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

  Going where else?

  Going to visit Grandfather Porter at seaside Williamstown, and being able to remember nothing of him externally except his wheelchair, the afghan that covers his knees, and his white military moustache nicotined tawny at the centre and smelling of wine. I remember my instant perception that, inwardly, he cares nothing for me. I consequently find him valueless even though he gives me a bronze statuette of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Behind the smudged facades of my parents are stacked almost visible quantities of security, of the emotional fodder and spiritual information I assume to be the truth and everlasting. Behind Grandfather’s afghan and stained moustache stretches an emptiness I have not the need, tricks nor impulse to imprint with the patter of childish cloven feet. Anyway, babyish tricks and winning wiles would, I see now, have been of no avail; a blown-off leg, a Boer War medal and a voice like a bittern might have won him back from no man’s land to the idiocy of affection, for Grandfather is consciously a Warrior and a Fine Old Gentleman and, deliberately, a Character. English, starting as a drummer-boy in the Crimean War, he has progressed to the wheel chair by such military steps as taking part in the looting of the Summer Palace in Peking, taking for his second wife a crack rifle-shot, and naming one of my uncles Martini-Henry. Militarism seems all to him; his hobby, before the wheel chair, is painting battle scenes. These large canvases illustrate no aspect of his own experience that is unfit to hang on a wall. Rape, gangrene, cholera, blown-out guts and bloody slaughter are absent. The paintings, in every shade of glossy brown, show neat soldiers, their helmets and plumes and cloaks and sabres exquisitely fresh, dreamily involved in some nineteenth-century battle. Caught at a moment of horrorless cessation, the finespun horses curvet like statue horses, their eyes limpid as madonnas’. The warriors pose in attitudes of languor. Here and there a brow is bandaged, the bandage immaculate except for one tiny carnation of rosewood-coloured blood. Usually these picnic-like siestas occupy the well-swept bed of a romantically rocky pass at whose gothic extremity is a golden-brown glaze of sky behind which no one but a superannuated God can be drowsing.

  Uncle Martini-Henry, my father’s brother, is married to Aunt Rosa Bona, my mother’s sister. They too, as Grand-father does, live in Williamstown but in a new house in fashionable Victoria Street. Grandfather Porter and his rifle-shooting second wife, Father’s stepmother, occupy an older, shabby, wind-tormented house at the edge of the Rifle Ranges on the bay’s edge. The house seems guarded by two small cannon, and filled with cedar sideboards, wine decanters, glass-fronted bookcases and tarnished silver meat-dish covers. Where the walls are not covered with Grandfather’s paintings there hang crossed swords and racks of muskets and rifles. Nothing grows in the sandy garden but tamarisks all leaning away from the sea.

  Uncle Martini-Henry’s and Aunt Rosa Bona’s house, Australian Queen Anne in style, is of blood-orange-red tuck-pointed bricks. At the end of Victoria Street, which is lined by immature date-palms in picket enclosures, sand drifts on to the asphalt road from the beach with its tide-lines of shells and its wheeling and marching blue soldier crabs. On this beach Mother and Aunt Bona, squealing and holding up great handfuls of skirts and petticoats, take me paddling. Port Phillip Bay flickers many fringed, age-white eyebrows behind our backs as we return to Aunt Bona’s house, the ridge ends of its alp-steep roof and false gables of Marseilles tiles infested by terracotta griffins, its bay windows and fanlights enriched by art nouveau leadlights.

  At this stage of my recollections Aunt Bona appears continuously to wear a salver-sized black hat occupied by a whirlpool of yellow ostrich feathers. A string-thin golden chain hangs down her front. She and Mother call this front a bust. On the chain is a gold heart, fat as a fuchsia bud, with a ruby in it. Aunt Bona contains love and safety, not merely because of tribal relationship, but on her own account. The watcher perceives this, and that the brew, more diluted than that brimming Mother, and with a dash of wormwood, is nevertheless much the same brew and contains no poison of danger, of withdrawal or denial.

  Uncle Tini has a large beetle-shaped opal on his watch-chain, a jinker with dahlia-red spokes, a jinker-rug of simulated ocelot lined by waterproofed black, and a horse called

  Dolly. I find this mystifying because Father calls Mother Dolly which is mystifying enough as her real name is Ida. With a mocking intention I am later to recognize as part of her character she calls him Curly. His hair is as unrelentingly straight as mine.

  Just as Aunt Bona’s fund of certainty is noted by the watcher to be a paler extension of Mother’s, the paleness expressed in empty garrulity, so too Uncle Tini’s offering of simplicity is seen to be an extension of Father’s. Obscurely puzzled and dubious as I am, even then, I am never puzzled or dubious enough to be wary of this simplicity in Father, nor aroused enough from my inborn placidity, when wariness does much later come, to fight it face to face until it is too late, and lives have been mildewed by it. The danger in Father’s simplicity is that, years later, step by hidden ruthless step, it has transmuted itself to stubbornness, thence to simon-pure indifference, the final and most killing of selftreacheries. His ultimate destruction of himself and others by unfortified simplicity is something not foreseeable, but instinct, and observation of Father, warn me in time to give attention to my own inherited simplicity and indifference lest they shrivel me too down to an inhuman actor. When I do, much later, guess at the danger Father has passed from his body through Mother’s into mine, I watch myself closely. It is hardly necessary. I have been watching myself, by this time, for too long, since the days of the cast-iron balcony. I have watched myself watching the small suburban creature, the uninnocent good boy.

  He has a veranda with a view.

  The view is unpeopled. It is his, and not a place for people to mar. It cannot be prised apart from his first rainbow, his first skyscape, first clouds and stars and sunshine showers and whirlwinds. It is eternally silent.

  Nearer, at his foot, below the veranda, under the plane-trees, the footpath and the roadway do give up, from time to time, the sound of strange bright footsteps, of wheels stopping and starting, of the road-sweeper’s shovel as it scrapes under the horse-manure, of the gipsy cries tearing at the throats of the fish-oh, the rabbit-oh, the tinker, the vendor of pegs and clothes-props. He hears whistlers come nearer and fade to nothing to make place for the next whistler and the next. Once he hears a barrel-organ. Once he hears a man singing nearer and nearer and then farther and farther, singing the same words over and over again so that he learns them:

  ‘When the moon shines tonight on Charlie Chaplin,

  His boots are crackin’,

  From want of blackin’,

  And his trousers will need a little mendin’

  Before they send him

  To the Dardanelles’

  Behind his back, in the house, Mother sings, at the same time and in the same tune:

  ‘When the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing. . . .’

  In autumn, when the bluestone street-drain is flooded with leaves, he sees, he hears, big pinafored girls, whose schoolbags ride their shoulder-blades, wading the rustles of leaves, and squealing falsely (he recognizes the falsity) or, floppy hats inclined inwards to each other, whispering secretively as tiger-lilies. At twilight, the lamplighter is known to be moving, never near, always far off, at one or other end of the street, unseen with his unseen wand that pins staid large stars into the street-lamps.

  He has a house.

  It contains many indications of Empire: small silk Union Jacks, a red-blotched map of the world, Pears’ Soap, Epps’s Cocoa, Lea and Perrin’s Sauce, a chromo-lithograph of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, Beecham’s Pills, Mazza-wattee Tea canisters and, stamped in purple inside wardrobes and drawers, the assurance Manufactured by European Labour Only. The house contains also many indications of a lower middle-class lavishness Australians regard as bare necessities. In the meat-safe are a sirloin, pounds of rump steak and cutlets. In the pantry are a case of appl
es, a pineapple, peaches, oranges and bananas. The shelves are lined with bottles of jam, with sauces, pickles, chutneys and jars of Rose’s Marmalade. On top of the crammed vegetable rack lies a crescent of pumpkin on the cut surface of which is some large back-to-front lettering sucked from the newspaper it was wrapped in. This may be, for all I know, the heading from the news of the Czar of Russia’s assassination. It is curious that these mundane and humbly lavish still lifes of food should be so clearly remembered for, never having experienced what hunger is, I have no recollection of ever performing, at that time, the act of eating anything except mandarins, strawberries and asparagus. There is my wooden egg-cup, my own egg-spoon with teeth-dents in its silver bowl, and no memory of egg-eating. There is the Sunday tea-table: white damask glossily starched, and bearing, as the table-napkins stiff as cardboard do, a design of swans and bulrushes; the salad bowl, cake-stands, jam dishes, pickle jars, sugar-castor and celery vase all of cut glass; the tiered electro-plated cruet; the silver trumpets of sweet peas; the butter knives, cake knives, jam spoons and Sunday bread-knife with mother-of-pearl handles, and silver-gilt blades and bowls engraved with florid scrolls and curly acanthus leaves—all the glitter and gleam of the setting for an Australian Sunday tea. I recall seeing the emerald green jellies inside whose fluted trembling are suspended grapes and strawberries and banana slices; the pink-iced sponge-cakes flavoured with rose-water, the cream puffs, macaroons and lamingtons piled up; the ham coated in breadcrumbs and stuck with cloves at Father’s end of the table and, at Mother’s end, the highly peppered Sargasso of sliced cucumber, tomato, lettuce, onion and radishes sodden in Champion’s Malt Vinegar which Mother imagines is a salad. Although no memory of sitting at the table and eating remains I must, of course, have eaten like a little boy.

  He is a little boy.

  He has a sheep-dog called Nigger.

  Mother has brought Nigger from the country along with her linen sheets, crochet-rimmed pillow-shams, tea-cosies, crested silver forks and teapot and table-spoons, Rockingham dinner service and a collection of aprons graded in size and material to match every domestic duty: black Italian cloth for sordid tasks, white bibbed ones for cleaner tasks, small useless ones heavily embroidered or inset and edged with lace for more ceremonial occasions, symbolic garments of no use and on which no spot is permitted to fall. Nigger, the one living object of the trousseau, is older than the boy, so many years older that his teeth are abraded almost to the gums. Bulky as a wrestler, Nigger prefers a pretence of drowsing and dreaming prone rather than levering a burden of body to its bored legs. Seeming as old as Grandfather, Nigger is not unoccupied as Grandfather is. Wisdom, sympathy, forbearance, and a weary knowledge of which shade of kindness a mood demands, occupy Nigger. The boy kisses him as one kisses life; reluctantly but of polite necessity to kiss Grandfather is to kiss death.

  Besides Nigger he has toys. He has a no-eyed Teddy Bear he kisses more than Nigger or anyone, a glass walking-stick, a wooden top, a skewbald rocking-horse with a real horse’s tail, a paint-box, a slate with a walnut of sponge attached by a string, Cole’s Funny Picture Book, a large india-rubber ball decorated with a shiny picture of a fair-haired boy like him playing with a large india-rubber ball decorated with. . . . The implications of the ball thus decorated tempt him to thoughts of never-ending diminution, to his first thoughts on the nature of infinity. In later life this absurd game engages his attention for a period until he reins back his mind to the fact that he is to deny any donation of other impermanent animals to the pattern his parents, impermanent animals, have donated him to.

  He has Mother and Father.

  Fortified by these possessions, these seemingly indestructible possessions, his belly full, his body neutralized by excellent health and proper degrees of warmth, he is freed for timeless and solitary behaviour.

  He has, above and beyond all and everyone else, himself.

  He presses the palms of his hands firmly on his eyeballs to make the phosphenes glide from the luminously veined dark he has brought into being. Glowing oval blots, rimmed with a blurred electric blue, swim out of the ornamented gloom, then, on the point of capture, slip sideways and upwards out of vision, to be replaced by others and others and others, all infmitesimally different—stemless flowers of his own manufacture.

  It rains. He sits, neatly as a story-book boy, on the colonial sofa in the living-room. He watches the drops on the pane. For how long? For a little while? To this moment; he sits there watching to this very moment. He sees the drops writing their descents on the glass, wriggling in a pretence that they avoid linking with ether drops, next swiftly darting to snatch other drops, to melt together and stream dying out of sight. ‘Gentle Annie,’ says his mother of the rain, in an informing tone. And then, again, abstractedly, ‘Gent-le An-nie,’ as though listening, not to the present rain but to a bygone rain and something else. Is Mother, he thinks, listening to her own English mother saying, ‘Gentle Annie’? He thinks of the fair boy playing with the ball on the ball he plays with.

  It is a sunny day. He has looked at the green fruit on the backyard tomato bushes or at a snail or at the view or under Nigger’s tail. Is there nowhere else to look in the world? ‘Go and look up the chimney,’ says Mother, reminding him of a pleasure he always forgets to remind himself of. He lies on the rag rug, his head on the raddled bricks of the fireplace. In the blue at the chimney-top he finds a daytime star. He watches it, and watches too the black miniature cauliflowers of soot bloomed with indigo that grow in the chimney tunnel. Oh, to grow there! he thinks. Oh, he yearns, to fly there and nestle in the blue-black!

  He looks out through the coloured glass panels of the living-room door, first at a ruby-tinged world, then at a yellow one, finally at a world blue as the blue of a castor-oil bottle. Oh, to walk there, to watch himself walk there, wandering off and away, the blue-haired boy holding the blue Teddy Bear, and disappearing among the boles of the blue plane-trees.

  Mother has taught him of the coloured streets and the chimney star and Gentle Annie and the skirmishing raindrops.

  It Is Mother who directs him towards a form of animism shot through with Victorian moral maxims, and leavened by pitiless practicality. Under fly-papers unravelling like sticky curl-papers from the ceiling, and stuck with dead and dying flies (naughty flies?), Mother points out a free fly (a good fly?) wringing its hands clean and scrubbing its eyes. She recommends its attitude to cleanliness, and points out the cruelty of tearing the wings from flies, a thing he has never thought of doing let alone done. With mousetrap, cobweb broom or other destructive device in hand, Mother speaks, nevertheless, graciously of her intended victims, supplying them with such an air of respectability as to suggest they have the power to judge between good and evil, and that they possess souls. The mouse is at least clever, the spider industrious, the bee busy, and so on. Ant, caterpillar, moth, butterfly, the Gentle Annie rain, thunder, the winter plane-trees hung with uncountable ear-rings, Christmas beetles, flowers, have each and all, Mother implies, the natures and souls of human beings. To illustrate this she shows him how to strip petals from the pansy or the violet to reveal the green mannikin with an orange scarf about his neck and his feet in a mustard bath. She tears the lower lip from the antirrhinum to unveil the minute Virgin Mary standing inside with her long-sleeved tiny arms extended in compassion.

  Mother teaches what she learned in her country town girlhood: to thread lilac flowers on broom straws, to make a poppy-show of small flowers in a matchbox, to cut from folded newspaper long chains of dancing men, to build houses of cards, to make wheels of interfitted matchbox drawers, to play a thousand simple games. One of these games he . . . I . . . can never forget.

  It is night. The living-room fire wanes. I have never been out of bed later. Mother and I sit at the table, I in pyjamas with a cashmere shawl over my shoulders, she in nightgown and grey-blue wrapper. A long bedtime plait of hair hangs over her shoulder. Its end, tied by a piece of tape, lies on the furry table-cloth over wh
ich we bend to play Tit-Tat-Toe.

  Eyes half-closed in a simulation of being closed, I majce spiral movements above the slate on which Mother has drawn a spiral figure divided into numbered sections. I chant dreamily:

  ‘Tit-tat-toe, my first go!

  Three jolly butcher boys all in a row!’

  The kerosene lamp is glowing and breathing like some warm golden animal. Now and then it blinks. It purrs. It almost utters a dim, kind word.