, that my suspicions are largely correct, and that the pleasures of thus exercising the mind are not, for ever, to be for most of my schoolfellows: bodily pleasures will do, a cave and a curtain will do.

  I am, fortunately, as indifferent to my success indoors at school as I am indifferent, fortunately, to my lack of success in the organized games of the schoolground. I do recognize some protective value in, and receive some physical pleasure from, swimming, running, climbing and fighting, and therefore am able to swim like a frog or Byron, can run and climb as well as less brainy boys, and fight with uninhibited ferocity when circumstances nick a hole in my thick fleece of serenity, and let out a gush of hate. I cannot consider fighting in competitive Manly Fun any more than I can consider pitting my running, swimming or climbing body against other bodies. Nothing, then, or now, arouses me or will ever arouse me from a perfect disinterest in ball games. I see other boys showing every possible sign of coarse pleasure in football and cricket and shinty, in boxing and wrestling; I see their burning eyes and hurtling bodies and interlocked limbs, and know they are freeing themselves from something, but cannot understand precisely how the relief occurs, because my relief from much the same sort of something occurs in different activities. The boys’ anticipatory conversations, endlessly repetitive, bore me; the games bore me; the postmortems composed of excusings, recriminations, vainglory and downright lies horrify me.

  My disinterest, openly expressed and lived up to, angers my father. It is a spurning of his unexpressed hopes that I should equal, perhaps even surpass, his own skill for competently kicking, bowling, catching, throwing or striking at balls of various sizes.