Alva’s Boy by Alan Collins

Alva’s Boy: An Unsentimental Memoir,

by Alan Collins;

Hybrid Publishers, 2008, $29.95.

Ever since people have been able to write their memoirs, many have set to. Some have been quite shattering—even world-changing—many more have been fascinating, tender, funny, brave, eye-opening or eye-glazing. Here we are at eye-opening Alva’s Boy. It has an added piquancy in that it is local in both time and place: and it happens that I have a good deal in common with Alan: he was born in 1928 and I in 1929, and I, like him, arrived at Bondi Beach Public School in 1938; and while he lived at 48 Francis Street, I lived in the parallel one behind his at 47 Sir Thomas Mitchell Road. And much else we shared, between reading The Saint and Phantom comics, frequenting local penny libraries and being Jewish.

But there the similarities fade. He had a terrible life. It began ill and hardly got better. His young mother unfortunately, and against her mother’s wishes, married the debonaire, glitzy commercial traveller, Sampson Collins. No sooner married than pregnant. For economy’s sake she was to be delivered at home by the midwife. It was Yom Kippur. So, out came the baby, then came the blood. On and on. The doctor could not be reached—he was praying hard at the synagogue—but the phone didn’t seem to work anyway. Alan became an instant orphan.

At this point Alan the narrator becomes a sort of Tristram Shandy, telling us exactly how his bris (circumcision) felt, then the feeling of the rough cloth of his wet-nurse’s apron and other sensory matters. In fact, if he weren’t Jewish, I would say here is the beginning of his via crucis. It is certainly the beginning of his hard, hard life. For reasons of—probably—bloody-mindedness, Sampson refuses all offers of family members to care for Alan and dumps him in the Scarba Home, run by the Benevolent Society of New South Wales, where he does at least grow and become somewhat attached to his wet-nurse. Regulations are regulations, and at two years he must leave. The weeping nurse rushes to give him a teddy bear, but the matron takes it away: it belongs to the home, she says.

So he is promoted to the Ashfield Home for Infants, where he remains till the age of five. He is scarcely visited, though his wheelchair-bound nana and uncle come a couple of times and his dad marries number three, but any hopes Alan has that this is to be a cuddly mum come to naught.

Next he finds himself in a new menage: Uncle Harry and Auntie Cissi, who for a quid a week take him into their one-room flat:

I never had a proper bed. Or for that matter, I never had a proper bedroom. I slept, played, sat, was washed, dressed and sometimes fed on their couch so malignant that 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 …

There is a good deal more misery, but at least Uncle Harry, a man of some culture and kindness, tried to teach him the Hebrew alphabet (well meant but not easy for a five-year-old on the lap), told him some heroic Bible stories (just like mine) and took him to the Great Synagogue, memorably to the Torah festival, where the Torahs are taken out of the ark and walked around the congregation in all their glory (just as I saw in a grand synagogue in Vienna, taken by an auntie). But that is as good as it ever got for him.

And alas, there is only worse to come. Alan had always hoped to be called Alan by anyone talking to, or more often at him, but he was usually called lad, or boy, or chum, but mostly, poor Alva’s boy. Suddenly his father, somewhat down on his uppers, announced that he was marrying a beautiful shikse, many years younger than he, and boy-o-boy, how great. Alan at once thought a young mum, who’d call him Alan, and give him a hug … What he got was a horrible harridan, who only called him brat, or bloody brat, and whose even more horrible mother called him Jewboy, and worse.

So, they moved into that house in Francis Street, but Alan was never to enter it. He was to sleep in the laundry-toilet annex, where he had to pull up his stretcher bed any time during the night when the others needed a pee. He was to eat out of an enamel bowl only out there.

Two step-brothers followed, not each by Sampson, but as Sampson went ever further downhill, the new little boys ended up nicely kitted out and at the Marist Brothers up the road. Alan’s school life was horrible too. A slight burst of light came when a neighbour engineered a summer school working holiday for him at her son’s potato farm near Windsor. The best thing about it was the tucker, and the fact that they called him Alan.

Something of interest is the difference between the settled Australian Jews, the hard-working, buying-and-selling-and-making locals, and the reffos, who began to appear in numbers from 1939. The old lot, like Sampson, greatly disliked these, shall I say, cosmopolitan, often university-educated Jews, with their briefcases and overcoats and foreign accents. Nothing was easy for any of either lot, but while Alan was in trouble in Bondi Beach Public as a so-and-so Yid, I was pet for being the first reffo ever seen there. (“Bags sit next to her,” they said.) But the biggest difference between us was simply that I was loved.

The wonder is that through it all he did manage to grow. He stole fruit and spuds, and baked the latter in a cave by Ben Buckler, he worked a bit here and there, he became a paper-boy on the early morning Bondi trams—a hazardous affair. He even saved a little money. So, slowly, and with a sudden bit of luck—about which my lips are sealed—the book ends on a hopeful note, and the reader is glad.

It is even more gladdening to find at the end that he had written four other books, had entered the middle classes, married and had three boys. One cheers his life, and deeply regrets his death.

Lee Shrubb’s long association with Quadrant includes a period as Editor.