In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  I had spent two weeks the previous summer in a village along that coast, so I was easily able to pick out places. We chugged on to Naples and landed there for the night. Early the next morning, in time for the first edition of the Evening News, I telephoned an eyewitness report of the tragedy which was occupying the world headlines. After what I considered to be some graphic aerial description, a bored-sounding sub-editor came on the phone and yawned: 'Did you manage to get any interviews?'

  It was always difficult for those at large in the big moving world and those in the confined office to reconcile their outlooks. My days as a sub-editor were not so far behind that I did not appreciate the attitude. Vivid prose and exciting happenings frequently seem pretty poor meat in the murk of some early morning office. There were other desk-bound men who appeared to take a real delight in cutting my stories just before the carefully climaxed punchline so I took to devising alternative punchlines and distributing them throughout the story so that the cut could be made at any almost point. It was usually made between them.

  The tour of the Middle East took us from Lebanon to Jordan and into Israel through the Mendelbaum Gate in Jerusalem. The first part was undertaken in a United Nations Dakota which made our ramshackle Viking look like Concorde. There were metal seats and no seat belts. On the side was reassuringly stencilled, 'Refurbished 1946'.

  It was a good time to go to the Holy Land, for Christmas was nearing and I wrote a series of articles about the unhappy region from which so much hope was always expected. In Nazareth I stayed at a hotel where the foyer was thick with posters and pictures of Kew Gardens. The manager said it was his heart's desire to go to Kew. I also sat through a nativity play in Christ's own town. Not one of the children taking part was a Christian. They were all Arab Moslems attending the Nazareth Anglican School. Like all visitors to Jerusalem I wasted much time looking for the 'green hill far away' where Our Lord was crucified. There is no hill, not according to the official and accepted view. In fact the ugly Church of the Crucifixion lies at the foot of the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Tears, where Jesus carried His cross. We were solicited by the usual gabbling guides who tried to persuade us that the crucifixion, the tomb and the resurrection were all neatly packaged within the confines of the church. Much more convincing, but unacceptable to the variety of churches who squabble in that sacred city, to me at any rate, was the Garden of the Tomb, a simple and quiet place of olive trees and wine presses, with a sepulchre carved into the rock. Beyond the garden is a hill which, although not green, is fashioned in the shape of a skull, the Golgotha of the Bible, and is historically accepted as having been a place of criminal punishment. It overlooks the Jerusalem bus station.

  Not long after this first visit to Israel, the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was spirited from his hideaway in Argentina and flown to Jerusalem to face charges of crimes against humanity. I attended the trial. The accusation, although seemingly large for one man, was not too much for Mr Eichmann. He was an entirely despicable figure, standing in his bullet-proof glass case as the evidence was piled up against him. Even when sentenced to death he stood like a man applying for a job.

  The Israeli authorities had thoughtfully provided him with a blue suit for his public appearances and he sat, evil-faced, in this throughout the weeks of the trial. The Nazi ego had not died. When one particularly horrifying piece of material, filmed in a concentration camp, was being shown, it was decided to clear the courtroom. They brought Eichmann from the cells in his prison clothes and sat him in his glass booth while the terrible indictment contained in the film was presented to him. He figured in the action depicted on the screen but remained unperturbed. What concerned him most were his prison clothes, especially when photographers crept close to him and began to take pictures. 'Why are they taking photographs?' he asked crossly. 'And I am not wearing my suit.'

  Fortunately, because of the time difference, there was no necessity for me to attend the hearings after the lunch adjournment each day. Any copy I filed would have reached London too late for the final edition. Any time I did not have to be in the courtroom was welcome. Some of the evidence was outrageous and Eichmann's attitude was of studied indifference. One part of his testimony went something like this:

  I had visited a place where they were going to shoot some Jews and when they were shooting them I was standing dose and the blood from them spurted onto my uniform. I remember the place well because there was a fine railway station there, built in the reign of the Emperor Franz Josef, and my mother had always taught me to appreciate the good things of those times. After lunch we went back to where they had killed the Jews. By this time they were buried, but the grave was too shallow or there were too many bodies because the blood was coming from the earth like a spring . . .

  Any man who could describe a scene like that, and put a railway station (not to mention lunch) in the middle, richly deserved everything that was to happen to him. He was hanged and his body taken out to sea on a plane, then dropped into the water. Amazingly many of the younger people in Israel could see no point in the trial. It was merely a show they said. How could punishment of one man avenge the deaths of six million? The older people, those with the death camps still shadows in their eyes, and their camp identity number tattooed for ever on their wrists, understandably felt differently.

  Even such a long-running horror as the Eichmann trial, however, had its wry moments. Within the compound of the Beit Ha'am, where the court was sitting, was a restaurant for the use of the journalists, the translators and other people connected with the court. On the first day we sat down to lunch and in walked Adolf Eichmann. He busily began rearranging the trays on the self-service counter. It was not Eichmann of course, but it needed more than a second glance to realise this. The man was the restaurant manager. He went about blissfully unaware of his evil double and was bemused when people wanted to have their photographs taken with him. He thought it was because of the food.

  The timing of the trial made unusual demands on the Jerusalem hotel trade. Not only was the city crowded with journalists and television people, but it was the Passover holiday and the independence celebrations when there was to be a big military parade and dancing in the streets. I was staying in a hotel where the owner had overstretched his resources so much that he had three people booked for each room available. The British journalists were told by the Israeli Government Press Office that they would have to move out into private lodgings. None of us liked the idea but there was nothing for it. I was taken to a block of council flats (you don't think of Jerusalem having council flats, do you?) and introduced to a couple who I am certain were as reluctant to accommodate me as I was to be there. Their son was in the army and they had a small spare room. I left my belongings and went out.

  It was Independence Day and the rejoicing went on long into the starlit night. Several hours I spent in a night club (you don't think of Jerusalem having night clubs, do you?) in the company of the American writer Meyer Levene, who lived on the shores of the Sea of Gallilee, and Stephen Ward, who committed suicide during the Profumo, Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies sex scandal (he was an artist and was sketching for the Daily Telegraph). By the time the dancing in the streets had finished it was dawn and Meyer and his wife drove me to the hotel. By this time I had consumed a liberal amount of local wine and I had forgotten that I had been transferred to a council flat. When I did remember the Levenes had gone, and I had to walk in the warm grey dawn to my correct lodging.

  When I reached the place I was confronted with six identical blocks of flats and, I knew, within each of those blocks every flat was identical. As I fingered the key I had been given I was aware that I had no idea where I lived. There followed a furtive and embarrassing sequence. I crept into the blocks one by one, hoping by some fluke to recognise something. The wine was not assisting matters. Like a felon up and down stairs I went, secretly trying the key in any door I thought might be likely. Eventually the key turned. Relieved, I went into the small hall
way. Yes, that seemed right. I crept into a sitting room that, in the dawn light through the window, seemed to be vaguely familiar. Yes, there was a door at the end. The door to my room, surely. I opened it. Lying on the bed was a sleeping and beautiful girl, wearing nothing at all.

  Just keeping panic at bay, I backed out towards the front door of the apartment. As I did so the biggest shadow I have ever seen loomed from a couch in the sitting room. The huge man sat up and leaned on his elbow, staring at me through the gloom.

  'Shalom,' I muttered as I backed through the main door. 'Peace be with you.' Outside I tumbled down the stairs and hared out into the main road, not stopping running until I reached the foyer of the hotel. That is where I spent the rest of the night.

  If it is true that the evil that men do lives after them, then they have, at least, the consolation of knowing that they are not available for retribution. During separate times in Israel I had two experiences that came home to roost many days after in England.

  The first concerned two American girls who were standing in the Negev desert, under the boiling sun, at a bare crossroads with no habitation or inhabitant visible for many miles. Had Moses and his flock happened by it would have done nothing to disturb the scene. I was driving over the desert hills with a beserk Russian. He was a huge, emotional man with a Joe Stalin moustache and eyes like my dog's. When they played Russian songs at the End of the World, a hostelry on the Red Sea, he shed the largest tears I have ever seen from a man.

  As we drove over those hot and flinty mountains, and came upon the prospect of the plain, spread out brown and baked before us, my friend at once spotted the two specks, far below, further away, at the crossroads. 'Women,' he forecast, like a hunter saying 'Bison'. 'They have had a lift on a truck going to the kibbutz to the west. Now they are waiting for someone to take them down to Eilat.'

  His forecast was perfect and after coming down onto the flatter desert we eventually arrived alongside the dusty young ladies, standing veiled with flies and with their thumbs held hopefully out. They came with us to Eilat, on the Red Sea, where they stayed at the youth hostel and we stayed at the Queen of Sheba hotel. During the course of the next few days, influenced no doubt by the warmth of both the local friendship and sunshine, I suggested to the girls that if they should ever arrive in London then they might telephone me at the Evening News.

  At least two years went by and I was working in the garden of my flat-roofed house one Sunday when the telephone rang and my wife answered it. She appeared a little peevishly I thought, and said: 'It's Mimi.'

  Mimi I did not know, but she had been given my number by one of the girls from Israel under that irritating system where every American's friend is everyone else's boon companion. She was visiting London and would just love to meet me. She had been given, against the strictest rules, my home number by an accommodating, if lax, telephone operator at the office.

  She was very insistent and, after explaining that I could not rendezvous with her immediately since I was among the weeds, I agreed to have an innocuous tea the following afternoon.

  We met at Lyon's Corner House, me and Mimi and forty-three of her teenage girlfriends. They were so flattering and so pleased to see me that I ended up showing them around London. In a long and noisy crocodile we trudged through the tourist spots, me in the van. Every now and then I would pause to answer some question about our architectural heritage, our history, what sort of trees grew in the parks, or whether we had ice cubes yet. There were some enquiries to which I did not know the answer so I made it up. When we were trooping along the Mall, a policeman at a crossing called out to me: 'Guide! Will you keep your party off the road, please.'

  Naturally I was very fed up with the whole farrago. It was also extremely wearying. Eventually they demanded to go to Soho to see some sin and I agreed to lead them, with the proviso that it was to be the last call. I wanted to go home to my weeds.

  Like some latter-day General Booth I marched this wholesome mob up and down Old Compton Street, Greek Street, Romilly Street and all those nefarious byways that appear to change places every time you visit them. There was no sin visible and I had to assemble my team and confess that in all the years I had been familiar with Soho I had never seen a gangster. Soho's reputation was just a fable. At that moment a man began stabbing another man to death outside a greengrocer's. The victim was stabbing the assilant back and a box of plums was knocked onto the pavement. The American girls crowded around, thrilled to bits, while the two men rolled and stabbed each other. Blood was all over the pavement and the shopkeeper was howling somewhat surrealistic ally: 'My plums! My plums!' Eventually the police and the ambulancemen appeared and the protagonists were cleared up and carried away. The forty-four American girls were fizzing with excitement. Mimi kissed me violently and gushed: 'Oh, thank you, Leslie. Thank you. London is just wonderful!'

  The second fall from grace concerned a young lady of extreme beauty and madness called Hannah. I met her one day in the California Bar in Tel Aviv, an establishment run by one Abe Nathan who shortly after tried to bring about a one-man peace in the Middle East by flying to the Egyptians and asking them to be reasonable. I like to think it was Abe to whom they eventually listened. He has spent his life, since then, abandoning his former wine-women-and-song existence, in trying to bring peace and understanding to all parts of the world most of which obstinately refuses to listen. He sails in a boat and broadcasts sanity. Sanity, unfortunately, is something not many people recognise when they see it. But Abe tries.

  In his bar, this hot afternoon, I met Hannah who told me in the same breath as her name that her life's ambition was to visit England. During the time I knew her she remained the most dedicated and most voluptuous Anglophile I have ever met. She was also, as I have mentioned, impetuous to the point of being crazy.

  Two years or more after our meeting when I was, so to speak, between marriages, she suddenly appeared in London, at Aldgate Pump to be precise, and announced that she had come to live with me. This would have been complicated in the extreme, but I was just going to Norwich to take part in a programme at Anglia Television and it occurred to me that, just for old time's sake, she might like to accompany me.

  On the train she told me her story. She had taken part in a film and won a beauty contest in Israel and with the money she gained she had set out by sea to Greece and then overland to see the England she had loved so long from afar. Her English was limited (Hebrew being her natural language) but she graphically recounted her adventures across Europe and how she had arrived, with passport but no work permit or other documents, at Dover. It was raining and she was cold. She began to cry. A sympathetic, if predatory, dock policeman put his cloak about her and took her home with him. There she stayed for a week. Now she was with me again, overjoyed to be in England and eager to become famous.

  We went to the dining car to have tea and there she produced a wad of her latest glamour photographs. She was deeply in love with herself. The pictures were by no means obscene but might have been considered a trifle over-exposed. She had a great pack of them and she was very proud. Sitting opposite was a young man reading an evangelistic newspaper with good-news headlines: 'God's Word Proved'! and Jesus Lives Today'! I had been keeping an anxious eye on his proximity and I was not worried for nothing. Suddenly Hannah began distributing her naked photographs like a dealer in a poker school. One, and then another, slid beneath the religious young man's paper and I heard him gasp, then moan.

  Hannah would have never understood anything complicated so while attempting to gather up her pictures I said: 'Stop. He is religious. He is . . . a . . .' Inspiration came. 'He is a rabbi.'

  The young man, puce-faced, pushed the offending photographs back at us, folded his gospel news and scrambled from behind the table. When he had reached the aisle he turned and glared at me. 'And I'm not a rabbi either!' he squeaked.

  Hannah was quite without restraint. A sort of madness came over her at, for me, the most inopportune moments
. Another arrived early that evening. I was sitting in the interview chair at Anglia Television talking about my latest novel. The programme was going out live in the evening magazine. Suddenly I saw the interviewer's eyeballs begin to curl. To my left and slightly behind me there was an ominous crash. Still attempting to talk rationally I saw from the edge of my eye that the lovely Hannah was being pinned to the floor of the studio by four technicians who were patently enjoying every moment of it. One was sitting across her stomach, one had her legs and the third her arms. The fourth, most important, had his fortunately large hands across her mouth.

  Somehow we got through the allotted four minutes of the interview; I do not know how. Afterwards they switched to some film item and we managed to manhandle her struggling from the studio. She recovered quickly. 'I am beautiful,' she announced to the massed technicians. 'It is me who must be on the television.'

  There was one further incident before our mercifully short reunion came to an end (she was eventually deported, having entered the country illegally, I imagine to the relief of a good many frightened men in London and elsewhere). We sat at dinner in the County Hotel, Norwich. In the middle of the table was a large bowl of salad. The dining room was full. Along came a waiter and Hannah, typically, asked him if he knew where she came from. After several attempts he gave up and she proudly said: 'I am Hannah from Israel.'

  'Oh, Palestine,' he said, realisation dawning. 'Out there myself just after the war. Shot quite a lot of your people.'

  He passed on. But I could see she was boiling to do something outrageous. 'Steady, steady,' I warned. 'He was only joking.' Then she did it. Seizing the salad bowl, she shouted: 'What is this market!' and flung it violently at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and, conscious of being struck by falling cucumber slices, when I opened them I saw that our salad had been distributed about the room. A woman was sitting shocked, with a lettuce leaf on her head while her husband scraped a squashy half tomato from the bridge of his spectacles. There were lumps of lettuce, spring onions, cucumber, and sloppy slices of tomato everywhere. The bowl itself had struck a child a resounding blow and the boy was holding it up and asking wonderingly: 'Where did it come from?' 'From whence did it come?' corrected his mother insistently. An onion had been added to another diner's soup and the crunch of radishes sounded below the feet of waiters. People began to wipe themselves down and a waitress collected the bits of salad and put them back in the bowl which she then pointedly replaced on our table. Eventually I looked up into the smoky and disgruntled eyes of the manager. 'Sorry,' I mumbled. 'It was an accident.'