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

by Hal Porter

  Throughout a middle-class boyhood, private school education, and young manhood, Father has every opportunity to burnish his skill, and empty-headedly seizes these opportunities. He wins several electro-plated cups on stands of fake ebony, half-a-dozen medals in jewellers’ boxes lined with royal-blue satin, and a meerschaum pipe in a meerschaum-pipe-shaped container lined with vermilion plush. His particular passion is cricket, a game he plays so successfully as a young bachelor on a two-years’ visit to South Africa that a farewell dinner attended by sixty cricketers and cricket-addicts and hangers-on is held in Cape Town on the evening before he sails back to Australia. To the seat of honour at that dinner is as far and high in life—or, rather, in what Father considers worth-while life—as he goes. It would have been a fitting chair for him to have died in, at least for the games-playing part of him to have died in. He would not then have nonchalantly bowled down other human beings as though they were wickets and he fate.

  I first become aware that he is famous to himself when he becomes aware (or has he been patiently waiting?) that I am old enough—no, big enough—to be taught some tricks with bat and ball. He is too late. I am not to be corrupted; and my precise and glass-clear and abominably priggish analysis of why I will not play with him, my own Father who buys my porridge and boots, begins a period of years of wry antagonism. He is too late because, first of all, I have already watched, and found out that games of this formal sort are, from my point of view, only for those people whose supplies of energy and vanity can be burned away inside the framework of a game, only for those who have nothing to do, and who have the time to waste to become proficient in wasting time. I have no time to waste. Father’s idea of daily practice with bat and ball shocks me because it means less time for swimming, tree-climbing, reading, drawing, less time to loll and think long wonderfully useless thoughts, less time to watch myself and the world. He is too late because I am born with some lack in or addition to my faculties which makes it impossible for me to pit myself against another in games at the finish of which there are only two prizes, Winner or Loser, both meaning nothing, games that smell of wars conducted on gentlemen’s agreements, their sincerity hollow, their intentions cut-throat. Finally, and most tellingly, he is too late because, by the age of ten, I am dubious of the weight of his honesty, and the safety of his simplicity. Time is to prove this wariness all too prophetic. It is not until I am thirty-five years old that I meet, face to face, an actively evil person, a highly intelligent, complex, dishonest and destructive woman but, from having observed my father, a man of mediocre intelligence, simple, honest and, ultimately, as destructive as cancer, I have learned to make out the signs of the blind wrecker.

  I am able to sniff out many of my father’s imperfections because he has passed them on to me from his own father. It is a heritage I have to keep my eye on for many years, a heritage including a blindness to the points of view of others that amounts to insulting indifference, a lack of imagination, a stubbornness, self-satisfaction, and bland selfishness. I attempt, still, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to amend this heritage in myself. Father, at thirty-six, merely conceals these flaws by a convincing pretence at hearty participation in the rites of public living—he is, for example, a Mason; he plays golf; he plays cricket; he plays masculinity and respectability and being a good husband, a good father and a nice man.

  A form of wordless heroism?

  I am trapped by blood, convention, daily proximity, the law, and the fact that I am utterly incapable of earning my own roof, porridge and boots. I love Father but know him to be an unfurnished man. What contretemps of inner existence has made him continue unfurnished, year after year, I do not know. I do not know because, having no imagination, I do not understand people. I understand no one, and never have, and never will. What they will do is too easily foreseeable; for me it is nearly always impossible to know why. Rape, murder, suicide, gambling, budgerigar-keeping, any-bloody-thing—they can tell me why and, ‘Yes, oh yes, I do so understand,’ is what I can say. But—really—I do not. About Father, I suspect (but am nevertheless doubtful) that his sensual desires perpetually gnaw at and consume any will to discipline, any thought of sacrifice. These itchy desires must long ago have consumed ambitions and hopes.

  He may possess secrets too sweet for the rest of the world.

  For all I can judge he may well be—it is difficult for an eldest son like me to put the correct price on a father like him—the most cynical man I am ever to meet.

  He is undoubtedly a man not earthed although he appears to be, for it is a prefabricated and carefully inspected personality that fronts the world. Brought up middle class he chooses to become lower middle class, and to assume the identity of the lower middle class, that class whose contribution to ethics is self-respect. The Australian form of selfrespect, however rough-and-ready, heart-of-gold, come-and-take-pot-luck-with-us, and matily extrovert is, essentially, genteel, ingrowing, self-pitying, vanilla-ice-cream hearted, its central fear a fear of the intellect. Father simulates all this in such a trompe Voeil manner that he convinces himself too.

  What he does do: work, eat, sleep, make babies, go to Lodge, brush his eyebrows, bowl balls, dress, bathe, and so on—these make a harmless pattern. What he does not do makes another pattern for which I find no adjective. He does not whistle or sing or directly express an opinion or collect things or write letters or—until decades later, and then only the ‘relaxing’ rubbish of Westerns and thrillers—read books. He sits by the fire, his eyes burnt down to glass, and set in a quizzicality of wrinkles. If I ask how Old Mother Mawdsley plants the seeds for babies he tells me to tuck my shirt in. He has a number of such replies. After any question, his blue eyes twinkling at some inner judgement he seems to have had to make of the questioner, he says, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be doing your homework?’ or, ‘You’ve got indelible pencil all over your lips,’ or, most often, ‘Ask your mother.’

  I stop asking him, and with him, stop asking serious questions ever, even of myself.

  I repeat, by the age of ten, I am dubious of the weight of his honesty, and the safety of his simplicity. Does he realize that I have inherited this obliquity of indifference, this stubbornness, and am also fortified by these qualities against his indifference and stubbornness, and am too clever by far to ask one of the questions that would alter the indirect glint in his eye to some other sort of glint, even gleam. If I were to flatter the skill on which his tiny fame is built by asking, ‘Would you show me how to bowl a left-hand googly?’ is he cynical enough to reply, ‘Your neck is as black as the ace of spades,’ or, ‘Ask your mother’?

  I wish, now, that I had been dishonest enough, and unselfish enough, and sweet-natured enough, to ask that question, just as I wish I had been honest enough, and selfish enough, and vicious enough, to ask, ‘You spent your boyhood practically living right on Williamstown Beach. Why can’t you swim?’ or, ‘You were thirty, and healthy as a trout, in 1914. What did you do in the Great War, daddy?’ His responses to a genially dishonest question about one aspect of his masculinity (the cricket, golf, pipe-smoking, Masonic side), and a maliciously honest one about another aspect of it (the non-swimming, not-going-to-the-War side), would have been as enlightening to me as a writer as to me as a son and a different kind of male.

  Years later, I spend some weeks fighting, with my own middle-aged obstinacy, his seventy-three-year-old stubbornness which is taking the final form of starving himself to death in a posh hospital. From somewhere he dredges up his last mortal words, and gives them to me, using the long-unused nickname of my boyhood, ‘Thank you, Laddie, thank you for everything.’ As a finale to a ludicrous deathbed scene, and a father-son relationship, and a life, it is, with its Yankee-Jewish-Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sentimentality, a farewell both startling and mysterious. Irony? Cynicism? Pity for me, uselessly pitting my strength of will against his in the battle to make him keep on living? Good sportsmanship? Charming manners, and being a nice man? His dead face, of course, was
then there to be seen. Dead faces, despite the novelists, despite even the poets, are nothing more than the faces of the dead which say nothing, nothing new, nothing worth recording or shedding tears for.

  ‘Ask your mother!’ says the unfurnished man with his eyes, exactly the colour of mine, twinkling. Sometimes, rarely, he is harried by Mother into attempting to make something—he has an enormous sea-chest of elegant tools. He begins a dog-kennel, a piece of trellis, and, once an extension to the cow-shed. Hurriedly and badly (deliberately badly?) he makes part of what he has been begged to make. Leaving the tools scattered about, he abandons the job, puts on his silk shirt, and white flannels, his cricket boots, and his I-am-a-man cricket cap, his cap of invisibility, and is invisible. I finish the dog-kennel; the trellis remains unfinished, and wistaria hides its imperfections; Mother finishes the cowshed, all us vertical children simulating helpfulness, the latest baby, now weaned to a titty-bottle, horizontal on an afghan, Mother crying out, ‘Hell and Tommy!’ and, ‘Hell and bloody Tommy!’ or singing as she hammers away:

  ‘OA, don’t de-ce-eive me, don’t ever le-eave me,

  How-ow could you you-oo-oo ze a poo-er maiden so!’

  She has named the cow Dolly—which is the name of Uncle Martini-Henry’s horse, as well as the name Father calls Mother. The implications in naming the Jersey after herself are too fine for me to pin down. Something is doubtless implied—I know Mother. Her quirk of calling straighthaired Father Curly is a sauciness one can expect from her, but it is also the expression of an attitude many Australians have, an attitude tending towards aspersion. It also seems to me to be Early Edwardian for Ida and Harold to become

  Dolly and Curly, to suggest the gaiety and liveliness of their courtship and young marriage, the cosy safety that the watcher on the cast-iron balcony in Kensington feels behind his back as he gazes, not only into his future, but into the actual direction of the scene of much of his future.

  Mother completes Father’s unfinished cow-shed, and it is 1921, and she has only eight more years to work and sing, and suffer without ostentation, and grow older, and die without completing unfinished Father.

  In 1921 Father is a cricket-playing Mason who does not sing; Mother is a mother with one more child to be born; the long horizontal banners of calico with WELCOME HOME on them no longer need to be hung along the eaves of front verandas with their trimming of cast-iron crochet to greet soldier sons or husbands returning from the Great War healthy as trivets, or shell-shocked or gassed or one-legged or all three, for they have all returned older who have not died younger, and are beginning to limp or creep from door to door along the elm-shaded streets, with trays of wide bootlaces, golliwogs, packets of pins and hairpins and darning needles, jew’s harps, milk-jug-cover beads, imitation amber cigarette-holders, and Japanese fountain pens made of bamboo, with toffee-coloured glass nibs ribbed like lemon-squeezers ; I am ten, and in my last year at State School 754.

  State School 754 is as architecturally solid, purposeful and comfortable as many schools built in Australia in the 1880’s and 1890’s. It is of red brick circumspectly enlivened by a geometric fancy-work of primrose-coloured bricks, clinker bricks and lines of black mortar. Its alp-steep, alp-high roof and false gables are regularly inset with smaller ventilator-gables, attics for starlings whose untidy nests protrude from the louvres, and whose baby-ribbon-blue egg-shells are found in the school-ground caught on the shores of the archipelagos of plantain and shepherd’s purse that litter the sea of gravel. Since each class-room has its fire-place, on the shelf of which sit wheat growing in saucers of damp cottonwool, and pickle-jars decorated with shards of broken china embedded in putty, there are many chimneys. Above these shafts, of terra-cotta, and ornate, in the terra-cotta manner,as Oscar Wilde’s Tite Street house is, the bell-tower soars up, pricks up its weather-vane, and trident lightning-conductor, to overtop the elms and oaks and plane-trees and peppercorns we are forbidden to climb. Higher than all is the red gum, hundreds of years old, which stands, muscular, masculine and primitive, at the edge of the several acres of playing-fields, a pelt of couch grass and onion grass through which generations of small soles have abraded deep, narrow, winding paths.

  Inside the school, there is the smell of chloride of lime, chalk-dust and cedar pencil-shavings. The white tongue- and-groove ceilings seem miles up; the rows of hat-pegs and wash-hand-basins in the tiled-floor cloakrooms seem endless (here there is the smell of carbolic soap entwined with the P. and O. ship smell of Brasso); the wide central corridor, lined with the indoor casement windows and glass-panelled doors of the classrooms, symbolically objectifies primary school life, for at the distant eastern end are the classrooms of the Babies at their sand-trays, paper-folding and uncertain singing; at the western end, peak of achievement, is the Sixth Grade singing ‘Wind of the Western Sea’ in three parts, diction momentarily refined and poetic—wined for wind—and voices still unbroken, and sexlessly melancholy.

  Perhaps it is because I love Saturday and Sunday somewhat more than I love school, that Friday, the door opening on to them, seems the day of the week I recall most, the last hour of Friday afternoon, 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., summer.

  Friday afternoon. Summer. Beneath the half-drawn blinds flows the faintly peppery scent from the miles of desiccated grass encircling the town. Outside, in the European trees, the cicadas, which have been unremittingly at their vast chorus since eleven in the morning, are running down like dentists’ drills. Inside, the end-of-the-weekly tasks are done. The inkwells have been emptied and washed. The blackboard has been blacked. Teacher’s strap is well-earned- resting until Monday when, once again, for the thousandth threatened time, no boy will have the foresight or the resin to rub resin on the palms of his hands. We all believe that, not only will this simple treatment protect us from pain but that it will shatter the strap into fragments as it strikes our palms. The class, twenty of us, drones contentedly with the droning blowflies—twenty of them. I drone, I listen to the droning, and watch myself and those others.

  Heads weighed forward by foot-long curls or gushes of nitty hair, the pinafored girls inject stitches, with infinite ladylike languor, into soiled poly-angles of huckaback—huckaback bibs and comb-cases and nightdress bags and scissors-covers and sauce-bottle jackets. The girls’ glass bangles tinkle as their soft, soft lips purse and part, purse and part over teeth smudged with mignonette-green. They had a bath last Saturday night; they will have a bath tomorrow night. Their hankies live about the elastic of their bloomer-legs, dirty mauve handkerchiefs into which they weep gently as overflowing cups when they lose their polka-dotted hair-ribbons, skipping-ropes with wooden handles ringed like Alice in Wonderland’s stockings, little copper cable-bracelets with locks to which the keys are already long lost, and their hexagonal pencils, one end of which writes blue, the other red. Boys lose shanghais, bazookas, penknives, tops, water-pistols, tin soldiers, and the greenish glass marbles formerly stoppers in lemonade bottles. While the girls prick on at their huckaback, the boys—flannel-singleted, galatea-bloused, bare-footed, all of them uncircumcised, un-vocational-guidanced, un-medical-inspected, un-intelligence-tested—publicly ‘model’ on their modelling-boards plasticine ivy-geranium leaves and, under the desk, long skinny snakes, or small male sexual organs which they show each other in the curve of their grimy hands without looking at each other.

  Teacher, sacrosanct on the platform, sits seemingly harmless, nearly human in posture and silence, but only to be trusted out of the corner of one’s eye, at the table covered by its ink-blotted maroon serge cloth. What does he, in alpaca coat, winged collar, and boots with toes turned up like a London bobby’s, or she, in pearl-buttoned voile blouse, and patent leather belt, write or dream or privately agonize about?

  Matters not.

  Huckaback, plakka, love letter, poem never to be published, lying letter to creditor, formless daydream, fretful vision of expected lustful satisfaction or foreseen loneliness, all in that schoolroom are earmarked. All occupy a set pl
ace in a scheme of rigid relationships. Nothing is equivocal. Boys dress as boys, girls dress as girls, teachers as teachers, and no one, least of all the teacher, suggests that any of one group should pretend to understand or magnanimously sympathize with any of another group, or should betray instinct and the facts, and, with democratic dishonesty or psychological pusillanimity, overlook the palpable differences in age, power, intelligence, position and class. It is still a world Victorian enough for one decisively and safely to know one’s exact place.

  To middle-aged (reactionary?) me this summer-embalmed sense of safety, individuality and realism sums up State School 754, Bairnsdale, in the twenties of—it seems unbelievable—this century. Was it all, ultimately and really, a system giving a more accurate foretaste of Life than education tries too analytically to offer now?

  The Headmaster, with clattering false teeth, dribble-marked waistcoat, and dandruffy clerical grey shoulders as sloping as a hock-bottle, is a rarely vouchsafed God whose weekly sixpence prize for the best essay on Thrift or Honesty or Patriotism has an air of the Victoria Cross. He and his staff, however crabby, crazy, sawny, pernickety, tempestuous, motherly, scatter-brained, hot-blowing and cold-blowing, are God and the archangels, feared and revered, a human God and human archangels, wiser intuitive psychologists and proxy parents, more dedicated and less materially molly-coddled than the subsidized, production-belt experimentalists of today, the political fancy-men, the fad-sellers, the childhood-betrayers, the confidence men on a soft cop. These seem not to know, as children know, and teachers of forty years ago know, that children are both wicked and wonderful, needing to have their bottoms tanned so that they are not seduced into destruction by unjust tolerance. Teachers of my childhood are, of course, vilified for a number of imagined failings; children are the world’s most accomplished scandalmongers, liars and gossips. Those teachers are, however, never traduced for a moral misdemeanour, unless lack of ability to control children can be seen as morally improper.