The Heroic Captain James Wesley Mackenzie

In the Anglican Cathedral of St George in Jerusalem there is a plaque commemorating a Captain James Wesley Mackenzie .
James was born in Belfast, but was a medical student in Cambridge when WW1 broke out. He immediately joined up. After training, he became a 2nd Lieutenant and was sent to France with the Royal Fusiliers, but although severely wounded twice, once in the Battle of Loos and again in the battle of the Somme he survived the war. He was demobilised  in 1920 while serving in Egypt.
Rather than returning to Cambridge to finish his studies,  he joined the newly formed Palestine Police in what was still officially Enemy Occupied Territory, with the rank of British Reserve Inspector, the term used for deputy assistant superintendents in those days.
The first two years of his service were spent in hedonistic Jerusalem, enjoyung the company of the fishing-fleet, debutantes who toured the middle–east and India with mothers in search of eligible  sons-in-law, commodities  in short supply in England after the carnage of WW1. Despite this, he was immensely popular with his male colleagues.
In 1922 he was posted far from sophisticated Jerusalem into the real Palestine as police district commander of upper Galilee, where bandits roamed the wild hills and most of his time was spent patrolling the countryside on horseback in charge of a team of Arab and Jewish police.

Officers of the Mandatory police in the Upper Galilee, 1922 

Seated on the left is British district Commander Mackenzie.Bechor Shitreet, who was to become the first commander of the Israeli police, stands on far right, next to a Moslem, then a Jewish and a Christian (far left) policeman.

The job of the police in Northern Palestine was not made any easier by the indignation of the  local Arabs  over the terms of the 1919 Paris Peace agreement when the Balfour Declaration had been ratified . Instead of becoming part of the Arab Caliphate promised by the British they had come under the control of a British government.
On April 15th 1922 James was leading a patrol consisting of himself, Inspector Ibrahim Effendi Oweida and six Arab Constables all on horseback about ten kilometres south of Lake Galilee. Down there in the Rift Valley so far below sea- level, the temperature,  touching on  100 F, was almost unbearable. The surrounding countryside was barren wilderness,  apart from a  jungle of reeds and low trees lining both sides of the River Jordan which, from the sound of it was in full spring flood. James realised his horse needed water, but he had to wait until he found a path trampled through the reeds before he could ride his horse down to the river.
One of his men warned him that the Jordan at this time of the year was treacherous,  but Inspector Oweida contradicted the constable  and rode his horse into the water where he  allowed it to stand still to  drink.
James  followed him but  Oweida’s horse began to struggle as it sank  into the soft mud of the river bed.  The inspector, who was unable to swim, was thrown into the water and  carried away.
James immediately jumped off his own horse into the swirling water  and succeeded in getting hold of Inspector Oweida, but handicapped by the man's weight,  found himself  unable to beat the strong current. Both men were carried away, never to be seen alive again.
When Jame’s  body was recovered, he was buried in Jerusalem, his grey British granite headstone  the first of the many to appear among the white stones in cemetery on Mt. Zion  during the following  years .
 Some good, however,  came out of his sacrifice.  Arab policemen were now respectful of the handful of British police, and the Force had no more difficulties in recruiting local  Arabs.  It was said among them, “These Inglizi will sacrifice their lives for us.”

The plaque in the cathedral reads:
“To the glory of God and in memory of Capt. James Wesley Mackenzie of the Palestine Police (late Royal Fus,) who met his death in a gallant attempt to save the life of a brother officer, Inspector Effendi Oweida, in the river Jordan nr Jisr Mejamieh on 15th April 1922. Erected by his officers and friends"
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Miss Newton of Mt Carmel and the Grand Mufti

Victorian spinsters – they were amazing, especially when they left Great Britain behind and went to live and work in lands under foreign rule, such as China, tropical Africa and the Ottoman Empire.

 In 1889 in the Muslim provinces Christendom lumped together as Palestine there were at least 41 unmarried British women qualified teachers, nurses and in one case even a doctor, working as missionaries. During the course of background research for my novels I came across the bizarre story of one of these women. You have the title above but just as appropriate might be

The Derbyshire  Woman who threw both Oil and Lighted Matches on Troubled Waters.

 ‘Comely but podgy — tall and masterful, with the hell of a temper and always having rows.’ is how, at the age of 56, Miss Frances Emily Newton is described by journalist, Owen Tweedy. By that time she had been living in Palestine for 35 years. 

The Manor House, Mickleford

The character traits, he describes, are probably the result of a childhood spent holding her own against several older step-sisters. Since they were all educated at home by governesses she would  have enjoyed no respite. As for her looks, I have not yet tracked down any portraits. 

I have one however a photo of the house in which she was born. Whatever else her childhood may have been, it was not financially impoverished. Her father was a banker; her mother had considerable private means. The family lived in the Manor House in the village of Mickleover, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, was rapidly becoming a suburb of Derby.

Mickleford Church

For the Newton sisters, however, the village still centred round the 13th century church and they became infatuated with stories of the missionaries the church supported. By the 1880's one of Frances’ sisters, Edith, had already  left home to work in Palestine with the Church Missionary Society (CMS for short.) When Frances, was 17 in 1888, she accompanied another stepsister, Constance, who had bought property in Jaffa for conversion into a medical centre that catered not only for Jaffa but also for the nearby towns of Lydda and Ramle.

Frances was so enthused by both her sisters’ work that she decided to become a missionary herself and travelled in the company of fully fledged missionaries in both Palestine and Transjordan, while learning Arabic before returning to England to train as a nurse, During her training her mother died leaving her a woman of ample independent means. She abandoned her training and returned to Palestine to work with her sister Constance in Jaffa.  She also invested in several properties in fast-developing Haifa including at least two hotels.  and also bought a magnificent home for herself on top of Mt Carmel.

The most memorable time of her Jaffa years was the winter of 1901 to 1902, when a terrible outbreak of cholera broke out in Lydda, one of the largest market centres in Palestine. Frances and her sister worked there flat out until the epidemic was over. During that time  Frances became even closer to the Arab peoples of Palestine.

In 1909 ill health forced Constance to give up work.  She bequeathed the medical centre to the CMS. Although Frances continued to support the centre financially  moved to Haifa, which was now a town of paved roads connected by rail and steamship to Europe.

A visitor describes her house there as “ very lovely, in a most beautiful situation, looking out towards the Bay of Acre and the Ladder of Tyre. The principal living room, high up in the house, is very large and not much encumbered by furniture: everything in it being either useful or beautiful, and sometimes both. Its air of spaciousness is made more so by French windows s opening onto an almost equally large veranda. Room and veranda can easily accommodate a public meeting of several hundred people.”

 Frances made good use of her new home. She took it upon herself to act as a counsellor to the Arabs of Haifa, turning the lower part of her house into a virtual lawyer's office. People with grievances, either physical, moral, or political, real or imaginary, came to seek her advice. The British vice-consul also relied on her local knowledge and so began her journey into politics.

As with  many other people, the outbreak of WW1 disrupted France’s life. The Ottomans requisitioned her house and exiled her to Egypt.

Frances volunteered to serve as a war-time police officer in Leicester Square, but instead the CMS persuaded her to represent them on the committee of the Syria and Palestine Relief Fund along with the Red Cross and the order of St John of Jerusalem. Her service as secretary led to her being honoured by St John’s as a Lady of Grace

While in Egypt she became the British High Commissioner’s unofficial adviser on Palestinian affairs and translated from Arabic top secret correspondence on both the Sykes-Picot agreement and the promises made to the Haj Husseini. It was during her time of exile that she became acquainted with T. E. Lawrence of Arabia and Prince Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca, later to become Emir of Transjordan.

On returning home to Mt Carmel in 1919, Frances found her house stripped of all its belongings. She was even more distressed , however, by the dejection of her Arab friends who feared the 1917 Balfour Declaration had handed their country over to the Jews, who according to the Arabs, were already parading arrogantly through the streets of Haifa..

 Frances’ ant-Zionist increased in correspondence with the growth of Haifa’s Jewish population. Indignant over broken promises made to the Arabs, she passed on the secrets she had learnt in Egypt to a Daily Mail journalist who used them in his newspaper articles. The material was not officially available to the British public and its appearance in the Daily Mail caused a considerable stir in parliament. The journalist later published his articles in a book ‘The Palestinian Deception 1915-1923.’

British administrators, who did not realise Frances was the source of Jeffries’ material, treated her as their advisor on Arab affairs and occasionally the district commissioner asked her to play hostess for his social functions.

Although Frances spent most of her time on Mt Carmel, she was addicted to travel, and made the 100 mile journey to Jerusalem almost every month to keep in touch with government affairs. A close friend of hers there was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Like many British ladies she was attracted by his charisma. Her ardent support for him was to change the whole course of her life.

In 1924, at his suggestion, she undertook a prolonged trip to Europe to submit a report on the situation of the Arabs in Palestine to the League of Nations and also arranged an interview with the Secretary of the permanent mandates committee in Geneva.

On returning home, she questioned a close friend, the editor of an Arab newspaper ‘El Carmel’,  on the fate of five villages in the district of Affuleh.

Shortly afterwards the , head of the Jewish Agency’s Department of Arab Affairs, Dr Chaim Kalvarisky, visited Frances appealing that she use her influence to persuade her Arab friends to co-operate with the Palestinian administration. Frances passed on to the editor of el-Carmel her reply that she could not comply with the request so long as the present unjust conditions of the Mandate prevailed. The editor reported the incident in his paper, urging all Arab intermediaries and sellers of land to follow her example.

To make her position on Zionism even clearer, when Lord Balfour paid a visit to Palestine soon afterwards,  Frances wrote a strong, anti-Zionist leader entitled “J’accuse” for another fierier Arab language paper ‘Filastin’.

For the next four years Frances concentrated on publicising the suffering of evicted fellaheen from the five villages in the Affuleh district demolished to make way for the Jewish town of Afula. She did not , however, investigate the legal aspects in detail.

August 1929 saw Arab riots resulting in the massacres of Jews in Hebron and Safad. The government appointed a commission to enquire into the causes.

The Jewish Agency employed a former British solicitor -general, Sir Boyd Merriman to protect their interests.

Frances volunteered to witness on behalf of the Arabs of the Affuleh district.

 Sir Boyd reduced her to tears by not only , revealing her factual ignorance but also by exposing her as the source behind the Daily Mail’s disclosures.. Frances’ humiliation was compounded when the English language paper, ‘The Palestine Bulletin,’ published a transcript of Sir Boyd’s cross examination. Her mortification, however, was somewhat mitigated, when a few weeks later she became Dame of Justice of the Venerable Order of Saint John.

All the same for the next few years she concentrated on safer projects such as helping the Coptic Christians with whom the Anglican Church in Palestine had a close connection and serving on the Palestine Women's Council that advised the British on matters affecting women and children

Then in 1936 came the Great Arab Rebellion, headed by the Grand Mufti. Frances was one of several British female admirers of the Mufti to become founding members of the Palestine Information Centre (PIC) based in Victoria Street, London.  The Grand Mufti persuaded Frances to become its honorary secretary., and from then on she yo-yoed back and forth between England and Palestine.

 She took her new role very seriously and wrote to the daily papers and all British MPs telling them she hoped the PIC would a centre for academic studies on the Palestine situation and provide a meeting place for Arabs and English to exchange ideas.

During the next few months, Frances, via the Centre, produced several anti-Zionist pamphlets. Helping her run the London Office was a law student cousin of the Grand Mufti. Frances approved of the young man’s attitude and thought he should be given more responsibility,

She visited Jerusalem at the beginning of 1937, during a lull in the rebellion, and suggested to the Grand Mufti that Arab members should play a greater part in the organisation of PIC.

The Mufti welcomed her proposals and held a reception in her honour. He then renamed the PIC, the Arab Office, appointed two Arab notables to head it and affiliated it to his own political party. He placed his young cousin in day to day control.

Theoretically, British members now held only advisory roles but Frances, while in London, spent almost every day at the Arab Office..

 In July 1937, The Peel Commission announced its plan for the partition of Palestine. All Arabs united to oppose it and rebelled more violently than they had before. The British administration reacted by sending the Grand Mufti and most of his party leaders into exile.

Frances was back in Haifa when the British at last put the country under martial law. She attended the first post-war military court in the history of Palestine. It was a drizzly day in November. Kingsway now lined with Palestinian police. The doorway of No 61, was strongly guarded by British Palestine Police holding the public at bay until they knew how many seats were left after journalists had poured in. Frances was one of the few non-journalists allowed into the second storey courtroom where 82 year-old Sheik Farhan es-Sa’adi was on trial.

This Sheik had taken part in the 1929 riots, in a minor rebellion of and had led the first gang to fire weapons in the 1936 revolt.  The gang had dragged three Jewish civilian passengers off an Arab bus and shot them in cold blood. Even Frances could not condone that crime nor complain about the imposed Death sentence.

She did however, oppose a military court replacing a civilian one when, in her opinion , the military had committed even more violent incidents than the Arab rebels. From then on she focused on investigating alleged British atrocities.

For that purpose early in 1938 she visited a village near Haifa, which had undergone a collective punishment after the assassination of an RAF Squadron Leader. She had profited from her humiliation of 1929 and was now meticulous in visiting the sites of incidents she intended to expose.

In sixty houses of this village she found that doors had been torn from their hinges, mirrors smashed, cupboards emptied, furniture smashed to pieces, bedding and clothing soaked in olive oil. Nine hundred sheep and goats had been rounded up by British soldiers and taken to Haifa. The owners had to buy the animals back for eight shillings a head.

She returned to England to write up her exposure.

By this time the administration in Palestine had had enough of her. They banned her from re- entering Palestine under ‘Regulation 15 of the Emergency Regulations Act of 1936, as amended by Defence regulations in 1938’. No reason was ever given.

She boasted that she was now as famous as Ze’ev Jabotinski, the right wing Zionist leader, who had received a similar ban.

She lived on in England during WW2 unshaken in her beliefs.

 Even when Amin al-Husseini went to Germany, met up with Hitler and helped create the Yugoslavian Muslim SS, she remained loyal to him.

Her ban was eventually lifted in September 1945 after Frances pleaded it was ruining her business interests. However, she never again resided in Palestine. Instead, along with other female British admirers of the Grand Mufti, she formed the Anglo-Palestine Friendship Society in England.

Unfortunately for her, prominent veterans of the Palestine administration had formed a rival anti-Zionist group, the Committee for Arab Affairs (CAA). This very masculine organisation was infuriated by the existence of an emotional pro-Mufti female group, liable to bring into disrepute other pro-Palestinian organisations. Sir Edward Spears, the founder of CAA attempted to bring her under his control by offering an amalgamation the Anglo Palestine Friendship Society and CAA with herself a vice president. She refused and published her pamphlet ‘The Truth about the Mufti,’ in which she defended her idol and blamed his collaboration with the Nazis on English atrocities. This was not a popular stance in Post-War Britain since most people thought the Mufti should be on trial at Nuremberg along with the other Nazi leaders.

The Anglo-Palestine Friendship Society now sank into oblivion. Frances concentrated on writing her Memoir. ‘Fifty Years in Palestine.’ and died of a heart attack in 1955 in her Chelsea flat, leaving 44,675 pounds and two shillings, a substantial sum at a time when newly qualified teachers received £26 a month and a semi-detached three bed roomed house could be bought for under £2000. All or most of her money went to provide medical services for Palestinian refugees in Jordan.

Margaret Penfold

The Man on the Railway Handcar

This is similar to the hancar I saw but the levers were further back and more upright. There was room in the centre for a chair on a small platform

Once in the Spring of 1939, when I was no taller than a mandrill but a deal more troublesome, I climbed to the top of an eight-foot dry-stone wall overlooking the Jaffa to Jerusalem railway line.  I could only accomplish this feat because our Greek landlord’s Arab workers had built a ramp against the wall while our family was on furlough.  The workers had stretched out on to steady their aim as they took pot shots at passing trains. 

If Dewya, our fourteen-year-old maid of all work, and my mother had known about that ramp, neither of them would have allowed me to play in the olive groves by the boundary wall.  My father knew about the ramp but, unlike my mther, he never stopped me doing anything just because it was dangerous. 

So there I was perched high above the railway line, waiting.  It was that time of the year, when winter rains were past and spring ones had not yet started.  Flies swarmed over goat poo on the narrow path between the wall and railway line.  I liked the animal smell. It reminded me I was back home in Palestine.  My bottom enjoyed the gentle heat from stones warmed by spring sunshine.  Brown lizards darted across the stones.  One ran across the back of my hand and disappeared into a crack.  I wanted it to return so kept my hand still until I had to move to scratch at biting ants. 

At last there was sound, but not the roaring and whistling of a majestic engine preparing to leave Jerusalem station, instead a low rumbling noise. An inspection handcar appeared round the curve in the line. 

Brown-capped prisoners, with chains round their ankles, worked levers attached to the sides of the trolley.  In front, two men in railway uniform examined the track.  At the rear, a pair of railway police with astrakhan kalpaks held tommy guns at the ready.  In the centre, a white-bearded man sat on a chair, his hands tied behind his back.  His suit was European, but he wore a shepherd’s white keffiyah fastened with a black iqal.  He gazed ahead, chin held high, reminding me of a picture in my bible of Jesus before Pontius Pilot.

Ten minutes after the trolley had passed, the steam engine arrived with a satisfactory ear splitting clacking.  I stood up to wave but, to my disappointment, iron shutters hid the windows of every passenger carriage.  There were even shutters on the guard’s van.  As I ran back down the ramp, I wanted to cry but didn’t, because my father would have said that was sissy.

This memory remained for twelve years uncontaminated either by photos or other people’s reminiscences, and typifies my childhood, a background of political turmoil setting off the dramas of family life.

At the time, I didn’t mention the trolley to my parents.  Normally I told Dad all about my day as soon as he came home, but in early 1939 his Post and Telegraphs job took him to Jericho everyday and I was asleep before he arrived home.  I didn’t tell my mother, because I didn’t want to get into trouble for climbing the wall. 

I did tell Dewya when I returned to the house.  She said that the British should have put the Grand Mufti on the trolley.  I remember that because  she spat on the floor after she said the word ‘Mufti’ and she had to wipe the spit up quickly before my mother found out.  I discovered much later that Dewya’s guardian uncle belonged to a political party opposed to the one led by the Grand Mufti and many people she admired had been assassinated.

It was 1950 before I mentioned the incident to my mother, I forget in what context, but she told me firmly that the British had never treated Arabic prisoners that way, so I must have made it up.  I consigned the incident to a mental cabinet, labelled ‘imaginary memories.’  There it remained until shortly after my mother had died in the 1980’s when I read a book that referred to the British placing Arab hostages on inspection trolleys during The Rebellion. 

In 1938 I assumed the government had put the notable  and  fellaheen prisoners on the trolley so Arab rebels would blow them up instead of the train.  Strange as it seems to my adult self, it didn’t occur to me to ask why railway employees and policemen should co-operate in their own sacrifice.  I now know that Arab dissidents had detonators sufficiently sophisticated to allow a light trolley to pass over them.  Line inspectors used the trolley so they could signal to the train behind if they found  signs of sabotage.  Adding a very visible, handcuffed Arabic effendi to the inspection trolley and using fellaheen prisoners to propel it was merely a piece of theatre designed to discourage urban Arabs from supporting rural zealots in their efforts to rid Palestine of both the British and the  Jews.

Once I discovered my memory had not tricked me, I asked myself why my mother had denied the existence of that hostage with such vigour.  My mother had been noted for valuing honesty above all virtues so I was certain she had not deliberately lied even though every grown-up in Jerusalem must have known about the hostage. 

However,  I had realised by then that someone so relentlessly honest as my mother needed the protection of a robust subconscious.

 Early in her life, my mother had acquired the notion that God had created the British as a special vehicle for spreading the gospel and to this purpose had endowed them with moral superiority.  In the late nineteen thirties, she would have found nothing immoral in putting an Arab civilian on humiliating public display.  Like everyone else, however, her notions of morality changed over the years.   By 1950, she regarded such behaviour as Nazi-like and cruel.  To concede that a British government was capable of such an act would have undermined her belief in God’s choice of the British as his chosen servants.

1939 Intimations of Mortality at the Jerusalem Post Office

The Main Post Office in Jerusalem

The episode, which was to have a huge impact on the way I view the world, started with my left school shoe disintegrating when I was five.  My mother reluctantly admitted that it was beyond salvation. Since my school operated a strict uniform policy and my only other shoes were a pair of scruffy sandals, before I could return to school we would have to go into town to buy another pair.

My father, a telecommunications engineer,   had left the family chequebook in his workroom in the main Jerusalem Post Office.  He gave my mother the key to the drawer where he kept it, before jumping into the P&T van that took him to Jericho,  where he was currently working on an automatic telephone exchange.

My mother was in a hurry because she was teaching that afternoon so we raced up to the Bethlehem Road but missed the always-overcrowded Arab bus coming from Bethlehem. The cleaner Jewish bus my mother preferred stood at its terminal on the other side of the level crossing. 

To my delight, and my mother’s exasperation, the gates swung shut in front of us.  I pressed my face against the wire gate as the awe-inspiring engine thundered past.  It was a freight train so there were no passengers to wave to but I was not too upset.  My father had told me that I could learn more about the economy of the country from its trains than I could from any book.  I hadn’t understood what he meant but I enjoyed counting the different types of rolling stock.  Iron wagons like giants’ wheelbarrows piled high with huge rocks; steel gaz containers shaped like enormous spectacle cases with red sea shells painted on their sides; wooden sheep trucks with narrow slits below their roofs; secretive packing cases on wheels filled with unknown treasure, and post office vans with barred windows.  In those vans, Dad said, postal workers sorted parcels and letters for streets in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Gaza.  I knew all about sorting mail.  When my mother had been seriously ill, Dad had taken me to work and left me in the Post Office sorting shed with the foreman I called Mr Parcelchief.  Mr Parcelchief taught me how to take parcels from sacks and throw them into the correct rope net trolley when he read out the name of a country.  I hoped I would see him again when we collected the chequebook.

The Egged bus was still there when the gates opened, with plenty of empty seats because no Arabs travelled on a Jewish bus in the summer of 1939.

We left the bus outside the main Post Office, in my childish opinion, the most elegant building in all Jerusalem.  The doors, set in giant sized arches, led into an enormous hall paved with white marble.  The counters of grey marble shone like mirrors.  Gleaming pillars, as tall as the ones Samson had pulled down, supported a carved ceiling from which hung chandeliers on rods twice the length of broomsticks.

My mother moved to the bank of brass boxes that glistened across an entire wall, unlocked our box, and took out letters she put in her pocket to read later.  Then, to my joy, we headed for the door in the back wall that opened into the sorting shed.

Mr Parcelchief, wearing his usual crimson fez and smooth grey checked suit with thin red lines running through it, salaamed my mother as we entered, then waved at me. 

‘Hello Miss Chiefhelper.  Ready for work?  Here’s a parcel for India.’

 ‘You don't have to tell me what’s on it now,’ I told him proudly, ‘I can read.  Sometimes I can even read double writing.’  I threw the parcel into the correct bin.  He clapped, just like in the olden days. 

My mother was already striding up the stairs to Dad's office. 

‘I'll come and help again in the summer holidays,’ I promised Mr.  Parcelchief, before running after her.

 My mother took the chequebook from Dad’s desk and looked at her watch.  ‘Gracious, half past ten already!’

To save time we left by the fire escape at the rear of the building.

At the shoe shop, the assistant x-rayed my feet before producing a pair of black school shoes. 

As we left the shop, with my shoes in a beautiful gold and green cedar of Lebanon patterned paper bag, my mother looked at her watch again, before dragging me helter-skelter to Jaffa gate.  A fire engine speeding past, bells clanging, held us up as we tried to cross the road but we managed to catch our bus just as it was pulling away.  However, it was not long before the driver came to an abrupt and unexpected halt.  Police had barred the way ahead with oil drums.

My mother looked at her watch and blew out her breath in frustration.  ‘Not another protest march!’

The driver reversed the bus and took us through unfamiliar narrow streets but ended up back on the Bethlehem Road near the station.  We jumped off at our usual stop and raced downhill so my mother wouldn’t be late for work.

Half way up our drive, Dewya, our maid-servant came running to meet us, holding out a slip of paper. 

‘Mrs Foster, Mrs Foster, Mr.  Foster rang.  He says to call him straight away on this number.  It's very urgent.’

My mother shot ahead.  When I reached the house, my mother was standing in the hall with the phone pressed to her ear.  The one-sided conversation I overheard went something like this.

 ‘What?’ Pause  ‘Oh no!  What time did it happen?’  - pause, ‘We were in the shoe shop then.’  pause – ‘We went out by the back way.’  A much longer pause – ‘Oh no! .’  She sank down on the hall chair - ‘All right then.  I'll expect you when I see you.’  She put the phone down and placed her hands over her eyes.

I went closer.  ‘What's happened?’

My mother looked down at me and held my hand even though we weren’t crossing a road.  ‘A parcel bomb.  It blew up in the Post Office.’

That sounded interesting.  ‘Were all the parcels blown up?’

‘Not just the parcels, I'm afraid.’

 I felt my stomach go funny then.  I didn't want to know any more.  I pulled my hand out of my mother’s and went into the kitchen to ask Dewya if I could help lay the table.

Dad came home even later than usual.  I crept down stairs in my pyjamas and peeped round the door of the dining room.  He was spreading small photographs round his dinner plate. 

My mother saw me.  ‘Back to bed, Peggy.’

 ‘No,’ Dad waved a hand, ‘Better to let her look than have her imagining things.  Peggy, these are photos the police took.’

 I forced myself to walk over to the table and peer down at the photos.  Lumps of concrete and pieces of jagged marble covered the Post Office's white floor.  Metal rods spilt out of pillars stripped to their concrete insides, but I couldn’t see any bits of body.  A question popped out of my mouth although I didn't really want it answered.  ‘Who was hurt?’

 ‘They took lots of people to hospital.’  Dad clenched his fists.  ‘Most of them are going to be all right.  One person though, the one who was holding the bomb when it went off, took the full blast. He’s dead, I am afraid.’

‘It could have been Peggy,’ my mother muttered, ‘She was holding a parcel only a few minutes earlier.’

I ran out of the room then without waiting for my father to finish answering my question.  I felt as if I was deep inside my body,  buried so my fleshy outer part could get along without me.

My body crept back into the lounge. It kissed my mother and  father good-night.  I sensed it was smiling at them.  It waited in front of my mother. Hidden inside my body, I wanted her to pick me up, put me on her lap, and cuddle me but she didn’t.

‘Thank goodness she is still too young to understand,’ I heard her say as my body left the room again.

My body and I got together again after I had climbed back into bed, and I knew it had never really left me.  As I lay there, I couldn’t stop thinking of what had happened to a dead dog I had watched decompose day after day when we lived on Mt Carmel and realised that that must happen to most people too.  All that talk about going to heaven was only for special people like my parents.  The blown-up bits of Mr Parcelchief’s body were going to rot and stink like the dog, because he hadn’t been SAVED and one day mine would too because I wasn’t converted and I would be inside my rotting body unable to escape.

I didn’t talk about the bombing again with my parents, and my father didn’t take me to work that summer holiday so it was only when I read a list of pre-war  Irgun attacks a few days ago  that I realised  it wasn’t my friend, the foreman of the parcel department, who had died, but an army officer who had been killed while attempting to defuse  the parcel bomb.

  

Lost Soul

I first bought a book by Malika Gandhi because the central theme of the book concerned the partition of the Indian sub-continent and all the horrors that went with it. That Partition has always interested me because I was involved with another partition that  that followed it - the partition of Palestine in 1948.
I can never understand why the UN voted for the Partition of Palestine after they had seen the tragic consequences  in India and had been warned by the British that partition was not a option  for a country the size of Wales with water resources confined to  particular areas meaning water had to be piped from afar to irrigate the most fertile soils -  but enough of my rant!  I enjoyed the book of Malika;s that I had bought with its mix of history, magical realism and romance. so was pleased to find myself sitting next to Malika in a writers meet-up  in the Midlands and found her an interesting personality.
When she ask me and several others on facebook  to put the promotion of her latest book on my blog I was only too ready to do so.
Unfortunately I didn't realise the transitory nature of the blog tour she was taking part in and when her material arrived on the 15th I set it aside until the worst of a personal crisis I was going through was over. However,  an email on my computer  a few minutes ago alerted me to the fact that this is the final day of her blog tour,  so I've set aside my work and hope this hasn't been composed in too much haste.If you're quick you'll still be in time to buy and claim your freebie
Here is what Malika has sent me.

 by Malika Gandhi

A story of a spirit who has been alone for over a hundred years, who suffers her dead mother’s wrath. Will she ever be forgiven?

.....

When a Soul begins to ask questions, she expects answers. 
Aanchal wanders the lonely haveli (Indian mansion) at night. The villagers become aware of a presence and fear a girl never seen in their midst. 
Who is she and where did she come from? Who turns the lights on in the old ruin every night? 

Aanchal is not afraid of the villagers who want her banished, but she is afraid of her mother's yearly visit from the Other Side. Aanchal wants to be forgiven but will she have to pay a price before she is granted her wish? 

When Kunaal arrives with Jennifer, Aanchal sees the chance to right what went wrong, but she will need help. Will her friends help her? Will her mother's spirit forgive her? Will she finally be ready to cross over? 

Lost Soul - a harrowing tale of expectations and long-awaited hope. 

Free 15-17^th July 2015 – don’t miss out!

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Jim's escape from a Bulgarian Prison

One reader has asked me how Jim Shepard escaped from prison in Bulgaria.  I originally had Addy describe it when she is talking about Jim close to the beginning of the novel, 'Patsy'. I deleted it, however,  as I felt I was trying the reader's patience a little too far with Addy's long speech. I know Addy is voluble, but there are limits. Anyway if any reader wants to know here is the answer.

 Jim was in a rural prison near the mountainous border with Greece. He had been able to work out roughly where he were after the  the Bulgarians had taken him off the train and driven him away in a car, because he knew the Germans always kept an exact distance between telegraph poles.He had been able to see out of the car's front window although the Bulgarians had curtained off all the other windows. 

Much to Addy's annoyance Jim always kept  nails , screws and nuts in his jacket pockets.  In those days men had two sections to their pockets, the large one big enough for their hands and a small one for coins. When the car passed a telephone pole Jim put a nail in the small pocket, when they turned a corner he put in a nut.

Jim was kept in a locked room  that led off from the guard's room while the Bulgarian guards waited for the German interrogators to collect him.

The guards played cards and drank local wine while on duty. One day in a rush to get back to the card game one of the guards left the room unlocked after delivering a meal.  Jim waited until the guards were engrossed in a fierce argument over a card game and slipped round the back of the room and out of the open outside door-(presumably the guards wanted warning to clear up and look busy before  the Germans entered the building). 

It was only a short distance to the Greek border. Once in Greece, Jim cadged lifts with  Greek soldiers and made his way to Athens where he caught the last convoy out before the Germans took over.

WW1 Crossing the sinai and the Negev

I can't get away from WW1 in the Middle East this week.  Another blog about a soldier of the the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.

Infantry crossing the Sinai on the wire road

The veteran of hell-hole Gallipoli marches with his unit along the mesh wire road unrolling across the Sinai towards Ottoman territory.  

Building the railway at Al-Arish

Beneath a relentless sun,  he takes his turn  to guard the  Egyptian Labour force creating the  railway  that slowly chases the temporary road.  Rapidly drying sweat on his face proves a magnet for flies.

A Camel Convoy being loaded.

  He views with thirsty eyes a  thousand-strong convoy of camels plodding past,  bearing  water, food, equipment, iron rails and wooden sleepers to the camp he’d be heading for when night stopped work.

German aircraft over the Negev 1916

The sound of enemy aircraft has him dropping to ground, curling up, his heels digging into his backside, his head beneath his chest. The bombs still find him. His body lies fragmented,  inextricably mixed  with those of  Egyptian labourers.

Although his unrecognisable body may be buried in an unmarked common grave, this soldier  has  his name engraved in stone in his native village and is remembered in his regiment’s records.

The civilian Egyptian labourers, however,who literally paved the way for the Allies eventual victory,  remain  forgotten by all.

Inspired by Siobhan Logan's workshop, organised by Writing East Midlands,