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

by Hal Porter

  ‘Jealousy /’ Uncle X rolls his eyes ceiling-wards. ‘Jealous of that poor bastard’s bastard of a bloody tie!’ His shouting over, he looks fleetingly, but with meaning and expectancy, out of his raillery, at Uncle Y who is the acknowledged family jester.

  The ground having been prepared by Uncle X, principal stooge, with some assistance from Aunts X and Z, Uncle Y is now ready to perform. He puts down his ham-sandwich with elaborate preciseness. He brushes his finger-tips together to remove crumbs or a pretence of crumbs. He clears his throat in the manner of actors acting throat-clearing. His face puts on the pursed-mouth blandness of a superior being.

  ‘X,’ he says, curling his fingers like a tea-sipping shopgirl, and assuming an accent of rum truffle richness, ‘X, mai deah, deah brothah-in-law, whai not be honest with me? Ai know you dote on the tai. Ai’d hev given it to you. If you’d asked naicely. If you’d been frank and open. But you’re a cad, suh. You’re almost a bally boundah. Your language is foul. In short, suh, you’re a bastard of the first water, and as cunning as a bloody bagful of you-know-from-where rats. Ai see through you, mai good fell-oh. No tie for you; no bloody tie at all.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ says Aunt X and Z, ‘we all see through you, my boy. You can’t pull the wool over our eyes.’ Then, changing sides, partly because X has now been put in the position of underdog, partly to give Uncle Y, the wit, the funny man, the sad case, the dag, the trimmer, the one-never-lost-for a-smart-come-back, a further opportunity to set them giggling and squealing, the aunts over-act cajolement, ‘Now, come on, Y, don’t be an old meanie. Set the poor silly bugger an example. Open your heart. Don’t be stingy. You know he can’t afford ties.’ This is obverse but graciously astute acknowledgement of Uncle X’s keen business sense, and materially successful career. ‘Give the poor bugger the tie before he breaks down. Come on, Y, off with that tie.’

  And so on.

  Exchanges of this coarsely-textured, bravura kind are merely one ingredient of the clamour, and interrupt nothing else. The eating continues as does the passing of teacups, and ham-and-piccalilli sandwiches, and thick triangles of shortbread, and strawberry tart, and the correction of children’s manners, and the false praising of other women’s sleeves and necklines and jabots. Each one skilfully carries on, at full belt and the top of the pitch and the same time, several conversations: hay harvest, biscuit recipes, bed-wetting, other people’s pitied misfortunes and enjoyably scandalous carryings-on, pig prices, milk yields, births, deaths and marriages.

  Beneath the over-large gesturings, the mock blackguardisms, the trenchant side-comments and satirical laughter, lies a calm reservoir of feeling. This is a reservoir, not too deep, not too large, but strictly family and private, to be tapped only in situations of the gravest kind. It is, indeed, rarely tapped because individuals, and smaller families within the larger widespread family, prefer to be independent, even secretively proud, in solving their own problems.

  Anyway, at the age of ten, I am so in love with the hubbub and braggadocio and seeming confidence of the family that I see them as a skylarking herd to whom nothing is ever a problem, to whom a problem has never presented itself and never will. I see them, of course, only as guests in Bairnsdale or hosts in Sale, when they and we are on show, or in holiday mood, at riverside picnics, renting adjoining beach-shacks at

  Seaspray on the Ninety Mile Beach, at carnival times, camping or quail-shooting or salmon-fishing or hare-hunting, and taking steamer-trips down the rivers, through the lakes to the ocean and the endless miles of wide, radiant beaches that rim it. It seems perpetual high noon, dazzling, the air like molten window-panes, and vibrating with family laughter, a laughter never menacing, twopenny-ha’penny, vicious, shallow or hollow, but jetting and splashing out in a happy-go-lucky fountain. I know, now, that what I see and hear, then, conceals behind the jocular uproar, behind the camaraderie and zest, all kinds of selfishness and procrastination, guiles, mendacities, multi-coloured sorrows, anguishes of every variety, even down-right tragedy.

  Knowing all this now, I am nevertheless able to see them all, still not found out by Life or me, on that Show Day forty years ago, loud-mouthed and showing-off, over-hearty and carelessly high-spirited, and yet keeping meticulously to the hidden rules. Those rules! Take one rule only; take the rule that governs swearing.

  Blue the air may seem to be, but it is only blue of a certain tint. Bloody, bastard and bugger are the only three swearwords they, man or woman, permit themselves and each other to use in mixed company. These words are used in the tone of voice that fillets them of offence, and gives them the quality of endearments. Beyond these three words lies the country of broken rules, of outrage and disgust and Puritan anger. Egged on by my nature to listen and watch, I note too that the swear-words most loudly and often used in the early scenes of clan-gatherings are excited substitutes for expressions of affection taboo to the blushing Australian tongue, for the revelation of deep feelings not to be admitted in a more gracious form. As day wears away to its end, and night falls, and voices soften, the women do not swear at all, the men swear far less, and in a muted way. An aunt who swears like a cockatoo at eleven a.m., at eight p.m. surprises no one by saying, without venom but with firm intention, ‘Really, you great hulking men ought to control your language. It’s eight o’clock.’ My uncles do not comment on this inconsequential remark, but it is understood as consequential, and has its effect. Later in life I am able to observe those of my uncles or cousins who drink, and are usually as foul-mouthed and bawdy as they come when in male company, pruning their conversation of even some of the acceptable swear-words in the front of a barmaid whose attitude they have not yet discovered.

  However much I enjoy the hurly-burly and higgledy-pigglediness of these Sale holidays, however many rules I realize, or am forced to kotow to, however much my awareness of being a small fraction only in a multiplication of ancestral flesh, my keenest enjoyment comes from being able to find on every hand three-dimensional evidence of Mother’s tales. This is a means of extending myself, of spreading myself backwards in time beyond my own birth; it is the beginning of thought about myself. Hitherto, I have thought far less about the being most concrete and important to me—myself—than about other people, and the world of appearances. Now, in Sale, I appear to myself not only as the me I am discovering but also as Grandfather Ruff chasing aborigines around and away from the very house I am holidaying in—‘Cut ’em! Slash ’em!’ I cry through my whiskers; I am Mother being born in the room I share with a brother and two cousins; I am Father carving, in his courtship days, on a post in the barn, his own and Mother’s initials, H.O.P. and I.V.R., inside a lopsided heart. The past thus surrounding me contains innumerable questions to which I attempt to find answers: here, for example, is the pomegranate tree Grandmother planted above the well; I am part of Grandmother; Grandmother is dead; I live, and the pomegranate tree lives; as I break off a pomegranate, what is the slender but indubitable connection between it and Grandmother and me? Naturally, I find no real answer. I suspect then, I more certainly suspect now, that there is an important answer.

  Sale is tied by innumerable threads to many bits and pieces of my later life; I am repeatedly being reminded of Sale by fragments of the world: the waters of Tunbridge Wells have the same gassy taste as the waters of the artesian fountain in Sale Park; the Aimee Vibert roses of Kew Gardens are as white and prolific and untidy as the Aimee Vibert roses by the side-gate where Father used to kiss Mother good night during their courting; the lilies-of-the-valley I pick in a glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau remind me instantly of the lilies-of-the-valley I smell for the first time in the garden-bed by the old pump. Again and again, my boyhood in Sale comes back to me: blood oranges in the railway buffet at Alessandria, chocolate cake at Groppi’s in Cairo, a particular sort of cherries in Athens, white violets under the gingko trees of a Kyoto temple, an outsize salmon in a niffy, open-fronted Soho fishmonger’s.

  It is just such a salmon, in size, that Unc
le Fred Ruff has caught on the Ninety Mile Beach, at the Honeysuckles, when we are surprised, Uncle Fred and seven or eight of us boys, by several women in long white dresses and floppy hats appearing over the sand-dunes. Baying blasphemously, his Rodinesque, hairy hands suddenly clamped in the classic gesture of modesty, for he is as naked as a statue, Uncle Fred caracoles with lolloping buttocks into the ocean, we frog-naked boys with our hands similarly but almost unnecessarily arranged, cantering behind him. There, once decently obscured in the soap-suds of surf, but nevertheless keeping our hands in position, we all glare, Triton and his minions, until the ocean- and sand- and sun- and shock-dazzled women start into life again, and, scuttling back over the noon-flowers, disappear like routed Touaregs among the dunes. On the wet sand between the startled and the shocked lies the salmon from the Soho fish-slab.

  One day, autumn I suppose, while staying in Sale, Mother and I walk three miles to the cemetery. We have a two-fold purpose: to leave flowers on Grandmother’s and Grandfather’s grave, and to pick mushrooms. On the way we pick so many along the edges of the ditches that we reach the cemetery with a full basket. At the grave, Mother arranges the chrysanthemums she has brought. Although I am fully aware that she is just not crying, she does not give me the pleasure of the convential tears I conventionally expect so I wander off to watch a nun who is apparently performing what I guess to be a Roman Catholic ceremony at a plot of many nuns’ graves surrounded by yews and dominated by an image of the Virgin Mary in white marble. Investigation proves that the nun’s moppings and mowings and swift dartings in a half-crouch are no more than the movements of a nun making measurements with a tailor’s tape-measure. Is another nun about to die?

  As Mother and I are leaving the cemetery, the nun is climbing into a cab at the entrance-gates.

  ‘Gracious God!’ says Mother to herself, but loudly enough for the world to hear, as she recognizes the nun. She brushes nothings from the knees of her skirt, takes a little run of excitement, and calls out, ‘Sister Philomena!’ Sister Philomena is the nun who teaches Mother singing at the Convent of Notre Dame de Sion when Mother is the one Protestant pupil there. We travel back together in the cab.

  I cannot recall the conversation which is rapid-fire reminiscence laced with the names of Sisters and Mothers and the girls who were pupils when Mother was Ida Ruff. It is conversation not to listen to, for the sentences have no full-stops and reach no conclusions. My attention goes inward, playing with a name they mention several times, and which haunts me to this day—Bridget O’Loughlin. Who was Bridget O’Loughlin? What were Mother and Sister Philomena saying of her? Where is she now? Occupied with this fascinating name, I do not know by which steps the women in the cab arrive at giving a performance I cannot forget. Suddenly, to my complete amazement, from Sister Philomena’s soft and ageless face encaged in brutal white, emerges a clear-cut scale of beautifully formed notes. My own mouth falls open, partly in amazement, but mainly because hers is ovally open.

  ‘Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!’ she sings. I see her tongue quivering like a human being’s. Next, she smiles. Her teeth are so white, so very even, that they must be the first false teeth I ever see if they be not the only flawless teeth I am ever to see. The smile persisting, she says, firmly, not intending to hear refusal attempted, ‘Now, Ida, you too. Come, girl.’

  Mother immediately folds her hands in a dutifully school-girlish right over left on her lap.

  ‘Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!’ they both sing, Sister Philomena gently agitating one black-gloved hand in time. The gloves bear little scabs of super-human darning.

  ‘A-a-a-ah!’ sings Sister Philomena, schoolmistress, going higher and sweeter.

  ‘A-a-a-ah!’ sings Mother, going pink and faintly crosseyed, and, I know by her twitching fingers, really trying hard.

  ‘Good girl! You were always a good girl, Ida. Now, “Through forest boles.” One. Two.’

  And, as the cab, the fringes above the doorway quivering, the wheels turning through the freshly gravelled road as through sugar, idly makes its way between the red-hawed hedges and the Kelly-green paddocks and the ditches overhung with fennel and chicory, ‘ Through forest boles the storm-wind rolls,’ they sing with soaring melancholy, rocking and bounding circumspectly opposite each other on the leatherette seats, ‘Vext with the sea-driven rain. . . .’

  It is the first incident in my life that I consider unconventional or, rather, it is my first recallable experience of unself-consciousness. This correctly presupposes developing self-consciousness in me. That the happening occurs at the time I am being nudged towards self-consciousness by selfinvestigation, is to prove of great value. 1921 is the last year, for many years, of my early poise, and is, therefore, part of the design of me, the last year of unflawed non-innocence. I am soon to begin that long, tempting and often shocking journey through the experiences of others which is, year by year, to wear the soles of non-innocence thinner and thinner.

  I should, ultimately, die innocent, if I live long enough to wear down, to have wrenched from me, to lose in a halfdream, to give wantonly away, the supply of non-innocence I brought on to earth with me. To assure myself of this desirable end, since half-way house is nowhere, I am constantly uprooting myself, climbing out of the cosy pockets, avoiding the insured cave, the bed-sitter in Babylon, the air-conditioned foxhole with T.V. In short, I do not and must not rehearse for death under the popular anaesthetics.

  However, I am still ten and, though I have caught fleeting first glimpses of myself as something rather more than an animal, I am still largely a creature of the five senses.

  It is my sense of smell that presents to me, so early, one of the insoluble problems of communication, of communication by word of mouth or writing. I find myself trying to put into words, not only for others but for myself, the nature of various scents, of the difference between the scent of Mother’s cabbage roses and her Frau Karl Druschkis, of the odour of a jam roly-poly baked in the oven and a jam roly-poly thumping about in its pudding-cloth in the iron boiler.

  It is impossible.

  Sometimes one scent appears to duplicate itself, as one situation of living appears to duplicate another, and gives one a chance and a false sense of saying something—the rotting flowers of the iris smell like cat’s urine, Early Nancy smells like plum-blossom, peonies like tobacco, marigolds like coffee. This seeming simplicity is unsatisfactorily complex.

  It is simple enough, at this age, to recognize but not describe to others the smell of other people’s houses, to be—like an animal without words—pleased at, wary of, or affronted by, that smell. One aunt’s house smells of home-made bread, mignonette and the sun-hot slats of wooden Venetian blinds. This is pleasing. The house emitting an unrelieved odour of Brasso, carbolic soap, floor polish and phenyle pleases less. The house smelling of old indoor-dog, stale cigar-smoke and the death of moth-balls is one I am not happy to visit. The smells of Bairnsdale come and go, alter with the wind and the weather, and come and go. The south wind, a thing of halfpast three in the afternoon, is striped; it carries a diluted odour of the ocean, of mangel-wurzel fields, and a current that waves, like a dirty chiffon scarf, now in front of, now away from one’s nostrils, the stench of the slaughter-yards. I am becoming conscious of the fleeting, the impermanent, the here-today-and-gone-tomorrow.

  I see an Honour Board, For God, King and Country, go up in the school-corridor, and on it the names of my school-fellows which are also the names of their killed fathers—here-today-and-gone-tomorrow.

  I see bush-fires, far-off on the foothills and mountainsides, jewel-like at night, glowering under a mustard-coloured awning of smoke by day. Then the slopes and crests are deceitful and lovable blue again.

  I see the river in flood, the water like milk coffee, apparently thick as treacle, and bearing along, not with violent speed but with power too patent and too arrogant, the ballooning bodies of cows, and a rooster, a muck of drenched feathers, masculinity shocked at cataclysm, crouched on a ba
rn door that glides, and revolves like a gramophone record, and glides, and revolves, and glides inexorably out of sight.

  I see that October is a month in which flowers of one colour take the gardens and fences and old sheds: lilac, wistaria, thistle, dolichos, cherry pie, cineraria, rhododendron, primula and columbine. Next minute, the tide of mauves and purples has gone; it is multi-coloured November.

  I taste the dust of the dried horse-manure that the slender willy-willies leave on my lips and teeth as they circular-waltz from nowhere giddily up to me, and through me, and on to nowhere else. I feel the white dust spirt silkily up between my toes which are soon to paddle no longer in dust for, still barefoot, I know that barefoot days are dropping behind me with the abated flood, the extinguished bush-fire, the willy-willy in a hurry, the flowers of October, the scents of cabbage roses and slaughter-houses.

  It is my sense of hearing that collects most telling indications of what is happening to me. I have been living, detached from myself, in a dream composed of fascinating elements, of other people’s noises, of the oceanic sound of wind in the pines of the Tannies, of tradesmen’s wheels turning into Mitchell Street. Now I am tossing and turning on the outskirts of the dream. I am either beginning to wake to my own fascinations, my own inner noise, or am twisting down more deeply into a dream in which I am of increasing interest to myself as a figment of my own making.

  I begin to hear time running away in sumless various fashions; it dawns on me, a startling revelation, that each one sound I hear is one sound fewer to hear in my destined total of sounds to hear. At night, the town’s electric light plant, pumping on and on like a heart, is my own bedtime heart, each beat more one fewer of the total beats left. At midnight the town’s heart stops dead. Silence falls so violently, with an increase of blackness in my bedroom and the edgeless world, that for a while nothing can be heard but silence. Then, far away, I hear a last rider galloping across the wooden planks of the Wy Yung Bridge, over the river, out of the town. Beyond that scatter of hoof-beats suggesting flight and fear, far far beyond it, on the outskirts of darkness and silence, rises the sound of farm-dogs howling to each other across the miles, and answering each other, and the echoes of their howlings and answerings more remotely howling and answering in the foothills and creek-valleys and waterless gullies.