by Hal Porter
At the western end of Main Street, opposite the final outrider grocery, is the State School. In the middle block, between St. Mary’s Cathedral and Kyle’s Bakery, is the Roman Catholic School, St. Joseph’s, at the intersection of the arms of the cross and the stranger intersection of the scent of baking bread and meat pies and cheese cakes, and the scent of incense and the sound of the Angelus. At the eastern extreme of Main Street, beyond the last shops, the last hotel, the smithy and the police station, is the School of Mines. A tannery reeking of hides and skins and wattle bark, and a brooding public park of oaks and elms and poplars, once the pioneer cemetery, separate the School of Mines from the town’s edge and the river which defines it with water and weeping willows, wattles and cress-beds and reeds, wharves and peach orchards and the butter factory.
On the town’s northern rim is the Presentation Convent, unseen behind lofty trees and a twelve-foot corrugated-iron fence in which there is a vast wooden gate, heavy as that of a castle or prison, eternally and irrevocably locked. Through a small door set in this gate, wealthier Roman Catholic girls, black-gloved, black-stockinged, all in black like Sicilian working-class women, and with faces set in a womanly, almost maternal, expression exposing at once both modesty and boldness, disappear to what we Protestants imagine are curious rites.
To the south is the High School on a rise overlooking Macleod’s Morass, rood after rood of shallows spiked with reeds and bulrushes, and city-busy with swans and plovers and ducks and water-hens. The morass fades out into acres covered with noon-flowers, dazzling as silver-foil in midsummer. These acres in turn give way to asparagus fields and orchards through which the olive-green river grows wider and wider as it creeps to the lakes. The High School is of bricks, and is draped in Virginia Creeper, wistaria and bougainvillea. Surrounding it are the playing fields: a cricket pitch, a football ground, tennis courts, basket-ball courts and, in one corner, under some red gums, is the horse-paddock for those pupils who come from outside the town on horseback or in jinkers.
Legally, I must attend school until I am fourteen. Since Father cannot afford to send me to even the modest sort of private school he went to himself, I must fill in my required four more years of education either at the School of Mines which is for boys only, and teaches technical subjects such as carpentry and metal-work, or at the High School which is for both sexes, and is a corridor, rarely used in those days, to the University.
As an obedient son I almost never run against my parents. I am disobedient to Father about cricket, and to Mother about reading to idle visitors or neighbours a poem I have written, or displaying a water-colour I have done. I am not disobedient about much else. It is easier to be obedient to these grown-ups deft in the mechanical tricks of existence, and to hold my fork properly, and put it down properly, and to wash my neck, and polish my boots, and say my prayers, than to be disobedient and wrong. I prefer being right. My parents, anyway, have known me long enough not to waste time in asking me to run against myself. They trust me. Moreover, Mother is too busy and Father too indifferent to think up lures or lies to trap me into being an imitation child young before my time: my-son-who-plays-a-nice-bat or my-son-who-writes-poetry. I am therefore left to my desired and happy condition of an obedient son—that is before their faces. Behind their backs I am scarcely less obedient; I run against them—behind their backs—only in matters not fit for adults to know about. Even in these esoteric, and often erotic, performances disobedience is far from specifically so because I am doing not what has been forbidden but what has been not forbidden. The silence and apparent ignorance of my parents is the silence and apparent ignorance I obediently return them in my disobedience to the unexpressed. Behind their backs or before their faces I rarely run against myself.
In attempting to recall who makes the decision for me to go to High School rather than to the School of Mines I draw a blank. My parents’ attitude in this, as in the overall matter of education, remains the secret they make it. I may risk the statement that the decision is mine. Since, in going to High School, I am neither running with nor against myself, I can only have made the decision on no grounds other than a curiosity about High School subjects whose names sound exotic and romantic to me—Civics, Algebra, Physics, Chemistry, Geometry, French. Certainly, neither I nor my parents have any thought of what lies beyond schooling. Admittedly, I have decided, without any consideration whatever of the place education, training, opportunity and backing have in the affair, to be a famous actor, a famous writer or a famous painter, perhaps all three (I can see no reason why not!), but with a bias in the direction of writing. If Mother or Father has dreams for a precocious, cocksure and offhand eldest son, they are unrevealed, and never spoken of in my hearing. If they ever talk, late at night, in the lofty Venetian bed all white and nickel, with regret or distress for what they cannot do to manure ‘a career’ for that son, no one now knows what is said. I think, and fervently hope, there were no dreams to be marred, and no talks to cause bitterness.
I proceed at a hand-canter, dispassionately and fearlessly on into my own future.
The first day of High School life begins.
The gravest insult I can offer my parents’ memory is the magnanimity of forgiveness. Perhaps they may have forgiven themselves; I am too devoted to their memory as samples of human beings to forgive them. Forgiveness, at any rate, is something one throws to those one regards as too contemptible for one’s hate or one’s love. One of the things I do not yet forgive Father and Mother is their planless existence in which two, at least, of the children they have are trodden underfoot. My parents are physically competent enough to have many more children; they have no right, their finances being what they are, to have so many; no right to let themselves fall into long range selfishness by being taken unawares by their anatomy.
Modernized animals need money; man does not live by love alone.
If I do not forgive their planlessness, which wealth would scarcely have modified, I must, in fairness, be grateful for the plan of warm and secure existence which lay at the centre of planlessness, and so occupied the hours that one did not look out on the surrounding wastes. Here I can speak of my parents with admiration and gratitude though without reverence. Food, warmth, shelter are all always there: sirloins and strong boots and thick blankets. That the central plan is one of well-tested attitudes inherited by my parents from the late nineteenth century, and faithfully adhered to, rather than attitudes originated by them and tried out hopefully on guinea-pig children, is maybe a good thing. It is a plan still working in 1922, still diverting attention from the future, although it is to begin to falter several years later when there are six children, when Mother’s vitality languishes and Father’s mask thickens, when they cannot but be aware that they have taken nature at its own hoodwinking word, and blandly gone on playing an old game of which they do not know the modern rules. But, in 1922, the plan works.
It means that Mother takes me to the tailor to be measured for my navy-blue twill suit, my red-trimmed blue blazer with the crest-embroidered pocket, my black alpaca coat for the more grilling days. It means that, as I walk the mile and a half to the High School on the first day of term, I am correctly dressed and capped and shod, that I wear the conventional school socks, and have the exactly correct quota of books. As I walk, proud as Punch, and dying for the curtain to go up, no Mother walks with me as she did on that first Kensington day.
Winton Adams, also a first day High School boy, pretending not to see me so that he can pass me and be seen, scorches by me on his bicycle which has, doubtless for the occasion, a glittering new lamp, a new luggage-carrier and a new brutally melodious bell which he rings repeatedly as he circles back to show me all these and his new silver watch and his new fountain-pen, his new mouth-organ. He, too, is in school uniform even, surprisingly, to boots. I perceive that his clothes are what Mother calls hand-me-downs or slop-clothes; his serge has a tinge of purple lurking, the trousers are too baggy, the coat too tight here and too lo
ose there. His knees are dirty and, since he wears no garters, his socks are already coming down.
It is not clearly apparent to me, in those days, that, as in my parents’ non-planning there is a core of purpose, so in the Adams non-planning there is also one. Winton is sustained by watch and bicycle and mouth-organ, and must look askance at my lack of these aids to spirit, as I look askance at his clothes. Our differing snobberies are not spoken of but are there, parallel and definite. I am to walk to and from the High School four times a day, six miles a day for five years, and am never to own a bicycle or a watch, but am always to be well-dressed even though darned. Winton is never to have tailored clothes, is to revert to cheap sandshoes while flourishing expensive gadgets: a Kodak, a cricket bat signed by the Australian Eleven, a Mah Jongg set. His parents and my parents have both handed on some of the unused evil, some of the affectations and sillinesses left lying around in death-rooms by their parents.
Of these things, at the beginning of 1922, as I climb carefully—my new suit not to be marked—through the lichened post-and-rail fence surrounding the High School playing fields, I scarcely have even inklings. During the five years at High School much is revealed obliquely to me. Although my self-confidence never wavers, it has wildly growing self-consciousness ever ready to assist in making it waver, ever ready to assist the brutalities and snobberies of the other children.
At that time I am Australian lower middle class. My place in the shire town’s social scale is fixed by Father’s income which is revealed, even to people like Winton, by what one has not got. While I avidly go on gnawing and gulping at my minute world, watching it with ferocious intensity as though it really be as vast and wonderful as I find it, I am being watched by eyes which see nothing vast, nothing wonderful, merely a gradation of price-tickets. Whether I become conscious of this watching because the new milieu and its denizens engage my older attention more closely is, at this distance, hard to know. Yet there is, in fact, at the High School, a system of callously simple, provincial snobbery. I could well be its victim because, having, so to speak, my father’s income, I qualify for victimization by the tongues and tenets of children who have their fathers’ bigger incomes; there are all about me the children of graziers, bank managers, lawyers and doctors, as well as of richer but less acceptable people, the owners of emporiums or tanneries or jewellers’ shops, those in trade.
Because it is just as absurd a fact, my own different brand of snobbery—that of intellect and manners and shameless self-confidence—nickel-plates me against other snobberies far less sure-footed and far less insolent than mine. I am, of course, wily and meticulous in disguising this insolence because I like people almost equally as much as I like myself and solitariness. I believe no more in my crystal notions than I do in human clay and its fecklessness and amateurishness, but I do believe in both.
On that first High School day an incident occurs wherein my own nature compels me to behave in a manner which appears as much to have been born with me as to have been fostered and which, more or less, for better or worse, I still possess.
There is an initiation ceremony, a naive, mild and unimaginative one. We new boys have already heard grisly exaggerations of it. Behind the sports pavilion is a corrugated iron water-tank. Here the initiation rites of holding the new boys’ heads under the tap to be baptised take place. Presently, the moment for this ducking approaches. There is no need to round up the new boys. We have rounded ourselves up from the moment of our arrival, about twenty of us in our new clothes. The more frightened ones, whose eyes and the tones of whose voices give them away, express their fear of gossiped-about brutality and legendary almost-drowning by saying they are not frightened. The older boys, in their group, have been turning the tank tap on and off as though testing some dreadful machine. They stop this. With almost self-conscious uproariousness they advance, muscular, pimpled, knickerbockered Hons on us rattled, short-trousered Christians. There is, to my pleased amazement, none of the savagery I have braced myself to put up with. I am not expecting my arms to be torn off, but I am expecting strenuous horse-play. Our names are asked of us, and are mocked unwittily. Meantime, with the gentlest simulation of manhandHng, we are arranged in a rough and ready alphabetical queue. Winton Adams is the first to go to baptism. He wears this distinction brazenly enough but is ready, is half-cocked—I know him with that slanting, sliding look in his eyes—to fight. There is no need. From near the end of the queue I am able to see what happens. Winton is inexpertly upended by several older boys and, with his feet in the air, has his head thoroughly saturated under the tap. Watching, I find that each successive ducking is done with more clumsiness, with more deliberate clumsiness. Not only heads but necks and shoulders are now being soaked. I experience a flash of combined distress and anger, and then rapidly act on its inspiration. I make no bones with myself. I take off my coat, my hand-tailored coat that is the symbol of Mother’s practical love and her snobbery, and Father’s money. I hand it to Winton Adams who is less soused than anyone, and has the manner of one about to be asked for his autograph. The thought of taking off tie and shirt rears a head too dangerous to be encouraged for, although aware that, as the youngest and smallest boy, I can play on youngness and smallness, I know boys too well to try too much. I am already on treacherous ground. Anyway, it is too late. The witch-doctors grab me. As I am upended, the voice of the agitator, the bitter voice of the rabble-rouser, squalls: ‘W’ere’s the coat, eh? W’ere’s the coat? It’s not fair. All the others had coats. W’ere’s the coat?’
It is a question no one really cares about having an answer to, but I am reversed so that my feet tip the ground again, while the bell-wether repeats his question. My atavistic inner eye, the jungle eye, opens round and clear as a moon. I see myself, as though watching from yards away, the smallest, the youngest, the neatest, Daniel in the lions’ den. I make my choice for the little one. Selecting my vocabulary with old-maidish precision, intensifying the clarity of my voice, I say, hoping that my voice sounds piping:
‘I have very wisely taken the precaution of divesting myself of the garment. My parents are far too poverty-stricken to have it marred by immersion in liquid. They would batter me into insensibility.’
This is an imitation of some schoolboy in The Boy’s Own Paper, and my first attempt at debunking myself for a useful purpose, at playing the funny boy by parodying my own addiction to long words. Disappointingly, none of the lions laughs. Poverty-stricken is too jarring; immersion in a liquid and batter into insensibility win the day. There is no laughter, but I sense a relaxing, and no fangs. Relatively gently I am ducked, scarcely as myself so much as a new-born ‘funny little codger’. It is a double baptism.
By this act, which could not have been foreseen despite my taking over from Mother a quirk for self-mockery, I make myself more of a character than I know. Watched I may be as I return to Winton Adams, and take my coat from him with the air of a highwayman taking his cloak from his jackal, but no one is watching me more narrowly than I. It is obviously obligatory to do more than merely put on a coat, and commit thus an anti-climax. With a gesture of counterfeit fastidiousness I act picking a thread from my sleeve, embellishing the gesture with, ‘Tut-tut-tut! Untidy child!’ This is just what is needed. The big boys who have already been tricked into hoisting me into the air like some cuddly thing, a kitten or a Teddy Bear, now lose interest in my successor who is being doused to cries of my words—‘Immerse him in the liquid! Immerse him!’ I have become notable quickly, as much if not more to myself than to the others. Some of the older ones surround me and, in a way that could be vicious, question me in the hope of polysyllabic answers. I give them, trying to make myself appear smaller and younger and more piping as the words get longer, and the replies more purposely stilted. This bookish manner, this confidence-man behaviour, is to be my social stock-in-trade and smoke-screen for all my High School life, and even for some years after, for it becomes so ingrained that it does not easily scrub off.
Hypocrisy has an infinity of subtly graded shades.
My High School hypocrisy is, at first, crude enough but its persistence polishes it, giving it an air of truth, and often makes me, if I relax to a careless and intemperate display of it, a crashing bore. It takes the form of presenting myself as a special sort of word-crazy clown always ready to entertain the mob when, really, I am no more than a contented and earnest child with a bi-focal view of the crowd whom I am contemptuous of and in love with. It is not that being an entertainer irks me. It is worth the pinch of effort it takes to build up a character whose unshakable preferences, concealed behind the words they are couched in, come to be amiably misread as lackadaisical eccentricities. This is not a method of buying popularity, which is as tiresome as its opposite, but a means to privacy.
Sometimes I become so deceived myself by my assumed disposition that I am carried away, and am in the danger zone and being naughty, even cheeky to masters and mistresses, before the brake can be applied. Getting into trouble of this kind with those in authority has advantages: it makes my cleverness in one direction and my incompetence in the other direction less offensive to the majority whose abilities are the obverse of mine.
My old black beast organized sport, and in the particular form of cricket, immediately appears. Father, had he seen my performance of wriggling out, would, I feel, really have battered me into insensibility.
Because sport is compulsory, and I am obedient, I go calmly and uncomplainingly to the wicket for the try-out. I am cold-bloodedly ready for anything, especially deceit. If I pray, it is that I have not caught the disease of cricketing ability from Father.
A busy-body master who plays cricket with Father starts to correct my grip on the bat, and then stops, saying, ‘But, of course, your dad will have shown you.’
I say nothing, and replace my hands in the position I now assume to be wrong.
