Uncle Harry and Aunt Cissy lived in a dark manganese block of four flats in a small street just off Bondi Junction. Their son and daughter had fortuitously married two years earlier. The parents had then moved to this tiny one-bedroom flat, the lounge room dominated by a huge wind-up gramophone, later to be superseded by an even larger and infinitely louder electric 'record player'.
Hardly had they moved when the first chill wind of the Great Depression gave Harry Cohen economic pneumonia from which he never recovered. The diminutive Cissy, her neck permanently in a brace from scoliosis, chain-smoked Craven 'A's, a cigarette forever associated for me with a black cat, the emblem on the packet. To supplement their income, they took me in for a quid a week while Cissy, a hopeless, indeed disinterested housekeeper, spent hours every day playing bridge and poker for penny pots, earning enough to keep them afloat. Harry, his last post as a bookkeeper gone, now had endless hours to devote to his love of reading and classical music.
I never had a proper bed. For that matter, I never had a bedroom. I slept, played, sat, was washed, dressed and sometimes fed on their couch, so malignant 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 as its turntable spun dinner-plate-sized 78-rpm records of Beethoven, Brahms and the syrupy Bloch violin concerto. Uncle Harry scorned steel gramophone needles and instead sharpened his own bamboo ones on his wife's emery board. After 10 o'clock at night, the upstairs tenants shouting to him to turn the bloody thing off punctuated the music. Eventually, he threw the switch and sank ever deeper into an armchair, reading and rereading the two volumes of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
And all this in the one room: dining, music, cards and a small boy sleeping. A room that perpetually reeked of cigarette smoke dispersed once a week by the smell of fried fish, which was Aunt Cissy's contribution to a Jewish Fridaynight cuisine.
Uncle Harry was a self-styled conservative orthodox Jew in the English tradition. The Bondi School of Arts synagogue was within walking distance, but he took the tram on Saturday mornings to the Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, and alighted two blocks before, fooling no one that he had walked all the way from Bondi Junction. Walking was too risky for a man of 65 with a weak heart who never went anywhere without his TNT pills to pop under the tongue when the ticker became arrhythmic. He rented a seat in the Great Synagogue, located right next door to the Packer newspaper office. When the giant rotary presses rumbled in the bowels of the building, it was as though God was once again chastising his errant Israelites for deserting Canaan for the sandhills of Bondi and Bellevue Hill. Harry was highly respected for his learning, his courtesy and the fact that he was a Cohen, one of the priestly class detailed in Leviticus as worthy acolytes for serving the Temple. Not that this fine man was ever asked to fulfil the assignment - it was reserved for the affluent and the well-connected. On his return from the synagogue he lunched on cold fried fish, bread and cheese, and a cup of lemon tea. Only on the Sabbath day he would not turn on the gramophone. Instead, he would place me on his knee, a position hardly more comfortable than the couch, and try to teach me the Hebrew alphabet, notwithstanding that I had no knowledge of the English one, let alone the hieroglyphics of Hebrew.
It was a dull existence for a child going on four. The affection shown to me by Uncle Harry and Aunt Cissy was circumscribed by the limitations of their age, their preoccupation with living on a financial knife edge - and, one had to face facts, the child enjoying the dubious status of a boarder was not theirs. There were no other children in the block; my toys were discards; I amused myself with worn playing cards from which I devised endless patterns, laying them out on the floor and showing a remarkable inventiveness, or so some of the visiting lady bridge players said. One I remember as Sadie actually spoke to me. Of course, without exception, I was known not as Alan but as 'poor Alva's boy'. Sadie helped weaken my already dwindling faith in adults by promising on her next card day to bring some toys from her grandchildren - she never did, always with an excuse, something about her memory. When it came to remembering the fall of the cards though, Sadie was damn near infallible.
My father now became a peculiar focal point in my life at the Bondi Junction flat. The quid a week due to the Cohens for my board was vital to their survival. I suppose I never ate up to the value of my board; my daily stand-up wash and weekly bath, plus the occasional medicine from the Friendly Society's dispensary, would not have accounted for much, and my clothes, such as they were, arrived with Sam, smelling more of dry cleaning than newness. I say 'peculiar' with good reason. I had become a fixture at Uncle Harry's, as much a part of the lounge room as the horrible sofa. The constant stream of card players took no real notice of me; Uncle Harry's visitors were few and frankly he did not encourage them, not wanting them to see the shabbiness of his surroundings.
My father arrived more or less regularly late on Saturday afternoons, possibly after the last race, and dispensed good fellowship according to his cash flow. In my week of stultifying boredom, his entry into the tiny flat was like switching on a thousandwatt globe.
'Ar there, me son, 'ow y' goin'? Feeding y' are they? Givin' y' the best bit of the bacon?' Aside, 'Only pullin' y' leg, Harry.' He gave the pound, and sometimes a bit extra, to Cissy, knowing Harry did not like to handle money on the Sabbath. By now, too, my father had lost most of his 'lines', the sample merchandise he carried with him in his heyday as a commercial traveller. His last remaining line 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