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
