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.