The war still seemed at a distance from me. My father, working shifts at the munitions factory, was as remote as the ships that sailed past Bondi Beach. When they cleared Sydney, they made a sharp turn south, continued on their voyage and for a while were only a few miles offshore. Sam had a pair of ancient binoculars, the deteriorating lenses barely able to bring the vessels close enough for me to see the crew. From my crevice in the rocks of Ben Buckler on the North Bondi headland, I kept my eye on them. Their names were supposed to be obliterated for safety's sake but, curiously, they kept the shipping companies' distinctive markings on the funnels. I had a booklet listing the various shipping lines so I could identify them. I dare say so could the enemy; German and Japanese submarines lay in wait for them.
Perhaps it was sheer bravado that caused a Japanese submarine in June 1942 to attempt to shell the Sydney Harbour Bridge from nine miles out to sea. Ten shells were fired in four minutes, most of them landing in the eastern suburbs where the Jewish refugees had settled. Quite a few took fright. Their suitcases, evidence of their caution and of their previous flights from war, were hauled down from the tops of wardrobes. One shell lobbed into the very heart of Bondi and stuck in a crossroads, looking ludicrously like a tumescent phallus.
My association with Mrs Gelman continued. As her friend 'Eln' I still helped her with greengroceries, feeling quite at home in her flat, which she refused to leave. Even I could tell that I was a substitute for her dead grandson Louis; she questioned me with a charming lack of reserve which, couched in her weird syntax, was hard to resist. I even told her of my father's visit to the risque cinema.
'Freud,' she murmured and shook her head. 'You are still a child, you do not understand zese things.'
'Yes I do,' I replied through a mouth stuffed with strudel and cream. 'I read about it in Havelock Ellis. It's because of his dicky - or something,' I finished lamely.
Mrs Gelman then gave me the first kiss I had ever had from an adult who was not a relative. She gently hauled me to my feet and pressed her lips to my cheek at the same time holding me to her chest. She brought Louis's photo to the table and propped it up in front of me. She even tried to brush my unruly hair in the style of the photo. Things were going too quickly for me. I freed myself from her embrace. 'That apple cake was grouse,' I told her.
'Voss is grouse?'
'Beaut.'
'Ach, Eln, I think I speak better English than you.' She dabbed at my lips with her handkerchief. I wanted to pull away but there it was, a perfume on it that took me back. Was it Bella? Which of my father's flames? Mrs Gelman stood with her hands on her hips in a pose I recognised as similar to Sam's when he was about to make one of his portentous pronouncements. My eyes roamed around the living room, which over the past few months had become familiar to me - the glass- fronted china cabinet nearly to ceiling height and the pieces carefully spaced out to convey the impression that there was more than there actually was. In fact, it was all that the woman had salvaged from her European home. On earlier occasions, I had paused in wonder at the many photographs that covered the walls of this compact flat and seemed to me to bring the walls in closer.
But in the instant that Mrs Gelman had put her arms around me, the photos took on a new meaning.
She now took my hand and led me down the hall, festooned with pictures of stern men and women dressed up to the nines, the women in fussy billowing dresses, the men looking very much like those I remembered from illustrations that accompanied Kipling's yarns of the British lords in India - stony-faced superiority! Except, she told me to my juvenile amazement, they were German! We entered a small bedroom. It was disturbingly neat, not a cover, not a pillow, not a curtain that had not been considered and placed with precision; even a towel on a delicate little stand.
And there, framed in heavy silver, was Louis, alone, immobile and isolated in time. Not a boy for charging through the waves rolling onto Bondi Beach - the poor bugger!
My hand in Mrs Gelman's went cold and clammy. I actually had to use my other hand to break her grip. Once I was freed from her clasp, she resorted to putting her arm around my shoulder.
'What you think, Eln, is this not a beautiful room? I keep it so . . .'
'Look, Mrs Gelman, I got to go.'
'I know you have not to go anywhere, Eln.' Her hand firmed on my shoulder. 'You have nowhere to go. Is this not so? Back to sleeping outside a toilet? Running around the streets of Bondi like a...' She searched for a word. 'Like a gornisht ' a nothing, a nobody. What a life is this for a Jewish boy?'
Too late, I realised I had confided too much of my life to this woman. Too late the penny dropped. I was to become Louis, to be fattened up on strudel, maybe even dressed like the frozen-in-time grandson, dead and lying in a grave in some unpronounceable town in Germany. No bloody fear, not for all the strudel - and cream - in the world. Sorry, Mrs Gelman, you can get someone else to (what was the word she used?) shlep your vegies. 'Eln' is bailing out, back to the dunny sleep- out. Once again I'd be Alan, the streetsmart tearaway whose shelter would not be Louis's mausoleum of a bedroom but a crevice in the rock around Ben Buckler where the waves rolled in but couldn't get me, where I could roast stolen potatoes in the ashes of the driftwood and where I could read anything I bloody well liked. Not Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or whatever else on Mrs Gelman's shelves. After all, didn't I pick it all up from diving into Havelock Ellis?
.... ....
Out in the street, the sun seemed to shine with a greater intensity and warmth. Its rays curled around my shoulders as I set off in a steady lope down Bondi Road, hardly breaking my stride to swipe a shiny red apple from outside Angelo's. At the lending library I returned a book, The Three Musketeers. In our gang hierarchy I had moved up a rung. (By default, the Greek Petros had dropped out, having to work day and night in his parents' fish shop.) I was now number three! Also, I kidded myself, because I could run like the wind. When we met, I was bursting to tell Charlie and Tom which one of these blokes they could be. I chose Aramis, for no other reason than that it was not so different from Alan. It just goes to show, a little knowledge can bugger things up. Hardly had I put the plan to Charlie and Tom than they turned on me as a bloody knowall with his nose always stuck in a book. My defence was that I had learnt to say fuck with nervous surety.
'You're a bunch of fuckin' stupid bastards,' I yelled.
'Say that again and we'll beat the bejesus out of you.'
Pretty funny, I thought, for a Jewboy, as they got me down on the ground and applied a crude variation of the Indian Death Lock wrestling grip they copied from Big Chief Little Wolf who gave demonstrations at the Bondi Pavilion. The trouble was, in all my reading I could not truthfully name one Aussie hero figure. Charlie and Tom had never heard of Athos and Porthos but automatically had them tagged as poofters, like all Frenchies. Henry Lawson's heroes were a sad, defeatist lot; Adam Lindsay Gordon had some daredevil horsemen, but they had no place in Bondi. I recognised this - no use putting them up as examples.
Tom applied the Chinese burn to my wrist but it didn't really hurt me. Reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that my days with this gang were over. Alan Alva Collins was destined to be a loner. There was a measure of relief in this. I had survived as an outsider at 48 Francis Street. I reviewed my short existence; of all those whose lives I had touched, truly, it was only Uncle Harry who had shown an undemanding empathy for me. Short of dying, I knew he would always be there for me. He and Havelock Ellis - what an incongruous pair to have an influence on a child. What if David Copperfield and Oliver Twist had been lucky enough, as I was, to have those two for help? At least I never blacked boots or washed pickle bottles for a few bob - I cheated death by hanging off moving trams, planted seed potatoes (eyes upwards!), pasted blackout paper - yet, I always had my freedom.
I wandered off down Campbell Parade, past the seedy tattoo shops, soaking in the heady mixture of sea air, dim sims and hamburgers but withal gulping in the breath of freedom. I might be Mrs Gelman's gornisht running wild but I did not care. Only once that I can recall did I joyfully share this freedom and it came about in a most unexpected way.
.... ...
I still occasionally went to the small synagogue conducted at the Bondi Road School of Arts. Once in a while, I felt a twitch on a thread that brought me back to my Jewishness. After the Japanese shells lobbed in Bondi, the understandably nervous Jewish refugees vacated their flats and fled inland. Some made the peculiar decision to resettle on the north side of the inner harbour - right alongside huge petrol storage tanks!
The empty flats were soon filled by US servicemen - officers in their chocolate and beige uniforms wore their raffish caps and had rows of ribbons before they had even seen combat. One Saturday morning, to my astonishment, an American serviceman took a place in the front pew of our ever-so-modest synagogue. Through his steel rimmed GI spectacles he studied the prayer book and, on receiving a call-up to the Torah, recited the blessings in accents straight out of a motion picture. Softly I mimicked his speech, rolling the 'r's in boruch until I sounded like Mickey Rooney.
After the service he asked me about Bondi Beach. Could I show him around? Of course he would pay me. His name was Hyram something. I took in his immaculate uniform. Even his tallit was knife-edged and crisp with all the fringes intact.
'You can't go to the beach like that,' I told him. He patted my shoulder. 'Don't worry, kid,' he said in a voice a dead ringer for Spencer Tracy in Boys Town. All morning our aged rabbi had been droning on. How I envied the Catholics with their worldly priests who could throw a ball and probably be just as at home in the surf.
A taxi! Hyram hailed a taxi, deftly opened the door and handed me in. It stank of cigarettes and sick; its velvety seats were stained. It was my first taxi ride ever. We set off down Bondi Road but after a block or so detoured into side streets. I whispered to Hyram under my hand in my best gangster style, 'He's takin' us for a ride, mister.' The Yank leaned over and squeezed the back of the driver's neck. 'My buddy here says you're goin' the long way round.' Angrily the cab swung to the right and in a moment was back on the main road. Stretched before us was the glistening expanse of ocean. Hyram stuck his head out the window and sniffed the air like a dog.
We walked together to the top of the grassy slope that fringed the beach. Hyram took off his cap and swore. 'Gaad, man, what the fuck is goin' on here?' The great crescent of sand was wreathed in barbed wire from one end to the other. Coils of the horrid stuff were a hideous garland meant to deter a Japanese landing. It may well have achieved this objective if put to the test. It was not impervious to boys and late-night fishermen: hardly had the army sappers gone than we had found a path through the wire that zig-zagged until we could reach the surf. Hyram, with me now in command, took off his shoes, socks and trousers to reveal khaki underpants, not so different from bathing shorts. He followed close behind me until we reached the water's edge. I grabbed his hand and together we plunged into the surf as though we had been mates for years.
At dusk we left the beach. I never saw him again. He tried to force a five-pound note on me but this day could not be bought. I felt a new sense of pride in myself. Hyram was the first of many US servicemen I piloted through the wire so they could write home and say they had surfed at Bondi. Yes, they paid me and I did not knock the money back. I was embarrassed for a while, but not enough to prevent me from steering them to a bloke called Uncle Siddy who sold them cold tea in whisky bottles with a nice shiny foil on the top - hard to see at night! My profit went to buy a bicycle that I rode to see a barmitzvah at the impressive Central Synagogue in Grosvenor Street, Bondi Junction. When I came out the bike had been stolen. So much for my illicit trading.