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
