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

by Hal Porter

  He falls, not in love this time, but into a too gay and too garrulous relationship bordering on hysteria, with a young woman of seventeen, a shingled flapper called Bunty whose father is a shoemaker. They appear frequently together, one-stepping, Hesitation-waltzing, fox-trotting and Charlestoning, at dances for which, as a reporter, he gets free tickets, cricket or football club dances, dances run by Mothers’ Clubs or Boy Scout committees, dances with suppers of corned-beef sandwiches and iced queen cakes and coffee made from coffee essence and skimmed milk boiled in kerosene tins, dances at which three-piece orchestras play with wistful incompetence ‘Valencia’, ‘In a little Spanish town’, ‘Smile a while’, ‘Moonlight and roses’ and ‘After the dawn’. In much the same way as his feet tire and ache from sliding on the dance-floors slippery with boracic acid powder or candle scrapings, and the material of his suit becomes dusty, so his heart begins to tire and ache, and the material of his hope becomes dusty. Where are the walls of looking-glass, the chandeliers, the champagne glasses with foot-long stems, the women ethereally beautiful as Corinne Griffith? Bunty is not beautiful nor exquisitely dressed nor brilliantly witty; she is happy and bold and noisy and skinny, with lips painted in a pouting Cupid’s bow, with touched-up silver dancing shoes, pink silk stockings, and sale-price dresses of tangerine or flame or reckless green cut well above her triangular knees. He too is neither handsome, nor dressed in tails and court shoes, nor as devilishly witty as he knows he can be. He is happier than he thinks he is but affects a more loud-mouthed happiness than even the young needs display.

  Something always seems to go wrong; Life’s special purpose seems to be to reveal to him—to me at sixteen—its shoddinesses and imperfections and embarrassments. The vomit of a drunk outside the Picnic Point Dance Hall splashes my shoes; Bunty loses her brooch of iridescent butterfly wings under glass, and weepingly nags and nags as we wall home in the mud and rain, she in bare feet carrying her silver shoes and rolled-up stockings. When I attempt to kiss her calm outside her front gate, she has already begun to smell like a wet fowl; our hard young mouths press with absurd ardency upon each other’s as we imitate Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres; our teeth clash together without tenderness or warmth and, more than anything, I am thinking of the fact that I have still to walk home through a mile of puddles and mud in the blackness unbroken by the street-lamps which have gone out at midnight.

  I am tired of lights that go out at midnight, of winter and mud, of the family, of the books in the Mechanics’ Institute Library, of the frost on the weeds I see through the window from my little rickety table in the corner of the editor’s little room with its little fire that spares no warmth; I am tired of Bunty, and dances, and reporting hick football matches and Methodist weddings and the laying of foundation stones for hideous buildings by aitch-dropping councillors; I am tired of writing my falsely witty and dishonestly romantic weekly article: ‘Around the Town’ by Rambler. Around the town! Jesus!

  I find myself driving myself to try anything for diversion. I commit self-abuse with a punishing savagery as though committing the most splendid of brutalities and the most engaging of evils by playing masochist to my own sadism. I foster tormenting crushes, for an assortment of the shoddiest and flabbiest reasons, on an assortment of people, some of whom I have never spoken to and shall never speak to. I expect always to be disappointed. I always am.

  I develop a passion, never mentioned until this very second, for a draper’s daughter who does not know I exist. She looks like Clara Bow, and wears evening dresses gleaming with tiny metallic beads, and walks, I think to myself, like a tigress, a sophisticated tigress. One day as I watch my Clara Bow tigress loping along Main Street, she begins to pick her nose. My love dies in an instant and for all time, to be replaced by an unfair contempt.

  I become friendly with the barber’s new assistant, Mario Cerretti, an eighteen-year-old Italian who has all the glamour for me of the film-star Antonio Moreno. One morning, after he has come from Mass, we take a Sunday walk along the river-bank. He scratches at a pimple on his jaw; he holds out his barber’s pointed finger-nail with its little mess of pus and blood. ‘See, ’Ahl,’ he says, ‘I squasha da bloody pimp.’ I change my barber. From then on, when I accidentally pass him, I destroy his vivid smile by a nod of killing coldness, the behaviour of a spoiled bitch.

  As I am, one day, hurrying to catch up to my favourite English master of High School days, the man who has helped to shap’e my literary taste, and has been lavish with the loan of books and advice, a sound breaks from his body, and an unpleasing stinl. I do not catch up with him. When, years later, I wish to catch up with him, to thank him for his care and kindness, it is too late: Death has caught up before I am old enough and wise enough to be just to human beings.

  I pick my own nose, squash my own pimples, and fart, but covertly, not enchanted by having to—it is, in those days, more and finally disenchanting to have the gods and goddesses I admire for appearing to be above these vulgar actions revealed as being as flawed by ordinariness as I am, then, flawed by a tinpot gentility.

  Attempts to escape in solitary walks, in the giddiness of dancing, in odd passions and admirations, in the writing of esoteric poems, and rococo short stories called Lisel and Aen, Albrecht and Trudel and Tissinella and the Fat Man, are all attempts to escape my own over-heated body, and the town wherein the pleasures of barefootedness and tree-climbing and unthinking joy are no longer possible. I cannot escape this body nor its equally over-heated mind. The gods of my boyhood are on the dole, out-of-work for ever. They sit, mildewed with a boring immortality, on the park-benches of my past, and feed on their own tears. Oddly enough, I have none. Burning to free myself, I am lit by a tearless anger I display to no one. I do not even silently accuse and curse anyone, not even myself. Looking back, I am merely being, I see, cunning with myself so that I can be more successfully cunning with others. I am working up to something: I am after that flight to the city; I am planning for that flight to take place with the most apparently simple circumspection.

  September and spring, the waves of vanilla pouring in from the fields of Chocolate Lilies, all overwhelm me and my affected procrastinations: I make the decision I have already made, and act on it. Since I have become a baby in the ways of that other part of the forest to which I now belong, or appear to others to belong, it is as a baby I must cry out. Who will give me milk if I do not? It is expressive of a side of my nature as it develops at this period that I cry out with shrewdness and clarity and intense sincerity in the right direction. Milk is given me; arrangements are rapidly made for my escape to Melbourne. Then, and only then, do I announce to myself, to Bunty, to the editor and Miss Ray, to anyone who will listen, to Mother and Father, that I have a desire to go to the city. I want to be on the stage, I say. I want to study drawing and painting. I want to be a real author, a poet, writing with the ink of my own heart, not a country town newspaper reporter emasculating and rearranging the truth in journalese.

  Mother and Father make scarcely any comment; Mother’s remarks are a little blanched, and resignation lies behind them. Perhaps Father expects no more than eccentric behaviour from the monster he sired; perhaps he and Mother know my strengths and weaknesses, obstinacies and wilinesses, my desires and fancy ambitions, more thoroughly than I suspect.

  I have cried out to the headmaster of the High School. He has instantly understood my cry. To my amazement he has suggested that I become a schoolteacher, one of the innumerable professions I should never have considered in a million years. He gets a job for me.

  Thus it is, for the last time in my life, my parents provide me with the goods and chattels they think proper—undergarments, brogues, socks, a large leather suitcase, two ebony-backed hairbrushes in a leather container, and two dozen handkerchiefs with a gothic P embroidered in one corner. Letters fly between Mother and Aunt Rosa Bona.

  In October 1927, I leave Bairnsdale by the early morning train, alone at last, to advance on Victoria Street, Wil
liamstown, where I am to live with Aunt Rosa Bona and Uncle Martini-Henry while I earn my living as Junior Teacher, Third Class, at State School 1409, Williamstown.

  The next eighteen months are among the most crammed and lively and restless of a crammed, lively and restless life. I should not like to live any one month of them over again, despite their exaltations; any one day, despite the ecstasies; indeed, scarcely even one hour. I should, however, like to have restored to me the vitality and enthusiasm, the recklessness and piratical impertinence, the perfect unawareness of pitfalls, which I then have, and which make it no trouble at all, at all, to have many irons in the fire, to burn the candle at both ends, to walk where angels fear to tread, and yet to slip nimbly through certain experiences—that could, and should, have scarred more deeply and very deeply—with no more than scratches faint as scrimshawing. Many of the wrinkles now marking me must have had their birth then as almost imperceivable lines of astonishment, excitement, exhilaration, anger, dismay, happiness and—ultimately—early agony, but it is soothing to imagine, rightly or wrongly, that today my heart remains unwrinkled.

  No sooner am I in the train—that is, the moving train, with Mother behind me, and Bairnsdale behind me, and The Advertiser behind me—than my several months of gadabout and insincere semi-unhappiness are forgotten, fled away, out of sight.

  Looking back, it is easy to see that I never was as unhappy as I pretended I was, merely itchy-footed, flaming with impatience, mad for the city, and as wily as a viper in getting my way.

  As the train chatters and roars its way through Gippsland and its sheep plains and hill forests and one-horse villages and provincial towns and cow-peopled shires, in the direction of earliest childhood, towards the towers and spires and never-ending terraces and hemmed-in minute parks that I used to spy on from the balcony edged in cast-iron, I bend down my lips to kiss, am able to bend and kiss with happy tenderness, the boutonniere of two Cecile Brunner roses and maiden-hair fern Mother has pinned to my lapel. I have no regret, no tears, no inklings of disaster. It is with rather less tenderness, and a different sort of almost wanton happiness that, as the train roars on complaining contentedly to itself, I make the strange and secretly showy gesture of chucking away into the undergrowth of the Haunted Hills my grey felt hat, so recently the insignia of adulthood. Shocked as I am by the waste, and stricken on behalf of Father’s wallet, I am elated by the profligate display of independence. As the train approaches the spot where, a decade before, I explode into my first remembered, angry, angry, useless tears, I am surely smiling, with the stiffness and brazenness of an archaic statue, in anticipation of the years ahead, years decorated with unimaginable delights and the almost unbearable raptures of freedom; as the train approaches the suburban spot where I was once shocked by Father’s momentarily not wearing a hat in a public place, I am boldly bare-headed for ever. Bare-headed, bare-faced, bare-hearted, and bai e of any misgivings or mental reservations, I arrive.

  On Flinders Street platform Aunt Rosa Bona is immediately visible, like an arpeggio on a sheet of music. Not only is she in a fever of fuss, but she is strikingly dressed in black, even to stockings, gloves and jet brooch. No one is dead.

  ‘Where,’ she cries, before she clutches me from the train-step to kiss me an unnecessary number of times, ‘is your hat?’

  I guard myself from telling the truth, for that will be to arouse outcry and consequent emotional exhaustion. I make up some satisfactory lie putting off the evil day of revealing myself as a hatless nut. She, embarrassed by my nude head, I, by her sable get-up, we travel to Williamstown. Port Phillip Bay still flickers shaggy old man’s eyebrows at the end of Victoria Street. The house still smells of mignonette and lemons. I am given a large front bedroom with lead-lighted bow windows, a lead-lighted oeil-de-boeuf, and an art nouveau electrolier with shades of fluted pink glass. Thinking of my own bedroom, I have a brief spasm of home-sickness, from which I am diverted by the pigeons whose gentle grumbling on the terra-cotta griffins of the gable immediately above the roof of my room I attempt to translate into words.

  The next day I begin work as a Junior Teacher.

  The Bairnsdale High School headmaster’s perception that there is enough of the stuff in me from which schoolmasters can be moulded is an astute one. It would be as tedious to record my minor early mistakes as to record the minor successes: suffice it to say that, in no time, I am a useful teacher, even a good one—dramatic, noisy, happy, over-energetic and a disciplinarian, this last because I will put up with no childish nonsense that interferes with the display of myself or with my conception of what is due to me as an adult. One wears the disguise of manhood seriously at sixteen. The showing-off side of my being; the ability to simulate Lear-like rages I do not feel, as well as the ability to fool myself into being lovingly patient, all serve their purpose. Controlled by the canny and ruthless self-watcher, these qualities are turned into performances that trick the children into obedience. While still sixteen I am put in charge of a class of forty children who are two, three or four years younger than I. I fall in love with them. They are my possession, my material. The love is not for them as individuals but as a mob whose forty minds, under my flashy and domineering control, are to become one, a mind unsullied by errors, unmarked by blots, uncontaminated by misplaced originalities outside the curriculum, and as full of facts as a pomegranate is of seeds.

  In Williamstown of 1927 and 1928—and for years later—this sort of educational technique is fashionable: strict discipline, learning ‘by heart’, legible handwriting, clear punctuation, correct spelling, all these are insisted on or, at least, battled for and strapped for and sincerely hoped for. The ditch between adult and child is still a clear one with little pretence made of using temporary planks across which teacher and pupil run merrily back and forth exchanging anything but information. Happiness, while to be hoped for, is not the final end of educative processes, any more than it is the final end of living processes. Although, then, the Australian Labour Government is beginning to urge the abolition of capital punishment, no crank adult, in the Australia of those days, has spoken loudly enough for record, on behalf of spoiling the rod and sparing the child.

  Anyway, outside school, the adult suffers controls as much as the child.

  In the matter of sea-bathing, for one example, children suffer rather less, for it is not so defiantly immodest of boys and girls to bathe together in the open sea, as it is for men and women. The Williamstown Bathing Enclosure at the end of its pier is divided by a species of iron prison-grille into two sections, one labelled males, one labelled females. As well, during certain hours of certain days, males only are admitted to the Enclosure. A blue flag flying high indicates this. When a red flag flies, Williamstown knows that the Enclosure is legally a harem only. When the red and the blue flag fly at the one time, both sexes can enter, through separate doors, the waves enclo^d by barnacled posts and mussel-footed pickets but, dressed in their neck-to-knee bathing costumes, they can only perform their puffing and blowing breaststroke or lop-sided trudgeon stroke in the designated section, the salt-gnawed iron bars separating them. In short, the era I have rushed bare-headed into to shock Aunt Rosa Bona, and to shock others into calling out after me in the streets, is the era in which, on November the Twenty-second, 1927, the Mothers’ Unions of Australia make a powerful protest against the Evil of Beauty Competitions.

  In dozens of suburbs such as Williamstown, similar attempts at moral control persist, preserving a late-Victorian world in which, to be sure, deaths are still caused by bolting cab-horses or by being thrown from a jinker, but which another world is already overlapping: Dame Nellie Melba is heard singing God save the King over the wireless at the opening ceremony of the new federal capital, Canberra; Bert Hinkler, Sir Alan Cobham and Ruth Elder are each attempting long-distance aeroplane flights, and there is a great march of the unemployed. I see the word communist whitewashed on a brick wall, and do not know what it means. Nor do any of the people I ask. This de
veloping world of which it is often platitudinously said that I and my generation are the heirs does not really cut across my consciousness. I am, as the young are, devoted to myself. I am engrossed with my teaching job as I never was by smalltown reporting. I am even more fervently engrossed in so many other activities that it seems today impossible to have been able to do and see all I do and see, and yet have enough time for sleep.

  First of all, there is Williamstown itself, an early settlement, so named after King William IV because, with its position at the mouth of the Yarra River, it was contemplated as the port capital. Every part of the town fascinates me, even Aunt Rosa Bona’s naice suburban Victoria Street, lined with palms and lawns, and leading, like other naice streets, to the beach, to the Bathing Enclosure with its male or female flags flying, and its clothes-lines of grey-brown towels, and washed-out cotton bathing dresses into the white borders of whose sleevelets the dye has run like weak ink. On the lofty weatherboard sides of the Bathing Enclosure is painted in enormous letters TOWELS AND BATHING DRESSES FOR HIRE and HOT SEA BATHS. Just inside the entrance is a shabby shop where the Enclosure-keeper’s wife, Mrs. Pidoto, displays for sale bathing-caps in the shape of mob-caps of oiled silk, seagull-like birds made of mussel-shells, ginger biscuits the size and thickness of novelettes, wafers of gritty home-made ice-cream, and post-cards of fat mothers-in-law in polka-dotted red bathing dresses being nipped on their biggest curves by large crabs. Tamarisks and coprosma hedges stand along the esplanade. There are little wooden shelters on the planks of which are carved hearts and initials and obscene words. There are a bandstand, a roller-skating rink, cast-iron weighing machines, penny-in-the-slot chocolate machines, latticed tea-rooms showing hot water signs, an open-air cinema and, under the pines farther along, shelters made of old cable trams with their slat seats and the enamelled notices saying PLEASE HOLD ON AROUND CURVES. Beyond the pines are the Victoria Gardens where, among palms and pigeons, among beds of bonfire salvia, and granite drinking-fountains with bronze cups attached by chains, are the marble statues of mutton-chop-hairy civic notabilities, and a fountain that no longer plays but stands looking drier than anything in the world. It is all Edwardianism running to seed, my childhood drying up, that world flaking apart. On the sand of the beach, lilac-grey and fine as caster-sugar, the soldier crabs still wheel, in their season, as they did when Mother and Aunt Rosa Bona paddled and squealed. The women have left no footprints. The gulls imitate their forced feminine hilarity. Tangled in ghosts, the son, the nephew, Laddie the child, strides by in the shape of a lean six-footer with flapping hair, and dares not look behind.