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

by Hal Porter

  All this, and more, boils down to nothing except that an upstart and word-obsessed adolescent is self-educating himself towards an aim, not to this day accomplished, of stating as incandescently as possible verities not yet fully realized.

  I put away my High School cap with its enamel badge in a manner so deliberately and affectedly sad that I neutralize—rather in Mother’s self-twitting manner—what may have been the sincere feeling of sadness every human has when doing something, even something hateful, for the last time.

  Once again, Mother sterilizes the threepences and sixpences and minute china dolls for the Christmas Pudding of 1926; once again—the baby too—we all stir the pudding with the worn wooden spoon in the large wash-stand ewer decorated with nasturtiums; once again the puddings hang in their cloths from the pantry ceiling with the leg of ham. Paper-chains made from wallpaper, crepe paper streamers, witch-balls, tinsel and artificial holly are strung across the dining-room ceiling, and looped about the walls. There are conic bottles of Schweppes’ lime juice in the ice-chest, shortbread and mince pies in the biscuit barrels. A half-crown is left on the lavatory seat for the dunny-man. The John Chinaman greengrocer leaves his Christmas gift of a hexagonal green china jar of preserved ginger in a net of oil-on-water-coloured silk; the grocer gives his annual present of a bottle of raspberry vinegar and a large bag of liquorice all-sorts and wine gums. The shop-veranda posts along each side of Main Street are all disguised as Christmas trees by having a eucalypt sapling tied to each. Christmas stockings of every size from minute to colossal hang in the fruiterers’ and confectioners’ and grocers’, each containing the same ritual rubbish they contain when I am a small child in Kensington, and contain still now nearly half-a-century later: the nasty oval over-sweet sweets of nasty green, nasty yellow and nasty pink; the red-and-white striped cardboard trumpet with its wooden mouthpiece; the cylindrical blue-and-white-striped cardboard whistle with its multi-coloured tissue paper mop; the small glass-topped box revealing the grinning face with its pupils of lead-shot to be rolled into the eyeholes, and the inexplicable fluted tin object—patty pan? jelly mould? mud-pie shape? dish for a miniature Quiche Lorraine? what?

  Once again Christmas is over.

  The heat is searing and superb. The paddocks surrounding the town are bleached blond. The distant ring-barked gums, mile after mile, wriggle in the heat-waves, and seem to melt like the bristles of a melting hairbrush. The hills turn powder-blue and gauzy. Mirages resembling pools of mica and shallows of crystal water appear at the far ends of streets and roads. Punctually at eleven every burning morning, the cicadas begin to drill the air, to drill themselves also, ceaselessly and relentlessly, to death in one short day after seven long years underground.

  Once again, it is New Year’s Eve.

  All of us children, eldest to youngest, are let stay up to hear the Old Year out and the New Year in. We sit eating cold Christmas pudding and shortbread and mince pies, and drinking the grocer’s gift of raspberry vinegar with small chunks of ice in it, as we do every New Year’s Eve. Where is Father? Mother is there in the same, now shabby and darned, wrapper she wore when we played Tit-Tat-Toe. Mother is tired, tired, tired; there are shadows like beautiful bruises under her eyes. The baby is there, and the Richelieu supper cloth, and the Japanese saucer filled with pennies and threepences for the Salvation Army. Out in the simmering night, on The Common, under Orion and all the stars and planets, the Salvation Army plays and sings. We chew, we drink, we talk softly as though night weighs our tongues. My brothers’ and sisters’ eyes are glittering as if they have fever. We all quiver—even sophisticated I—in our night-clothes, waiting to hear the front gate click, to hear the exciting footsteps . . . who? . . . who? . . . on the gravel path, on the veranda boards, and the knock—so late and possibly dire. What if it were not a Salvation Army collector but Springheel Jack, or Satan, or Jesus himself? It is the Salvation Army collector, radiant and ruddy and smelling of sweat. We . . . even sophisticated I . . . rattle our money into the box. Mother puts in an amazing shilling on the baby’s behalf. Where is Father? He is in bed like, he says, all sensible people. The clocks begin to strike; the church bells, the fire bell, the school bells, all the bells in Christendom began to ring swiftly and clearly. We all kiss each other—even sophisticated I. We watch from our door doors everywhere opening, slapping down shafts of light on the gardens, the privet hedges, the picket fences, the grassy footpaths and elm-boles; a chattering roar augmented by turning wheels, motor-car horns, galloping horses and barking dogs, gushes up and up from the town which seems to grow incandescent, up and up to push the sounds of the bells higher, higher and madder.

  It is presently 12.5, Saturday, January the First, 1927. On Monday, January the Third, I shall be at work.

  Adolescence, it now seems to me, is a period one gesticulates through largely in secret, and for no one, least of all for oneself—that is, one’s past self and one’s future self. If one be, at this period, noisier than ever before in life, the noise, the guttural rages, the bitter bellowings, the beatings of brows and pounding on tables are as surprising and boring to the executant as boring to the listener. In the fog of this boredom the Present is lost, is under the ether, is joyless and secret. The secrecy, and the boredom making it, occur also if, rather than hullabaloo and cries of fury, one indulges in brooding silences, sulking withdrawals and noiseless typhoons of pique. The adolescent sees nothing of Past and Future because the nothing of the Present obscures them, but he does see himself, does see his physical self, with unnecessary and amazed clearness.

  I see myself—visually, that is—with greater clarity than before or since. I occupy my own foreground and, in it, face with distaste many unpredictable situations that I could have predicted and placidly faced when younger. I face also, and too often, the looking-glass. There I am. There is the appalling secret: while, yesterday, I was what I wanted to be and look like, today, I am not what I want to be and look like. My hair is fair: it should be blue-black as a rook and in amaranthine curls. My eyes? Blue. Oh, for eyes of deep green speckled with gold! Daily examining the length of my eyelashes and nose, the colour and shape of my teeth, the quality of a variety of tried-out smiles and head-cockings and melting glances and quizzical ones, I seek for signs of physical beauty for my own pleasure as much as for the pleasure of others, the Olwen Connors of the world, and the passers-by whose hushed voices will float back to me as I delight them in the street, ‘Did you see that handsome youth, the one with the blue-black curls and startling green eyes?’

  Ah yes, I seek for the one who existed contentedly yesterday and who will exist contentedly tomorrow but who is, today, a secret.

  No matter how much hair-oil, in spite of Mother’s expressed disapproval of any, I use to paste down my brush-back, I get no nearer a resemblance to Rod la Rocque or William Haines or any of my patent-leather-haired heroes of the films. My nose grows bonier and beakier. Pimples appear. Blackheads appear. Nothing will remove my freckles although I furtively attempt versions of beauty treatments suggested by advisers in the women’s columns of newspapers. Slices of cucumber and lemon rubbed on my freckles seem merely to brighten and multiply them.

  However, it is not merely as one who cannot now move abroad without a comb and a nail-file in his pocket, and several cloves to sweeten the breath, that I see myself. Adolescence forces me to watch every move and gesture I make physically and socially, to weigh every word, and the accent and intonation of every word I utter. Some new creature is compelling me to make it stronger and sleeker, to get it ready for freedom. All I have spent years learning, and all I appear to know, have become heavy and shabby tools—where are the razor-sharp and exquisitely turned and chased ones I feel I now need for the task in hand? How cruelly and closely, meantime, from behind the fog, the little-boy me, ever astute and clear-cut and calm as a conviction, scrutinizes the side-steppings and almost-blunderings and nearly false-steps of him who is no longer a child, nowhere near manhood, and scarcely any
thing but a self with a core of nothing but self, and wrapped in layers of self.

  On Monday, January the Third, 1927, this creature, not yet sixteen, goes to work as a cadet reporter for The Bairns’ dale Advertiser. How does he get the job? I think his headmaster gets it for him. Is that how it happens? I cannot recall. His parents? Their involvement is doubtful. Father and the headmaster may have flickered their aprons at each other in a special job-getting way behind the doorless facade of the

  Masonic Hall, in which sinister building opposite St. John’s Church of England, I have heard from Sunday School gossip, there are indelicate and unimaginable rites involving nudity and goats. I reluctantly disbelieve these rumours because I find no practical answer to the questions I ask myself. Why is there no door to the Masonic Hall? What does go on there that must not be seen? Why does Father lock his black Masonic satchel away?

  In whatever manner he gets the job, and I scarcely think it is by his own machinations, there he goes, on his first money-earning Monday morning, to work. Watch him!

  For some reason, for the first time in his life, as he kisses Mother, ‘Good-bye!’ he says. This is forbidden; Mother has trained the family in the belief that the use of‘Good-bye!’ is an invitation to doom; lighter forms of farewell have always been the custom: ‘Ta-ta!’, ‘Bye-bye!’ or, ‘Be back soon!’ Mother, horrified and genuinely upset, demands another kiss, another farewell than ‘Good-bye!’ Nevertheless it is good-bye. Childhood and Chapter One are over, the mantrap is set, the bucket of icy water is balanced above the door of the next room, there is no, ‘Be back soon!’ for that Hal Porter. When he returns home for luncheon on January the Third, 1927, he will appear the same but already something will be stirring—the Devil in the basement, the Angel in the attic, the two-faced Diplomat in the drawing-room, the Clown in all the corridors—who yet knows?

  Watch him go.

  He walks, bold as brass, straighter of back than usual, and with longer strides than he needs to take. He is thinking, for the first time, of long trousers and silk socks, but wears the blue twill knickerbocker suit that Mother has cleaned and pressed. It smells, very faintly, of petrol. He has a Cecile Brunner rose in his button-hole. He wears a grey felt hat—his first. Garment by garment, body hair by body hair, sin by sin, he is to be clothed as a man. He carries a pad clearly lettered Reporter’s Note Book so held that the lettering faces the public, and his hand does not hide it. Clipped into his breast-pocket are two well-sharpened pencils, one cylindrical and H.B., one hexagonal and B.B., each with a piece of india-rubber set in the end.

  Displaying thus affectedly, and with cheap pride, that he has severed ties with childhood, as he walks—oh, striding too much, and offensively—under the elms of nine o’clock, to cross to The Common, he receives his punishment. It is doubly a punishment since it rebukes too his own childhood.

  The house on the corner opposite The Common, and once occupied by the Adams family, is now occupied by the Macgregors. There seem as many Macgregor children as there once seemed Adams children, smaller and plumper ones with bold pink faces and, inherited from Mrs. Macgregor, violently crossed eyes which the glare on many steel-rimmed spectacles scarcely hides, and which the spectacles them-scarcely correct. Each head is covered with whitish hair like dirty thistledown.

  From among the Macgregor roses as packed together, and the delphiniums aspiring as preposterously as calendar flowers—for Mr. Macgregor is a perfervid gardener—the striding youth, the fifteen-year-old growing out of his knickerbockers, hears the saw-toothed voices, the sexlessly cruel voices, the justice-dealing and terrible voices of the country he has left for ever: ‘Where dija git that hat? Where dija git that hat?’ and, then, ‘Silly old Porter! Silly old Porter!’

  As Nurse Mawdsley did not turn, and the dunny-man did not turn, nor the dwarf, nor the disintegrating Chinese, nor the skin-and-bone aborigines, so he does not turn. His blood ignites and singes his heart but he does not turn. Once across The Common and around the corner and out of sight of the spectacles glinting among the overfed flowers, he nonchalantly and as though by the most ordinary movement turns the pad towards his body. His fingers cover the proud lettering. He knows, as the Macgregors know, wherein he has sinned. He walks on, rebuked, towards some simple lessons from the primer of disillusion, towards the building which houses some of his future and The Bairnsdale Advertiser.

  The building is long and narrow, a mere door and a frosted plate-glass window front the street. One steps directly from the street into a small room. Behind the counter, on which are a file of old newspapers clamped between two strips of pine, a pewter inkwell, and several dried-out clag bottles, Miss Ray sits at her table behind a lofty typewriter. Her bentwood chair with the cretonne cushion is conveniently disposed so as to get the warmth, in colder seasons, from the corner fireplace, and a view, every day and every hour of the day, of what might happen in the street—murder; adulterous notes of assignation passing from hand to hand; fast flappers with jazz-garters lewdly showing; old men creeping along, and dying on their feet of fascinating diseases; unhappy wives; tippling husbands; children who were once premature babies. Miss Ray prefers to catch, less with malice than with pleasure, glimpses of the flighty or the doom-struck. These glimpses enliven her, as glimpses of others’ failings and immoralities enliven all women. To be sure of getting as much as she can of what little can take place outside the window, she has scratched two eyeholes in the frosting of the glass under the lettering:

  She seems to me to work, sustained on innumerable cups of treacle-coloured tea, and Marie biscuits, with stolid but mistake-less efficiency, at her numerous duties of typist, office-girl, receptionist, secretary and accountant. Chewing a peppermint, she jangles the keys of the green-painted safe that sits by the fireplace and has a handle shaped like a stove-handle, a clenched brass fist holding a piece of brass dowelling. She climbs on to, and descends from, and rides to and from work, a very ladylike Lady’s Bicycle with sprays of roses and convolvulus lacquered on its frame, with a chirruping bell, a glossy pump, a large headlamp containing a wax candle and, enclosing its wheels, a sun-ray effect woven in string. She wears skirts of dim tartans composed of material with the texture of steamer-rugs, and hanging well below her knees. Bum-length cardigans of lacy wool in lilac or nut-brown or heather-mixture are also recallable. The knitted belts of these have furry pompons at each end. Her hair is plaited and wound over each ear like crystal-set receivers. She is of some non-conformist religion, probably Presbyterian. Her religion, her appearance, possessions and habits suddenly interest me intensely because—click!—I realize that for years I have been doing subconscious addition sums of others’ appearances, possessions, habits and all that, and arriving at a total which, aided by instinct and its adding up of the unrevealed, is the total on which one comes to dislike or bear with, pity or abhor, love or loathe another. It is apparent I am not her cup of tea, as she is scarcely mine. We work in the same place, therefore, in wary amity, dishonestly sheathed in stale politeness. I am fast losing my right to be as truthful and impolite as a child.

  Behind Miss Ray’s room is the room, no larger than hers, of the editor who seems as old as a beardless Jehovah diminished to fit his working-box. He sits behind a table, littered as a racetrack, and gives the table importance by the fact that he never seems, in memory, to be elsewhere. He is there when I arrive, there when I leave. A glass-fronted cedar bookcase towers behind him; a large pewter inkwell, a verdigrised rack of many steel-nibbed pens, and a blotter with gold-tooled calf corners sits before him in a clearing in the mess. Perhaps because I rarely find much pleasure in looking above his starched butterfly collar, his hands remain most in my mind, hands composed of overlapping dark veins, liver-spotted cold bones, and finger-nails ridged like grey celery. A little Dickensian fire fumes in a little Dickensian grate to the right of this dour god and his table on which the details of mediocre lives are jumbled like rubbish. Far from the fire, back to the editor, in a corner of the room, face to
a dirty window curtainless enough to permit a view of gangling burdocks, I sit—the cadet-reporter sits. He works so quickly that he has plenty of time to pretend to be always working when he is really keeping his finger-nails as exquisite as an actress’s, and writing poems which now reveal where his mind thinks it is:

  BATHING POOL

  In silken flocks, above sleek strings of grass,

  Slide on buckled brilliant feet, spruce maids;

  Jonquil-painted cheeks among their braids

  Glowing golden, sweetly . . . as they pass,

  Glowing golden, sweetly . . . as they pass.

  Rime-lashed honey eyes flutter,

  Bubbles under jade mutter,

  Afay drowns in the jargonelles.

  Softly, softly sing the babbling bells.

  Wavelings peck the naked bosom-buds,

  Long eyes glimmer in the lapping shade;

  Silver faces, water-woven, fade,

  Swooning sadly on the lily floods,

  Swooning sadly on the lily floods.

  Feather fins below quiver,

  Emeraldine reeds shiver,

  May swoops down the whistling skies,

  Rubies, rubies, rubies burn the satyr eyes.

  I can only imagine now that Norman Lindsay’s etchings and water-colours have affected me, and that I have moved one little stage further in the production of masturbation poetry; cock-raising desire, and ill-digested art, and eighteenth-century Hellenic balderdash, causing me to scribble off many such verses. At least, for a while, I am no longer ‘alone’ in these rhymed ejaculations. It is no wonder that, pretending to do the work I have already done, I find myself with an erection invariably when the editor grunts me to my feet to bring my copy to him.