Alva's Boy

by Alan Collins

  'My grandson,' she repeated. 'Yes, he is dead, also his mama and his papa.'

  I closed the album; even then I could not stop the shivers. She leaned over my shoulder and took it from my hand. 'Louis, only eight, his mama Berthe and his papa Alfred, all gone.' Her voice choked. 'Why am I living, Eln, tell me why? Because my second husband was not a Jew. A gentile who ran a dye works that the Germans needed. He knew what was happening to all the Jews in our city and he paid thousands for me to get a passage on a ship to anywhere. The first one to sail from Bremen was also the last one to take us refugees. What did I know about Australia? I knew from nothing: kangaroos and beaches was all I knew. Did I need kangaroos? As for beaches, at my age better I stay safe on the land.'

  Mrs Gelman now sat down opposite me. She tried to hold my gaze but I could not take my eyes from the endless backs of the books, so secure and protected behind glass doors. She said ever so softly, 'Louis, Louis . . .' I still avoided looking at her until she asked, 'You like books, Eln?'

  'Yes, Mrs . . . Mrs . . .' I could not think of her name; in fact I wasn't sure I'd ever heard it. 'Of course I do,' I answered very importantly, 'I've read a book called The Psychology of Sex. It's about . . .'

  'Gevalt! What is in this child's head? Nu, Eln, I think you are grown-up enough to drink coffee instead of lemonade.'

  Well, I was certainly grown-up enough not to ask how her grandson had died. She set the pretty coffee cup and saucer in front of me and poured the treacly steaming stuff into the cup. Just as I had seen a wild dog on the farm circle a bait, I sniffed at the cup then raised it to my lips. Shit, how could they drink this stuff ? So bitter! Mrs Gelman hovered over me, then ladled and stirred in three teaspoons of sugar. I tried again.

  'Better, Eln? Now you can have with a piece of cake.' She watched me closely, stroking my arm. Each time she did this, the tears welled up and she murmured, 'Louis, mein Kind.'

  I managed half the cup of coffee and bolted down the cake. 'Got to go, Missus, Angelo will give me a belt in the ear for being away so long.' I'm afraid this was all it took for Mrs Gelman to wrap her arms around me, her teardrops dampening my forehead while she moaned the name of her grandson over and over. Absolutely amazing: somebody crying over me! Never in all my life! Bugger me! I struggled free and ran for the front door. I could not work the latch. Mrs Gelman caught up with me, embraced me again with one arm while she opened the door. I slid through, took the steps two at a time and burst into the street. I zipped between the cars and a tram on Bondi Road and reached the shop. Yes, as I expected, Angelo tried to give me the deserved belt in the ear as I slid past him.

  'Little bastarda Jewboy,' he yelled. The few Jewish customers in the shop stared, horrified. Two left immediately, one walked up to Angelo, tried to speak, shook her head sadly and went on shopping.

  Angelo called to me to bring out the apples. When I came up to him fearfully, he patted my head. 'You a good boy for helpa da lady, Alan. But you gotta be quicker, unnerstan?'

  ...13...

  Poor Angelo. Although his 'Jewboy' utterance had been overhead by only a few Jewish customers, his slip of the tongue raced around the Jewish network; there was a marked falling off in business. Many went down the street a bit to where Angelo's rival (a Sicilian) traded. Angelo, a Calabrian, loathed and probably feared him. Well, Mrs Gelman's 'Eln' lost his job as the business suffered.

  I had had a brief moment of triumph in 1940, which I shared with just about anyone I could buttonhole. I revelled in the victory of the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, which sank the Italian warship Bartolomeo Colleoni off the coast of Crete. The Sydney's captain was J. A. Collins. A relative, sure enough. Just what a Jewish boy needed. I began to take an interest in the war. Up till then, I knew of it mainly through trying to avoid being lumbered together as Jewish with the refugee kids. I also had my patriotism kept on the boil by reading of the adventures of Rockfist Rogan, the square-jawed RAF Spitfire pilot. He killed Germans, but Erich who wanted to sit next to me at school was also a German. Erich passed notes in German to Joseph who grabbed his crotch in pants-wetting hysterics and pointed at me. That made me hate Germans far more than Rockfist, who saluted the Messerschmitt pilot as he spiralled down to Valhalla.

  I had been in the habit of reading the paper, being a bit toffeenosed too by reading mostly the Sydney Morning Herald, a paper I remember Uncle Harry loved, right down to the cryptic crossword puzzle. He would lay his pocket watch on the arm of his chair and compete with himself to see how quickly he could finish it; next day he would check his fillings-in against the answers, even to the extent of rubbing out the very few errors he made and inserting the right letters.

  I obtained a newspaper from the newsagents. It didn't matter to me that it was yesterday's paper - it was free. There was no light to read by at night where my army stretcher was, but at times the light from the lamp in the lane was bright enough for books although no good for the tiny typefaces of the newspaper.

  One morning in July 1942, I stopped in the park on the way to school and read my paper, avoiding the curious look of an old man nearby. I read:

  According to a report from a Polish underground group, which has just reached Jewish leaders in London, over 700,000 Jews have been murdered by the Nazis in Poland alone. In Rumania the death toll is 125,000, and in Holland, Belgium and France, Jews are being executed in large numbers daily. In all, over a million Jews have been killed, making this one of the worst massacres ever.

  In Poland the Nazis have been using a special van fitted as a poison gas chamber. Up to ninety men, women and children are herded into such vans. In many villages all the Jewish men have been forced to dig their own graves, and have then been machine-gunned in a public square.

  I folded the paper carefully and stuffed it into my schoolbag, maybe trying to cover up what I had just read. Was this part of the war? The numbers were beyond my comprehension. From the Saturday nights at the Bondi Road picture show, where I saw war films, I knew what a machine-gun was. I recognised that Nazis were bad, identifiable sometimes by their steel helmets, other times by their accents while speaking English, much like the reffos of Bondi.

  Too easily, I pictured Abe Feldstein's furniture van packed with the Jews of Bondi, including the kids from my primary- school days. The van would drive off towards the cold grey water tower on the Waverley hilltop. The driver was not the corpulent Abe but a nobody, wearing a German steel helmet. Instead of water, gas would be pumped into the back of Abe's van . . .

  I was never in that van.

  Yet I experienced the war vicariously - a Jewish kid living on his wits. Most of the year I ran barefoot with a pack of Dagos, Greeks, the occasional Chink and a quarter-caste I once brought home. My father reckoned he had 'a touch of the tarbrush' in him. The reffo kids did not roam the streets but if they were spotted walking alone, the pack would call out:

  Jewboy, Jewboy, 'ave a bit of pork.

  Jewboy, Jewboy, stick it on a fork.

  How did they know? How could they tell with such uncanny accuracy? Once, at the Bondi Baths, wearing only a skimpy Speedo swimming cossie (as did nine other boys), I lined up on the starting block in a school race. They knew I had a fair chance of winning; their encouraging yells were, 'Go, Jewboy, pretend it's the Red Sea!'

  Ah well, the reffos had been through this before and with heads down hastened their steps. I was in a delicate situation. I was in the pack. What could I do but hang back a bit? I learned to walk this fine line and never once was moved to object. After all, it never evolved into violence. The one rhyme I joined in because it had a rollicking tune was:

  Ikey Moses King of the Jews,

  Sold his wife for a pair of shoes,

  When the shoes began to wear

  Ikey Moses began to swear.

  And so it went on a for a few verses, covering the doings of Ikey Moses. I loved it! There were other ditties about Ching Chong Chinaman and endless jokes about Paddy the mad Mick. I could not have identified a Protesta
nt kid by ribaldry, very odd, that. Why were they exempt? When we tired of that, there was always the night bell of the undertaker's front door. Press the bell, down he would come, sometimes halfdressed. 'Got any empty boxes?' we'd shout, doubled up with laughter.

  I suppose I had a rip-roaring time with this gang. No mum or dad scouring the streets for me - they were mostly in the army or, like Sam, working shifts, making good money which went on booze, black-market smokes or, for the women, dressing up for the Yanks. But I still needed pocket money. With a sack on my back I collected beer bottles, hauling them to the bottle yard for a halfpenny a bottle. The bottle merchant stroked the side of his nose: 'I can count better than you, Jewboy, so don't try and put one over me.'

  I knew where the big drinkers lived, just as I knew the houses where the starting-price betters lived. I collected the punters' bets - two shillings wrapped in paper with the horse's name on it. The starting-price bookie, our local barber, Jewish, ran the book. After the race, it was my job to take their winnings to them in a billycan. The few winners were quite generous, tipping me sixpence or so.

  As well, I became a 'paper boy', probably the most dangerous job I have ever had in my whole life. By 6 o'clock in the morning I was at the local newsagent. With a leather strap slung diagonally across my shoulder, holding around 30 newspapers, I'd wait until the tram slowed for a stop, leapt onto the moving tram's running board behind the conductor and faced the way the tram was travelling - by now it was doing about 10 miles an hour. I hung on with one hand while shoving a paper through the door, grabbed the money and hoped I did not have to fossick for change in the leather purse slung over the other shoulder. Sometimes I had to cross behind the conductor, who swore at me. In a matter of seconds the tram had gathered speed. I had to hit the road in my sandshoes, trying to keep my balance and not spill my load of as yet unsold Sydney Morning Heralds and Daily Telegraphs. I had to be ready for the tram following hard behind. And so it went until 8 o'clock, then off to school, all on a breakfast of two slabs of bread and IXL plum jam. And at the end of the week about ten shillings for five mornings of living dangerously.

  Yes, I was a busy little Jewboy. On Friday nights, I manned the fairy-floss stall at the Bondi Beach carnival while the owner went off in search of romance with the girl who ran the hoopla. I whipped the sugar into pink mountains and illicitly kept every third threepence for myself. The faster the machine whirled, the more fairy floss with the least input of sugar. The money went to a good cause: the local lending library that had for years been so generous and kind towards me, guiding my choice of books, had changed hands. The new owner, an elderly man with hooded eyes, downturned mouth and a dyspeptic disposition, charged me full rates and never even looked up while he date-stamped my books. My dopey way of choosing books now was to look in the back - the ones that had the most date stamps in them, I assumed were OK. Fortunately, I soon grew tired of the sloppy romances of F. J. Thwaites et al. By chance though, I stumbled across Bony, the aboriginal detective; this opened a new world to me.

  By midday at school, I was struggling to stay awake. What with a novel on my knees beneath the desk and a marked disinterest in any subject other than English and history, I failed exam after exam. One teacher leaned over my shoulder during algebra and had the tact to whisper in my ear, 'You're letting down your Jewish cobbers, Alan. Most of 'em are as smart as paint, especially in arithmetic.' Failure also stalked me in Religious Instruction: the teacher was a plump, fussy little Austrian Jewish lady whom I had once helped carry her vegies from Angelo's shop. This good deed was soon rubbed out as quickly as she took the blackboard duster and wiped out the blessings (in Hebrew) before I could copy even half a line. Then she would fall back on German, 'Du bist ein Dummkopf, Eln.'

  Well, 'Eln' was fleet of foot, able to steal fruit and vegies. It was easy. The fruit was stacked on wooden pineapple cases on the footpath outside the fruit shops. Start your run about 100 yards up the hill, race down and grab what you could on the way past. I learned this 'trade' by first stealing the big Tasmanian Brownell spuds, so big they would barely fit in your hand. Once in the shelter of the caves at the foot of the Bondi cliffs, I'd roast them in a fire made from driftwood. I can still smell them, impregnated with the sea from timbers that had drifted thousands of miles and finally fetched up on Bondi's shores.

  An almost predictable visitor to 48 Francis Street was the school truant inspector, a gaunt man in an ill-fitting suit of regulation grey, probably his 'demob' suit from World War I.

  'Orright, young shaver, what is it this time? Mum kept ya home because she's crook? Twice this month, innit? Lemme in, I got to speak to her about you.'

  'No bloody fear, mister,' I told him, 'she's in bed with shingles, yeah, shingles.'She was in bed alright. In a hole in the ground at Rookwood Cemetery with not even a stone to mark the gravesite.

  The truant inspector wet the end of his pencil and put a cross on his notebook. 'No point, is there,' he said half to himself. 'No point in asking to see your dad. I suppose he's like the rest them.' He polished his returned serviceman's badge with his sleeve. It was like a glittering eye that transfixed me. He tucked the notebook away in his hip pocket and said in a wheedling voice, 'Couldja make me a cuppa tea, son?' I shook my head and looked at the ground to avoid the glittering eye. 'Just what I'd expect from you Yids.' Calling over his shoulder that I'd hear from the department, he trudged off. I heard from the other kids in our gang that he had our mob marked down and openly threatened that he'd have us sent to the Gosford bad boys' home.

  .... ....

  I had already made my contribution to the war effort. While I scorned collecting silver-foil bottle tops meant to confuse the enemy's radar signals, I took wholeheartedly to becoming a junior ARP (Air Raid Precaution) warden. I was entitled to wear a black-and-yellow armband. My contemporary Jewboys in faraway Europe also wore armbands, but ones with deadly implications. The job of junior ARP warden carried some attractive, even financial rewards. I was issued with a wonderfully powerful torch that could (and did) shine its beam on lovers as they heaved and groaned in the deep slit-trenches that bisected the parks.

  'Turn that bloody thing off, you little bastard, or I'll come up and kick your arse.' No chance with his strides around his ankles.

  'Gizz a bob first.'

  'Fuck off.'

  Female voice: 'Jack, watch your language, please.'

  Jack: 'I'll kill him, so help me.'

  The lady reached over her head to her handbag, found a few coins and handed them to Jack, who flung them up the beam of my torch. 'Now piss off, will ya!'

  I cut the offending beam, scrabbled in the grass for the coins and moved on to the next victim. I was also issued with a scout whistle. Sometimes it was just as much fun but less rewarding to look down on the lovers in the slittrench and, at a climactic moment in their coupling, give a blast. To this day I don't know whether the whistle's shrill was a boon or contrariwise. If you owned a bicycle like some of my mates, you could have free tyres and tubes and be a junior dispatch rider. I had no bike, but the council never checked, so I claimed for them and sold them to those who did.

  I realise now it was not merely a desire for more money in my pocket that set me on these various enterprises. Mostly it was to keep me out of the house, as far away as possible from my stepmother and her acid tongue. I was getting too big and too spry to be belted either by her or by my father at her urging. She had sent her two sons to the local Catholic school so our paths rarely crossed. Now and then I could hear them reciting the catechism. Much simpler, I thought, than me trying to learn the 613 commandments contained in the Torah at the dreary Bondi Road School of Arts. In fact, the only ones I remember were the dos and don'ts of sexual behaviour. What with these and the bizarre bits I had picked out in Uncle Harry's edition of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, I should have been a bloody know-it-all. I might also pay homage to the forthright and mostly erroneous school lavatory 'classroom'. How many times was I asked to show
my circumcised dicky, masturbate under bullying threat to display my poor abused member, only to be humiliated by invidious comparison.

  My father had been given the afternoon shift at the munitions factory. By sixthirty in the morning with his Gladstone bag containing his two bread rolls, and having cut me two doorstep sandwiches of jam and peanut butter, he sometimes got on the tram to catch a glimpse of me clinging to the running board selling papers. I wondered about this early departure for work because he did not start until 3 o'clock and finished at midnight.

  One day, on a school holiday, I followed him to town in the tram, not difficult because he sat outside and smoked while I as a child was not permitted there alone. I watched him through the glass partition; he got off at King Street and walked all the way down to Erskine Street where there was a hotel that opened very early for the wharf labourers coming off their shift. By now it was around 8 o'clock. Sam went in through the swinging doors, doors that were sandblasted with terribly manly lifesavers performing a rescue with belt and reel and endorsed by Tooth's Beer, 'A man's drink!'

  I sat on a tramways bench and watched the swinging doors, to be overwhelmed each time they opened by the fetid air of sweat, urine and beer. One giant lurched up to me and gave me a shilling. 'Go round the back, young'un, and get yourself a shandy.'

  Finally, just on nine, my father came out, erect and steady but staring straight ahead, with not even a glance at me. He walked purposely like . . . well, like a drunk demonstrating control. I gave him a few yards start and, employing all my Simon Templar 'Saint' skills, I trailed him up the hill to George Street. Heading down towards Circular Quay, he suddenly stopped outside the Globe newsreel cinema . . . except that it did not show newsreels . . . Oh, no, it showed naughty pictures. Pinned to the easel outside were photos of women in contorted positions that left me gasping.