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.