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,  

Soldiering with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force

GAZA 1917

The soldier above was just one of a vast army that brought about victory for the British Commonwealth against the Turkish Ottoman Empire  in WW1.  The soldier's name was Arthur Llewelyn Jones of the Royal Army Medical Corps; the army’s name the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. 

  

By the time of the third battle of Gaza, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was over 35 000, strong encompassing  divisions from all over the commonwealth. This large  army's  name, however, carried little significance for the British public.  Even after they lost 7000 men in their second attempt to capture Gaza   the British press reported the battle as a minor skirmish.  

After that failed second attempt both sides dug in for the long, hot Palestinian summer, while they waited for reinforcements

.

 Most people seem to know about trench warfare in France and Belgium but few have heard of the  Egyptian Expedition's trenches and dugouts. Their dugouts were cave-like holes in the sandstone side of the wadi Ghazzeh.  Their enemies, the Turks had dug themselves into  similar dugouts on the other side of the wadi.  

While over in in France British and German trenches were so close the occupants could throw stones at each other, in Palestine, even at the narrowest point of the wadi, at least 800 yards separated British from Turks.  As the wadi widened while meandering  inland the British cavalry on the eastern  flank were no less than ten miles from the enemy.  

The wadi Ghazzeh  not only marked the boundary between British and Turks  but also separated cultivated land from wilderness.  When Arthur stood on the cliff top above his dugout his eyes rested on  fertile fields and orchards surrounding the then beautiful city of Gaza but, on his side of the wadi there was only uncultivated wilderness.   This wilderness was not the sandy desert of the Sahara but undulating stony ground dotted with plants that could live through summer drought. True, there were sand dunes where land approached sea, but they were more an extension of the beach than desert. Camels plodded through this wilderness from the railhead now 14 miles to their rear, to bring food and ammunition.  Arthur Llewelyn Jones, along with the other foot soldiers, had also marched all the way from the Suez Canal across that wilderness on the wire road laid down for infantry use by the Royal Engineers. While marching he had  helped guard the native labourers working on the Sinai Military Railway that brought  rations from Egypt.

 Lack of water became the British  army's main problem that summer. When the soldiers had first dug in, a winter river  had flowed through the wadi.  It, however, rapidly dried up and the infantry  had to spend their days drilling wells in the wadi bed.  The water they found proved insufficient for the cavalry sections  so squads were given the task of guarding, against aerial attacks,  25 000 camels padding along  the wire road from the railhead each carrying two 15 gallon containers,  When the camels arrived at the wad, the cavalry emptied the water into natural indentations lined with tarpaulin.  

So the army sat out the summer, entertaining  themselves with night forays on the enemy until, at the beginning of November, they fought and won the decisive battle that opened the way to Jerusalem,  Damascus  Alleppo and the Armistice of Mudros.

Arthur Llewelyn Jones, however was not there to witness the victory.  He was killed on 7^th May 1917. A Turkish shell landed directly on his dugout.

D-Day elsewhere

British  troops examine a knocked-out German StuG III assault gun near Cassino, Italy, 18 May 1944.

June 6^th 1944 has been well and truly commemmorated as D-Day in Normandy this year but  now media attention has faded it is appropriate to remember that other events vital to the ending of the war in Europe were taking place in Italy..

Eleven months prior to D-Day a successful invasion of Sicily had forced the Axis to undertake their own Dunkirk-type operation from Sicily to mainland Italy. By Autumn the Allies had landed three armies on the mainland. 

By November Special Ops(M), which employed the main character in my novel, Patsy, were up and running in Bari, a sea-side town on the East coast facing Yugoslavia..

 Soon after Patsy arrived in Bari the Italians surrendered although the Germans continue to occupy northern Italy. .  By D-Day the allies had taken Rome and were  pushing their way north towards the Germans' last defensive line.

Mediterranean Spring

Turkish Poppies

In  April  I was fortunate enough to enjoye a week’s coach tour of Turkey’s Lycian coast and rugged mountains. The area is renowned for its ancient monuments so we spent  much of our time tramping round ancient ruins in various stages of restoration. Although fascinated by these classical and Christian sites I was even more enthralled by the botanical features of a Mediterranean spring. Of all the many  wild flowers in bloom that month the blood-red poppy was the most conspicuous.

It has always puzzled me why so many Israelis confuse their sturdy , flamboyant Judaean anemones with poppies. The poppies, I remember seeing  in Palestine  were more like the fragile vermillion poppies  we have in Britain. On the Lycian coast , however, we saw poppies which, unless viewed at close range, could easily be mistaken for the anemones  that turned the hillsides round Jerusalem crimson each spring.

Anemones in \israel photographed bt Etan J Tal

 Another plant, a small tree, covered in purple sweet pea shaped flowers, caught the eye of everyone on the coach. It is known as the Judas tree from the legend that this was the tree from which the traitor apostle Judas hanged himself.

Although the crimson anemones play a starring role in my emotional recollections childhood, strangely the Judas tree  in all its springtime glory does not feature in any childhood memory.  All I recall  is my father , in the height of arid summer, pointing at an insignificant tree growing on a rocky hillside, and telling me the associated legend.   This has reinforced my realization of how very selective my memories are.

Incidentally, on my return to England I saw a Judas tree in lower a few houses down the road from my daughter's house in Market Harborough. Now I know it will grow in England I am adding it to my wish list. If I get to plant it though it will  be in my garden not for the deeply sentimental reasons I grow my my fig and apricot trees and  my anemones and miniature cyclamen but purely as a souvenir of my holiday in Turkey.  

WW1 in Palestine and further afield

Ottoman Troops defending Gaza-  Picture by American Colony restored by  Durova

Over the last fortnight I've been reading memoirs set on either side of the the time frame for the 'Land of Broken Promises' trilogy.  On the left hand side of the frame, as I visualize it, are memoirs describing events in Palestine during WW1 (and yes, despite all the arguments one hears to the contrary, the area  that became the British Mandate of Palestine, post WW1, was referred to as Palestine in Victorian, Edwardian and WW1 literature.)  On the right hand side are books describing events in that area since the 1948 partition. Today I want to talk about a book from the left hand pile. There is another on the right hand pile I want to discuss in a later post.

THE FIFTH BATTALION HIGHLAND LIGHT INFANTRY IN THE War 1914-1918 by COLONEL F.L. MORRISON, C.B., D.S.O., V.D. is an invaluable book for anyone who wants to to take a wider view of WW1 .  The good news is that it is free for download in several formats from Gutenberg.

In this detailed account of daily life with the battalion we travel with  it from Scotland to Egypt and on to trench warfare in  Gallipoli in 1915 then back to Egypt and tents in 1916. There the battalion becomes part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF)for the invasion of Palestine, 

The EEF re-occupies the Sinai desert and marches through the Negev, building a railway behind it and laying down a chicken wire road in front for the convenience of marching infantry.A convoy of thousands of camels carry water and rations to the troops from wherever the railway has reached,   The EEF's progress is halted outside Gaza  where  it digs into hillsides on the fringes of the wilderness and the troops gaze in frustration at the fertile land in front of them.  For  Gaza at that time is very different from the town that exists today. It is an important depot for cereals with a German steam mill.  Barley, wheat, olives, vineyards, orange groves, and wood for fuel are grown as well as many goats grazed.   Maize, millet, beans, and water melon, all harvested in early autumn, are cultivated nearby.  The produce isn't just for local use and trade isn't all one way. Before WW1. barley was exported to England for brewing into English beer. In 1912 the 40,000 inhabitants of Gaza imported £10,000 of yarn from Manchester.

After two defeats the EEF captures Gaza and the battalion moves on to help defeat the Ottoman army throughout Palestine.  

From a conquered Palestine the Battalion sails, in the spring of 1918, on to Southern France and from there travels by train to take  part in the final stages of trench warfare in the North.  This is the point at which I would usually close the book and take up the next in my ever-increasing list of book-to-read. However, curiosity overcame my self-inflicted timetable and I carried on reading.

It was in the French portion of the story that  I received my biggest shock. For some reason  I have always assumed that only Germans used poison gas as a weapon during WW1  so on reading the following paragraph:

“When at La Lacque we received our gas training. It took the form of a route march to a place six miles away, where the whole Division being assembled as at sports, various demonstrations were made, including the firing of projectors—tabloid gas training.”

I assumed the training was designed so the battalion could set up defences against gas attacks.

It was only when I read the following paragraph later in the chapter that my illusions were shattered.

About this time a number of gas beam attacks were made from our line. These were from the infantry point of view a great advance on the old system, which meant man-handling innumerable heavy gas cylinders up the trench system to the firing-line. By the new system a light railway was run forward to the front line and all the infantry had to do was to push the bogeys forward. When all were in position the gas expert turned a handle and a poisonous mixture hissed off towards the enemy. What casualties, if any, were inflicted we never heard; we certainly had a number as the result of enemy retaliation by shell fire.

I am glad I  continued reading that memoir after  the battalion had moved from Palestine,  even if it does leave me wondering how many more comforting assumptions I make  about the actions of my own country.

An exciting Week

We launched 'Patsy on Saturday in Leicester, UK, at the Independent Book Publishers Fair 'States of Independence' held annually at the De Montfort University. When I say 'we' I am referring to the British  half of the Bluewood publishing team, David Bowman and myself.

I can't begin to say how grateful I am to all the people who came to support me.
After David had interviewed me, I  read out a portion from the book, the scene where the main male character is wounded when the Irgun blow up the King David  in 1946. When writing that piece, memories flooded back of the awful time when my aunt and I waited for a telegram to let us know if my father had survived the incident.

That was not the only exciting thing that happened that week. I have mentioned before in this blog how several  of my childhood memories  have proved to be  accurate, (or as accurate as they can be by someone who has  difficulty in telling left from right and who mentally mirror-images locations emotionally  important to her).  I have now discovered that one of the locations I describe in  both Patsy and Maftur,  inspired by vague memories of conversations overheard in childhood, and rumours passed on in later life,  is very likely non-fiction.  I am eagerly awaiting further developments .

The Bombing of the King David Hotel

The King David Hotel shortly after the cloud of dust had dissipated

By modern standards the bombing of the King David Hotel on July 22^nd 1946 was no big shakes.  There were only 91 people killed and 46 injured. 

The initial reason it made such a big impact in the international news was that the targeted South wing of the hotel  housed the British Civil administration but the main  reason it became a pivotal point in the history of the  Middle East was  the outburst by General Sir Evelyn Hugh Barker, commander of British forces in Palestine from 1946 to 1947.  He had been working  in the unscathed middle section of the hotel on a floor housing the army HQ when the bombs went off.  He sat down at his desk only two hours later to write an order to his troops forbidding them to fraternise with Jews or buy goods from Jewish shops adding the notorious sentence We will be punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets and showing our contempt of them.

The order was rescinded a fortnight later but by then the damage had been done. A copy of the document had been circulated and printed in newspapers throughout the world and made it impossible for the civil government to work with the Jews to deliver a peaceful solution to the problem of Palestinian independence.

There  were many witnesses to the event, mostly from people across the road at the YMCA. They were left with two striking images.

One was a swarm of what looked like coloured parachutes rising high into the air above the South Wing. Only when the ‘parachutes’ plummeted down into the rubble did the viewers realise that they were the billowing summer skirts of the women who had been at their desks in the Secretariat’s typing pool.

The other image was that of a gargoyle  that  appeared on the wall of the Sports Wing of the YMCA. In reality the gargoyle  was the head, with all facial features intact, of the Post Master General who had been walking up the path to the South wing when the bombs went off.

The incident remains vivid to me because my father was in his office in the South Wing at the time.  My Aunt and I heard the news when a BBC announcer  interrupted our weekly after-school session of ‘Larry the Lamb’ to give the breaking news. I remember my mental agony as we waited for a telegram to let us know whether my father was one of the many casualties. It was several hours before we learnt that he had survived with only minor injuries.

I incorporated much of what my father told me about the incident into ‘Patsy’.  All main characters in the novels, apart from Jim and Addy Shepard, are completely fictitious, and the legal disclaimer applies to them, but it wouldn't take a genius to work out that Jim Shepard’s actions and experiences are  based on those of my father.  Ive just removed a few warts and added some others.

So that is why I chose the photograph above as the background to all three novels in the series.

Not all Exiles are the same

An Exile's Nostalgia reflected in an English Garden

I grew up in the British  Mandate of Palestine.  My mother was very anxious that we children should grow up British.  She forbade Dewya, our maid-of-all work, to speak to us in Arabic, but Dewya used her English to pass on hints on how to avoid the evil eye or to teach us the village games she had played when young.

My mother cooked as if she still lived in England,  using recipes from her English cook book and ingredients she would have found easily in English shops.   Unfortunately, she was not the best of cooks.  All the time I lived in Palestine, I assumed egg custard had to curdle, meat had to be roasted until it was dry and tough and that it was normal to scrape charcoal from the bottom of cakes.

 Fortunately for us Dewya was responsible for children’s meals.  She taught us to wrap vine leaves from our vineyard round rice flavoured with wild herbs  and her stews were were thick and full flavoured, so to this day I prefer Middle East cookery to traditional British.

My mother disliked living in Palestine,but my father loved it.  On Saturday afternoons he would take me, the eldest child,  for long walks over hills and down wadis. In late winter we hunted for cyclamen growing beneath rock and took bunches back for my mother.  We watched  the seasons change the hillsides, from the  brown of bare soil in  summer  to winter’s shimmering green grass. Spring wasn't satisfied with one change but moved quickly from the  bright red of anemones, to the orange of ranunculus, then on to the  pink of  frail flax and finished with a flourish of tall, yellow daisies.

 We explored caves with skeletons and jumped over crevasses that split narrow paths hugging the sides of rocky cliffs while  he regaled me with stories about the ruins we came across and the battles that had been fought here between Crusaders and Saracens.

Then in 1946, after the war had ended and shipping returned to normal, I  was exiled  to England to receive a stable grammar school education.  (Prior to that, I had been shuffled about between 12 educational establishments varying wildly in aims and competences.)

I tried my best to regard England as my proper home, and  am proud to be British but even now, as an octogenarian, I am constantly aware that I don’t quite fit in to what should be my native community and regard myself as an exile from the land of my childhood.

I hadn’t realised how much I had allowed the theme of exile to permeate each book of my trilogy until someone put up a link to a lecture by James Wood on the different forms of exile.  I realised then that I had made exile an important element in each novel although my characters' experience  reactions to it vary greatly.

In commenting on the character’s experiences of exile in the paragraphs  below I have tried to give away as little of the main plot lines as I can but  with so much of importance  ignored, the stories that emerge here appear very different from the ones I have written.

I’ll start with Dalia because, at first sight,  she experiences the worst form of exile, being disowned by her fellow citizens. In 1933 she and her parents leave their comfortable home and middle class existence in  Germany for  ‘back to the soil’ slog and basic accommodation on a smallholding.  Dalia’s parents, loyal Germans,  regard their exile  as temporary  and intend to return ‘home’ when ’Germany has come to its senses'.  Dalia’s mother in particular, has difficulty in adjusting to her new life.   Dalia, however, is much quicker to accept Palestine as her real home. After the way her German school friends turned on her,and Brownshirt louts had vandalised her father's workplace,  she has no wish to be considered German or even to speak the language, and is only sorry that she wasn’t born a Palestinian Jew with all the kudos that would have given her amongst her new friends.

Dalia, however, becomes far more emotionally confused when, as an adult, she faces a second exile, this time self-afflicted.  Engaged to a British Palestine Policeman, she realises she will eventually have to move to England and fears people there may treat her with the disdain most British ex-pats have displayed towards her in Palestine. 

 In the second novel, Maftur, is brought up in a culture where marriage to a man she has never met, usually exiles a woman, often as young as 14, from her nuclear family   The main thread  of the first half of ’Maftur’ is the fight she puts up  to avoid this domestic form of exile.

 As an adolescent, in 1937, however, she is threatened by another form of exile that makes the domestic one look paltry in comparison. The British government  approves a partition plan for Palestine that includes a forced transfer of populations and land ownership. The population transfer would affect up to 225,000 Arabs but only 1,250 Jews.

The plan is eventually dropped in 1938 when the British realise the impossibility of dividing Palestine into two economically viable states.  Nine years later, however, the United Nations vote for partition against the advice of the British, and then fail to organise a smooth transition.  The exile Maftur faces in 1948 seems all the worse for the happy life she won for herself.

So now to the first novel  -  Patsy’s exile may initially attract less sympathy.   She is a British woman brought up in Palestine. In 1942, at the age of 21, she is in self-afflicted exile in Egypt.   The problems that caused her exile are resolved at the start of the novel and she is free to continue her war work inside Palestine.  The previous period of exile, however, has made her realise how much Palestine means to her so she is pleased when her recently widowed mother returns to work as a qualified nurse which entitles her to stay on in Palestine.

All might have been well if Patsy had stayed working in Palestine after Rommel’s defeat. However, her war work takes her out of Palestine to Italy where she marries an English officer.  Pregnant, Patsy discovers the army intend to repatriate her England since, she has no legal right of return to Palestine. Although  she manages to smuggle her way back into Palestine and live there for a while, eventually she has to leave the land that belongs to others.  For the rest of her life she finds it difficult to call any location home.

Secrets will Out but not necessarily be Publicised

Ships on fire in Bari Harbour

In the middle section of Patsy, the  first novel of ‘The Land of Broken Promises,  Patsy is stationed in Bari, Italy.

While gathering material for this section of the book  in the 1990s I came across references to mustard gas mixed with oil that had been responsible for the deaths of so many merchant seamen following the disastrous air raid of  Dec 2^nd 1943, known as ‘Little Pearl Harbour’.  I assumed it was still a great secret because none of the British ex-servicemen I knew, who had been in Italy at the time, had any inkling that mustard gas had been involved.

The U.S. Liberty ship ‘John Harvey’ had carried a secret cargo of liquid sulphur mustard, When that ship was destroyed in the 1943 air raid, sulfur mustard spilt into waters already contaminated by oil from other damaged vessels. Sailors,  who had jumped into the water from  burning ships, were covered with the oil which proved an ideal solvent.

Other sulfur mustard evaporated and, mingling with clouds of smoke, blew overland containating Italian civilians.

Allied High Command tried to conceal the disaster, fearing the Germans would believe  the Allies intended to use chemical weapons,  but there were too many witnesses, and in February 1944, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff statement owned up to the accident adding that the U.S. wouldn’t use chemical weapons unless the enemy did so first.

 Winston Churchill, however, ordered all mustard gas deaths to be listed as ‘burns due to enemy action’.

U.S. records of the attack on Bari were declassified in 1959, but no one took much notice until an American author, Glenn B. Infield, published ‘Disaster at Bari’ in 1967.  Even so it wasn’t until 1986 that the British government finally admitted that survivors of the Bari raid had been exposed to poison gas and upgraded their pension payments.

Despite all that no one I spoke to in the 1990s knew that people in the Bari air raid had died of mustard gas poisoning.

SS Patria, Operation Exporter and fallible witnesses.

My father in 1941

Today I give two examples of why one the evidence of witnesses to any historical event shouldn’t . 

The first is my own memory of the capsizing of the Patria. Standing by the back wall of  Allenby Park after the capsizing, along with hundreds of others on Mt Carmel I watched the police and army rescue operations. The sight left a permanent impression, but, when  someone asked me the date of that event, I was about to reply,  1939.

Then I paused. Hang on, I told myself, I wasn’t living in Haifa in 1939.  We didn’t return there until January 1940.  So I checked with  the Palestine Post and yes the date is 1940 and late at that, 25^th of November,to be exact.  So why do I keep thinking 1939?  I suspect that if  I had lived continuously in Haifa between 1936 and 1943 and had only been writing a memoir, I would probably still be convinced that the Patria capsized a year before it did. So now,  even if I witnessed an event for myself, I always check dates in the local newspapers of the time and consult reputable histories.

It doesn’t only happen to me. The second example happened only today.   I was online  discussing Operation  Exporter, otherwise known as the Syria/Lebanon campaign with a group of  people who had been born before WW2.  One person, who had watched his father dig defence trenches on Mt Carmel in anticipation of a German invasion from the north, wrote that  Operation Exporter took place in 1942. I would probably have agreed with him if 1941 hadn’t been such a momentous year for me  and I had had to fit several historic bits together looking for cause and effect.

The event I use as background when sorting the  major  events of 1941 in chronological order is of no significance to anyone else but looms large in my memory.   I was eight , and had been catapaulted  away from my friends at the instigation of my mother into  a class where I was by far  the youngest. The only other British girl was twelve and my father was abroad on a mission in the Balkans  and had been missing for three months,  so I couldn’t appeal to him.

At the end of April 1941 my father  returned to Palestine via the last convoy from Athens.  After his adventures in the Balkans he was in  poor physical shape.  Nevertheless the powers that be flew him almost immediately to Iraq where a British base,  Habbaniyah ,was being besieged. I don't know why they wanted him there, but when he returned about a fortnight later, obviously very ill, he refused to consult a doctor because he was too busy preparing for a show in Syria. (I can only presume it was to do with wireless or telephone support for the invasion) My mother was furious.  Anyway the result of his self-neglect was that he collapsed in his office and was rushed to the government hospital with yellow jaundice at the same time as all those nose-to-tail convoys filled with Ozzies rattled through Haifa on the way to the Lebanese border. (Yes, I know yellow jaundice is tautologous but that is what we called it in those days.)   

He was still in the government  hospital when Moshe Dayan was there having his eye socket treated after taking part in Operation Exporter.  

After  my father came out of hospital he plunged straight into setting up wireless communications against  a probable invasion from the south .

For details of Op Exporter see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria-Lebanon_campaign

From Fantasy to Reality

My Teenage Idea of the Ultimate in Sophistication

When mentioning my own experiences in Palestine, if I have left the  impression that Patsy is thinly veiled autobiography, that is far from the truth.

v Patsy was born in 1921.  I was born  in 1933.

v Patsy is an only child.  I am the eldest of three.

v Patsy is close to her mother and protective of her. My relationship with my mother fractured when I was four.

v Patsy is at boarding school in England during the Arab Rebellion .  I was in Palestine.   
v Patsy, as a young adult, plays an active role in preparations against German invasion. I was a child throughout WW2. 

So what inspired the character, Patsy?

When I was 12, my current school, the British Community in Jerusalem, offered me an  opportunity to sit a scholarship exam to a prestigious English boarding school. My father, however, refused to sign the forms, on the grounds that the daughter of one of his colleagues had won that scholarship before the war but, on returning to Palestine, she had broken her parents' hearts by frequenting night clubs and refusing to go to church.

As, at that age, going to a nightclub and not wasting Sundays at chapel  was the height of my ambition,  I fantasised about the sophisticated young woman I had never met and whose name I knew not. 

 Patsy grew out of that fantasy but when, as an adult with a somewhat different definition of sophistication,   I started on her fictional story,  Patsy became less of a fantasy and more a real woman with concerns similar to my own. Perhaps after all her mental state is slightly autobiographical although her experiences are so different to mine. 

A land of spies and espionage

When the first novel of the series ‘Land of Broken Promises’ opens,  its central character Patsy, aged 21,  is working ostensibly as a civilian typist for a Special Ops outfit based in Cairo. The outfit’s purpose is to co-ordinate guerrilla operations in Palestine in the event of an enemy invasion.

I chose preparations  for a WW2 guerrilla  force in Palestine,  as a starting point for  a series spanning the years 1932-1948 because I was following the advice given to all Newbie authors ‘Write what you know about best.’

Incredible as it seems to many modern parents, as a British child aged  8 and 9, I was  heavily involved, mostly unwittingly, but on occasions knowingly,  in British  preparations to set up Jewish guerrilla groups to resist a likely German occupation of Palestine.

During WW2,  spying in one form or another was the favourite occupation of  Palestine’s residents, whatever their cultural background.  

My father, a British telecommunications engineer,  was recruited by MEIC (Mediterranean East Intelligence Centre) in 1940.  MEIC’s initial assumption  was that Germany would invade Palestine from the north via Bulgaria, Turkey and Vichy-controlled Syria.

Israeli Michael Gottschalk standing in one of the wartime trenches in Haifa his father helped dig on the assumption the Germans would invade from the North.
(Since retirement one of Michael's hobbies has been excavating these trenches)

 In early 1941 my father’s first major espionage task was to ascertain whether the telephone lines the Germans were laying in Bulgaria were genuine or fake.
'Real' meant invasion from the north, 'fake' meant invasion from sea or south. 

My unwitting role in this enterprise was to convey misinformation to our Arab maid of all work, who was suspected of having a Nazi sympathiser brother.

  My father told me  that he was going to neutral Turkey . His special job,  and this was a great secret, would be putting telephones down the chimneys of hotel rooms in Istanbul where German generals were staying.

Over a year later I played a more straight forward role.  The allies had insufficient army and police personnel to patrol the whole of Palestine's Mediterranean coast. Our family spent September camping in Army tents on a restricted area beach near the Crusader Castle at Athlit, pretending to be a military unit guarding against invading spies. We had orders to make our camp as visible as possible despite the blackout in the rest of the country.

Crusader Castle at other end of beach from our camp

 Unfortunately after the first fortnight  my father had to rush my mother into  hospital in Haifa, leaving me, aged 9, in charge of  both the camp and my younger sister and brother for two days.  I took my responsibility as the sole obstacle to the Nazi invasion of Palestine very seriously, lighting up kerosene lamps in all the tents at night and along the pathway to the rather posh trench latrine  dug deep into the sand for privacy.

During that month my father frequently left us for two or three days at a time. One day he returned to camp, his knapsack covered in blood and filled with a sheep’s back leg. I have used the cryptic explanation he gave us in the third novel of the series.

In fact I have handed over his wartime role but not necessarily his personality to the fictional character, Jim Shepard, who plays an important part in all the first three novels.

The start of an Obsession

My father and myself in 1939

I have been writing and rewriting a series of novels set in the British Mandate of Palestine  for over 25 years.  The Series is called ‘Land of Broken Promises.’ Last year Bluewood Publishers accepted the three completed novels.   The first one. 'Patsy' will be coming out in both print and ebook form in March this year.

Someone recently asked why I was so obsessed with the subject. I had to travel back  almost 75 years  before identifying the seed of the obsession, an incident that occurred in the spring of 1939.

At the age of six I climbed a ramp to the top of an eight-foot dry-stone wall overlooking a railway line.  Arab patriots had built the ramp, to take pot shots at passing trains.

I  sat high above the railway line, waiting to wave at the train that delivered mail and much else from Jerusalem to Jaffa.  Eventually, I heard a sound, but not the roaring and whistling of a majestic engine preparing to leave Jerusalem station, instead a low rumbling noise as an inspection trolley rounded the curve in the line.

Brown-capped prisoners, with chained 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 policemen, wearing midnight blue uniforms topped by astrakhan kalpaks, held tommy guns at the ready.  In the centre of the trolley, a white-bearded man sat on a chair, his hands tied behind his back.  His suit was European, but, on his head, 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 olivewood-bound bible of Jesus before Pontius Pilot.

A photo showing a different version  of using rail  hostages 

At the time, I didn’t mention seeing the trolley to my parents in case I got into trouble for climbing the wall so, for twelve years, this memory remained uncontaminated by either photos or other people’s reminiscences.  It was 1950 before I mentioned the incident to my mother, I forget in what context, but she told me, in no uncertain fashion, that the British had never treated Arabic prisoners that way so I must have made it up.

Believing her, as I had never known my mother to tell a deliberate lie, I consigned the incident to a mental cabinet, labelled ‘imaginary memories.’  There it remained until several decades later  I came across a book that referred to the British placing Arab hostages on inspection trolleys during the 1936-39 Rebellion. 

I wondered why my mother, who had valued truth above all virtues, had denied the existence of that hostage with such vigour and  realised that someone so relentlessly honest needed the protection of a robust subconscious.  Looking back,  I discovered other instances of her involuntary self-deception.

In this particular case, however, I knew that early in her life, my mother, like many other British citizens, had acquired the notion that God had created them 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 amiss in the army or the police  placing  an Arab civilian on humiliating public display.

In the example I witnessed,  public humiliation  was probably the main motive, because there rail officials on the trolley and Palestine police as well as prisoners and Arab patriots had long learned to make sophisticated detonators  that would not be affected by a lightweight trolley.  The photo I saw, however,  looked rather more sinister.

 Like everyone else. My mother’s notions of morality changed over the years.   By the 1950s, she would regard 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.

I spent the next few years researching what had really happened in Palestine during the thirties and forties, conversing with people from many cultures who had lived there during the Mandate era and reading memoirs written not only by the British but by Arabs and Jews.  In more cases than I had expected, my own memories were confirmed.

Sequencing events proved more difficult. My memory there was far less accurate.  but the more I learned, the more I realised that sequencing was vital to understanding cause and effect.

The daily English language newspaper the Palestine Post proved the most useful tool for sequencing major events . A journalist is unlikely to write a description of a bombing before it has happened.  At the same time I became aware that censorship ensured some events went unrecorded, especially during WW2.

I learnt to distrust official reports  written for a government back in England that issued orders with no idea of the situation on the ground. I realised, too,  that all official documents were  composed in the knowledge that agents of Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern gang worked in every department of the Mandate government.  acquiring copies of even the most top secret documents on the same day that they were written.

 With so much  research under my belt I was disturbed at the ignorance of political activists on all sides of the Middle East spectrum .  Irritation as much as anything else  instigated the decision to write chronologically accurate novels depicting  events in Palestine during the British Mandate from the viewpoints of characters from four cultures.