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
