Rosa. Ros Collins
Her school reports said she worried too much, and her hazel eyes had a questioning look as though she was searching for something, a direction, a path, maybe an escape.
Al managed a rather wan smile. It was all getting away from him; he’d lost control and felt out of his depth. Less than a month before he’d been ready to sign on as a deck hand on a merchant ship, just to get home to Melbourne for a job his employers would not hold for much longer. He would have gone ahead with it, but the officer who interviewed him suggested that such a nice boy might like to share his cabin, and Al fled.
London was a cruel, hard city, and the only work he could find was as a mail sorter at Victoria Station. The West Indian crew were kind enough. They showed him how to examine the bags of Christmas mail and identify those gifts that came in bottles: if the sacks were carefully positioned on the railway tracks, the train wheels would neatly slice through the tops and in next to no time flat there was whisky to ‘warm the cockles’.
The Rosa situation had developed out of hunger. She lived around the corner from Al, sharing a flat with a school friend, and he would ‘drop in’ just around meal times. They were all part of the same crowd: ex-pat Australians, most of them post-graduate students, and a handful of locals like Rosa. Some had accommodation at Hillel, the residential college for Jewish students at the University of London, but others lived in an old Edwardian three-storey house in Swiss Cottage, on the fringe of bohemian Hampstead. It was divided up into bed-sitters, and in addition to the students, was home to a motley collection of characters: the photographer who went to Everest with Hillary, the first black musician to be featured on the BBC, a German-Jewish refugee, a Danish pianist – and Al. He and Rosa had met there at a party. Later she said that her mind was made up that night, and she told her friend, ‘He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to marry that man.’
And so, as well as the visits to Uncle Will, Aunt Dora and countless other relatives, Al was now struggling to adjust to a situation that was becoming very unmanageable: prospective in-laws who seemed charming, an extended family who didn’t know what to make of him, no money, a wedding that terrified him and a Lambretta motor scooter with ‘attitude’. And there was Rosa.
He had no idea why she was marrying him. He remembered the afternoon when she accepted his invitation to move out of her flat and share his bed-sit in the old house.
‘Come for afternoon tea,’ he’d said, very carefully distinguishing between ‘tea’, ‘dinner’, ‘supper’, ‘high tea’ and all the variations that had tripped him up in Britain. Not much furniture in his room, so he used a packing crate, on top of which he placed an embroidered tray cloth that he’d bought from a thrift shop.
‘Wanted to get you lamingtons but they don’t sell them here,’ he told her.
‘I don’t think I know what they are, but scones are just fine,’ she said.
And so began their lives together. It was winter 1956, and very cold. From the dormer window of his attic room they looked out over the snow-covered roofs of Hampstead and huddled back under thin grey army blankets. They had a map of the world and planned a road trip on the Lambretta that somehow would end up in Australia. They never actually mentioned marriage, but just assumed a suburban life in Melbourne forever, with four children and a dog – an Australian fantasy that in the 1950s might still come true.
Rosa went to work in a black suit with a cinched waist – a copy of a Dior ‘New Look’ design – and black patent high heels; she was a trainee buyer for Marks and Spencer in their Baker Street head office. Al, who wore corduroy pants and hiking boots, rode up on the Lambretta to meet her one afternoon with a cable from his Melbourne employers: Return as soon as possible, cannot hold position for you after April.
‘We must leave immediately,’ he said.
‘If we are to leave, then I think my parents would be happier if we got married first,’ replied Rosa; and Al accepted her proposal, as he was to accept all her proposals for the next fifty-one years.
‘Chalk and cheese’ was how their friends described them. Rosa had grown up an only child, and on one side the only grandchild. Within their modest means, her family indulged her. Her parents, Sadie and Solly Fox, once they realised there would be no more children, treated her with kid gloves and were nervous in case they offended her. When she left home unwed to go and live in cosmopolitan Hampstead, it was traumatic for all of them.
‘You’re breaking your mother’s heart,’ said Solly.
‘You’re breaking your father’s heart,’ said Sadie.
‘But I’ll come home for Shabbes every week,’ said Rosa.
It was an impasse for her. Jewish community life, dances and clubs didn’t attract her; she felt awkward, out of place. She wasn’t daring enough to be a real bohemian. To ‘marry out’ was a step too far, and Rosa thought she’d end up just having ‘affairs’ – relationships about which her parents would have no knowledge. The Australian Jewish students in London amazed her with their casual ways, so different from the stuffy Brits. Choosing Al was the easiest thing in the world. She didn’t care about money or prestige, she’d be perfectly happy riding on the back of the motor scooter. They bought the engagement ring in an antique shop after the wedding, and it didn’t bother her at all that it wasn’t a diamond.
Al’s mother had died at his birth, and his father, known derisively as ‘marrying Sam’ on account of his four wives, was a foolish man. Years later Al wrote in his autobiography, Alva’s Boy: ‘I invest in him my entire stock of misery.’ And it was indeed misery in 1930s Bondi, Sydney: children’s homes, foster care, an abusive stepmother and finally a Jewish orphanage, which he once remarked, ‘saved me from the gutter’. But in 1956, he wasn’t very communicative about his background, in fact quite wary, for he’d been rejected by many a protective Jewish mother seeking a suitable match for a daughter.
Strangely, Rosa didn’t seem very curious about his past, and Sadie and Solly were equally unperturbed. Just for the sake of it, Solly did attempt the so young man, you want to marry my daughter, do you? conversation, but he already knew in his heart that the union would work out. Even if it didn’t, there was no crossing Rosa.
‘We’re going shopping,’ said Sadie one Saturday afternoon, so they went out and left Solly and Al facing each other by the fire to ‘have a little talk’.
‘You alright?’ asked Solly.
‘Well, to be honest, not really. Haven’t any money to pay my passage home to Melbourne. Rosa will be a “ten-pound Pom”, a subsidised migrant, but I’m full fare.’
‘What about your return ticket, didn’t you expect to go back?’
‘Mm, well, you see, I cashed it in on the way here when the boat docked at Naples so I could buy the Lambretta. Thought I’d find work in London and be able to save up my fare home.’
‘Do you have a job in Melbourne?’
‘Yeah, I’m the advertising manager for a chain of retail shops. Couple of Jewish brothers, ‘reffos’ from Poland; they sell fashion and household stuff like towels and tablecloths and they’ve been very kind to me. Kept the job open so I could take a year off.’
‘For a holiday?’
Al did a quick think and decided it was not the time to tell Solly – or anyone for that matter – that he’d broken off an engagement to a perfectly nice Jewish girl and left Melbourne in a hurry. It was a mistake; he’d been set up by friends, and it took all his courage to tell the young woman’s father that it wasn’t going to work, that they’d both be unhappy. Fathers and their daughters were something of a mystery; he wondered fleetingly if he’d ever be responsible for bringing up a little girl. He didn’t really know much about families at all