Читать книгу Alva's Boy - Alan Collins - Страница 6

I was born in late September 1928, a particularly busy time in the Jewish calendar, encompassing the New Year and the Day of Atonement as well as the Feast of Tabernacles and the Festival of Rejoicing in the Law. This last marks the end of one reading of the scrolls containing the Five Books of Moses and the beginning of the new cycle. It is one of the few occasions when Jews, lay and clergy, can get joyously drunk without admonition. It was bad luck for me; I was comforted by those in the know and told that to be born on Yom Kippur was a blessing, a happy event.

As it happened, no glasses were raised in l'chaim; I was unceremoniously put to one side while my mother, the poor doomed Alva Phoebe Collins nee Davis, fought for her life, haemorrhaging critically while the only professional help at hand was a midwife. She employed her limited skills in an attempt to save my mother, at the same time casting around for the doctor who at that moment was mortifying himself with prayer and fasting in a synagogue a mile or so away. My father, enjoying an all too brief period of prosperity, had insisted that the accouchement be in the bedroom of his recently acquired Bellevue Hill mansion, a sandstone and brick 'gentleman's residence' clinging to the steep, grassy hillside. The furnishings had come from Bebarfalds store in George Street, Sydney, chosen by my father with a sweep of his arm around the various departments. My mother's input did not extend beyond flattening her swollen body against the walls as the gang of burly furniture men reassembled the store's showrooms in her new home.

And now she lay dead in a pool of blood and placenta, her olive skin blanched and with beads of sweat that would all too soon turn to icy pinpoints. My father, Sampson Collins, abused the newly installed wall-mounted telephone for its inability to connect him with his doctor - any doctor - who might re store life to his 27-year-old wife of little more than a year. He rounded on the midwife with an illjudged mixture of abuse and supplication until the woman raised her arm to strike him, paused in mid-sweep and then let her arm fall in a defeated, dejected gesture that ended in her tenderly pulling a covering over the body. Sampson Collins let the receiver dangle, sat on a carved Chinese chest at the foot of the bed and stared hard at the outline of my mother's body. Around his feet, a squat oriental satyr drank tea and gloated over pubescent girls. The midwife lifted me from the cradle (Bebarfalds: anybody for the fourth floor? - all nursery requirements) and carried me to the bathroom where she unwrapped me and washed me, then drew her dress aside and guided me onto her breast.

My mother was one of three sisters all of whom had the honeyed skin and warm dark eyes of the Sephardic Jew. Together with their mother, widowed before she was 40, they lived in a spacious ground-floor flat in what were then the sandhills of Rose Bay and contiguous with Bondi. The district was an enclave of Jews, most of whom would soon feel the 1930s Depression deeply, especially the men with no skills who could not handle a saw or dig a hole. Most of them had already lost the portable skills of the tailor or watchmaker that had at least provided their parents with bread. Those same parents who could ward off starvation and the pogroms of Eastern Europe had not passed on their survival skills to the next generation living in Bondi. It soon became clear that the relief work handed out by a government held in thrall to the Bank of England was the right of the goyim, nonJewish worktoughened men with wiry wives and kids able to subsist on the proverbial smell of an oily rag.

If I do not dwell too kindly on my father, it is because I invest in him my entire stock of misery. From photographs, he appears to have been a man of rakish elegance. The 'mashers' of their day were men who, regardless of the amount of cash they could jingle in their pockets, considered themselves irresistible to women. They wore tight suits, twotoned shoes with spats and managed to refresh their frayed cuffs with Harper's Silver Star starch. My father was mostly in work. He was a commercial traveller selling men's costume jewellery - the studs, cravat pins and cufflinks that the nobs needed to set off their 'soup 'n' fish' - dinner suits. Later, as the Depression bit deep, he went door-to-door buying scrap gold. But in this earlier, present occupation he was at one with the commercial travelling fraternity, the selfstyled knights of the road who met in the bar of the Commercial Travellers' Club to swap stories about the sales-ladies in the shops they called on.

My mother stood behind the brassedged counter of a high-class jewellers in Park Street, Sydney. Her specialty was cut glass, the dressing-table sets comprising tasselled perfume bottles, powder bowls, imitation ivory-backed hand mirrors and a stemrose vase. On another counter, at a rightangle to hers, was a rosewood cabinet containing gentlemen's toiletries in tortoiseshell or ebony. It was here that my father opened his sample case and rolled out a black velvet cloth. On it, he laid out his range of shirt studs, tiepins and cufflinks. My father watched her while his hands and mouth went through the patter.

'It's Alva, isn't it? Ma Davis's daughter? You're the youngest sister.' He had done his homework. He already knew as much as he needed to know about this 26yearold goodlooker: that she was single still, living at home, fatherless, penniless, that she was the pick of the sisters - the eldest was already married to a Gallipoli veteran, trying to buy a cottage with his war money. Alva Phoebe Davis was the 'quiet one', unlike the middle sister, Enid, who had good looks aplenty but a tongue that could lash. Sampson Collins's commercial traveller's dossier was up-to-date. In his monastic cell at the club, he pored over his girlie list like a bookie with his odds chart.

'How's Ma?'

My mother moved her chamois languidly over the counter, wiping away invisible fingerprints. She wore a clinging black dress buttoned to the neck and set off with a crisp white Peter Pan collar. Of all the men who came into the shop, he was easily the handsomest. Not even his prominent nose lessened his flamboyant appearance.

'How y' sisters? All well, I hope.'

And so it went, each knowing damn well that in the tightknit Jewish community, privacy was bought and sold on a barter basis. Gossip was a tradeable commodity, and a flat with a widow and her daughters in it was a clearing house for the small change of hearsay and the heavier currency of slander. Alva Davis knew why Sampson Collins's first marriage had ended up in the rabbinical divorce court. The rabbi's wife shopped where Alva's mother shopped. Ever the soul of discretion, she talked in Yiddish of both of them 'peeing in other people's pots', and said that when the kosher butcher left after delivering the chickens he had a new spring in his step. Second-hand goods Sampson Collins might be, but he was still under 40 - well, maybe 45 - and a goodlooker. Hanging on his arm would turn heads.

My father shot his cuffs so the gold links showed, fingered the pearl stick-pin in his tie and put a ringed hand on the counter in front of Alva. The rich voice purred like an eight-cylinder Packard.

'Alva, sweetheart, you know darn well Rachel and me are not together any more. Haven't been for more than a year but, official like, it's, er, a bit over six months.' His fingers crawled across to hers and held her hand ever so lightly. 'Got a few more calls to make in George Street, Alva, but how about you and me walking out this Satdee?'

She would have given quids to have the strength to withdraw it. The featherlight touch was as strong as a vice. Her other hand dabbed at her forehead with a balled-up hanky. In a moment, Sam imprisoned this one, too. He drew her to him across the counter and kissed her on the cheek. It was no more than the slightest brushing of his lips, yet she trembled, dropped her head and nodded.

'Is that a yes, Alva?'

She nodded again and finally answered him with a whispered yes. He let her hand go and was immediately brusque. 'Satdee, two o'clock and we'll go over to Manly if the weather's good. If not, tea and scones at your place. Better let Mum and the sisters know. With any luck, they might go out for the arvo.'

The sheer effrontery of this suggestion brought her down hard. She started to put him in his place, then put her hand to her cheek where he had kissed her. The reprimand died. 'I like Manly better,' she said, but Sam had already swept up his sample case, put on his hat and was almost out the door. He turned and gave an exaggerated bow, then was swallowed up in the lunchtime crowd.

That was Sampson Collins, my father-to-be, courting and catching my mothertobe.

They were married in the big synagogue in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, the one with the stars painted on the vaulted ceiling. My mother went under the marriage canopy on the arm of her boss while my father was attended by his brother, Mark, the furniture dealer. When my father died some thirty years later, I went through his few possessions and found a pile of negatives which yielded up pictures of their fleeting time together. They were fun snaps: Sam leaning on the tourer car, his fingers hooked in his vest, bowler hat at a rakish angle; Alva in flapper dress, cloche hat and a shapely leg extended. There they were at Luna Park, cuddling on the mock-up platform of the Melbourne Express, and numerous snaps of the two of them on the promenade at Bondi Beach. I looked at them, bitterly begrudging the unrestrained enjoyment they portrayed. They had filled every waking moment with a greedy happiness, perhaps against the day when she would die and he would be alone once more, burdened with a young child, a hindrance and one of the causes of the disintegration of his fourth and final marriage.

It took less than an hour for my mother to die. It took only marginally longer for my father to come to a decision that, by any yardstick, would be for me a monumental blunder. Angry and torn with grief, he turned on my mother's family and refused all offers of nurturing, notwithstanding that my mother's married sister, Beryl, offered to rear me together with her own two small sons. The dormant dislike and suspicion that the Davis household had held for Sampson Collins, the ever-so sharp commercial traveller, now rose to the surface like fat on a cooling pot of chicken soup. Like the fat, I was skimmed off and discarded.

The house in Bellevue Hill, it turned out, was rented; the fine furniture from Bebarfalds had been acquired on the 'never-never', the time-payment system. In his heart Sampson Collins, the itinerant, footloose commercial traveller, never really believed he needed anything more in life than a good car, a suitcase and a comfy hotel room with the occasional bit of skirt. The big men who had delivered the flash furniture were the same ones who came and took it all away, offering, simultaneously, condolences and smirks at the Jew they reckoned was too bloody big for his boots anyway.

But what to do with a hungry baby? The midwife, dear woman, was hanging her breasts out to dry when I came along. The last of her infants was being weaned onto a Nestle's formula called Vi-Lactogen. So, straight after Kevin Fingal O'Donohue took to the bottle, his mum plumped up her tits once more and offered them to me. For the next seven days she suckled me, leaving me only once and that was to follow at a distance my mother's pitifully small cortege that wended its way from the Jewish Burial Society's dingy parlours in Chippendale to the clay hole in the ground at Rookwood. Custom was followed: the mourners filled in the grave and the rabbi hurried through the prayers with an eye on the threatening clouds. As people dispersed, he took a wooden marker from under his long coat and stuck it in the mound. In thin black painted letters it read: Alva Phoebe Collins. He took my father by the elbow.

'Sam, it seems not so long since you stood under the chuppah with our late Alva. Now you are left with a child. Listen, you know that next week the babe is eight days old.'He turned to face my father. 'Y'know what I'm saying, Sammy? F'shteyst?". Sampson Collins recalled the few Yiddish words he had heard from his parents. Yes, he understood what the rabbi was not hinting at but telling him as a command written in the Torah.

'The infant must have a bris, Sammy. You gotta have him circumcised. Soon will be already eight days. Can't wait. The child is well? So . . . I can do it, or maybe you want for a doctor to do it and I'll say the prayers. OK? So bring the babe to my house in Bondi Road next to the shul.' The two of them moved back down the path to the cars. My father's whitewall-tyred Ford tourer was the only other vehicle apart from the hearse; Mrs O'Donohue returned to the car and sat in the passenger seat with me on her lap.

In a prim but firm voice she ordered my father to drive her home. 'The little one is hungry - again,' she emphasised and crushed me to her breast. My father stared hard at me through the open car window and at that wonderfully bountiful gland now drying up, and dismissed whatever thought had entered his head. He said to Mrs O'Donohue, 'The rabbi reminds me that the baby has to be circumcised and it should be next week.'

'Why can't you for Chrissake call him by his name?' she responded angrily. 'I know you've decided on it, it's written on his birth certificate.'

The rabbi cut in. 'It's not done, and God forbid the evil eye should fall on him before he is named at his bris. He has to have a Hebrew name as well as that other one.' He walked back to the hearse and got in. 'Don't forget, Sam, and bring with you a bottle kosher wine.' The hearse careered off at speed along the winding path to the exit on Liverpool Road.

My father drove in silence while Mrs O'Donohue bottled up the questions, such as why eight days to wait, why my mother was buried in a raw pine box with rope handles (was this a cheap Jew funeral?), why he had to scour around to find ten adult male Jews before a service could be held. And now he would again have to round up ten men to attend and witness my circumcision. She stared hard at him as he drove skilfully towards Bondi, imagined those hands on her and finally let her eyes rest on the bulge at his crotch. 'Mr Collins,' she purred, 'what will become of little Alan here after the you-know-what? Y' know I have my own to care for. Have you got any idea, because if you haven't, well, my parish priest says the nuns could . . .' She stopped and put her hand on his arm.

She was not prepared for his violent reaction. He threw her hand off and the car slewed dangerously as he stamped on the brake. My head stopped a fraction away from the dashboard as the woman braced herself against the inertia. My father regained control and swore in Yiddish about cholera upon her. 'The baby goes into the Scarba Home in Wellington Street straight after the bris,' he spat out, 'so no bloody church is going to get its hooks into it.'

'It's not an it, it's a him, and if you're afraid to say his name I'll say it for you!' and she leaned her head out the car window and yelled my name over and over until my own screams drowned hers out.

The car stopped at her little cottage and she got out, holding me tight. 'Have him ready at ten next Monday,' my father yelled at her and drove off to his dreary room at the Commercial Travellers' Club in the city. There he stared at the prints on the wall of Norman Lindsay nudes, sprites so voluptuous they would cause a miniature tidal wave if they entered the limpid pools.

The Scarba Home had popped into his head out of fear of the black-hooded women whose pale faces with thin-rimmed spectacles seemed more at home with death than life. The Scarba Home was run by the Benevolent Society of New South Wales. Cold statuary of a tortured, torn, impaled body marked the driveway of the convent down the road. By contrast the path to the door of Scarba wound between gloomy Norfolk pines. Its records of the discarded and motherless infants and the homeless pregnant girls it succoured were either secret or erratically kept, as I discovered when, more than halfway through my life, in the vaults of the Mitchell Library, I tried to find some record of my stay.

There was a telephone booth downstairs in the common room of the Commercial Travellers' Club. Sampson Collins took his address book and his gold Eversharp propelling pencil into the tiny cubicle and proceeded to give Shirley, the club's telephoniste, a series of numbers to call. After nearly an hour, he had nine men agreeing to meet at the rabbi's home. He had expected ribald jokes but was surprised at the serious manner of the men. Despite the interruption to their work, they had all assured him it was an honour to attend and witness my circumcision. Perhaps, too, they were touched by the tragedy of the circumstances.

On Monday morning Mrs O'Donohue was waiting at the door of her cottage. A car pulled up and my grandmother, already hobbling with arthritis, was helped out by my Aunt Enid, looking as though she was going to a morning tea at the Australia Hotel. Her sister Beryl, the eldest of the three Davis girls, was married to Alf Safran, a returned serviceman who had borrowed the car and now sat authoritatively behind the wheel. The two women walked up the narrow path, the privet grabbing at their clothes. The dear midwife had me wrapped tightly in a shawl. Wordlessly, I was taken from that breast I loved and placed into the inexperienced arms of my aunt.

'I've fed him,' said Mrs O'Donohue through trembling lips. She folded her arms over her near-empty breasts. 'He'll need another about twelve o'clock.' She added forlornly, 'Y' can bring him back here if you like.'

Enid said grimly, 'I don't think any one us will be seeing much of the child after this day.' She looked down at me and shook her head. 'Your stupid father will live to regret what he has decided, taking you away from a good home.' Mrs O'Donohue could contain her tears no longer and sobbed deeply as Grandma, followed by Aunt Enid holding the baby awkwardly, went back down the garden path, climbed into the car and never looked back.

As one of the men joked later, the scene outside the rabbi's house reminded him of the bunch that stood around outside the SP bookmaker's on a Saturday afternoon. When the black car drew up, their first reaction was to scatter. Alf got out and asked, 'Where's Sam?'

'Inside having a heartstarter, I reckon.'

'Give us a look at the nipper, Enid.'

'Struth, he's the livin' spit of poor Alva, wouldn't y' say, Izzy?'

Enid held me out to the men for just long enough and then marched to the door with Grandma limping behind. She knocked with a sharp rat-a-tat. The rabbi's wife opened it and beckoned them in. At this point Enid lost some of her cool composure and held me tight. The rabbi's wife sat Grandma down in a tall Jacobean chair in the hall and put out her arms to take me from Enid.

'Better now I should take the little one,' she said. 'The mother should - oy, forgive -Ich hob fargesn - you are the aunt, yes? Listen, give me the baby. This is no place for a woman. Now go sit in the hall with the buba. I'll call you when it's over.'

She winkled me out of Enid's arms just as the tears flowed. First her sister, now a motherless baby taken from her. She col lapsed into a matching chair alongside Grandma. 'Just so long as I don't see Sam,' she sobbed. 'I hate the mamzer.' The two women sat in the hard chairs waiting, waiting until Alf, the tenth man, would reappear to drive them home.

All was ready in the rabbi's lounge room. My father, dressed to kill, was seated in a wide, comfortable chair, his legs apart and with a pillow and a towel across his knees. A small table at his side was covered with a pretty white cloth. On it was a silver goblet, a bottle of wine, a prayer book and a shiny metal case. The men stood around sheepishly, jokingly enquiring if their mate Sam was fortified enough for the job or perhaps another shot of whisky maybe? They hardly noticed when the rabbi's wife glided silently into the room, gently placed me on my father's lap and withdrew.

The rabbi appeared from a side door wearing a white gown, which could have been a concession to surgical sterility, or more likely was his kitl, an outer garment worn by orthodox Jews on the High Holydays and in which they are also buried. He skilfully unwrapped me from the shawl down to my wet nappy, exposing my minuscule dicky to the cold morning air. I howled long and loud until the rabbi took a wad of cottonwool, dunked it in wine and squeezed it into my open mouth. Its insidious pleasure enveloped me. My father breathed whisky fumes over me. I shut up and shut out the unpleasantness of having my legs forced apart by an ugly man who clamped my dicky in cold steel and then cut away enough of it to initiate me into the Covenant of Abraham. The rabbi's wife reappeared and forestalled my father's inept attempt to wrap me up again. The men all behaved as though they had come through some terrible ordeal and had another drink and slices of teacake. They wished my father good luck, consulted their watches and trooped out.

Uncle Alf was the last to leave. 'The sister and ma-in-law are waitin' in the hall for me, Sam. You sure you won't . . . y' know, me and Beryl would love to take the little one and give him a good home.' Sam stood up, holding me awkwardly.

'They blame me, Alf, for poor Alva dying. Said I should have had her in a hospital. It's all very well being wise after the event. I know they'll go to their graves blaming me but you don't, do you Alf ? Things go wrong - you've seen enough of it yourself in the trenches.'

The alcohol was deserting the both of us by now. I was hurting like hell and crying. So was my father, snivelling with self-pity and calling out, 'As God's my witness, I didn't want her to die!' Alf, noncommittally, replied, 'You made your bed, you gotta lie in it,'and pushed past my father to gather up Grandma and Aunt Enid. It was only after the three of them had gone that Sam realised he had not seen the two women at all that morning, and it would be many years before he saw either of them again.

My father's tourer was parked outside. He waited until he thought nobody was about; then, with me quieter now, he laid me in a wicker Moses basket and put it on the seat beside him. He could have walked the short distance from the rabbi's house to the Scarba Home. As he drove up, the morning sun barely penetrated the gloom of the driveway. He tucked the shawl closer around me before lifting me out and carrying me up the few steps to the entrance. The matron was summoned. Her chest was adorned with a large metal badge like some lumpy school prefect. Attached to it was a metal strip engraved with her name, G. McCechnie, Matron. She towered over just about everybody; she was the supreme commander of the Scarba Home of the Benevolent Society. She in turn summoned an inferior person, a dumpy girl who could barely walk for the starch in her uniform. Only when I was deposited into the girl's scratchy arms and my face was almost lacerated, did Matron McCechnie speak.

'You are the Sampson Collins of the Jewish faith and this is your male child?'

She commanded the greyhaired woman behind the high counter to hand over the application form, which she proceeded to read like a military charge sheet. Scratchy uniform stood by, her eyes glued to Matron's face for a clue as to the next order.

Sampson Collins admitted everything: yes he was the person stated; yes, he had just been widowed; no, the infant had no birth defects (unless you count being born uncircumcised a defect); yes, he had the birth certificate here. Matron, who in the light of her long experience with male duplicity would have been happier to have fingerprints included, examined it minutely. Then her voice softened.

'The little one has been breastfed, Mr Collins?'

He admitted this was so, but caution made him refrain from naming the Irish midwife. He felt quite foolish then when Matron assured him that God in his infinite wisdom made all mothers' milk to the same formula. She turned to scratchy uniform. 'Martha here will be feeding little Alan. Off you go now, there's a good girl, and don't forget to change the dressing on his little thing, will you?'

Martha gave me a conspiratorial squeeze. Somewhere beneath that sandpaper blouse was my lunch. I tried to turn my face away from it in time to see my father edging towards the door. He paused and came over to me. 'Goodbye, old son,'he said jovially. 'I'll pop in on Sunday and see how you're getting on.' The sandblasted glass doors showing a pair of stags rampant closed behind him. Stags, rampant or rutting 'it could not have been a more apt exit for my father.

The Jewish mourning custom is wisely divided into stages: seven days of deep mourning (well, they had now elapsed), one month of reflection and then, pragmatically, at the end of the month, nobody would look askance if the surviving spouse was out and about. From then on, he or she was actually expected to take a new partner and, if at all possible, procreate.

In this regard, at least, Sampson Collins was an observant Jew. Within a year he had wed again to a divorcee named Bella. She soon found his long absences from home as he travelled New South Wales not at all what she had in mind when she married her boulevardier. In their first year, she visited me twice - at any rate, she came into the building twice. On all other occasions she sat in the car buffing her fingernails while Sampson Collins remarked on what a bonny fellow I was, winking at scratchy uniform when enquiring if I was on the . . . and he touched his chest; pleased as Punch that I was, he happily paid for another six months board for me at Scarba.

Bella was a manicurist at David Jones. Skivvying after a baby would damage her hands. I must say that on the two occasions she held me, she was soft as eiderdown and smelt divinely. I would like to have gone home with Bella if only for a change from the reek of disinfectant and the chipped white enamel cots and blankets that were more constricting than an iron lung. But this dainty, petite little china doll who was by now in her thirties and who could not walk past a mirror, did not want either someone else's child or her own. An interfering family had wrecked her previous marriage. She took Sam on because he showed he didn't care a damn for families and of course he had film-star looks (well, mature film-star looks), a touring car, and he was always good for a nod and a wink from the managers at Anthony Hordern's department store in George Street. Bella had kept the flat in Darlinghurst as part of her divorce settlement. At night she sat in it, waiting for Sam to be the husband she imagined from her film fan magazines. His artful lying did not fool her for one minute - she had heard it all a million times and was as adept at it as he was.

.... ....

I had my first birthday at Scarba. Somehow, Grandma and Aunt Enid managed to come on a different Sunday to my father. They coddled me and cried and said how much I looked like 'poor Alva' and thank God I wasn't a Collins - at least in looks. I was by now bonded to Martha and held out my arms to this oh-so-plain girl, herself an orphan, recently impregnated by a farm lad. Martha was now the centre of my own tiny world. I had returned her breasts to her with thanks and now allowed her to feed me the pap laid down in the Scarba handbook for infant care. Matron McCechnie told my father in the bluntest terms that I needed a proper home and that, in any case, my time at Scarba was nearly expired.

'This is an infants' home, Mr Collins; we cannot care for the growing child. You will have to make other arrangements.' She stared at him severely. 'You have remarried, have you not? Surely your new domestic situation should include the care of your child?'

He protested weakly that he was away 'on the road' most of the week and his new wife had a nine to five-thirty job. Matron took him into her office and sat him down like an errant schoolboy. She was quite impervious to his charm, even though in her dreams she might have clasped him in her narrow celibate bed.

'We have an arrangement with the people in Ashfield who are able to care for the weaned child . . .'

'How much will it cost?'

This sort of bargaining the Hibernian matron understood. She did not like Sam any more or less for his asking. She pursed her lips, fixing him with a look meant to forestall any attempt at haggling, a skill she suspected Sam possessed in abundance. 'Their Board has set the scale of fees, Mr Collins. I cannot depart from it.' She was about to say seventeen and sixpence per week when my father broke in, 'A quid, lady, that's all I can afford and that's five bob more than I've been paying, although I suppose the poor little bugger is growin' and he'll need a bit more tucker.'

(Interesting, isn't it? Fourteen years later, I boarded with a family in Ashfield. I paid fifteen shillings a week for full board and my washing.)

Matron McCechnie allowed herself the luxury of a smile. The Jews weren't so tough to beat after all. She gave two short rings on an electric bell which summoned scratchy arms, who descended the stairs, holding me tightly. I could actually waddle by now but Scarba rules forbade walking up or down stairs. Martha had been primed about my prospective departure. Her eyes were puffy and red. I was beautifully clothed in the most exquisite knitted suit with a pompom beret to match - all handmade by the Scarba Ladies' Auxiliary. Martha stood me on my shaky pudgy legs while I gripped her finger. She gently propelled me towards my father, disengaging herself as I grabbed his knee for support. Perhaps it was the rough tweed of his suit under my hand or the manly smell of hair pomade. More likely it was the abrupt separation from Martha that made me fall down and lie on my back screaming. Martha bent down to pick me up; Matron restrained her. 'Let Mr Collins deal with this,' she said. 'Healthy little chap, don't you think?'

Sampson Collins hoisted me onto his knee, made ridiculous clucking noises and, taking out a snowywhite handkerchief, dabbed at my face. 'Now, Master Alan Alva Collins, let's not have too much of that Irish paddy.' The hanky reeked of bay rum; its heady fumes were like chloroform to my immature lungs. My yells retreated to a snuffle. Sam grinned at Matron and Martha. He stood up and asked Matron where he had to sign 'to take delivery of me little parcel'. While he screwed the top off his gold-nib Conway Stewart fountain pen, he tucked me under one arm, waving aside Martha's offer of help. She ran upstairs to reappear with a toy bear which she forced into my arms. Matron immediately prised it loose from my grasp. 'Sorry, but this is the property of the Scarba Home.' Sam said audibly, 'Shit, and they reckon us Yids are tough!' He turned his back on the place and marched out to his Ford tourer. He smiled at me. 'Have I told you about Bella, old son? Me new missus? Well, she's not too shook on babies.' He patted my cheek and winked. 'Might be able to talk her round but you'll have to grow a bit first.'

My father opened the car door and propelled me into Bella's unwelcoming arms. Despite her entrancing aroma, I longed for Martha's scratchy bosom and the smell of Sunlight soap. Sam could not fail to notice the stiffness of her posture, her arms barely encircling me. 'For God's sake, darlin', he's not goin' to bloody well bite you. Hold onto him, we're only going to Ashfield.' And he flung himself behind the steering wheel and drove far too quickly down the gloomy Scarba driveway.