Читать книгу Rosa - Ros Collins - Страница 9

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GOING TO AUSTRIA

‘Austria!’ boomed Aunt Dora, holding the black Bakelite phone well away from her National Health hearing aids. ‘You can’t possibly live in Austria!’ It was 1957 and post-war Jewish sensitivities were still raw.

‘No, no, darling, you’ve got it all wrong,’ said Rosa. ‘I’m marrying an Australian and I’m going to Melbourne. We’ll come over for supper next week, if the Lambretta doesn’t break down. I’ll find it for you in the atlas.’

‘We’ll make it Tuesday,’ Rosa told Alan. ‘We’re going to dine with Uncle Will and Aunt Ray on Monday; Dora and Harry are much more down to earth, you’ll be comfortable with them.’

Al was twenty-eight years old and the remnants of an Australian tan still lingered on his thin face. He weighed no more than eight stone (fifty kilograms) and, even allowing for his slim frame, this was getting close to malnutrition. A great sadness lurked behind his smile, but also a tinge of hopefulness, a faint suggestion that life might just turn around for him: a new page, ditch the past, start again – even maybe the miracle of a family. Years later, a famous Australian literary critic, launching one of his novels, remembered him as ‘the boy with the hungry eyes’.

Rosa at twenty-seven was, according to her relatives, a problem; she was unmarried. The sheyn meydl who gave her family such anxiety wasn’t bad-looking: blonde curly hair, a neat figure and nice features. Her school reports said she worried too much, and her hazel eyes had a questioning look as though she was searching for something, a direction, a path, maybe an escape.

Al managed a rather wan smile. It was all getting away from him; he’d lost control and felt out of his depth. Less than a month before he’d been ready to sign on as a deck hand on a merchant ship, just to get home to Melbourne for a job his employers would not hold for much longer. He would have gone ahead with it, but the officer who interviewed him suggested that such a nice boy might like to share his cabin, and Al fled.

London was a cruel, hard city, and the only work he could find was as a mail sorter at Victoria Station. The West Indian crew were kind enough. They showed him how to examine the bags of Christmas mail and identify those gifts that came in bottles: if the sacks were carefully positioned on the railway tracks, the train wheels would neatly slice through the tops and in next to no time flat there was whisky to ‘warm the cockles’.

The Rosa situation had developed out of hunger. She lived around the corner from Al, sharing a flat with a school friend, and he would ‘drop in’ just around meal times. They were all part of the same crowd: ex-pat Australians, most of them post-graduate students, and a handful of locals like Rosa. Some had accommodation at Hillel, the residential college for Jewish students at the University of London, but others lived in an old Edwardian three-storey house in Swiss Cottage, on the fringe of bohemian Hampstead. It was divided up into bed-sitters, and in addition to the students, was home to a motley collection of characters: the photographer who went to Everest with Hillary, the first black musician to be featured on the BBC, a German-Jewish refugee, a Danish pianist – and Al. He and Rosa had met there at a party. Later she said that her mind was made up that night, and she told her friend, ‘He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to marry that man.’

And so, as well as the visits to Uncle Will, Aunt Dora and countless other relatives, Al was now struggling to adjust to a situation that was becoming very unmanageable: prospective in-laws who seemed charming, an extended family who didn’t know what to make of him, no money, a wedding that terrified him and a Lambretta motor scooter with ‘attitude’. And there was Rosa.

He had no idea why she was marrying him. He remembered the afternoon when she accepted his invitation to move out of her flat and share his bed-sit in the old house.

‘Come for afternoon tea,’ he’d said, very carefully distinguishing between ‘tea’, ‘dinner’, ‘supper’, ‘high tea’ and all the variations that had tripped him up in Britain. Not much furniture in his room, so he used a packing crate, on top of which he placed an embroidered tray cloth that he’d bought from a thrift shop.

‘Wanted to get you lamingtons but they don’t sell them here,’ he told her.

‘I don’t think I know what they are, but scones are just fine,’ she said.

And so began their lives together. It was winter 1956, and very cold. From the dormer window of his attic room they looked out over the snow-covered roofs of Hampstead and huddled back under thin grey army blankets. They had a map of the world and planned a road trip on the Lambretta that somehow would end up in Australia. They never actually mentioned marriage, but just assumed a suburban life in Melbourne forever, with four children and a dog – an Australian fantasy that in the 1950s might still come true.

Rosa went to work in a black suit with a cinched waist – a copy of a Dior ‘New Look’ design – and black patent high heels; she was a trainee buyer for Marks and Spencer in their Baker Street head office. Al, who wore corduroy pants and hiking boots, rode up on the Lambretta to meet her one afternoon with a cable from his Melbourne employers: Return as soon as possible, cannot hold position for you after April.

‘We must leave immediately,’ he said.

‘If we are to leave, then I think my parents would be happier if we got married first,’ replied Rosa; and Al accepted her proposal, as he was to accept all her proposals for the next fifty-one years.

‘Chalk and cheese’ was how their friends described them. Rosa had grown up an only child, and on one side the only grandchild. Within their modest means, her family indulged her. Her parents, Sadie and Solly Fox, once they realised there would be no more children, treated her with kid gloves and were nervous in case they offended her. When she left home unwed to go and live in cosmopolitan Hampstead, it was traumatic for all of them.

‘You’re breaking your mother’s heart,’ said Solly.

‘You’re breaking your father’s heart,’ said Sadie.

‘But I’ll come home for Shabbes every week,’ said Rosa.

It was an impasse for her. Jewish community life, dances and clubs didn’t attract her; she felt awkward, out of place. She wasn’t daring enough to be a real bohemian. To ‘marry out’ was a step too far, and Rosa thought she’d end up just having ‘affairs’ – relationships about which her parents would have no knowledge. The Australian Jewish students in London amazed her with their casual ways, so different from the stuffy Brits. Choosing Al was the easiest thing in the world. She didn’t care about money or prestige, she’d be perfectly happy riding on the back of the motor scooter. They bought the engagement ring in an antique shop after the wedding, and it didn’t bother her at all that it wasn’t a diamond.

Al’s mother had died at his birth, and his father, known derisively as ‘marrying Sam’ on account of his four wives, was a foolish man. Years later Al wrote in his autobiography, Alva’s Boy: ‘I invest in him my entire stock of misery.’ And it was indeed misery in 1930s Bondi, Sydney: children’s homes, foster care, an abusive stepmother and finally a Jewish orphanage, which he once remarked, ‘saved me from the gutter’. But in 1956, he wasn’t very communicative about his background, in fact quite wary, for he’d been rejected by many a protective Jewish mother seeking a suitable match for a daughter.

Strangely, Rosa didn’t seem very curious about his past, and Sadie and Solly were equally unperturbed. Just for the sake of it, Solly did attempt the so young man, you want to marry my daughter, do you? conversation, but he already knew in his heart that the union would work out. Even if it didn’t, there was no crossing Rosa.

‘We’re going shopping,’ said Sadie one Saturday afternoon, so they went out and left Solly and Al facing each other by the fire to ‘have a little talk’.

‘You alright?’ asked Solly.

‘Well, to be honest, not really. Haven’t any money to pay my passage home to Melbourne. Rosa will be a “ten-pound Pom”, a subsidised migrant, but I’m full fare.’

‘What about your return ticket, didn’t you expect to go back?’

‘Mm, well, you see, I cashed it in on the way here when the boat docked at Naples so I could buy the Lambretta. Thought I’d find work in London and be able to save up my fare home.’

‘Do you have a job in Melbourne?’

‘Yeah, I’m the advertising manager for a chain of retail shops. Couple of Jewish brothers, ‘reffos’ from Poland; they sell fashion and household stuff like towels and tablecloths and they’ve been very kind to me. Kept the job open so I could take a year off.’

‘For a holiday?’

Al did a quick think and decided it was not the time to tell Solly – or anyone for that matter – that he’d broken off an engagement to a perfectly nice Jewish girl and left Melbourne in a hurry. It was a mistake; he’d been set up by friends, and it took all his courage to tell the young woman’s father that it wasn’t going to work, that they’d both be unhappy. Fathers and their daughters were something of a mystery; he wondered fleetingly if he’d ever be responsible for bringing up a little girl. He didn’t really know much about families at all and now he had to explain himself to Solly.

‘Not exactly. I told Phil and Norman that I wanted to have a look at television in Brit, see if it had any potential for advertising. TV’s coming to Australia now, what with the Olympics in Melbourne, so they gave me a year’s leave without pay – but kept the job open.’

Solly considered the strange young man and the country from which he came. Australia. What kind of Jews lived there? Wasn’t the place founded by convicts? There were black people with spears, so he’d heard. Kangaroos – were they dangerous? Sheep, now he knew about sheep, for Australian wool was highly prized in the rag-trade, and he seemed to recall that Sadie thought well of the butter and dried fruit. Still, it didn’t add up to yidishkayt, Jewish culture. Solly was a modest man, never sought wealth or status, and fundamentally had a happy disposition. If he had any regrets, it was probably the fact that Sadie had miscarried two little boys and now they had just one child – Rosa, the daughter he was about to ‘give away’. He was deeply romantic, and in all their long marriage he adored his tiny wife with her gentle Welsh accent; and she adored him equally. Al, on the other hand, didn’t strike him as deeply anything; in fact, it wouldn’t surprise him at all if the young Australian suddenly backed out of the marriage altogether. But Rosa: he would never have come right out and said it to anyone, but somewhere in the furthest recesses of his mind he acknowledged that she was running away – from him and Sadie, from aunts, uncles and cousins, and from the London Jewish community, and there was very little he could do about it.

‘Tell you what. I’ll give you the money for your ticket home – a wedding present, if you like. You make the arrangements with the people at Australia House. Now, shall we watch the soccer? It’s the Gunners and the Spurs.’ And then, remembering Al was a colonial, ‘Arsenal and Tottenham.’ Quite soon they were both asleep.

It was an odd wedding, unlike any other the family had celebrated. Three weeks were all they had to organise it, for the passages to Melbourne were already booked on a P&O liner the government had requisitioned to send migrants to the Antipodes. The man at Australia House had somehow fixed them up with a cabin to themselves, well below the water line, but their own: It’s your honeymoon after all and we don’t want Rosa in a dormitory with all the other women, do we?

Solly botched the notice in the Jewish Chronicle. One breathless paragraph to say that the engagement is announced, the wedding will take place and the young couple will sail immediately for Australia. Many were convinced that Rosa was pregnant. She wasn’t, and months earlier had in fact lied her way into a family planning clinic and emerged triumphantly with a ‘Dutch cap’. Less successful were the attempts by the League of Jewish Womanhood, who wrote reminding her to observe Jewish religious laws regarding purity. The Hon. Sec. sent her an article written by a lady doctor explaining the restrictions surrounding niddah, menstruation, and the necessity of visiting the mikveh, ritual bath, before commencing or resuming sexual intimacy. The Hon. Sec. regretted that these important and vital laws are not understood by many young people of our present generation and are greatly neglected by them.

‘There’s absolutely no way I will visit the mikveh,’ said Rosa.

‘The letter says the laws of niddah and mikveh have to be carefully observed throughout our married life,’ teased Al.

‘Bullshit,’ said Rosa who had picked up a lot of new swear words from the Australians.

There was no relative from the groom’s side, and so his student friends from Australia and New Zealand stepped into the breach. Most of the guests had never met Al, and a good number of Rosa’s aunts, uncles and cousins thought that she was not only out of her mind, but also irresponsible, even cruel, to leave her parents to grow old alone. But Sadie and Solly handled everything with surprising aplomb. They found a reception hall at short notice in rural Essex, and although the Suez Crisis meant that there was very little petrol, they managed to organise a handful of cars.

Rosa insisted on a wedding dress that had no frills or lace, and Liberty in Regent Street were able to provide a true French classic, a Pierre Balmain copy in white grosgrain.

Al made just one contribution to the day, a request about flowers. He wanted Australian wattle, but the English florist had no idea what it was. French mimosa was the nearest she could manage, and the tiny sprigs of yellow blossom in his buttonhole were as close as he got to having a relative with him at his wedding. Freesias were his other choice, and now, sixty years on, when it’s spring in Melbourne, Rosa fills vases from the garden as a remembrance.

Al was very apprehensive and might not have made the ceremony at all, had it not been for his supportive friends who allowed him to stop on the way to the synagogue for several ‘heart-starters’. Solly and Sadie were respected founding members of a suburban congregation and there was quite a turnout of curious onlookers. The rabbi had insisted that Al provide documentary evidence from the Great Synagogue in Sydney that he was indeed a Jew and did not have any other wife; it was touch and go whether the cable would arrive on time. The rabbi wasn’t a very warm person but bent a little and allowed Al and Rosa to hold hands. Al wore a soft-brimmed fedora for the ceremony, the first and only hat he ever owned, and tossed it into the air outside the synagogue door as they left.

Solly was in his element when he made his speech; he spoke lovingly and with wit. Al had had a few drinks and was well on the way to being shicker when he responded. Rosa danced with Solly, and with the best man, who was from New Zealand. The best man’s wife, who was to become a famous photographer, took very informal pictures and upset the caterers by leaving her flash bulbs in the fruit bowls. The guests lined up to wish the couple well and little envelopes with cash exchanged hands: it turned out to be just enough to buy a dinner service, black Poole pottery with a bamboo design (very collectable in later years), a half-set of Danish cutlery, some blue-and-white-striped Cornish kitchenware and a few trad jazz LPs. Also a Georgian engagement ring – garnet and seed pearls.

When it was time to leave, the Aussie students sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and everyone gathered to say goodbye. Rosa wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, took the pillion seat and threw her bouquet to the well-wishers. Al kick-started the Lambretta and Rosa held on tightly as they skidded off into the snow.

It was grey and wet on the day they left England, and both Rosa and Al were grateful for their army surplus duffel coats. The port of Tilbury is located in a dreary David Lean-ish black and white marshland area at the mouth of the Thames and, apart from its maritime history, is most remembered for the speech Elizabeth I made to her troops, who in 1588 were facing the Spanish Armada. On the deck of the SS Stratheden Al made a speech too – a courageous one; they joked for years about his ‘Tilbury speech’. Rosa was as much a mystery to him as he was to her, but he understood that her relationship with her parents had not always been harmonious and that she and Sadie did not ‘get along’.

‘I’d like you three to make things right before we leave,’ he began.

‘I know you have differences of opinion but I don’t want there to be bad feeling between you, and I want you to be okay with each other because Rosa will be a long way away and I don’t want anyone being miserable.’ Not quite grammatically correct, but Al’s heart was right on beat.

‘Please, can you make up and be friends? I just don’t want to take Rosa to Melbourne and she’ll be sorry and you’ll be unhappy and I’ll feel responsible.’ The words were jumbled but Solly at least got the message.

Solly was a Londoner; he didn’t think much in Yiddish, but now for some reason he recalled how his mother had called Rosa a sheyn meydl, ‘a pretty girl’. He remembered the baby, the schoolgirl, the young woman – all the twenty-seven years of her. He and Sadie would have to rebuild. ‘We’ll be fine,’ he said as his heart began to ache.

Everyone kissed and hugged and there were promises of regular letters and phone calls. Perhaps in a few years there’d be money enough for visits. Yes, Al would look after her, yes, they’d send photos, and yes, she’d be safe. The siren blew; Sadie and Solly had to leave and Rosa stood at the rail to wave goodbye.

Five weeks it took, because the Suez Canal was still closed. They sat on the deck, typed blue airmails on Al’s portable Olympia and posted them at Majorca, Cape Town and Fremantle, which, Rosa wrote, was the most desolate place she’d ever seen.

As the ship steamed into Port Phillip Bay towards Melbourne’s Station Pier, Al belatedly offered a few pointers to Australian life: ‘See there, that’s the Luna Park fun fair, and that’s the Palais Theatre. You’ll like it, Rosa, St Kilda’s by the beach, we can go swimming. And we can go on picnics, take the Lambretta to visit the Dandenongs.’

Rosa assumed the Dandenongs were ‘Mr and Mrs’, another of these weird Australian names, didn’t sound like a Jewish family; Al hadn’t mentioned mountains so how was she to know?

‘We have the ABC, like the BBC, and we’ll only read The Age newspaper.’ Al rushed into a cultural rundown of Melbourne, realising, perhaps for the first time, that his wife would have to adjust to great changes.

And so Rosa came to Australia. She stood on St Kilda Beach in her swimsuit (Debenham’s of Oxford Street) staring out at the water, imagining Britain rather than Antarctica over the horizon – her geography was poor. And in the blazing heat of that first summer, she thought of London at Christmas time, with chestnuts roasting in the streets, mandarins in silver paper at the greengrocers and festive decorations in Regent Street. She rode on the back of the Lambretta through the beachside suburbs, through Chelsea, Sandringham and Brighton, and wept at the familiar names in the unfamiliar land.