Alva's Boy Read online

  ALVA'S BOY

  An unsentimental memoir

  ALAN ALVA COLLINS was born in 1928 in Sydney. His mother died in childbirth, leaving him in the care of his father and a number of charitable children's homes. At fifteen he became an apprentice printer, and subsequently a reporter for a Sydney newspaper. By 1949 he was editor of the Sydney Jewish News. He moved to Melbourne in 1953 and worked in advertising, opening his own agency in 1972. He had married Rosaline Fox in London in 1957 and brought her to Melbourne, where they raised their family in Box Hill. But Alan had always been drawn strongly to the sea, and in 1987 they moved to beachside Elwood, where he spent the last two decades of his life, writing fulltime. Alan Collins is the author of the trilogy A Promised Land? (2001), comprising The Boys from Bondi, Going Home and Joshua. He also published Troubles (1983), a collection of short stories. Alva's Boy was completed not long before his death in 2008.

  ALSO BY ALAN COLLINS

  BOOKS

  Troubles: 21 short stories (1983)

  The Boys from Bondi (1987) *

  Going Home (1993)

  Joshua (1995)

  A Promised Land? (2001)

  * Published in the US as Jacob's Ladder (1989)

  AUDIO

  The Boys from Bondi, Going Home and Joshua

  were also recorded by Louis Braille Books

  PLAY

  Shabbatai!

  Published by Hybrid Publishers

  Melbourne Victoria Australia

  2008

  This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to Hybrid Publishers,

  PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.

  First published 2008

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Author: Collins, Alan, 1928-2008

  Title: Alva's Boy

  ISBN: 9781876462666 (pbk.)

  Subjects: Collins, Alan - Childhood and youth -

  Jewish children - New South Wales - Sydney - Biography

  Dewey Number: 920.71

  Digital editions published by:

  Port Campbell Press

  Epub ISBN: 9781877006043

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  Cover photographs of young Alan Collins and of

  Alva Davis courtesy of the author

  Cover design: Dynamic Creations

  For Rosaline

  and the family

  I never thought

  I would have.

  Foreword

  Truth is only believed when someone has invented it well.

  George Santayana

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life experiences and recollections of a Jewish childhood over a time-span from 1928 to the early 1940s. In some of the telling, names of people, places and dates have been changed. Mercifully, those named who are or were of a repellent nature have long since 'gone to God'.

  The stories present incidents from the life of one person, the first-person narrator. The memoir is purposely unsentimental. The writer has worked hard to circumvent cheap emotion. Some readers might find it confronting. The linked stories encompass a child's unsparingly honest observations as he is buffeted by events which range from indifference and naked cruelty to sparkling life-affirming exuberance.

  The publishers are not expected to warrant the veracity of what the author has provided.

  A.C.

  ...1...

  I was born in late September 1928, a particularly busy time in the Jewish calendar, encompassing the New Year and the Day of Atonement as well as the Feast of Tabernacles and the Festival of Rejoicing in the Law. This last marks the end of one reading of the scrolls containing the Five Books of Moses and the beginning of the new cycle. It is one of the few occasions when Jews, lay and clergy, can get joyously drunk without admonition. It was bad luck for me; I was comforted by those in the know and told that to be born on Yom Kippur was a blessing, a happy event.

  As it happened, no glasses were raised in l'chaim; I was unceremoniously put to one side while my mother, the poor doomed Alva Phoebe Collins nee Davis, fought for her life, haemorrhaging critically while the only professional help at hand was a midwife. She employed her limited skills in an attempt to save my mother, at the same time casting around for the doctor who at that moment was mortifying himself with prayer and fasting in a synagogue a mile or so away. My father, enjoying an all too brief period of prosperity, had insisted that the accouchement be in the bedroom of his recently acquired Bellevue Hill mansion, a sandstone and brick 'gentleman's residence' clinging to the steep, grassy hillside. The furnishings had come from Bebarfalds store in George Street, Sydney, chosen by my father with a sweep of his arm around the various departments. My mother's input did not extend beyond flattening her swollen body against the walls as the gang of burly furniture men reassembled the store's showrooms in her new home.

  And now she lay dead in a pool of blood and placenta, her olive skin blanched and with beads of sweat that would all too soon turn to icy pinpoints. My father, Sampson Collins, abused the newly installed wall-mounted telephone for its inability to connect him with his doctor - any doctor - who might re store life to his 27-year-old wife of little more than a year. He rounded on the midwife with an illjudged mixture of abuse and supplication until the woman raised her arm to strike him, paused in mid-sweep and then let her arm fall in a defeated, dejected gesture that ended in her tenderly pulling a covering over the body. Sampson Collins let the receiver dangle, sat on a carved Chinese chest at the foot of the bed and stared hard at the outline of my mother's body. Around his feet, a squat oriental satyr drank tea and gloated over pubescent girls. The midwife lifted me from the cradle (Bebarfalds: anybody for the fourth floor? - all nursery requirements) and carried me to the bathroom where she unwrapped me and washed me, then drew her dress aside and guided me onto her breast.

  My mother was one of three sisters all of whom had the honeyed skin and warm dark eyes of the Sephardic Jew. Together with their mother, widowed before she was 40, they lived in a spacious ground-floor flat in what were then the sandhills of Rose Bay and contiguous with Bondi. The district was an enclave of Jews, most of whom would soon feel the 1930s Depression deeply, especially the men with no skills who could not handle a saw or dig a hole. Most of them had already lost the portable skills of the tailor or watchmaker that had at least provided their parents with bread. Those same parents who could ward off starvation and the pogroms of Eastern Europe had not passed on their survival skills to the next generation living in Bondi. It soon became clear that the relief work handed out by a government held in thrall to the Bank of England was the right of the goyim, nonJewish worktoughened men with wiry wives and kids able to subsist on the proverbial smell of an oily rag.

  If I do not dwell too kindly on my father, it is because I invest in him my entire stock of misery. From photographs, he appears to have been a man of rakish elegance. The 'mashers' of their day were men who, regardless of the amount of cash they could jingle in their pockets, considered themselves irresistible to women. They wore tight suits, twotoned shoes with spats and managed to refresh their frayed cuffs with Harper's Silver Star starch. My father was mostly in work. He was a commercial traveller selling men's costume jewellery - the studs, cravat pins and cufflinks that the nobs needed to set off their 'soup 'n' fish' - dinner suits. Later, as the Depression bit deep, he went door-to-door buying scrap gold. But in this earlier, present occupation he was at one with the commercial travelling fraternity, the selfstyled knights of the road who met in the bar of the Commercial Travellers' Club to swap stories about the sales-ladies in the shops t
hey called on.

  My mother stood behind the brassedged counter of a high-class jewellers in Park Street, Sydney. Her specialty was cut glass, the dressing-table sets comprising tasselled perfume bottles, powder bowls, imitation ivory-backed hand mirrors and a stemrose vase. On another counter, at a rightangle to hers, was a rosewood cabinet containing gentlemen's toiletries in tortoiseshell or ebony. It was here that my father opened his sample case and rolled out a black velvet cloth. On it, he laid out his range of shirt studs, tiepins and cufflinks. My father watched her while his hands and mouth went through the patter.

  'It's Alva, isn't it? Ma Davis's daughter? You're the youngest sister.' He had done his homework. He already knew as much as he needed to know about this 26yearold goodlooker: that she was single still, living at home, fatherless, penniless, that she was the pick of the sisters - the eldest was already married to a Gallipoli veteran, trying to buy a cottage with his war money. Alva Phoebe Davis was the 'quiet one', unlike the middle sister, Enid, who had good looks aplenty but a tongue that could lash. Sampson Collins's commercial traveller's dossier was up-to-date. In his monastic cell at the club, he pored over his girlie list like a bookie with his odds chart.

  'How's Ma?'

  My mother moved her chamois languidly over the counter, wiping away invisible fingerprints. She wore a clinging black dress buttoned to the neck and set off with a crisp white Peter Pan collar. Of all the men who came into the shop, he was easily the handsomest. Not even his prominent nose lessened his flamboyant appearance.

  'How y' sisters? All well, I hope.'

  And so it went, each knowing damn well that in the tightknit Jewish community, privacy was bought and sold on a barter basis. Gossip was a tradeable commodity, and a flat with a widow and her daughters in it was a clearing house for the small change of hearsay and the heavier currency of slander. Alva Davis knew why Sampson Collins's first marriage had ended up in the rabbinical divorce court. The rabbi's wife shopped where Alva's mother shopped. Ever the soul of discretion, she talked in Yiddish of both of them 'peeing in other people's pots', and said that when the kosher butcher left after delivering the chickens he had a new spring in his step. Second-hand goods Sampson Collins might be, but he was still under 40 - well, maybe 45 - and a goodlooker. Hanging on his arm would turn heads.

  My father shot his cuffs so the gold links showed, fingered the pearl stick-pin in his tie and put a ringed hand on the counter in front of Alva. The rich voice purred like an eight-cylinder Packard.

  'Alva, sweetheart, you know darn well Rachel and me are not together any more. Haven't been for more than a year but, official like, it's, er, a bit over six months.' His fingers crawled across to hers and held her hand ever so lightly. 'Got a few more calls to make in George Street, Alva, but how about you and me walking out this Satdee?'

  She would have given quids to have the strength to withdraw it. The featherlight touch was as strong as a vice. Her other hand dabbed at her forehead with a balled-up hanky. In a moment, Sam imprisoned this one, too. He drew her to him across the counter and kissed her on the cheek. It was no more than the slightest brushing of his lips, yet she trembled, dropped her head and nodded.

  'Is that a yes, Alva?'

  She nodded again and finally answered him with a whispered yes. He let her hand go and was immediately brusque. 'Satdee, two o'clock and we'll go over to Manly if the weather's good. If not, tea and scones at your place. Better let Mum and the sisters know. With any luck, they might go out for the arvo.'

  The sheer effrontery of this suggestion brought her down hard. She started to put him in his place, then put her hand to her cheek where he had kissed her. The reprimand died. 'I like Manly better,' she said, but Sam had already swept up his sample case, put on his hat and was almost out the door. He turned and gave an exaggerated bow, then was swallowed up in the lunchtime crowd.

  That was Sampson Collins, my father-to-be, courting and catching my mothertobe.

  They were married in the big synagogue in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, the one with the stars painted on the vaulted ceiling. My mother went under the marriage canopy on the arm of her boss while my father was attended by his brother, Mark, the furniture dealer. When my father died some thirty years later, I went through his few possessions and found a pile of negatives which yielded up pictures of their fleeting time together. They were fun snaps: Sam leaning on the tourer car, his fingers hooked in his vest, bowler hat at a rakish angle; Alva in flapper dress, cloche hat and a shapely leg extended. There they were at Luna Park, cuddling on the mock-up platform of the Melbourne Express, and numerous snaps of the two of them on the promenade at Bondi Beach. I looked at them, bitterly begrudging the unrestrained enjoyment they portrayed. They had filled every waking moment with a greedy happiness, perhaps against the day when she would die and he would be alone once more, burdened with a young child, a hindrance and one of the causes of the disintegration of his fourth and final marriage.

  It took less than an hour for my mother to die. It took only marginally longer for my father to come to a decision that, by any yardstick, would be for me a monumental blunder. Angry and torn with grief, he turned on my mother's family and refused all offers of nurturing, notwithstanding that my mother's married sister, Beryl, offered to rear me together with her own two small sons. The dormant dislike and suspicion that the Davis household had held for Sampson Collins, the ever-so sharp commercial traveller, now rose to the surface like fat on a cooling pot of chicken soup. Like the fat, I was skimmed off and discarded.

  The house in Bellevue Hill, it turned out, was rented; the fine furniture from Bebarfalds had been acquired on the 'never-never', the time-payment system. In his heart Sampson Collins, the itinerant, footloose commercial traveller, never really believed he needed anything more in life than a good car, a suitcase and a comfy hotel room with the occasional bit of skirt. The big men who had delivered the flash furniture were the same ones who came and took it all away, offering, simultaneously, condolences and smirks at the Jew they reckoned was too bloody big for his boots anyway.

  But what to do with a hungry baby? The midwife, dear woman, was hanging her breasts out to dry when I came along. The last of her infants was being weaned onto a Nestle's formula called Vi-Lactogen. So, straight after Kevin Fingal O'Donohue took to the bottle, his mum plumped up her tits once more and offered them to me. For the next seven days she suckled me, leaving me only once and that was to follow at a distance my mother's pitifully small cortege that wended its way from the Jewish Burial Society's dingy parlours in Chippendale to the clay hole in the ground at Rookwood. Custom was followed: the mourners filled in the grave and the rabbi hurried through the prayers with an eye on the threatening clouds. As people dispersed, he took a wooden marker from under his long coat and stuck it in the mound. In thin black painted letters it read: Alva Phoebe Collins. He took my father by the elbow.

  'Sam, it seems not so long since you stood under the chuppah with our late Alva. Now you are left with a child. Listen, you know that next week the babe is eight days old.'He turned to face my father. 'Y'know what I'm saying, Sammy? F'shteyst?". Sampson Collins recalled the few Yiddish words he had heard from his parents. Yes, he understood what the rabbi was not hinting at but telling him as a command written in the Torah.

  'The infant must have a bris, Sammy. You gotta have him circumcised. Soon will be already eight days. Can't wait. The child is well? So . . . I can do it, or maybe you want for a doctor to do it and I'll say the prayers. OK? So bring the babe to my house in Bondi Road next to the shul.' The two of them moved back down the path to the cars. My father's whitewall-tyred Ford tourer was the only other vehicle apart from the hearse; Mrs O'Donohue returned to the car and sat in the passenger seat with me on her lap.

  In a prim but firm voice she ordered my father to drive her home. 'The little one is hungry - again,' she emphasised and crushed me to her breast. My father stared hard at me through the open car window and at that wonderfully bountiful gland now dryi
ng up, and dismissed whatever thought had entered his head. He said to Mrs O'Donohue, 'The rabbi reminds me that the baby has to be circumcised and it should be next week.'

  'Why can't you for Chrissake call him by his name?' she responded angrily. 'I know you've decided on it, it's written on his birth certificate.'

  The rabbi cut in. 'It's not done, and God forbid the evil eye should fall on him before he is named at his bris. He has to have a Hebrew name as well as that other one.' He walked back to the hearse and got in. 'Don't forget, Sam, and bring with you a bottle kosher wine.' The hearse careered off at speed along the winding path to the exit on Liverpool Road.

  My father drove in silence while Mrs O'Donohue bottled up the questions, such as why eight days to wait, why my mother was buried in a raw pine box with rope handles (was this a cheap Jew funeral?), why he had to scour around to find ten adult male Jews before a service could be held. And now he would again have to round up ten men to attend and witness my circumcision. She stared hard at him as he drove skilfully towards Bondi, imagined those hands on her and finally let her eyes rest on the bulge at his crotch. 'Mr Collins,' she purred, 'what will become of little Alan here after the you-know-what? Y' know I have my own to care for. Have you got any idea, because if you haven't, well, my parish priest says the nuns could . . .' She stopped and put her hand on his arm.

  She was not prepared for his violent reaction. He threw her hand off and the car slewed dangerously as he stamped on the brake. My head stopped a fraction away from the dashboard as the woman braced herself against the inertia. My father regained control and swore in Yiddish about cholera upon her. 'The baby goes into the Scarba Home in Wellington Street straight after the bris,' he spat out, 'so no bloody church is going to get its hooks into it.'

  'It's not an it, it's a him, and if you're afraid to say his name I'll say it for you!' and she leaned her head out the car window and yelled my name over and over until my own screams drowned hers out.