Alva's Boy by Alan Collins

Author:Alan Collins [Collins, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Memoir
ISBN: 9781877006043
Publisher: Port Campbell Press

It all sounded pretty good to me except the Jesus bit but I was fairly used to that from school. And I thought about their seed potatoes and that maybe it was a payback for all the spuds I had nicked from the Dago fruit shop. I handed the letter back to Mrs Base and mumbled thanks. She actually smiled and then spoilt it all by telling me that I had better get the train from Central Station at six in the morning. 'Farmers are up at sparrow's fart,' she said. 'Cows got to be milked. Y' lucky they're vegetarians, these Seventh-day Adventurists. No pigs or chooks to feed, eh?'

It was unsaid that with this early start I could sneak away unnoticed. Suddenly she rose another foot above the fence. Frank had ambled down the yard and lifted her off the bucket. He threw cold water on my enthusiasm by swearing over his shoulder, 'Jack'll straighten out the fuckin' Jewboy.' Mrs Bayswaite called through the palings to leave a note for my dad. 'Tell him yer goin' for a country holiday. No need to say where, I'll fix that up.'

I trudged back down our yard, retrieved my schoolbag and went into the laundry where my few clothes were neatly folded and sat on shelves made from fruit boxes. I should've been a bloody greengrocer: from the labels on the boxes I knew that apples came from Batlow, oranges from Mildura, potatoes from Tasmania and assorted greens came from an outlying Sydney suburb named Botany and the boxes all bore Chinese names. Maybe, I dreamed, these Chinks (which was what everyone called them) jumped ship from Cook's Endeavour when he sailed into Botany Bay, missing Sydney Harbour by just a few stupid miles. Cook would have been labelled by my father as a shmok, Yiddish for a dope but literally meaning a dicky.

This brought Sam to mind. At this time he would still be at the munitions factory where he seemed to spend half his shift fashioning cigarette lighters from huge hexagonal brass nuts. They had pennies brazed to each side, a wick and a flint wheel, and there you are, mistersoldiersouvenirhunter, only five bob. He would come home quite late, stumble over me as he went to the dunny, 'Y' orright son?' A piss then a pat on the head as he went back to the bedroom. Shirley: 'Y'orta be sleeping outside with the brat.' This night, having straightened out the stretcher once more, I fell into a really good sleep and dreamed of nothing at all except maybe to memorise Frank and Merle, Merle and Frank - and then awoke at dawn realising I had mixed up Frank with Jack and had to learn it all over again. Which I did to the clacketyclack of the train as it rolled sedately through the rich flats of the river that has three names: Hawkesbury, Nepean and Wollondilly.

At Bondi Beach Public School I had reached sixth class for no other reason,

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