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.