The Watcher on the Cast - Iron Balcony - an Australian Autobiography by Hal Porter

Author:Hal Porter [Porter, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571055579
Amazon: 0571055575
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 1963-04-14T14:00:00+00:00

Briar Rosebud was a fair princess,

a fair princess, a fair princess,

Briar Rosebud was a fair princess,

Long, long ago. . . .

She dwelt up in a lonely tower,

a lonely tower, a lonely tower,

She dwelt up in a lonely tower,

Long, long ago. . . .

As we sing, the Adams audience, still on its hunkers in the frizzled grass, joins us. The reiterated, ‘Long, long ago . . becomes sweeter and sadder, verse by verse.

To look back on that group of twenty children in their out-of-date shabbiness or fake finery, opening and closing their geranium- or liquorice-stained mouths to make ardent noise, is to look back and trick oneself into a sentimental curiosity. Are they, as they sing themselves into a dimension a little above the earth and a little out of the hour, aware of which future is beginning to sprout or has already sprouted within them? Or do they not know and not watch themselves and their prophetic hearts at all but merely sing and sing and, having sung, descend from the dray, and walk from the orchard, careless of their destinies? The Queen with her gold- paper crown, diamante bracelets on her freckled arms, and alive with idiotic rippling giggles, commits suicide twenty years later. War swipes out of sight the King, the Court Jester (‘Dost thou know, thou august majesties, when is a door not a door?’) and some of the audience. Years later I listen to the Bad Fairy, Christobel Veronica, already ravaged by the cancer that is to destroy her, talking and talking, and unable to stop talking of bad weather and sickness, a middle-aged cow-cocky’s wife in a scarred and dirty Chevrolet jammed with her children who could easily be herself and her brothers and sisters of long ago—of long, long ago.

Briar Rosebud or The Sleeping Beauty is almost over. One thing yet remains for me to learn, and one thing yet to do.

A few days later, the day hot and the elm-leaves flaccid, the Sleeping Beauty, reverted to the cattle-dealer’s pretty daughter, appears, apparently accidentally, at the base of an oak tree in the Tannies. I am on a bough collecting the brittle husks from which the cicadas have elbowed their way on their journey from a hole in the ground to flight in the burning air. This will be the last time I collect these fragile carapaces containing nothing, the last time I will be up a tree, humming to myself on a bough.

‘Hello,’ says the Sleeping Beauty. ‘Come on down. I want to talk to you. A bonzer secret.’ We are all affecting the new words brought back from the Great War.

I climb down, warning myself of something I cannot pinpoint. There are children playing everywhere about, in and under the trees, as many, as busy as the children in Breughel’s Children’s Games.

‘This is a bonzer secret,’ she says. ‘Come over behind the box thorns.’

‘No,’ I say, getting an erection, for I have been behind the boxthorns with other children, but certainly not in the full blaze of December mid-morning with eyes everywhere.

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