Rosa. Ros Collins
to wave goodbye.
Five weeks it took, because the Suez Canal was still closed. They sat on the deck, typed blue airmails on Al’s portable Olympia and posted them at Majorca, Cape Town and Fremantle, which, Rosa wrote, was the most desolate place she’d ever seen.
As the ship steamed into Port Phillip Bay towards Melbourne’s Station Pier, Al belatedly offered a few pointers to Australian life: ‘See there, that’s the Luna Park fun fair, and that’s the Palais Theatre. You’ll like it, Rosa, St Kilda’s by the beach, we can go swimming. And we can go on picnics, take the Lambretta to visit the Dandenongs.’
Rosa assumed the Dandenongs were ‘Mr and Mrs’, another of these weird Australian names, didn’t sound like a Jewish family; Al hadn’t mentioned mountains so how was she to know?
‘We have the ABC, like the BBC, and we’ll only read The Age newspaper.’ Al rushed into a cultural rundown of Melbourne, realising, perhaps for the first time, that his wife would have to adjust to great changes.
And so Rosa came to Australia. She stood on St Kilda Beach in her swimsuit (Debenham’s of Oxford Street) staring out at the water, imagining Britain rather than Antarctica over the horizon – her geography was poor. And in the blazing heat of that first summer, she thought of London at Christmas time, with chestnuts roasting in the streets, mandarins in silver paper at the greengrocers and festive decorations in Regent Street. She rode on the back of the Lambretta through the beachside suburbs, through Chelsea, Sandringham and Brighton, and wept at the familiar names in the unfamiliar land.
2
THE HOPE CHEST
The long wooden box was on the upstairs landing of the two-up, two-down terrace house in suburban London, and Sadie reserved it for ‘special’ items such as hand-crocheted doilies or lace tablecloths. And mementos. It was different from the everyday airing cupboard over the hot water tank in Rosa’s room, where bedding, knickers and liberty bodices were rotationally dried almost to scorching point. Americans used the term ‘glory box’ or ‘hope chest’; in Britain, women referred more prosaically to their ‘bottom drawer’. It was a young woman’s treasure box, and the place where she collected items in anticipation of her eventual marriage. Sadie’s box didn’t have a name. It sat there by the banisters in all its mystery, secretive in a way with its scent a mix of lavender, furniture polish and cedar. Rosa never wondered at its provenance, at least not until she herself was over eighty.
‘Hold the lid open for me, will you,’ said Sadie as she knelt before the box rearranging the contents, and Rosa, bored as only a fourteen-year-old could be, did as she was asked.
‘What’s in that little packet?’ she enquired, although she really wasn’t much interested.
‘My wedding shoes,’ replied Sadie, and held out a tiny pair of white satin t-bars, size four.
‘And what’s in the envelope?’
‘My school certificates,’ said her mother, half shyly, half proudly.
‘And the album, whose pictures are those?’
‘Mine,’ replied Sadie.
The gulf between the two was unbridgeable. Rosa would never attempt to understand her mother until very late in life when she realised, with surprise, that far from being just Solly’s girl, the daughter of Solly Fox, which was the way she always wanted to be known, Rosa really owes much of her personality and temperament to Sadie.
It was wartime, 1944, and life was difficult enough: the Germans were now sending rockets, soldiers were still dying in Europe, food shortages hadn’t eased and everyone was looking threadbare in clothes that had been ‘turned’ several times to hide the worn bits. Sadie didn’t need a ‘difficult’ daughter, an incomprehensible young woman, so different from other girls in the community.
‘Why don’t you join the club for young people at the shul? They’re having a social this weekend, you’ll meet people, make friends.’
‘Boring, and anyway I’m going to the Old Vic with a friend from school. Laurence Olivier’s doing Oedipus.’
Sadie refrained from saying ‘Oedipus, shmedipus’. She was too polite, but she did purse her lips in exasperation.
‘You never go to anything Jewish, you’ve no feeling for yidishkayt. You are an apikoros, an unbeliever!’
‘Oh, come on, Mum, it’s enough I went to Hebrew classes. You know I don’t like all that stuff, I just don’t fit in.’
She’ll never marry, thought Sadie, I’ll never be a grandmother. But Rosa was to prove her wrong.
Al’s ‘Tilbury speech’ on the SS Stratheden was heartfelt. He wanted peace and harmony between his new wife and her parents, particularly her mother, and that’s how it turned out over the years, harmonious but rather bland and, inevitably, because of distance, lacking intimacy. However, there were eventually three Australian grandsons whose exploits – camping, fishing, surfing – entranced their lonely grandparents in far away London. Blue airmail letters told of out-of-date events, and the phone conversations, fuzzy and indistinct, were stilted:
‘How are you both?’ Rosa asked her father.
‘Oh, we’re alright. Went to the doctor last week because Mum got a cold, the weather here is really chilly, she’s much better now.’
‘That’s good. So what else is news?’
‘Nothing much. We see the aunties every week for Shabbes lunch. I can still find my way along the North Circular Road but the new overpasses and underpasses sometimes confuse me.’ Solly paused, needing to control the longing. ‘And so, how are the boys?’
‘Oh, you know, school. We had sports day and they all ran races. Soon be summer holidays here, we might take the caravan away for a trip, so we’ll send you photos.’
‘Sounds nice.’ Solly’s tone was wistful. ‘Mum and I might go on a coach tour to Portugal.’
Not once in Australia, even in childbirth, did Rosa call out for Sadie. When times were hard, the children sick and money short, she never longed for her mother to miraculously appear with chicken soup and sympathy, as in the punchline of some American-Jewish joke; the ability to comfort each other was something beyond the capabilities of either of them. One would have to conclude, sadly, that it was an unsuccessful Jewish mother-daughter relationship.
But Rosa is older now and has chosen to believe that somehow she will be able to put things right. She’s a great ‘fixer’, is Rosa, and will never accept that ‘nothing can be changed’. The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Rosa has no idea what Stephen Hawking meant but is optimistically convinced that undreamed of ‘possibilities’ lie ahead for her somewhere at some unspecified time ... maybe redemption.
In the meantime, she unpicks Sadie’s life, thread by thread; just a handful of phrases, snatches of conversations that she remembers from long ago. Rosa wants to be sensitive while unpacking and delicately – lovingly – teasing out the strands of Sadie’s history.
She was born in December 1893, but her mother Eva registered the birth in January 1894. It’s a big stretch, Melbourne 2017, back more than a century, and Rosa feels forensic when analysing the wisps of