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.

  

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.

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.

WW2 in Palestine

What is it about the WW2 years that cause novelists and civilian writers of memoirs who write in English about the British Mandate of Palestine to skate over them?.
I have had people tell me that nothing interesting happened in those years so they wouldn't want to read about it anyway but I would argue that the events of 1942 are as eventful as any, marking as they do a watershed in British -Zionist relations. I consider the formation of the Palmach by the British as a resistance group against probable German Invasion and the subsequent disbandment order was one of the single biggest factor leading to the post war mess. Yet people seem to know nothing about those events
Golda Meir probably had an excuse for skating over the period in her memoir in that the war years covered painful events in her marriage,
Moshe Dayan also had an excuse in his memoir. He was in prison from 1939 and then so severely wounded in Syria in 1941 that he confined his life to his own family for three or so years.
Other people who became famous were on war service outside Palestine but there were others
who stayed in Palestine who must know their importance. A small part of it may still be covered by the official secrets act but most of it is in the public domain.
Perhaps it is because of the paucity of memoirs that novels set in that period appear to be non-existent.
My outburst is caused by today's delivery of two well-written novels by Dvora Waysman. I had been looking forward to their arrival for some time. One covers events from 1951 onwards but the other The Pomegranite Pendant is a saga that covers the period 1890 -1950. I turned to it eagerly only to discover that the events of WW2 occupy about a page and a half.
It makes me all the more determined to hone my writing skills sufficiently to get the second novel in my trilogy spanning the years 1942-1945 published.

Snow here and now, snow there and then

A whole lot of activities have been cancelled here in Leicester due to a few inches of snow and colder whether than we have experienced for over 20 years. This gave me more time for writing. In my last post I spoke of my discoveries about November 1945. Those had given me 6000 words. It was now time to move on from Givat Hayim. The carastrophic event had caused a rift between my diverse characters and I needed to get them together again. The best way to do that in Palestine is via a wedding. The wedding I chose was of the Greek Orthodox variety. For plot purposes wedding invatations needed to appear to appear early in January. I thought I should leave at least eight weeks between invitation and wedding so hit on on the first Wednesday in March as the wedding date. That would provide me with an opportunity to describe a host of spring flowers. Luckily I had not wasted too much time in word-painting Palestine Spring before I realised my whopping error. I had not taken into account Great Lent.
Since Great Lent starts over 40 days before Greek Orthodox Easter Day my first task now was to determine the date of Eastern Orthodox Easter in 1945 - which proved nothing so simple as adding a fortnight on to Western Easter or co-inciding it with Jewish passover. I found two web sites claiming to calculate Orthodox Easters from way back. Unfortunately each arrived at a different date, so I used Nazareth tourist guide logic and plumped for the more convenient date. During the research into Greek Orthodox rituals I had come upon another perinent piece of information. Orthodox weddings generally take place on a Sunday. Employing a modicum of maths, I discovered the wedding would have to take place on February 17th.
Snow was piling up on my garden and the top of my car as I clicked my way through the Palestine Post, searching for news of political importance. I discovered a real coincidence. On Sunday 17th Fenruary 1945 snow had blanketed Jerusalem and made roads leading to it impassible. So that, I thought, was the weekend we had built our snowman abd Dad had wanted to take us sledging by Rachael's tomb but we hadn't been able to get out. That too,according to the Palestine Post was the week end every chemist in Jerusalem sold out of camera film, which explains why, when the elderly show you their favourite snaps of Palestine, you are tempted to think of el Quds as a city built inside the arctic circle.

Palestine Post and Researching November 1945

I realised the other day when looking through the first draft of the third book in my trilogy that no scene takes place in November 1945 and as far as I was aware, nothing interesting happened in Palestine that month. Then I realised that I spent most of that month on board the liner Caernarvon Castle, travelling from Durban to Suez. Nowadays people travelling on liners may be able to keep in touch with what is happening anywhere in the world, but not so in 1945.
Even when we had landed and in Suez and had travelled on to Palestine to meet my father, whom we had not seen for two and a half years, for the rest of November I was too immersed in settling into our new home on Mt Carmel and into my new school.

Once I realised why I had no interesting memories, I looked through a few timelines on the internet and found one that claimed terrorists had bombed CID HQ in Jerusalem on November 25th.
As is my custom when finding an entry so close to home I brought up the relevant issues of the Palestine Post to read reports and comments. I found nothing in November about the blowing up of any CID station but as I skimmed through a story emerged of escalating violemce culminating in the most deplorable happenings in the Hefer Valley area. It was hard to believe that such a disaster could have occured while I was in Palestine and that it had passed me by.It would not have done so two and a half years earlier, nor would it have done so a few weeks later when I had once more become accustomed to discussing current affairs with my father.

A word here about the Palestine Post. It was an English language paper published by a Jewish firm but read by all the British, because its front pages and editorials not only concentrated on internationl news but also reported on British football matches and county cricket. It covered Palestinian affairs as well, of course and in the least overtly biased way of any Palestinian paper.
Comparing it to contemporary English papers, it had more in common with the Manchester Guardian than the Daily Mirror.
It is now readily accessible to all. Formerly, if I wanted to read an item in the Palestine Post, I had to travel to the British newspaper library at Colindale where I might wait hours for a microfiche reader to become available.
Now however, I just click on the favourites button on my computer and I can browse through all the extant issues.
This is thanks to the University of Tel Aviv's Jews of Islamic Countries Archiving Project , established by Prof. Yaron Tzur. In personal terms I am extremely grateful to the technology manager, Shaul A. Duke (fka Shaul Garcia), who has helped me so often when I changed to a new browser.

An introduction

Land of Broken Promises is the name I gave to the trilogy of novels I planned many years ago to be set in the British Mandate of Palestine covering the years 1938-1948. I chose to concentrate on this period and this location because I spent my childhood in Palestine when it was being governed by the British. So far only the first novel in the trilogy has been published and in some ways I wish it hadn't (although I was grateful at the time for the money received from the publishers!)

The trouble is, once one part of a trilogy is set in stone, it limits what one can do with the rest. One can't change the names of the main characters, nor alter their previous history, however convenient it would be for the novel one is currently writing.

The title of the novel that has been published is Struggling Free and covers the period 1938-1941. It centres on three very young women, one English, one Jewish and one Arabic who between them are unintentionally responsible for the death of two men.

The second novel has the working title Spreading Tattered Wings and covers the period 1941-1945 It has not yet been published. I learnt my lesson on that with Struggling Free.

I am working on the third novel (working title Home to Roost) and am about two thirds of the way through. It will cover the period 1945-1948.

Some people seem to be able to dash away at their novels and do their research later. I can't do that. I do my research first but am constantly discovering while writing how much more research I need to do and find can't continue writing until the facts are clear

In the course of this blog I hope to show some of the things, not necessarily of a literary nature that I have learnt during the years I have been writing this trilogy