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