by Alan Collins
.... ....
About two years after we moved into Francis Street there were changes that affected me, although I don't think they were intended to. I was a nonentity to Shirley and her mother, who hardly ever called me by my name, preferring to speak of me in the third person as 'the brat', or when things hotted up between Sam and Shirley as 'your Jew brat'. Well, it sort of went along with the namecalling at school. I wore it and, if I had known what a god was, would have offered thanks for the wonderful protection I obtained from reading. To be abused by those two that 'you've always got your (Jew!) nose stuck in a book' was an accolade.
Shirley had a baby son. I shall not give his name. A few months later, the stick insect departed 48 Francis Street to go back to Marrickville. The baby got the vacated room and I stayed on my camp stretcher. My father would soon be required to work shifts in a munitions factory. Shirley used his absence to get a boyfriend. He was none other than my father's 'friend', Abe Feldstein, who always had money about him, usually in grubby rolls in his pants pocket. When I was around, he bribed me with a sixpence to 'keep shtum', as he put it. How odd of Shirley to take a Jewish lover. She was no antiSemite where cash abounded but it was very carefully allocated; the canny Abe rewarded his shikse with a mix of banknotes and a tiny reduction in the time payment on the furniture he had sold us.
Should I be ashamed to admit that I got on rather well with Abe? He had a roundish figure with a gold watch-chain across his middle ending with a watch which I presumed was in his waistcoat fob pocket, although I never actually saw it. He had a luxurious head of hair tinged with silver around the edges, called me 'sonny Jim' and now and then bought my acquiescence to his visits with Ginger Meggs comic books.
But now I was about ten, thin as a rake and in perpetual fear of being belted by my father who, at Shirley's urging, used his razor strop which sometimes drew blood if the metal hook at one end made contact. What a terrible marriage it was for the pair of them; their age difference, his vastly reduced status now that he was no longer a knight of the road. I became the only common bond on which they could unite to unload their store of misery. I learned how Shirley's curious sexual needs were fulfilled - with animal fury when copulating with a heavyweight Jewish furniture salesman or on the extremely rare occasions when my father forced himself upon her. To this day, I can still hear her scream, 'You've ruined me back passage!' What did it mean? Was it the narrow hall that led to my stretcher outside the dunny? Surely not. Oh no! Such goingson were never alluded to in the books I devoured from the penny library.
As my father's residence at 48 Francis Street was greatly limited by the hours and shifts that he worked in the munitions factory, I saw him infrequently. Shirley was mercifully occupied with a two-year-old child and was noticeably pregnant again.
After a bout of virulent namecalling, usually about me, she screamed about her second pregnancy, 'It's not yours. You don't put me up the duff doing the filthy thing you force onto me.' I was too young to feel sorry or pity for them, even if I had understood the ugliness of the accusations they hurled at each other. Whatever store of pity I may have had, I would have kept for myself; but oddly enough I never felt a bit sorry for myself. I was far too busy staying out of trouble at home and at school and lapping up sympathy from the elderly woman who shared a back fence with us. Of course, her concern for me was doled out in return for what I could tell her about what went on in our house. Mrs Bayswaite had no husband, dog, cat or canary but three sons, physical giants of men: a policeman, an itinerant tent boxer and a potato farmer who had married a Seventhday Adventist. They rarely visited, which gave her generous time to pump me for the doings at No. 48. A bit later in my life, the potato farmer and I shared a weird few weeks. Out of the blue, Shirley said to Sam, 'Why don't you send the brat to one of your relations?' She looked at him scornfully and continued, 'Or do they think you are as big a bastard as I do?'
I stood beside him as he mumbled, 'Well, I suppose there's his mother's sister . . .'
'There you are! Send him off to her. Let her take a bit of the responsibility for the brat.' On this triumphant note she thought she had found a means of offloading me.
And so it was that after nearly ten years, one Sunday morning at about 9 o'clock, I introduced myself to my Aunt Enid. My father had dressed me in my best Paddy's Market clothes and given me two pennies for the return bus fare that would take me to Rose Bay. The nicest part of this historic meeting was the thrilling doubledecker bus ride. At that hour of the day, the bus was empty. I sat on the top deck in the very front seat and revelled in the way the bus swayed and swerved around the Bellevue Hill streets where the branches of the trees on the footpaths brushed against the side of the vehicle and I would duck, pretending that they would surely hit me. I got an insight into the way of life of the Bellevue Hill welltodo by catching glimpses from the top of the bus of their immaculate manicured front and back lawns - nothing so ordinary as a backyard!
All too soon, I alighted at Plumer Road and nervously found myself on the doorstep of Aunt Enid's flat. At that time she was still married to Uncle Bert and they had a little daughter, Sandra. I knocked on the door; it was opened by a man with rimless spectacles on a quizzically smiling rotund face. A small girl peeked from behind his dressing-gown.
'Uncle Bert?' I asked tremulously.
He peered down at me and did not reply.
'I'm Alan,' I piped up. I went on in a rush, 'My dad sent me here. He said I was to see Aunt Enid. Will I go now? I mean will I go home, but . . .' I pushed the words out breathlessly, 'I'll get a belting if I don't see her.'
Bert looked at his wristwatch, rubbed the bristles on his chin then ordered, 'Wait here,' sensing (quite rightly) I might bolt. I knew nothing about little girls in their nighties so had no idea of Sandra's age except, doing a quick sum in my head, that she was younger than Gertie. Bert had disappeared inside; his place was soon taken by my Aunt Enid. We had not met since I was a 'parcel' which all those years ago had gone from Mrs O'Donohue to the carbolic-drenched Matron McCechnie to wetnurse Martha at the Scarba Home.
And now my mother, the lovely dead Alva, who had been courted by my father using his skill as a smoothtalker, stood in front of me in the person of her sister, my Aunt Enid. She did not speak to me but beckoned me inside. I sidled past her, brushing against the small girl. Was Enid shocked at seeing this child who so closely resembled her late sister? I knew her instantly from a sepia picture of Alva which Sam had secreted away from Shirley. He had shown it to me once when he was a little shickered from drinking muscat. The image was forever fixed in my memory. She was pretty alright, with an open and frank face onto which in my imagination I could project anything I wished. Which was not much really; I knew buggerall about what mums were supposed to be or do.
Aunt Enid had gathered her kimono around her, smoothed her hair from the disarray of sleep, and finally breathed my name.
'Alan.' She paused. 'What a surprise. Why have you come? How old are you now? Where do you live?' Ever so slowly we progressed from the hallway to the dining room where Bert now waited, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, seated, comically pompous I thought, at 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning in the carver chair at the head of the table. Up to this moment, nobody had touched me; finally Enid put her hand around my shoulder, steering me to a chair. Bert broke the silence, uttering the definitive phrase that I hated more than any other.
'So this is poor Alva's boy.' Enid sat in a chair opposite me with Sandra close by her side. She saw me stiffen at the use of the expression. I was not happy with the way things were going. Not a Sunday morning I would ever forget. I sat straight in the chair.
'My dad sent me,' I rushed on. 'He said it was about time you saw me and he gave me tuppence to take the bus here. I liked that, riding on the top and the trees hitting the window and I'm safe inside.'
'That's nice,' said Enid. She turned to Sandra. 'Would you like that too, darling?'
The small girl shook her head. She mumbled that s
he'd be frightened the branches might hit her. Bert and Enid withdrew to a corner of the room and discussed me as though I was not there. Just like 'home', I thought. Peering around the dining room, I edged towards a cabinet that glistened with a silver tea service and lots of sparkling glass bowls and stuff.
Sandra sidled up to me and in a tiny voice told me that these all belonged to her mummy and daddy. It was not her pride of possession that struck me, it was the gluey way she said 'mummy and daddy'. I am sure that in all my short life I had never heard this phrase spoken. Nor had I read it in any book; the ones that the lending library issued me were about thin, wiry kids enduring the endless makeshift life of a droving family. They drawled maa and daad and sucked on stalks of grass while fondling the ears of a cattle dog. To be sure, my father and Shirley would never qualify as 'daddy and mummy'.
Bert and Enid were now holding hands, and Sandra moved across the room to join them. If I had known anything about that sort of thing, I would have recognised a 'happy family'. Bert let Enid's hand go and folded his arms across his chest. For one moment I thought he might strike a pose as Sam did, with his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat. Bert looked down at me. 'Would you like a sixpence, Alan?'
Well, what small boy wouldn't? Ice-cream cones were a penny each. I could have one every day nearly. Or lucky toffees with a halfpenny stuck to the bottom or . . .
Enid's offer was even more surprising. 'Would you like an egg? It's hard-boiled so you can take it with you.' Bert opened a drawer of the dresser and found some coins; Enid went to the kitchen and reappeared with a peeled egg in a paper serviette. I had no option but to accept these odd gifts. They never questioned me about my father, my life or school or anything that might prolong my visit. Even as I was being gently edged towards the front door, I could sense a sadness emanating from Aunt Enid. I clasped the sixpence and the egg and was in danger of spilling my emotion when Enid, for the second time, put her arm around my shoulder. I regained control by storing up all that had happened, all that I had seen this morning, and weaving it into a beautiful, lying account to tell my father.
Once outside in the Sundaymorning sunshine again, I cheered up and hurried towards the Rose Bay seawall where the attraction was the milk bar and the tram that went all the way to Watsons Bay. I sat on the wall with my icecream, watching men and boys scull tiny dinghies out to where their boats were bobbing on the moorings; I imagined they were like me, anxious to get away. I wondered why they rowed with their backs against the direction they wished to go. One waved. I thought it was to me but further up the seawall a pretty girl waved back. My silly presumption made me momentarily miserable that, twice in this short time, I was unloved and unwanted. I used this maudlin moment to justify my decision not to go directly 'home' to the certain misery that waited at Francis Street. The tram to Watsons Bay arrived like a magic carriage to carry me far away from there. I pushed away the thought that Sam would send me again and again to Aunt Enid's. I stared hard out of the window at the glistening harbour and imagined being marooned on Shark Island, surviving with the skills of the country kids I loved to read about.
The tram ride ended at 'The Gap', an indent in the cliff face just south of where ships sailed through into Sydney Harbour. When the Depression was at its worst, Sam told me, people had leapt to their death from here. The sea, hundreds of feet below, smashed incessantly on weedcovered rocks. He had come near it once, he said. I didn't believe it. We had hung over the wooden rail. But what was true was the fear that never left him when he got work building the crumbly sandstone cliffedge walk from Bondi Beach to Bronte Beach. This softhanded Jew was still a frightened man, cringing and humiliated by a young wife. Young as I was, I felt a stirring of pity for him and, in a new and unfamiliar mood, took the tram and bus this Sunday morning back to 48 Francis Street.
...8...
A low mesh fence surrounded Bondi Beach Public School. A couple of gates were guarded by the sixth-class boys, who were readily bribed by fags from the cheap and nasty Cavalier (five for threepence) packet to let you out during the hour lunch-break. We either headed for the fruit shops to steal the produce stacked invitingly outside them on pineapple cases, or, as I did, raced across the road to the beach, unbuttoning our clothes as we ran so that by the time we had reached the water's edge we were in our skimpy Speedo swimsuits and threshing through the waves.
I caught the occasional glimpse of Gertie, part of a chattering little band who oohed and aahed at the clothing store windows along the beachfront. She was even then blossoming into the beauty that was to carry her through to womanhood. Occasionally I saw her head in the window of her dad's car as he drove her to school.
In the searing summer sun, the Speedos were practically dry by the time we got back to the classroom. After school we headed again for Bondi Beach, swimming and diving like porpoises. Dawdling home to Francis Street, I sneaked up the narrow path at the side of the house, dreading to meet Shirley. I did what little homework had been set by standing up at the huge copper washtub and spreading my books on the slab of asbestos sheeting that covered it when not in use. Late one afternoon, just as the setting sun made the laundry almost too dark for me to see my lessons, I heard my name being called. Then the ratatat of a stick dragged across the backfence palings.
It was Mrs Bayswaite, her head just above the fence. Like her three sixfoot sons she was a lofty, scraggy woman with a basso voice and stringy hair that rarely saw a ribbon or comb. Living alone, Mrs Bayswaite thrived on gossip but could contribute none of her own except to boast endlessly of her oldest son, a policeman and footballer for the Eastern Suburbs rugby league team. The middle son was an itinerant labourer and a fighter with Sharman's travelling tent show of boxers. When he came home and stayed a few days with his mum, he would beckon me to the fence and give me uninhibited, hairraising stories of his sexual doings around the country. I actually learned very little because his brain was rattled from tent fighting and his incoherent sentences were strung together with "fuckin" this and "fuckin" that. Still, along with what I learned from what went on between Shirley and my father and then with Shirley and Abe Feldstein, I could maintain a precarious place in the school hierarchy by retelling what I knew. And I had to stall off dopey questions like, 'Jews do it different, don't they?' As if I would know.
This late afternoon when Mrs Bayswaite called to me, the weak-in-the-head son popped up beside her. Suddenly she seemed to grow a foot taller. It was Frank lifting her up until she yelled to be put down. 'Come over 'ere, Alan, I got somethin' to tell ya.'
I came up to her through the unmown sticky paspalum grass, its gummy seeds already making my bare legs itchy. Frank hung over the fence as she spoke. 'Y' know I got another son, Jack, doncha?' I nodded and she continued, telling me that he was a farmer up near the Hawkesbury River and that he had two little girls and that he grew potatoes for the army. She beckoned me to come closer to the fence. I moved a step nearer until I could smell Frank's beery breath. She whispered hoarsely, 'He's a Seventhday Adventurist and, he's a bit like you Jews, Alan. Whaddya think of that then, eh?' Before I could answer she said, bursting with this piece of knowledge, 'He goes to church on Satdee like you Jews do.'
I looked behind me to see if Shirley was watching. My father had left a little earlier to start his night shift in the munitions factory. My two small halfbrothers were inside the house. Sadly, there was no love lost between us; Shirley had made sure of that, teaching them by example and by instructing them to call me 'the brat'.
Mrs Bayswaite went on. 'Howja like to spend yer Christmas holidays on a real farm, Alan?' My thoughts flew to the many Australian stories I had read, of bush kids running free. I selectively omitted the Henry Lawson stories of hardship and deprivation. While I was dreaming, her voice went on to tell me that because they were whatever it was she called them, I wouldn't have to work on my Sabbath. Then she posed a curious question: did I eat meat? Well, the scrag ends or bread- filled sausages that Shirley served up to me could barely qu
alify as meat. I shook my head.
'Oh my word,' she said, 'you're a lucky boy. They don't eat meat, y' know. It's to do with their religion, they're Adventurists and they don't believe in meat. Mind you, they don't go hungry, Alan, no fear, I've been up there and they eat nutmeat. Ever tasted it?' I shook my head. Frank chipped in. 'Fuckin' ratshit.'His mother went on, 'It's not so bad. Fills you up.'
Frank soon got bored with the conversation and left his mum and me to figure out how we could get me away to the farm. She questioned me about what Shirley's views would be and answered the question herself with the one word, 'buggerall.' As for Sam, she dismissed him with equal contempt. The long Christmas school holidays were due next month. It had always filled me with dread, not knowing how to occupy the interminable six weeks, how to stay out of the anger range of my father and of Shirley. Most school holidays I would stuff books and magazines up my shirt and find a nook in the sandstone cliffs where only the sun could reach me. Fortified with stolen apples from the fruit shop, I could occupy the whole day, only leaving my cave hideaway to cool off in the rock pools.
I loved a comic strip called Mandrake the Magician. He had a 'giant Nubian slave' who was at his beck and call and did all the dirty work for Mandrake and his girlfriend, Narda; I giggled when she appeared because there was a toothbrush in Woolworths called Nada. Such are the small things that brightened up my life, plus imagining what a huge dicky the giant Nubian must have had, judging by the way he was drawn. Mandrake, of course, was impeccably got-up in top hat and tails. The lady in the penny library fed me the exciting adventures in the Amazon jungle by R. M. Ballantyne, but would not give me books by Charles Dickens 'in case they make you sad, Alan'.