by Hal Porter
On that first occasion, and two or three succeeding ones, I do very clearly remember being intent on not hitting the ball, on not making a run. This is more difficult to accomplish than I think. To my chagrin I am not skilful enough to miss the ball always, and I make some runs. Fortunately, by making runs, I learn how not to make them. It is soon accepted that I am a mug, and that I must get no nearer the playing field than the score-sheet. This is from purgatory to limbo but it is not yet far enough away for me. There is no need to act myself out of keeping scores. Spotlessly neat and precise I may be when dressed up as a schoolboy, but my handwriting is thick, blotty and outsized. Two ruined score-sheets earn me my conge. For the remaining years of High School life I am permitted to eschew the playing field; it becomes accepted that I go swimming, am in charge of the library, can spend my time pruning the school roses or executing an historical mural or hammering away at the scenery for a school operetta. I do a number of things of no greater and no less value than playing football or cricket except that a personal contentment comes from doing them,as personal contentment comes to others from playing with spheres. Whether this singular behaviour means that I am losing sight of myself is doubtful. If I am losing sight of myself, I am not of others as I peer out from behind my screen of hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy also colours my relations with the less worldly and the perceivably less intelligent masters and mistresses. For as long as my voice remains treble enough, and the years have not begun to deform me into a big boy with pubic hairs and a dirty mind, I affect little-boyishness. Is this a version of Father’s Masonic manliness? This act, however, I am too astute to put on for those gifted teachers who sweep me off my feet, as adults should sweep children off their feet, but it is an act I can perform with a skill years since lost along with that untainted non-innocence that motivates the act.
I go on being stimulated by High School for the same reasons State School stimulated me: day by day, drop by drop, the information I cannot get quickly enough, falls into the edgeless and bottomless cistern of my mind. I want to be older for one reason only, to be filled to the brim with knowledge. Being made by the years taller or fatter or richer or speedier is, at this stage, nothing to my purpose. Most of all I want the . . . the Something that will empower me to say all I feel. Being a child I foresee Something turning up This Year, at the latest Next Year, in the way competence in the management of egg-spoons and shirt-buttons and bootlaces turned up. I do not foresee that This Year is to become Sometime, that Next Year is to become Sometime, and that Sometime is perhaps as near as I shall ever get. I am prepared, now, to face Never.
Next, suddenly, lightning suddenly, while I am still a child, a branch is lopped from my being, and a portion of my childhood ends for ever.
I see what poets are.
Long shafts of light pour from them through the galleries of the years, and cohere in a single greater shaft. This shaft does not blind; it scarcely even dazzles. It is an illumination in which not only the years and the poets themselves are radiantly visible but also the poet’s skylark or daffodil or ocean. I see that the poet’s possessions are everyone else’s, and that he is saying what everyone else cannot say or read or even think clearly of. His skylark is the skylark I hear singing high above the river-flats; his daffodil is the daffodil Mother grows; his ocean is the Southern Ocean I can now stand before at Seaspray or Lakes Entrance shouting as emotionally and vulgarly as Byron.
What shocks me, then and now, is that, as a writer, I have been outraced before I begin to run and that, if I wish to outrace, I shall never be able to stop running. Tranquillity and hope and conceit save me from chucking away my dream of communication, and taking up cricket. I can be said to set my mental jaw and set off for the foothills, utterly unconscious of the peaks I am yet to scale to see even remote Sometime on yet another horizon.
I cannot swear now if Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is the catalyst; the circumstances of the time and my own nature make it more than possible. Ballads Mother has taught me: ‘Lucy Gray’; T remember, I remember, the house where I was born’ and, ‘We are seven’ do not lose their power to haunt nor do the jingles heard or learned at State School—‘Harry Dale the Drover’, ‘The Village Blacksmith’, ‘The Loss of the Royal George’ and ‘Hiawatha’—lose their attraction. They are nevertheless revealed as unlit lamps and, as such, are put away for ever on the back shelves of my boyhood. The lit lamps thickly line the way I am to take; I cannot keep the fingers of my mind from their flames; the pain of the scorch is fresh and delicious and agonizing; but it leaves no scar; when I cry out, it is only in my heart, like a man.
This silent cry is of ecstasy for what has been done, and of despair at being forestalled, and being thus forewarned, that neither This Year nor Next Year am I to have the ability and the wisdom to light a lamp of my own. Although one branch of my childhood is in this fashion lopped for all time, the rest of it still inhabits the body of a child which occupies itself with childish matters.
I am discovered to have a flair for acting. This offhandedly happens when, as smallest boy in the most junior form, I am elected by a drama-crazy schoolmaster to play Tiny Tim in a set of scenes from A Christmas Carol. Limping and piping—an old one for me, this—with fervour, I so believe I am Tiny
Tim that I wistfully pipe and movingly limp for days after the performance is over. Father would like to, but it is Mother who boxes Tiny Tim’s ears; others bare their teeth in distressed forbearance, and could scream. Thus earmarked, not merely for a degree of ability but for the caprice of immodestly relishing that ability, quite without skiting but in a shameless transport, I am thence always in the school operettas or dramatic productions, and work my way up from the Emperor Hokipokitippitoptop’s parasol-bearer in Princess Ju Ju, through the rip-roaring Pirate Gub in The Pirate’s Daughter to Ko Ko in The Mikado and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night.
If ever I am nostalgically moved by High School it is in recollection of those moments when foul-mouthed boys with boils on their necks, and girls with bandy legs and false teeth, disguised in glittering rubbish, painted like beautiful idols, and flirting their spangled fans or brandishing wooden cutlasses, raise their clear coarse voices in song and dialogue, transforming themselves for a space to a grotesque and moving loveliness—for a little little space—before life transforms them to the burdened and confused, the mean and bitter, the stupid and cruel, the sentimental and unpitying, the defeated and destroyed, the dead.
While I am more than willing to caper and squeal as someone else, I am more than reluctant to take part as an orderly imitation of my essentially level-headed self in the speech-making and contrived cold wars of the school’s Debating Society. There is a smell of organized lying-to-come in the very choice of subjects, and more than a smell of the scoring-board, of runs to be made and goals to be kicked. This is not for such as I. I prefer to be the silly-ass cissy boy, the funny man chattering and giggling on the side-lines. Anyway, in matters of this public kind, my nature has decided for me that I am the Kipling cat that walks alone, and mum, and dead-centrally, down the avenue lined with fake Yesses and Noes. I have enough Yesses and Noes of my own, authentic ones, and no time to dally with abstract ones.
I continue drawing and painting. At one period sweet peas are an obsession until the problems of reproducing them floor me, and I take to easier subjects such as the Coliseum which, for a while, I am continually, almost constantly, executing. Massive grandeur is less a problem than fragility. Finally, Bocklin’s Island of the Dead becomes the subject I copy over and over again in every medium affordable, and so many times that I could now forge it in the dark.
Between school-work and play, between drawing and learning to smoke, between Sunday School and fruit-stealing, between poking away with my mind at the encrustations and interknottings of Browning, between staring into the stars or the faces of insects and flowers or the flaming hearts of fires or the cold hearts of children, it is impossible to stop myself from writi
ng. When The Bairnsdale Advertiser holds a short story competition for children I win my first First Prize, earning more money than I have ever had to myself, ten shillings, for The Golden Tortoise in which it is astonishing and amusing to find today a number of prophetic suggestions: my continuing affection for the Orient, for many-jointed words, and the outrageously fictitious quality of truth. With the ten shillings I buy Mother a xylonite hairpin-container, Father a tin of Light Havelock Flake-cut Tobacco, my brothers and sisters a large bag of the sweets then popular: Milk Kisses, Silver Sticks, Helen’s Babies, Coffee Stars, Aniseed Balls and tiny glass tubes of Silver Cachous. I am an unimaginative boy. For myself I buy a kaleidoscope which happens to catch my eye when I am in despair of thinking of something to buy myself, and a reproduction of Maurice Griffenhagen’s painting of two Arcadian bucolics fervently kissing in a poppy-field under an autumn moon. Mother sings about the house, at least when I appear, sad songs about Edwardian autumn moons, thus making me suspect that I have amused or disconcerted her by my unpremeditated choice. It seems to me now, that this gift-shedding after my little windfall, is hardly an unselfish move for it gives me great happiness, happiness of a rather buying-oneself-out sort.
At the State School I have had no special friend. There, neither the idea nor the need arises. Unself-consciousness requires no looking-glass, has no secrets or complaints to share, and wants none of the duties of friendship. At High School, by the age of twelve, I find myself with an assortment of friends, for I am losing the earlier purity of independence and one-ness that protects one from the charms and fatigues of friendship. These friends resemble, as it were, uniforms to be worn by the several creatures I am splitting into, uniforms to be worn in certain moods, on certain occasions, and never never never at the same time.
Now, I can smile at the stock quality of these friends, these uniforms, these looking-glasses, these sharers. Each is a character lifted straight from literature and yet, life successfully aping art, they are alive, and fulfil their destinies—or act their parts—flawlessly.
Willie Finch is the clever friend, the bookworm, the abused and cowering, his eyes the most naked I have seen. He can neither veil nor ignite his eyes against the arm-twisters and mockers; he has not my cunning against them, nor the nous to counterfeit indifference—perhaps his martyrdom is his consolation as his tears are their satisfaction. After school, particularly in autumn and winter when the call of the river and the countryside is not tempting to me, I spend hours with him in the Mechanics’ Institute Library which does not cater for children. The Reading Room is, however, open and free to the public, to anyone—as a framed set of rules points out in small pica—who is not under the influence of intoxicants, not improperly clad, not smoking, not noisy, not eating food, and not a dog. The Reading Room is furnished with the late-Victorian solidity of a respectable club; there is much cedar; there are deep leather armchairs. Here, two sober, properly dressed, noiseless, miniature old clubmen, Willie Finch and I, live out our friendship. The bond is our rivalry for position in class at school, and our passion for reading or, rather, for reading other things than Deadwood Dicks and comic papers. In the Library we subtract ourselves so thoroughly from the animal activities of living that we can each well be objectified silence itself. I remember, with a clarity nothing can blur, reading in Willie’s silent company Paul Bourget, Loti, Ibanez, Herman Melville, Marie Corelli, Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, much Dickens, Anna Karenina, and Tennyson’s Collected Poems—the last from a plump book, gilt-edged, bound like a cushion in padded levant, and having a watered-silk ribbon of a bookmark attached. Since Willie Finch has knock-knees, a bad breath, spectacles with steel rims, bitten finger-nails, and pink hands that look damp, he reads the Encyclopaedia Britarnica: he is never out of character. His writing is tiny and neat. He has a white mouse he loves, and of which he smells. When the Librarian arouses us at closing time from the anaesthesia of our withdrawal into, say, my Arthurian retreat or Willie’s solar system, and we adjust ourselves and our eyes to the facts surrounding us, and walk as carefully as elderly scholars down the stairs, it is Willie who pedantically talks. I am content to quarter-listen politely because he is my friend, although I am not ravished, as he is, by the statistics of the planets and the time-table of the moon. There is certainly some fascination in the landscape of the moon with its Mer du Nectar, Mer des Pluies, Lac des Songes and Marais du Sommeil, with its Golfe des Iris, Longomontanus, Arzachel and Mt. Pico. This is a romantic but, to me, valid fascination. The information Willie has soaked up and can ticker-tape out to me, without fear of being scoffed at or bruised for, is more legendary to my mind than the legends of King Arthur or Orion, more legendary than the Man in the Moon. Willie is impressed that the earth is shaped like a mandarin, and its girth and movements measurable; I prefer the earth flat. He tells me the dull truths in his swift, nervous, scraping voice in which I hear the tones of older and reputedly wiser voices. I listen without conviction but with affection and an insulting compassion, as though I am older and indubitably wiser.
On the other hand, my friend Herbie Bawker can tell me lies which may or may not be lies, and I do not bother to don disbelief because his own mis-statements are more exciting than Willie’s borrowed facts. In Herbie’s company I feel younger, not in my acted little-boy manner, but as though I am actually Herbie’s young brother. He is my Saturday friend of this period, another stock character, with his appropriate smell of ferrets in place of Willie’s smell of white mouse. The ferrets, called Jessie and Jim, are almost the only things Herbie owns besides me. He is strong and stocky, with convict-cropped hair, large thick ears stuck on at right angles, a drawling voice, and a grin that so involves the almost visible muscles of his face, one lot setting another lot in action like interlocking gears, that the grin takes a long time to be completed, and an equally long time to undo itself, during which time his small gleaming eyes disappear, and dimples appear above his eyebrows. I walk more miles with him than any person since except my own self with whom I have walked more miles than can be reckoned. We walk the boggy paths of the morass to the stony valleys on the other side, along the river-bank to the weir, into every nook and cranny of the district. It is he who teaches me many of the things I still believe: that all white cats with blue eyes are deaf, that a dog will love you more, and always, if you let it breathe in your breath, that rain is on the way when swifts fly low, or black cockatoos fly northwards, or a cat washes behind its left ear with its left paw. We seem always to be speeding, an inch or so above the surface of the undulating paddocks, speeding but never out of breath through miles of ring-barked gums, down breakneck slopes, along creek-beds filled with stones like potatoes, to reach a certain destination, a certain event, at a certain time. Because his knowledge is so exact we are never late. We find what we have set out to find: yards-wide rings of mushrooms in the pink of perfection, a patch of water-cress still tender and lush, a row of bottle-swallows’ nests, a vixen and its litter, a fig tree remaining from the garden of some long-gone pioneer house of which nothing remains except a fire-place filled with boys’ dried turds. We arrive at the fig tree in its plenitude a day before birds or other boys, it could reasonably be an hour before, even five minutes, so alert and certain is Herbie.
We learn to smoke. Where do we get the money for cigarettes? He earns it, I think, by being paid for running messages for his mother. I steal it from Mother’s kitchen purse, the morocco one whose shabbiness rebukes me as I silently and skilfully open the finger-smoothed steel clasp. Herbie tries to teach me to swear, and to spit. Self-consciousness hamstrings me, albeit safe and credulous in his gentle yet protective company. Of my friends of that period Herbie is the gentlest while also being the toughest in an ape-like way, the least intelligent and the best-informed about the earth and its manifestations, the foulest of mouth and cleanest of mind, the lightest-fingered and most open-handed, the strongest and the weakest. It is not easy to guess which of these qualities, brought into play twelve years later dur
ing the Depression, leads him into robbery with violence, and thence into gaol. Why, released from gaol, he is later murdered, I do not know. When I see swifts flying near the earth I almost invariably recall him, and wonder if I am the only human being he ever owned for a little while. Yes, I recall him. We sit smoking behind a hawthorn, attempting smoke-rings. Neither of us is successful until, on the point of giving up, I fluke a perfect one. I am amazed. Herbie is overjoyed, as with Jessie and Jim the ferrets when they excel themselves in rabbit slaughter, as with a dog that has learned a trick.
‘Shit, eh, young-un!’ drawls Herbie, using his favourite term of flattering praise, and beginning a grin. ‘A bloody corker! Shit, eh!’
He pats and kneads my shoulder. His little eyes emit a final gleam of pride, then go under in creases and folds. The dimples appear above his eyebrows. His eyeless grin says: What a clever ferret! What a good dog! What a smart young brother! I find myself smiling as though the smoke-ring really is as impressive a forecasting of. . . of ferret-hood? of doghood? of manhood? . . . as Herbie’s continued patting and kneading signify he thinks it is.
Willie is a friend. Herbie is a friend. The word, then, can scarcely be used for Alex Macalister. Lover may be the word. It is not the one to use in the hearing of Mother and Father—even Father—who like him most and much and, to justify and gratify themselves, talk of him as Laddie’s Best Friend. I do not bother to say that, if any, Herbie is my best friend. At least, if it be possible to grade differing sorts of happiness, the happiness I have in Herbie’s company is greatest and lasts longest, and lends a corresponding value to him. To my parents, I know, Herbie appears common and half-witted, while Willie appears sickly and namby-pamby. Not that their coldness of feeling for these two is ever put into words or actions, but Herbie’s and Willie’s antennae of intuition pick up the negative forbearance which turns them wordless and awkward, and ham-strings their already meagre social graces. Alex, on the other hand, turns on charm for Mother and Father. God, such charm! Since they do not know why, he seems charming to them. He has the advantage over Willie and Herbie of also being ornamental. He is slender but firmly rounded, shapely, handsome, with an olive skin and great dark restless eyes which can, when he has a purpose at hand, still themselves to direct so intense a gaze at the victim that it appears the world is being offered. His manners are perfect. He looks, and publicly behaves, like a schoolboy hero incapable of a thought below his navel. Because Mother has questioned me about his scholarship with an offhandedness so baroque it suggests anxiety, and has heard me answer that it is f.a.q. to mediocrity, she is doubly pleased to find him no danger as a rival to my high scholastic place in class. Willie suffers in her eyes by being a rival; Herbie suffers because his apparent oafishness might mar my apparent sensitivity. How people can be gypped by the good-looking! Father’s approval of Alex as a fine-looking, healthy, manly boy is trebled, is quadrupled, by the knowledge that he is vice-captain of the High School cricket team. This condones his appearances in school theatrical performances as Nanki Poo and Orsino.
