Читать книгу Alva's Boy - Alan Collins - Страница 7

Lost years? Unable to account for the passing of time? Like the young Cavalier Prince being grilled by the Roundheads, 'When did you last see your father?', I saw very little of mine. I saw very little of anybody during my confinement in the meandering, mock-manor-house spread of the Ashfield Infants' Home. The philanthropist who had helped generously towards the purchase of 'Gorton' in the 1870s watched my growth from his ornate gilt frame in the dining room. In reality, his ice-blue eyes were on the horizon of his sizeable estate, not on some Jewish infant kept out of trouble for a quid a week. These are the things I remember: the benefactor's blue eyes, the carved newel posts of the staircase where my pudgy fingers traced the leaves of the waratah, the drying room because of its dank smell, the reek of roast lamb on a Sunday every Sunday as weeks and months became time without end or interruption to a life circumscribed by the bars of my cot. Except, except . . .

One Sunday, many months after Sam deposited me in the Ashfield home, my maternal grandmother was pushed up the driveway in a wheelchair by Alf, her son-in-law the Gallipoli veteran, too shattered by the gas of Flanders to do any sustained work and thus on call to his mainlaw and sisters for odd jobs such as the rare visits to an unclaimed child. I was now fleet enough to be able to run anywhere other than where directed. My health card was gratifyingly free of those ailments so contagious and rife when thirty infants are in nursery propinquity. Grandma had been propped in the common room. From a distant doorway, urged forward by a nurse I detested, I saw this black mass peering at me through pince-nez and then a blackgloved hand beckoning me. The nurse shoved me in the back.

'Gwan, go and meetcha granny.'

Halfway towards her and the purple mole on her cheek with hair sprouting from it was enough to propel my stubby legs into a gallop, past her and out the door she had come through. The girl did not give chase; she had seen it all before. Alf stuck out a feeble arm but by then I was free, free and stumbling down the steps and heading for the noise of the Parramatta Road traffic. It was the gardener who grabbed me a few yards from the iron gates. His giant, earth-stained hands were imprinted on my spotless Sunday clothes. He tucked me under his arm like his bags of blood and bone fertiliser, which now shared its pungency with me. He dumped me just inside the doors where the wheezing Alf duly took over and presented me to Grandma.

'Just what y'd expect from Sam's kid.' And with an exhausting heave, he plopped me in Grandma's lap.

Grandma Davis was of that era when widowhood seemed to come early and stay around for an eternity. She was in her mid-fifties when I was born but had lain in a cold bed for the past twenty-five years. Her three daughters were raised on the payout of a life insurance policy which even now allowed her to live at least up to a similar standard to her Jewish neighbours. She arrived by taxi to inspect me, the first of only three such occasions while I was resident at the Ashfield Infants' Home, in a period of nearly three years.

You may have noticed that I was a very olfactory child. Go back over the events I have so far related and you will see how, from my earliest days, this sense was the one that received messages and triggered responses above all others. My father: bay rum on his skin; Mrs O'Donohue: congealed breast milk; Martha: Sunlight soap; Matron McCechnie: carbolic; Bella: a perfume that sent my little mind reeling. And now the nameless gardener's blood and bone permeated my Sunday clothing, for which I was grateful, as it so repulsed Grandma with her purple hairy mole that she almost managed to stand upright in her chair in an effort to rid herself of this noxious infant, grandchild or not.

The nurse retrieved me. Alf eased Grandma back in her chair; the notsoold lady took a vial of smelling salts from her bag, wafted it under her nose and in doing so released enough of it to reach me and partially subdue the blood and bone. She now had her own identifiable smell, which was not unlike that which emanated from the dirty sheet bundles in the Ashfield Infants' Home laundry room. When the smelling salts restored Grandma enough to have the nurse once more deposit me on her sable-clothed arthritic knees, she developed a to-and-fro rocking motion, at the same time crooning, 'Poor Alva, oh, poor Alva.' I began to feel quite nauseous and my little arms flailed about seeking freedom. Just as I was about to achieve this, which would have meant falling onto the paper-thin carpet, gallant ex-private Alf grabbed me and swung me up onto his shoulder as he had once done with his army kitbag. 'Whoa there, young shaver,' he wheezed from his gas-attacked lungs. 'Y' nearly flattened me poor old ma-in-law!'

A good man, uncle Alf. A man I took to. He could have been a real fullquid father to me, had my own not been the criminally stupid, vain, irresponsible bastard that he was. Married to Beryl, Alf Safran provided on his meagre army pension and part-time work as a bookkeeper. Alf was at this time the father of two boys only a year or so older than I was. He and Beryl had begged Sam to give them the care of the newborn child to raise with their own. Why did he refuse? Was it to 'snout' Grandma Davis, a mother-in-law who saw him as the epitome of everything she had heard and willingly believed about the alleged lurid ways of commercial travellers? She had read the riot act to 26-year-old Alva for keeping company with Sampson Collins, 40-something and divorced after only two years. His marriage to my mother was recorded in the ledgers of the Great Synagogue, Elizabeth Street, Sydney, in October 1927.

The next entry in that synagogue's ledger for Alva Collins was that of her death (and my birth) on 24 September 1928.

Alf set me on my feet. I explored the spokes of the wheelchair while Grandma's gloved hand patted my head. 'He's handsome enough,' she conceded. 'I suppose it's only to be expected - the mamzer was a looker in his flash way.' She led me around gently to the front of the wheelchair, fished in her bag and came up with a pink musk sweetie. Another new smell for me to store up. 'You can see poor dear Alva in him though, can't you Alf ?'

'I know what I'd like to do, Ma,' he wheezed. 'I'd like to take the young'un home with me right here and now. I know Sam is payin' for him here. Well, I wouldn't expect anything but if he offered, well, that's a different matter.'

'I've begged him, so has Enid, so has Beryl. I just don't understand how he can refuse - how he can keep the child in these places when he could . . .' She found a hanky and wiped her eyes. 'Take me home, Alf, and you can forget about little Alan. God knows where he'll finish up.' I think that might have been the first time I had ever heard Grandma use my name. Straight away I felt a spark of kinship with the black- clad woman with the purple hairy mole. I stood in front of her and held up my arms to her. The girl who had come to take me back to the nursery saw the gesture and lifted me up once more onto Grandma's lap. Her body softened and even through the layered clothing I could feel warmth and perhaps love. She hugged me as close as her arthritic condition permitted, kissed me, left powder on my jacket and rewarded my newfound acceptance with another sweet, a peppermint. Alf lifted me down and the waiting girl took my hand, instructing it to wave goodbye as the wheelchair headed for the door and out into freedom where the acrid scent of blood and bone hung suspended over the Ashfield Infants'Home. This scene, with minor variations, occurred twice more until I reached the age of three and a half, by which time my father and the sweetsmelling Bella had parted company. In those days of elementary contraception, it is little short of a miracle that Bella did not fall pregnant in a two-year association with the fecund Sampson Collins. Her powder-puff aura, like the halo of a Christian saint, fleeting though it was, stayed with me for a very long time, helping me through the darker hours of growing up.

.... ....

Soon after, I found myself in yet another home, only this one was that of very distant relatives of Sam's, Harry and Cissy Cohen. The relationship was tenuous, held together by their son-in-law whom my father supplied occasionally with antique jewellery, which he bought in country pubs while on his commercial travelling trips.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Cissy lived in a dark manganese block of four flats in a small street just off Bondi Junction. Their son and daughter had fortuitously married two years earlier. The parents had then moved to this tiny one-bedroom flat, the lounge room dominated by a huge wind-up gramophone, later to be superseded by an even larger and infinitely louder electric 'record player'.

Hardly had they moved when the first chill wind of the Great Depression gave Harry Cohen economic pneumonia from which he never recovered. The diminutive Cissy, her neck permanently in a brace from scoliosis, chain-smoked Craven 'A's, a cigarette forever associated for me with a black cat, the emblem on the packet. To supplement their income, they took me in for a quid a week while Cissy, a hopeless, indeed disinterested housekeeper, spent hours every day playing bridge and poker for penny pots, earning enough to keep them afloat. Harry, his last post as a bookkeeper gone, now had endless hours to devote to his love of reading and classical music.

I never had a proper bed. For that matter, I never had a bedroom. I slept, played, sat, was washed, dressed and sometimes fed on their couch, so malignant even my little body could not find a place between the springs to glean some small comfort. I would fall asleep from sheer exhaustion - exhausted by the unrelenting gramophone as its turntable spun dinner-plate-sized 78-rpm records of Beethoven, Brahms and the syrupy Bloch violin concerto. Uncle Harry scorned steel gramophone needles and instead sharpened his own bamboo ones on his wife's emery board. After 10 o'clock at night, the upstairs tenants shouting to him to turn the bloody thing off punctuated the music. Eventually, he threw the switch and sank ever deeper into an armchair, reading and rereading the two volumes of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

And all this in the one room: dining, music, cards and a small boy sleeping. A room that perpetually reeked of cigarette smoke dispersed once a week by the smell of fried fish, which was Aunt Cissy's contribution to a Jewish Fridaynight cuisine.

Uncle Harry was a self-styled conservative orthodox Jew in the English tradition. The Bondi School of Arts synagogue was within walking distance, but he took the tram on Saturday mornings to the Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, and alighted two blocks before, fooling no one that he had walked all the way from Bondi Junction. Walking was too risky for a man of 65 with a weak heart who never went anywhere without his TNT pills to pop under the tongue when the ticker became arrhythmic. He rented a seat in the Great Synagogue, located right next door to the Packer newspaper office. When the giant rotary presses rumbled in the bowels of the building, it was as though God was once again chastising his errant Israelites for deserting Canaan for the sandhills of Bondi and Bellevue Hill. Harry was highly respected for his learning, his courtesy and the fact that he was a Cohen, one of the priestly class detailed in Leviticus as worthy acolytes for serving the Temple. Not that this fine man was ever asked to fulfil the assignment - it was reserved for the affluent and the well-connected. On his return from the synagogue he lunched on cold fried fish, bread and cheese, and a cup of lemon tea. Only on the Sabbath day he would not turn on the gramophone. Instead, he would place me on his knee, a position hardly more comfortable than the couch, and try to teach me the Hebrew alphabet, notwithstanding that I had no knowledge of the English one, let alone the hieroglyphics of Hebrew.

It was a dull existence for a child going on four. The affection shown to me by Uncle Harry and Aunt Cissy was circumscribed by the limitations of their age, their preoccupation with living on a financial knife edge - and, one had to face facts, the child enjoying the dubious status of a boarder was not theirs. There were no other children in the block; my toys were discards; I amused myself with worn playing cards from which I devised endless patterns, laying them out on the floor and showing a remarkable inventiveness, or so some of the visiting lady bridge players said. One I remember as Sadie actually spoke to me. Of course, without exception, I was known not as Alan but as 'poor Alva's boy'. Sadie helped weaken my already dwindling faith in adults by promising on her next card day to bring some toys from her grandchildren - she never did, always with an excuse, something about her memory. When it came to remembering the fall of the cards though, Sadie was damn near infallible.

My father now became a peculiar focal point in my life at the Bondi Junction flat. The quid a week due to the Cohens for my board was vital to their survival. I suppose I never ate up to the value of my board; my daily stand-up wash and weekly bath, plus the occasional medicine from the Friendly Society's dispensary, would not have accounted for much, and my clothes, such as they were, arrived with Sam, smelling more of dry cleaning than newness. I say 'peculiar' with good reason. I had become a fixture at Uncle Harry's, as much a part of the lounge room as the horrible sofa. The constant stream of card players took no real notice of me; Uncle Harry's visitors were few and frankly he did not encourage them, not wanting them to see the shabbiness of his surroundings.

My father arrived more or less regularly late on Saturday afternoons, possibly after the last race, and dispensed good fellowship according to his cash flow. In my week of stultifying boredom, his entry into the tiny flat was like switching on a thousandwatt globe.

'Ar there, me son, 'ow y' goin'? Feeding y' are they? Givin' y' the best bit of the bacon?' Aside, 'Only pullin' y' leg, Harry.' He gave the pound, and sometimes a bit extra, to Cissy, knowing Harry did not like to handle money on the Sabbath. By now, too, my father had lost most of his 'lines', the sample merchandise he carried with him in his heyday as a commercial traveller. His last remaining line was thick hotel crockery, which he loathed, displaying it as if it was of interest only to those pubs he wouldn't be seen dead in. When he blew in like an autumn wind that swept all the detritus of summer before it, the flat seemed both larger and smaller at the one time.

'Got some clobber for the young'un, Cis, got it down at Paddy's Market this mornin' from one of the Yids.' He threw down a badly wrapped parcel. 'Try 'em on his nibs, love. If they don't fit we'll have to keep 'em till he shoots up a bit. Morry at the stall won't take them back.' Cissy opened the parcel. Ash fell from her cigarette onto the little shirt. She called me over and held it against me. 'It'll do, Sam. Now he'll need a jumper for the winter.'

'Got it, love,' he said triumphantly, 'in the next parcel and, guess what, something for you, too.' As Cissy shook the parcel open, six packs of playing cards fell out. 'Morry's brother on the next table sells them. Metsieh,' he said, using one of the few Yiddish words he had retained - a bargain. Cissy looked at them suspiciously. 'I wouldn't be surprised, Sam, if there wasn't fifty-one in the pack!'

My father was now in his late forties, florid complexion, slight bulge around the middle, hands well cared for, almost stylishly dressed in clothes that were beginning to fray where it was becoming difficult to hide. He wore a rolled-gold Rolex watch and had two Eversharp gold pencils in his waistcoat pocket. The gold wedding band had gone, indicating to the ladies that now he was fancyfree. There was no sweetsmelling Bella waiting for him in a flash tourer car outside.

As a father, he was a dead loss. He had not the faintest conception of what my needs were. His only acquaintance with children was with the son and daughter of his brother, Mark, who died when they were quite young; his nonJewish widow, never at ease in the company of Jews, had made it clear to my father that he was not welcome. My father's sister, Frances Brunetta, known as Fanny, never married. Not surprising: she was as ugly as he was handsome, with a tongue that was steeped in bile and not a kind word for anyone. Why do I remember her? I saw her rarely, but enough to frighten the life out of me with her smell of decay due, no doubt, to hardly ever moving out of her dank flat and into sunlight. The last I saw of her was when I was six or seven and my idiot father forced me to view her body in its pine box at the Jewish funeral parlour in Chippendale. Her teeth had been removed, her mouth had caved in below a pinched beak-like nose - it was a nightmare sight for a small boy that has never left me.

Sam's weekly visit to me was little more than en passant; his hour or so spent under the same roof was really to regale Harry and Cissy with braggadocio of life on the road. Harry listened with barely-concealed contempt while Cissy got a vicarious kick out of his risqu' encounters. He could have taken me for a walk, bought me an ice-cream, thrown a ball or lifted me up and placed me on his shoulders as I had seen other dads do on the rare times I walked at a snail's pace with Uncle Harry in Waverley Park. As 'poor Alva's boy' or 'son', my given name was rarely heard from the lips around me. Perhaps in childish revenge, I hardly ever uttered the title 'daddy'. I am sure I was never much more than a rent subsidy to the Cohens, good people though they were. It was an unhealthy life for a small boy. What did I learn, by osmosis, in the four years I spent under their roof ? To memorise and identify the pictures on playing cards, to construct card houses to the limit of my childish dexterity, to be able to hum passably accurately the main theme of Beethoven's Emperor piano concerto. I never progressed beyond the first eight letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The food was bland, repetitious and predictable. Cissy begrudged time away from her cards and Harry's assorted debilities controlled what he ate - and I had the same! Yet I grew well enough never theless: not roly-poly as over-cosseted Jewish children were supposed to be but thin and wiry with a big head (and nose) atop a matchstick body. Epidemics raged of whooping cough, measles and the dreaded infantile paralysis - they all passed me by. Now I realise it was due to my isolation; I never played with another child and, if I did, the fug of Craven 'A' cigarette smoke would have overwhelmed any disease they carried.

.... ....

I must have started school at around five years of age. I have absolutely no memory of it, where it was, how I got there or back 'home' again to the Cohens' Bondi Junction flat. There is nobody to ask, no crayon drawings or clagstuck cutouts, not even the usual class photo of three rows of little boys and girls sitting crosslegged with the one in the middle holding a slate with -1st Class Waverley Primary School, 1934'. Yes, yes, I remember now, I had a slate and slate pencil in a leather schoolbag with buckles and contents that smelt not of crisp paper or MillyMollyMandy storybooks but of decaying banana. And standing in a corridor for 30 minutes with four other Jewish children and a Chinese girl with an immobile face while from inside a classroom other voices averred that Jesus loved them. But not us, the Bible told them so.

The most exciting thing that happened to me in my time at this school was being menaced on my way home by an Alsatian dog which sprang out from a doorway and was restrained on a rope only inches from my face. I shat myself; the slime streamed down my leg over my sock and seeped through my thin sandshoe. Crying from shame and fear, I ran all the way to the Bondi Junction flat, burst in on the bridge players, grabbing the nearest one, dear Sadie, who skilfully kept her hand up out of view of the other players while she detached me from her leg. Harry Cohen, in his chair in the furthest corner of the room, allowed himself a smile. 'You'd better be dummy next rubber, Sadie dear.' As nobody else had moved, he levered himself out of the chair and prised me away from Sadie. Cissy's eyes had not left the table. Harry took me into the bathroom and cleaned me up. He put my pants in the washtub but, before doing so, extracted two highlycoloured Christian religious pictures that the RI teacher had forced on us corridor-dwellers as she left the classroom. I remember turning them over and being surprised that they did not carry anything from the deck of fifty-two. As cards they were therefore worthless to me. I asked Uncle Harry if the lady with the baby was the same as the Queen of Hearts.

'It's a fair question, my boy,' the old man answered. He helped me into clean clothes and looked at me thoughtfully. 'No, she has nothing to do with the cards in the packs you play with. But it does remind me that it is high time somebody told you who you are.' He stared hard at me. 'Do you know who you are?'

'Yes,' I said all in a rush, 'I'm poor Alva's boy.' I put my hand in his. 'I am, aren't I?'Harry Cohen nodded solemnly. I felt a tremor through his hand. He reached inside his vest pocket and took out his tiny pillbox. Freeing his hand from mine he slipped a TNT tablet under his tongue. 'We shall walk together and I shall tell you about the lady with the baby and why you have to stay out in the passage and . . .'

Uncle Harry took up his walking stick, steered us around the card players and out into the late afternoon sunshine. He made no concession to my age; he spoke to me as he would to an intellectual equal, only occasionally restating a proposition to be sure I understood - which I did most of the time for he had a talent for marshalling his thoughts and expressing them clearly.

'Tell me about the man on the other card, Uncle. Why has his face got blood all over it? Why has he got that wire thing on his head? Why is his heart so red and it's outside his shirt?'

'Don't you want to know first about the lady with the baby?'

'No, tell me about the bloody man.' Uncle Harry headed for a park bench but I was so happy to be outside and walking, even though it was at an old man's pace, that I tugged him along. 'Did the Jews do it?'

'Now we will have to talk seriously, Alan. Never mind who told you that. It's not important. I'm simply going to tell you that it is not so and if it's said to you again, say the Romans did it.'

My mouth framed a question, 'What are Romans?' but he cut in. 'Let us talk instead about Jews.' He found another park bench. He was very clever, Uncle Harry. He knew just how much talking I could handle at one go. No good compressing five thousand years of Jewish existence into one walk in a park with one small boy. He would speak in paragraphs, leaving a connecting thread for the next instalment while releasing me to run and jump and then call me back as one would when teaching a pup. In this way, on this afternoon and many others, we travelled from Ur to Egypt via the Flood, to Canaan via Jericho and to Moses who never quite made it. As Uncle Harry described it, 'Alan, see the water tower on the hill above the cricket oval? Well, Moses went to the top of the water tower and from there he could see the cricket match but no matter how hard he cheered, the players, like the Jews, could not hear him.'

I can still hear Uncle Harry's measured phrases more than seventy years later. Being a Jew was not going to be easy, he seemed to be telling me in his kindly avuncular way. Use your mind, not your fists; if the worst comes . . . run. If you get caught, roll yourself up into a tight little ball like the echidna. He showed it to me on one of our few city outings when he took me to the Natural History Museum in College Street. Another was when I accompanied him to the Great Synagogue. My father bought me a white shirt, a jumper with the maker's label snipped off and likewise a pair of navy serge pants - all metsiehs from Morry's Paddy's Market stall.

What a day that was! Not a whole day, really - it began at 9 o'clock with a ride on the tram sitting next to MY UNCLE who wore his pin-stripe suit, his bowler hat and held a silver- mounted walking stick. I carried his rubyred velvet bag with his tallit and prayer book. It was embroidered with Hebrew lettering in gold thread and seemed to me rich enough to contain the crown jewels. We alighted at the corner of College Street and walked across Hyde Park where the destitute were just rousing themselves from their newspaper-covered sleep. Once inside the synagogue, Uncle Harry nodded greetings with some and with others exchanged Gut Shabbes as we proceeded down the aisle to his seat. There, he wrapped himself in his prayer shawl, opened his prayer book and was soon oblivious to my company.

Which was just fine. First the vaulted ceiling transfixed me with its myriad painted stars. I stood up and sat down as the service required me to, but otherwise took no part in it. At the reading table on its raised dais before the richly curtained ark, the two rabbis bent over their praying until the high point, which from a seven-year-old's perspective was when the curtains parted and the scrolls of the Torah were taken out. Oh, the drama! Then began a parade of the scrolls led by the rabbis holding the Torahs and followed with aldermanic dignity by the president and treasurer, replete with top hats and striped pants. The ceremonial party walked a path which took them through the body of the synagogue, and the male congregants moved to the ends of their pews to greet the scrolls of the Law. Uncle Harry brushed the scrolls with the corner of his tallit then pressed it to his lips. I had never seen theatre or, for that matter, any staged entertainment, but I could not imagine that anything could be as wonderful as this procession which reached its apogee later when an open scroll was held high above the rabbi's head for all to see the sacred text. And to be sure, for me, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion.

Uncle Harry and I were silent on the tram ride home. He kept his hand inside his suit coat; he was gently massaging his heart, his head bent low as though he was listening for its tick. He walked at an undertaker's pace with me skipping ahead and doubling back to him. There were many questions milling about in my head but I stored them up. Uncle Harry climbed the few short steps to the flat and pushed open the unlatched door.

My father's hail-fellow-well-met voice boomed out from the dark interior. 'Stone the crows, Harry, I was about to send out a search party for you.' He tousled my hair, an unfamiliar gesture. 'Took the young'un for company, did you? Well, whaddya say to y' dad, son? Have a good time? Didja say a prayer for me, son?' He hooked his fingers in his waistcoat and gave a prodigious wink. 'Your Aunty Cissy's got something to tell you, haven't you, Ciss.' Harry moved to stand alongside his wife, who stretched her neck in the brace.

'Your father is getting married ' again.' She ground out the last word with undisguised contempt.

Well, whatever these adults expected of me, it did not eventuate. I was still enveloped in the wonders of this morning's Great Synagogue spectacular. The stars of the ceiling still danced before me, the scroll with its elegant Hebrew on parchment, whirled above my head. I could still feel the erotic smoothness of the wooden knobs at the ends of the pews; my palms tingled and my scrotum tightened at the recall.

My father shook me roughly. 'I'm takin' you with me, son, just as soon as I get things fixed up.'

The metamorphosis from Jewish boy to Jewboy was about to take place.