Back in Palestine
“I haven’t previously recorded what follows, which is probably not surprising…”
By mid November 1942 Cliff was back in Palestine in the 2NZEF Convalescent Depot near Tel Aviv, working as a clerk in the Orderly Room. The last man had lost the job after ending up in clink for being drunk and disorderly.
The Orderly job wasn’t demanding. There was plenty of time for letter writing, and it had one other advantage — getting to the head of mess queues for meals, meaning he was now, in army terms, a bludger.
Having been graded “Level 2”, he was likely be in Palestine for at least three weeks before heading back to Maadi — but then what?
He only had one of Dorothy’s letters now, one he’d carried into action. It was was now bloodstained — “how romantic!”
She’d been remembering the happy times they’d had together, and he often relived them in his imagination. They were great memories. Maybe his lovemaking had been “a bit crude”, but he guessed that was only natural, and if so, he promised her more when he got home — the two of them together in a quiet place with his arms around her and her head on his soldier.
“ Soldier? No, shoulder! Shoulder! I’m obsessed with soldiers.”
§
One afternoon a party of them went to a Jewish communal farm for a shufti at how they were run, a regular outing.
He said it was very different to Kfir Vitkin, the cooperative settlement nearby that they’d visited earlier in the year. There the cooperative ran the dairy factory, store, school and so on, in which each had an equal share, but each family had its own house, garden, cows, pigs, poultry, and so on, and received profits from its own endeavours.
Here the people lived like a large family and as far as possible were self-sufficient. They made their own clothes and boots, milled their own flour and baked their own bread. Besides their own doctor, there were carpenters, plumbers, engineers, school teachers — practically every skilled man they needed. They used money very little, and each man, no matter his trade, received the same cash and an equal share in the investments.1
It was very hard, Cliff wrote, to do justice to their mode of living — very different to anything they’d ever seen, its success depending on the goodwill, spirit and enterprise of the people. Before taking up the life they had a period of training to accustom them to it and allow them to decide whether it was really for them.
Child care and meals were community-based. The dining hall was “a lovely big building” where all the families ate. It was clean and modestly furnished, with white tablecloths on the tables and forms to sit on. When they visited several women were busy preparing the next meal in the kitchen. There was a piano and a radio, and the place was used for social events, dances and entertainments.
Land for the settlements was bought with money advanced by the Jewish National Fund, JNF, subscribed to by Jews around the world. The purchase of equipment and stock etc was similarly financed.
This way of life, they were told, was similar to the practice of the Russian Doukhobors, a Christian sect that practiced agrarian communal living. Persecuted under the Tsar, many of them had moved to Canada.
Cliff wrote at length about all this to Dorothy, and then to his parents and his church congregation back home. By the time he’d finished the third letter it was getting very tedious. Understandable, but it’s impressive how much he absorbed and wrote about, and checks out online.
.§
“I shot the bastard”
Written after the war:
One of our companions was a little Scotsman. Before the war he’d been in the Scots Guards, and he was an expert on spit and polish. He showed me how to get a super shine on my boots by spitting on them. He was now a New Zealand soldier.
One day he confided to me that in the last action he’d been given the job of escorting a German prisoner to the rear. They had got out of sight and sound. Then, as he said, “I shot the bastard.”
Perhaps his conscience with giving him trouble and he hoped for some consolation for me. I made no comment. I was appalled. Germans could have shot me under similar circumstances and hadn’t done so. Wounded, I’d been trying to escape from shell fire at Whistling Wadi.
I met this man once in Whangārei after the war, but I haven’t seen or heard of him since.
§
A taste for booze
“I haven’t previously recorded what follows,” Cliff wrote after the war, “which is probably not surprising. By then, I’d developed a taste for booze and enjoyed the relaxation it provided, and, most importantly, the comradeship”:
Feeling extremely bored, my friend John and I decided to go to Natania [Netanya, now a Mediterranean city but then a growing Jewish settlement with a few thousand people] a few miles away. Natania was at the time out of bounds to New Zealanders because a New Zealand soldier was under suspicion for raping a Jewish girl there. Also, we were broke, but why worry about little details like that? It was in the afternoon when we arrived at the main road and waited to bludge a lift.
On the opposite corner, also waiting for a ride was a very attractive Jewish girl with a little rat of a man. She had a lovely figure and, unusual in those days, her shorts were extremely short. She was well worth looking at. What happened next was very exciting indeed for us, so long deprived of female company. The little man knelt down in front of her and began to gently massage her outer and inner thighs. She made every sign of enjoyment, and it was more than a little hard to bear, to watch this little man having so much going for him while we had nothing.
It was a relief to board a truck for Natania and see they were going in a different direction.
We wandered around Natania until, feeling hungry, and about to set off back to Camp, we met some Divisional Cavalry blokes who invited us for tea at their expense. We spent several hours with them, and then with the Highland Division men.
They played and sang the Scottish songs Cliff loved, and he and John got completely plastered, drinking “beer, gin, whisky, brandy and God knows what else”.
I remember leaving the warmth of the hall escorted by our Scottish friends, and, as we got into the cold night air losing consciousness.
All went blank. How much later I don’t know, I regained consciousness to find myself sitting at a table in a cabaret or dance hall. Opposite John sat slumped down in his chair unconscious. I expect I looked at my watch and found it to be about 1 am or later. There were a few others present but no one in our vicinity.
I promptly panicked and tried frantically to wake John. I shook him and slapped his face, all to no avail. He was too far gone. Then I blacked out again.
I woke up in a frozen hell, frozen to the bone, bouncing up and down on a cold hard surface of some sort and in a great deal of noise. As I came to I felt all around me as I jolted up and down. On one side there was what seemed to be a hard cold surface and on the other a cold lifeless body.
It was pitch black, and thankfully I again blacked out.
When I came back to life again everything was quiet and frozen. The dead body still lay beside me. I cautiously felt around in the blackness and gradually concluded that I was in the back of a truck. After falling out over the truck’s tailboard I looked around in the darkness to see where we were. Miracle of miracles, we were outside John’s tent, and it was John’s body that lay inside the truck.
There was no sign of life anywhere. I made sure it was John’s tent and located his bed, the only one unoccupied, which was luckily just inside the entrance. His bed was a contraption he’d manufactured himself using boxes and timber to raise it off the ground. I dropped the tailboard down with some difficulty and dragged John out of the truck and managed to land him on his feet. With me in support he staggered towards his bed and I dumped him on to it. The bed collapsed under him as he fell. I couldn’t do anything about that.
I dragged a couple of blankets over him and sought my own bed in a nearby hut. Dropping my battledress to the floor I piled into bed and passed out. When I woke I felt terrible. weak and very poorly. My battledress wasn’t fit to wear, covered with stains I couldn’t shift, no matter how I tried. Even washing didn’t remove those stains and I had to get a battledress reissue.
I donned some fatigues and went back to see John. He was in a worse state than me. I aroused him out of bed, got him dressed and we assessed the situation.
The truck that was still parked outside John‘s tent was a Provo truck — the military police. We were really in trouble. We had been out of bounds in Natania, and I had lost my glasses and John his false teeth. How much worse could it be? We were sure to end up in jail for this lot. Think of the problems getting new glasses for me and false teeth for John. This was going to be very costly indeed. After some discussion we decided we must eat, and we set off for the mess hall, got some tucker and sat down. We had hardly settled down to eat when I saw approaching us down the alley way a Provo Sergeant. This was it. We were going to be arrested.
Stopping at our table he said, “God John, you had a ball last night, didn’t you?”
How lucky can you get? John had only one Provo friend and this was him. He told us how he’d picked us up and brought us home. He hadn’t been sure where we bedded down, but he knew where John’s tent was and that was why he’d parked the truck there.
Best of all, he had John’s false teeth and my glasses.
§
Christmas 1942
Come Christmas Eve Cliff been back at Maadi for a fortnight. After spending a couple of days building a tennis court and a week as an Orderly Room runner, he’d started an operator course in Signals School to learn the newer 19 and 21 transmitters. He was getting bad headaches at times but expected them to wear off:
I spent last night in Cairo at the New Zealand Club, sitting, talking, eating and drinking, and I enjoyed myself. We are to rejoin the Division on Boxing Day, so we drew some pay and got some leave. We left after tea and had a fast trip in. The trains were crowded as ever and we broke windows getting aboard through them. The guard couldn’t fight his way through the carriage so we had a free ride. Took a gharry to the club and went upstairs to see the lovely decorations.
The bar opened at 6 pm and in three minutes it was crowded. Beer had sold out by 7 pm. I went shopping for a diary and bought the only one, miserably small, that was available. I became separated from my friends and returned to the club alone. I drank tea, watched the antics of those about me and felt very homesick. Left about 10 pm and wandered towards the station, watching Kiwis very much under the weather trying to enter a cabaret for officers only. Called at an eating house for fish and chips and then came home.
He missed church next morning but Christmas dinner was lovely, the mess room nicely decorated with table cloths and serviettes. Roast pork and lamb, apple sauce, mashed potatoes, cauliflower and green peas, Christmas pudding, oranges, nuts and cigarettes. All a real treat for the men.
Mr Marshall our commanding officer gave a very moving speech and proposed a toast for folks at home. Just as well we were very merry or there would’ve been a few tears. Tea was good also, followed by fruit salad, ice cream and Christmas cake.
I must write to Mum for I may not be able to for some time. Poor Mum. She thinks I will be safe in Base for a long time.
My heart is so full of things I would like to say. Writing is so miserably cold and inadequate. We must keep praying and have faith. A man isn’t supposed to cry but I feel like it sometimes. God has been with us so far, Dear, and he is with us now. So let’s cheer up and pray for a reunion in 1943. I feel much happier after writing that. The thoughts that have gone through my mind while writing it have helped to renew my faith.
Footnotes
- Cliff doesn’t name the place, but it was probably Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, established in the same area, the Hefer Valley, in 1931, and based on communal farming, shared dining and collective child-rearing, with a strong egalitarian ethos. It and Kfir Vitkin were examples of two different Jewish settlement models, the Kibbutz and Moshav.
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