There’s a house with a yellow door
In Melbourne, in Melbourne town
Where the blues are sung
The blues are strummed
And rocked and strained through an old man
With a face of stone and a tone so mild
When he says, he says he writes the blues
Making poetry out of a God forsaken
For the blues, sighing as he sits alone like stone
Until he finds the tune and writes the melody true
For the House with the yellow door (oh yeah)
And don’t forget the buttons lying on the floor
And the faded rose upstairs, the kitchen hazy
With the smoke of the blues, bending the notes
Flowing the words from the broken down woman
Singing the house with the yellow door blues
Oh singing the house with the yellow door blues.
Balga sat in Adrian’s pad and listened to the famed gospel singer Mahalia Jackson singing a song about God. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t like hymns overmuch, having had his fill of them in the orphanage; but his friend loved the black woman’s voice. So he waited until the poet stopped his listening and got up to carefully put away the record.
‘Yeah, I dig her, yeah, but I’ve been thinking. You know I’m stuck in that rooming house and I want something, well, with more space, a loft! Man, I need a loft.’
‘Yeah so would we all, but look at this place. It’s small but contains all I need.’
‘Sure, but I would like to do some practicing without anyone getting annoyed.’
‘Yeah, we all need space to explore. Well, most of us. Now let me think.’ Adrian had hundreds of contacts and Balga watched him stroking his goatee. He got up put on a Louis Armstrong Hot something or other, jiggled until the track finished and then said: ‘We could try the house with the yellow door. Behind it is a big loft which hasn’t been used, well, hasn’t been used since the horse and buggy era. I guess Leo would rent it out to you, with my recommendation of course.
‘Good for you, Adrian, you always come up with something. Let’s go and get it; but wait is it close to the city and I can play my music there?’
‘The house with the yellow door is just about on the corner of Lygon and Victoria streets where the Trades’ Hall is and across from it is the 48 hour a week work monument, so it’ll be perfect for you. Now as for your future landlord — Leo Cash is one of nature’s gentlemen and though old is hip. A poet he digs new and ancient things.’
‘Yes,’ Balga breathed ecstatically. ‘It is for me; I know it.’
‘So let’s go and get it’ Adrian said taking off Louis Armstrong and carefully putting him away.
‘Lead on McDuff,’ Balga exclaimed.
It was a simple matter to get a tram down Collins, alight and jump onto a Swanston Street one that took them up to Victoria where they got off at the City Baths. They went up the side of the buildings towards the column of the 48 hour week monument. Across the street Balga saw a row of terrace houses ending with a pub on the corner of Lygon. His eyes traveled back from it to stop at one of the two storey buildings which had a bright yellow door.
‘That must be it,’ he said pointing across.
‘Indeed it is, now how shall I introduce you as an artist or….?’
‘Well, I am thinking of getting deeper into folk singing. Man, I want to sing the blues.’
‘Okay, an artist it is. Leo used to be with the New Theatre and digs all things theatrical.’
‘Yeah and you said he writes poetry. What does he write? He old and wouldn’t be doing Beat like you do?’
‘Well, do you know Thompson’s Hound of Heaven,’ Adrian almost sneered as if he knew Balga had neither read or even heard of him..
‘Who,’ the lad asked niggled because the only poets he knew were the ones he had been forced to learn at school and the Beatniks Adrian had insisted on reading to him.
‘Him,’ Adrian retorted then declaimed:
I fled Him down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
‘Well, it has rhythm,’ Balga commented dryly.
‘It certainly has and Leo is reworking this into a satire called, Smith’s Hound. Maybe, he’ll read you a bit if he digs you enough. It’s just as good as the original.’
‘I’ll wait for it,’ the lad said not all that interested.
By then they were at the yellow door and Adrian lifted up the knocker and gave three raps. The two waited. Beside the door was a dirty window through which the lad could see an office.
‘What does he do for a crust,’ Balga asked.
‘Buttons’ came the reply uttered in a low, level gruff voice as the door opened and there stood a small gray haired man with a round dead pan white face in which grayish-blue eyes glowered. Balga thought he looked a bit like a leprechaun because of the rigidity of his features. His general rigidity, the lad later found out was due to his contacting Parkinson’s disease from chickens he asserted, though Balga didn’t know if you could get the disease from chooks. The disease caused the old man to suffer from muscle atrophy and when he walked he tottered. Balga guessed this was what it was like being old; but behind the expressionless face was a sharp mind.
This rigid little man gravely regarded the Noongar his face unable to give expression to his thoughts. Adrian introduced him and the old bloke said: ‘Walk right in,’ and shuffled in front of them down a short corridor lined with boxes of buttons each identified as to type by a sample card fastened to the front. At the end of the passageway the three entered a small kitchen where the old man began boiling water. He made a pot of what wasn’t tea.
‘Red Bush from South Africa, healthy,’ he observed.
‘Healthy,’ Balga repeated.
‘For the stomach,’ he added.
‘For the stomach,’ Adrian repeated.
‘Ordinary tea has tannin and this harms the stomach lining.’
‘Harms the stomach lining,’ Balga repeated.
‘It also keeps the mind alert. Adrian has mentioned that you are an artist. Exhibited, yet?’
‘No, I’m thinking of giving it away, taking up the blues and writing and singing songs of my own devising. Need to work on my guitar though so I need some space about me.’
‘So you have performed?’
‘He had a gig or two in Sydney,’ Adrian butted in to build his friend up.
‘The Blues, jazz?’
‘Sort of…’
‘My daughter, Deidre used to sing for Swing Bands when she was young and well … now she’s taken up writing and has just had a novel called The Delinquents accepted for publication by a London publishing house. You should talk to her, compare musical notes if you have a mind to, she sings a good Stormy Weather.’
‘Stormy weather,’ Balga replied politely.
‘She’s unwell these days, but her voice is still there. A well trained voice too. You should listen to it. Her pitch is perfect. You know, I too was in the performing arts, the theatre until I became a sort of lame duck.’
“Or a robot,” Balga couldn’t help thinking somewhat cruelly.
‘The theatre, art for the people or so I thought then. Do you think it still is?’
‘No. music is,’ Balga couldn’t help exclaiming.
‘Part of theatre it is, so why not become a song and dance man? Get into theatre, vaudeville. I was active in the New Theatre, a communist, no a left wing theatrical movement of social realism. We sought to create and put on valid proletariat pieces taken directly from life. An example of this was Waiting for Lefty about a taxi drivers’ strike. It had songs too. You might have seen it….’
‘Yes,’ Adrian said hurriedly. ‘Theatre must be valid and authentic, but styles change. The Union Theatre at Melbourne University is extremely progressive under John Sumner. He is producing a season of the best of recent British drama. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is on now. I’ll take you to see this contemporary expression of proletariat drama.’
‘Perhaps I should, perhaps I may, let us fix the date,’ Leo intoned like a theatrical character and with a dismissive gesture.
‘Tonight then, I can have two tickets waiting for me at the box office.’
‘Take our budding song and dance man here. He might learn how to project some of his ideas or gain some ideals, who knows what he may beg, borrow or steal,’ the old man said in his toneless voice. He may have been joking. It was hard to tell with his expressionless face.
‘No, I want you beside me,’ Adrian exclaimed. ‘Give me some of your expertise so that I may write a decent review. Yes, so it is fixed, now how is your long poem progressing?’
‘Smith’s Hound?’
‘What else, I have already introduced Balga to Thompson’s Hound.’
The conversation went on like this and the lad wondered if he would ever find out if the loft was available or not.’
At long last Leo fixed his eyes on Balga’s and asked him where he was from and in which school he had been educated. Balga spoke the truth. He was from Western Australia and had been educated by the Christian Brothers at Clontarf Boys’ Town.
The old man managed a smile though his eyes continued to read him as he replied: ‘The Irish Brothers, and of course you are now a lapsed Catholic?’
‘Well, I don’t go to church or even think about it all that much.’
‘That’s the best way to be, lapsed, and if you are of course you’ll be a socialist, one of those reds you’re always reading about in the papers.’
‘Well, I …’
‘Exactly and now you have entered this, this den of lapsed Catholics and Communist fellow travelers seeking out a refuge from the Bourgeoisie.’
‘Yes,’ Adrian spoke up. ‘Balga’s come to the House with the Yellow Door in quest of that space behind it. He has his heart set on a loft.’ Adrian finished off quaintly.
‘Yes, it does need to be filled’ Leo replied his eyes moving slowly to Adrian then coming back to Balga’s face.’
‘And the answer is?’ Adrian asked abruptly.
‘Well, let’s see,’ Leo replied, his face deadpan and his tone flat.. ‘Deidre has the room just up those back stairs there. That’s a nice large room. She’s out at the hospital now but will be back soon. We Cashs aren’t in the best of health, as you can see by staring at me. Now there’s the front stairs. There is a short corridor or passageway across which are two doors opposite each other. One opens onto my room which faces the street and the other opens onto a room with the window facing onto the back yard and beyond is the loft quite isolated. There’ a bit of a space at the end of a yard beyond which is the dunny and next to it the back gate too opening onto a lane. Yes, your loft now. It needs to be cleaned and you are must pay the nominal rent of two pounds ten per week, cheap because there are few amenities, no furniture, but the company here is priceless.’
Balga grinned he had a new pad and a loft at that. Things were going his way.