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

by Hal Porter

  Several things rapidly happen—or seem, at this distance, to happen rapidly.

  The baby is no sooner weaned than Mother has her hair bobbed. In early 1926, in that country town, fashions drift slowly into the stream of provincial life, a year or so late and, having drifted in, take at least another year to rise up from the younger and more reckless to the older, more wary women. Not so with Mother. She goes to the barber’s, for there are no beauty parlours in Bairnsdale then, in the same month as the young women, the flappers and hussies with their knee-high skirts and jazz garters. This is almost shocking, and is certainly defiant of Mother. The operation does not make her look younger, merely impertinent. Once, an eternity ago it seems, most of her aids to beautification disappeared from the elaborate dressing-table, freeing her once-suburban hands to take up the duties and tools of a country mother. Now, without relinquishing any of these tools, seemingly as many-handed as a Hindu goddess, she takes up once more the pots of Pond’s Cold Cream and Vanishing Cream, the dry rouge, the tinted face powders: Peach, Rachel, Flesh. Why? And how does she find the time to lacquer her face with egg-white?

  Certainly, she is helped about the house by us older children; there is the washerwoman; there is the old Scotchwoman who milks Dolly the Jersey; but a flock of servants would, I think, have made little difference to the total of work Mother does. A job taken over by someone else only means that she is somewhere else magicking other work, extra exercises in perfection, out of nowhere. This striving, this positive need for everything to be speckless and decorously tied-off is something I have inherited or imitated from Mother. I can jibe at every scrupulous effort I thus make in Mother’s manner, every sally at a faultlessness invisible to most others; I can even compel myself to commit momentary slipshoddinesses. It avails nothing. I must turn back and retie the bow, find le mot juste, write the bread-and-butter letter, empty the ash-tray, be absolutely abstemious and sleep eight clear-eyed hours, or drink all night until garnet-eyed drunkenness is perfected. Thus, also, in her fashion, Mother. Now, 1926, the more sordid daily tasks over, she does not merely scrub herself and change into something fresh. She has a bath or a shower; she almost decorates herself. She sits at dinner with the fringe of her bobbed hair gleaming from the brush, wearing her gold brooch with IDA on it, wearing a little rouge, a little scent, wearing too a hostess manner. Sometimes, she comes to table with her fringe caught back under plaited switches of her own hair twisted about her head in the manner of the nicer vamps, Aileen Pringle or Jetta Goudal, her bare forehead illustrating serenity, her ear-rings on.

  The point to be made is that she is doing these things against herself. That I clearly see. I smell defiance; there is a faint odour of despair. I do not understand why. At the age of six or eight or ten I would have understood. It is probably the woman nature at her age; it is equally probably an attempt to balance . . . somehow . . . somehow . . . financial dislocation by making a mask of scent and powder and pretty clothes to hide the fact that money is no longer a tamed kitten but a wild cat clawing and gnawing at her children’s safety and her own peace of mind. It may be that Father, without actually leaving French-letters under the oaks in the Tannies or the horse-chestnuts along the river bank, is performing mental adulteries observable to her. There is no one to question now; I shall never know. Aware of something, I record, from time to time, and carelessly, a flicker of pity I do not express, and cannot express, and have no time at all to express, as I rush into and out of the house, for I am selfish fifteen, mad about myself, in knickerbockers of blue twill, my first shoes, my last year at High School, and am wildly concerned with my own whirling little world.

  I am now one of the three most senior boys, one of the trinity which controls such matters as the ritual ducking of new boys. One of us three is the school captain, the allrounder, the Rhodes Scholar kind; one is the brilliant mathematics and science boy; I am the poet of the school magazine, the dasher-off of long flamboyant essays crammed with esoteric fact, obsolete words and five-syllabled adjectives. I am given to chattering in French, and draw flower-pots and garden trowels leaning against watering-cans better than anyone at Bairnsdale High School, 1926. My early skill in mathematical subjects deserts me more and more as my pubic hairs increase; the elementary properties of the parabola are not elementary to me, and require almost more concentration than I can spare for, here I am, growing all over at a fascinating rate, my treble cracking and crackling, my nose getting longer (oh, dear!), and my passion for pleasure of a rackety sort increasing. I wear a clove carnation in my buttonhole. I can do the Charleston. There can have been no more grotesque sight than that of a knicker-bockered adolescent, with long golden hair in the conventional brush-back style, Charlestoning across the quadrangle from lesson to lesson. It is what, then, I think of myself as—The Gay One. It may still be what I am, symbolically, that is. Placidity does breed a joyful fecklessness.

  Other than the three boys, the senior form contains six girls, all of them several years older than the boys, and many years older in the blunter wisdoms. There are even rumours of sexual misbehaviour by some of the girls, which I do not believe, for they are virtually young women of sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, with breasts under their blue tunics, and seem to me far too old to do what little girls used to do with me when I was a little boy and went in for that sort of thing. These girls, however, during certain unsupervised periods, Study Periods during which we are all ‘on our honour’ to work diligently, do tell us dirty yarns and, sometimes, do read us dirty yarns from the same sort of typed sheets of paper worn at the folds that I am to be bored by, time and time again, in later life, typed sheets produced from the wallets of commercial travellers from Fremantle to Blackfriars, from Hobart to Manchester, from the wallets of army officers in Japanese Occupation messes, from the wallets of shipboard hearties and ill-met tourists in B.O.A.C. planes at Zurich and Beirut and Djarkata. Where do the girls, who keep these, like their handkerchiefs, in the legs of their bloomers, get the obscene things from? My mind boggles. None of us boys has any. The girls have, as well, a tattered copy of Chic Sale’s booklet on rustic lavatories. I have rarely laughed so agonizingly much, the tears streaming, the belly muscles hurting, as when Olwen Connor, the female school captain, reads from this bawdy work. This is not my reason for loving Olwen Connor, but love her I do, and her knowledge of the cruder aspects of life makes no difference to my love for her as something exquisite and untouchably sacred. Everyone at the High School knows of my love for her because I make no bones about it. Everyone also knows that she does not care for me. She drives to school each day in her own jinker: her father is a grazier five miles outside the town. Her grown-up brothers, with expensive masculine names like Dirk and Rex and Rod, are often smashing up long, low, crimson or white open-topped cars as they roar about the country doing pub-crawls from Bairnsdale to Sale, from Ensay to Lakes Entrance, fifty, sixty, seventy miles of drinking in the Australian country fashion. Olwen, if she does not have the passion for me that I have for her, does not dismiss me from her presence; she is a woman, and will not deplete her retinue of followers—I am not the only boy in love with Olwen Connor—by even one poetically soppy member. Since at this moment I am able to think I know, and can state bluntly, that my sexual fervour is less than or at least less unsettling than the fervour of the apparently and reputedly normal, it is not simple to gauge how far below the standard of puppy-love anguish and exaltation mine falls, nevertheless anguish and exaltation of almost intolerable kind I do experience. I draw overlapping hearts, one labelled O.C. and the other H.P., everywhere, deeply pressing into the wood of desks and gate-posts with the pencil, driving the arrow that joins these two hearts with an intensity of day-dreaming and romantic desire that shocks me now. What wasted power!

  I bombard her with letters—about unrecallable what!—enclosed in envelopes bearing on their sealed flaps the letters S.W.A.L.K. (Sealed with a loving kiss) or T.O.I.L. (To one I love.) She takes them as secretly as lover ever took l
etter from lover, with something cat-like in her gestures. She never answers except by a quarter-smile faint as smoke which she lets me catch, behind the backs of the world, when no one is expected to be looking, but when everyone is looking, albeit obliquely and pretending to stare the other way. I should have preferred an answer in writing, an envelope bearing S.W.A.L.K., but the flitting smile serves—well, serves enough to stop me from despair. I write poems to her:

  IN DREAMS (to Olwen)

  In dreams upon your silver breasts I spread

  Blue magic stuffs wherein stars sleep;

  Tour ears receive sweet jewels that are bled

  From silken-lidded roses as they weep;

  And for your feet my eager hands have set

  The virgin velvet daffodils.

  Thereon you walk, among my tears that fret

  Tour way with silver pearls.

  There I worship, and your wonder fills

  My trance. 0 move there always, in its hills,

  For of you have I nothing save my dreams.

  God knows who the inferior Georgian poet is who serves as model for this piffle and these lies. I certainly never dream of Olwen; I recall only dreams of flying, higher and ecstatically higher above the burning colours and the exquisitely minute detail of a world in which I am able to see both sides of an object, inside and outside a closed box magnificently embossed and decorated, at one and the same time. I write poems of lies which I think I mean, about dreams I do not have, and a desire I have not formulated.

  The young, at this stage, do not really exist.

  I leave flowers on her desk, Mother’s flowers, which I pick like a thief, an outsize pansy with (I say to myself) one tear in its eye, a perfect camellia, a bunch of double violets. She never wears them, never, but, with one of those feminine gestures I now know too well, gives them—not to one of the bigger girls, not just to any girl, but to dirtyish, ragbag little girls in the first form. This gesture of combined delicacy and ruthlessness makes my heart quiver towards breaking. It never breaks. I confound it from breaking, and confound my disappointment too, by lying to myself, ‘How kind and gentle Olwen is!’

  A curious incident occurs. During 1926 many of the High School girls get their hair bobbed or shingled. Of the six senior girls Olwen Connor alone keeps hers untouched, a single strong curl, brown streaked with gilt, lying between her shoulder-blades, a persisting symbol of my taste: have I not fallen in love with the one girl who will not tamper with her beauty for a mere change in hair-fashions? Although Olwen Connor’s beauty does not exalt me as that of the Kensington child in the grey velvet dress to this day does and to the end of life will, it does excite me: I find her beautiful and warm and cruelly untouchable. It is not that I feel I wish to play with her sexually; she is too beautiful to be thus sullied—gentle kisses in a garden, or long strollings hand in hand under the willows and wattles of the river, are something of what I think we want, she and I and her beautiful hair. Then, suddenly, as 1926 nears its end, the school knows that Olwen Connor is to have her hair shingled. An excitement slides across the school’s mind like the shallow hem of a wave, sparkling yet icy, limpid yet salty. Oh, you will see that this is not transference of my own feeling to others. I write what is my first love letter begging for what I can only now suppose I call a lock (or tress?) of hair. As ever, she takes this letter, deadpan, as her due or punishment for being beautiful. As ever, behind the all-observant backs of the small universe of detectives, she returns no answer except the wraith of a smile.

  The day of mutilation arrives.

  After school I watch her, in the strangely empty and silent school-ground, the shadows of the trees getting longer, walk to the horse-paddock at the end of the playing fields. As she harnesses her horse to the j inker I see, for the last time in life, the curl lying down her back. Tears come to my eyes. She drives off. I know she is on her way to Jeremy Confait, the barber who cut off Mother’s hair. I hurry in Confait’s direction, over the railway crossing, past the ostentatious nineteenth-century bulk of the Grand Terminus Hotel with its vast first storey cast-iron veranda, its hitching-rings on each veranda-post, its livery and baiting stables, its brick- floored yards and roaring bar, into Main Street. Feeling my romantic purpose to illumine me to unconventionality, I walk, I hasten, I almost run, not on the footpath, but through the gardens which occupy the centre of Main Street. I speed along under the elms and starling-haunted palms, between the crescent-shaped beds of municipal roses edged with lobelias, past the Boer War memorial, the bandstand, the drinking-fountain of pink granite, until, far along the street, in the gardens opposite the bicycle shop on the roof of which sits a penny-farthing, I reach the grotto in which is set a fish-pond. Behind this I have decided to lurk, to watch until Olwen appears shorn, to advance and beg the lock of hair I have already begged for. Outside Confait’s, tied to one of the barber-pole-striped veranda-posts, the horse and jinker are tied. Outside Confait’s, their bicycles leaning against posts and elms, are more than thirty High School students. I pretend not to see them. They pretend not to see me. They murmur together, their faces turned towards Confait’s door through the upper glass panel of which they can see, pinned on to the voile curtains, a chart illustrating feminine haircuts: Cherub, Cringle, Claudine and Madonna. Set centrally of these four, in its own oval, is the head showing Qua Neglige, A Superior Cut, states the chart, With a Tendency towards Frou Frou. Which is Olwen to have?

  I could join the group of other watchers which includes other admirers, but prefer to be the solitary and sensitive lover, the one behind the mossy grotto and the romantic fountain. When, after what seems ever, the mob is suddenly so silent for a second that one is aware of the clanging from the blacksmith’s, the bitter whining from the sawmill, the gurgling from the fish-pond statue of a noseless boy holding a nameless fish in his fingerless arms, I know Olwen has come out.

  “A-a-a-a-a-h!’ they all say, from one throat.

  I cannot see her.

  I have forgotten that I have come to beg.

  When she climbs into the jinker, and I can see her, she wears her hat. I do not see the shorn hair—Cringle—until next day. She is still beautiful, yet, for some reason, I write her no more letters or poems, and act the thief no more in Mother’s garden. Then, I do not know why my tactics change. I know now. Men will know. Another hour has struck. Women will know why, a month later, on our last day at High School, Olwen Connor hands me, with so whole a smile that it seems, after dearth, many smiles, in front of everyone, in front of the world, an envelope containing a curl of her hair.

  ‘This,’ she lies loud and clear, ‘is the curl I promised you.’

  I do not see Olwen Connor, after this unbelievable moment, for twenty-five years.

  Not a long-time keepsake-keeper, I nevertheless carry this curl about with me for longer than I do anything except Mother’s last letter to me, much longer than I do the remains of the yellow rose my ex-wife gives me the first night we meet, for longer than other ‘locks of hair’, and letters in which the words have turned sour, or mocking, or too agonizing to bear. I carry it from one end of the earth to the other for twenty-five years. In 1951, enough blond still in my hair almost to conceal the grey, I see Olwen Connor. I recognize her as instantly as I recognized King Bunyip, Dick Verco; she greets me as offhandedly as he. She is a pretty, little, grey-haired woman vigorously pedalling a bicycle. She is, I later learn, a grandmother. ‘Hello, Harold,’ she says, speeding by with her sturdy legs. The quality of her voice is a shock to me. Was it not silver-and-golden after all? The feelings with which I burn the worn envelope and the curl, that evening, are too faint to bear the weight of even one word. A sigh—for what?—a sigh, no more. The paper and the creeping flame neatly wrestle and writhe a little; the gilded brown curl from the head of the grey-haired cyclist, the pretty granny with the alloyed voice, emits a faint stench as it bubbles to ash. How foolish of me to have persisted for a quarter of a century in being a sort of sentimental boy when I am r
eally a sort of unsentimental man.

  This act of giving the curl in the envelope, in the last hour of the last day of the school year, is the actual finish of my schoolboyhood; with this overwhelming gift in the pocket of my silesia jacket, I walk away towards manhood which I think is just around the next corner in the years, but which is many more corners away, and has little to do with years.

  With nine years of formal education behind me, four at State Schools, five at High School, I am ready to earn my living in a world moving inexorably towards Depression. How am I to earn a living? I have given it no thought at all.

  Certain school subjects have come, as I lose my early infallibility, to mean little to me except as mental toe-touching; I can touch my toes easily enough to pass examinations. The grossest torture could leave me nowadays as upright and unbending as a ramrod in the matter of cross-questionings mathematical, geographical, historical, chemical or scientific. I have, however, driven by my own inner devil, gone very much further, have ploughed much more deeply than the examination standards require in Art, French and especially English. At fifteen, for example, without guidance, almost against guidance, I have developed an outrageous taste, eclectic to eccentricity, in authors: Dickens, Olive Schreiner, Tchekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Maupassant, Paul Fort, Ibanez, Tolstoi, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Hardy and Barrie. I am so fascinated by Remy de Gourmont that I translate into an exotic English everything of his I can lay my hands on.