by Nick Frost
***
I digress. This is all to come. For now I was still in fucking Ray Lodge. Only one thing helps me escape my fucking pain and I start to hit that shit very hard indeed.
I really liked my P&O teammate Brendan Heggarty. It’s amazing how a few years make all the difference in terms of friendship. When I was his younger brother’s friend, Brendan hated us because we were little jerks. Ten years later, it all changes. I was still a lowly freight rookie while Bren was a man going places in the shipping world. But during our time at P&O he never once fires a phlegm-centred foil ball at me. Not once! On the contrary, I think he was the person who helped save me from myself.
Working was my escape from a totally shit home life. I hated my life, I felt so alone, so lonely. I didn’t know what to do. I found it all too much watching my mum kill herself. Watching my dad, a shell of a man, broken, quiet, absent. My friends absent, no girlfriend, me having to live in a shit estate.
‘Oh boo hoo! Poor me.’
I think it broke me though. I was seventeen or eighteen years old. I didn’t realise what depression was for another twenty years or so.
One afternoon in the office Brendan pulled me aside, suggested we go and have a beer after work. It’s what geezers do when they need to put the world to rights. I met him in the Valentine in Gants Hill, a place I used to frequent when I was fifteen or so. We all hung out in pubs back then, playing the endless game of cat and mouse to see who could get served.
I think Brendan saw in me something he might’ve had in himself. After a while and several beers later he talks to me about his time abroad, talks to me about his travelling adventures. He tells me about a place he went to that helped him sort his shit out.
Like the French Foreign legion, this socialist commune accepts people from all religions, all colours, all creeds, no questions asked. All you need to do is work. He’s talking about a kibbutz. My mind starts to race. I could go. I could leave and start again, be someone else. Leave this fear and paranoia here in England.
If it hadn’t been for Bren’s intervention I think I might have died. Everything was killing me.
The problem was I had next to no money. Fortunately for me, back then in the early nineties we didn’t have the instant connectivity there is now, banks didn’t talk to each other as much, this was perfect for what I needed. I found a place that had four or five different banks pretty close together. I started at 11.59 p.m. and stopped at 12.01 a.m., going from one cashpoint to the next drawing out all the money I could. I managed to get almost £700. Minted. Let’s roll.
I found a company called Project 67 in Edgware Road that could get me to Israel and place me on a kibbutz.
I don’t remember what my mum and dad’s reaction was to me leaving. I think they were shocked but they didn’t try and stop me. If this is what I wanted then they’d support my decision. We had a little farewell BBQ at Uncle Brian’s house where I was presented with a shiny new backpack.
Mum kept a stiff upper lip until we got to the airport where she crumbled slightly. Poor thing. Dad’s wounds were beginning to scab over so he was on good form, cuddling Mum and cracking shit puns. We had a three-way cuddle and that was that. I was gone. When you share joy and tenderness and sadness at the prospect of a long time away from people you love it’s easy to forget for a moment the reason you’re leaving.
Part Two
I had NO idea what I was getting into. No idea whatsoever. That said, I was happy to be away. I immediately felt lighter, my soul felt lighter. I liked being on my own. Anything that happened to me now was completely my own doing and completely my own responsibility. I had no one else to blame but me and I liked it.
The El Al plane landed late at night in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. Wow. My mind was completely blown. What a place. It reminded me of Mos Eisley spaceport. It was the hottest, most alien place I’d ever been. I couldn’t believe you could reach somewhere like this by simply flying east in a plane for four hours.
It was amazing, frightening and utterly beguiling. The noise of mopeds, alien languages being coughed up into the air. Crowded mouthfuls of brown and broken teeth. Hundreds of cigarettes being smoked by men in long white robes. And then there were the soldiers, which of course meant guns. Lots and lots of guns.
A few of us who’d come through with the same operator bumble together, terrified, shuffling around, not knowing what to do at all. We wait alone for ages, we’re approached by men who raise their eyebrows and finger our shirts. Some of the blonde girls have their hair sniffed. Not me though, no one tries to sniff my hair. Not then! By and by, Project 67 (the tour operator) vehicles turn up, names are shouted out according to kibbutz. Goodbyes and good lucks are uttered and one by one they disappear. It feels like waiting to be picked for football. In the end the van that was coming for me and three or four others didn’t materialise.
The rep sticks me and the leftovers in a hot, loud taxi. It takes us to a youth hostel behind Ben Yehuda Street. I’m led with the others through a maze of hot, humid alleys into a tiny lift in an art deco building. I generally don’t like staying over at other people’s houses, I hated it as a child and even today if there’s a chance I can have my own bed, I’ll absolutely take it.
Now, however, I have no choice. I stand in the reception of my first ever youth hostel. I actually feel homesick, I want my mum, it’s an unfamiliar feeling for me. To want my mum. Maybe it’s not weird for me. I think I always wanted my mum really. Just not the Special Brew version.
All around reception are seasoned, battered-looking travellers, all dust and beaded goatees, they sense the freshness of my meat. They know something I don’t, they have the look. I’d get it eventually but it would take a while. To be fair they may have also been looking at my brand-new Berghaus rucksack (65L), a gift from Uncle Brian and Auntie Francis. God, I must have looked so young. I was so young.
I got checked in for one night – the next morning I’d go to the Project 67 office and be assigned a new kibbutz placement. For tonight though I’d be free to kick up my heels in Tel Aviv!
I’m assigned a space in a dorm. Four hard, metal, functional bunk beds in a very dark room. Wet towels hang from a spider web of twine strung across the room. Bags litter the floor. I see the shape of people sleeping under thin sheets. It’s so hot, and so smelly. I find a bed with a free mattress and haul my bag up. My bunk was the top one, there’s someone’s stuff on the bed beneath mine but they’re not there. I don’t unpack. I grab my secret bum bag, the kind you hide under all your clothes and reveal to would-be robbers the moment you have to haul your new shirt up to pay for anything, and meet the others in reception.
I buy a cold can of beer. It is called Goldstar, she is a stranger to me at first but would soon become my friend and part-time lover. She is so cold and so wet and delicious I devour her right there in the lobby. I don’t care who sees or hears my groans. I must imbibe her.
I think there were four or five of us in our little team of refugees, other forgotten souls like me, left over from the selection process. I don’t remember anything about them. Soz. Not names, not the girl:boy ratio. I’m not even sure what we did, not really. I vaguely remember walking around, eating a fucking great falafel and drinking beers. Then at one point we’re all on the beach. It felt so strange and different to me. Who knew that by taking one flight everything I had on my shoulders would be gone. It was that easy. (Of course it wasn’t, but sitting on that warm night beach, flirting and drinking beer felt a world away from Ray Lodge.)
We go back to the hostel, a small group of tipsy, noisy kids on holiday. I stumble into my assigned cell. Beds that had previously been filled with human-shaped lumps were now empty and empty beds now full of breathing, snoring human-shaped lumps.
Being a Bigmun there are universal truths you must quickly accept – limitations, one might say. Climbing silently up a flimsy bunk bed while a bit pissed without it shaking to fuck is one of those things. And volleyball.
The motion of my ascent settles by and by. I lie there knowing what was coming next, knowing what I have to do, I don’t want to but I’m compelled like a Wolf or Chihuahua and it begins, I roll and turn a while trying to get comfortable. I come around for the third or fourth comfort roll and I notice an old man standing five inches from my face.
He has long white hair in a loose plait and a white beard. He is shirtless although he wears a fetching denim gilet. I then note that in his left hand is a shiny ten-inch hunting knife. I say ten inches – it could’ve been eight. We regard each other in silence for an age.
‘Hello.’ I babble, he stares, unflinching, then speaks.
‘I was in Vietnam.’
‘Oh, an American!’ Why did I decide to play it so chipper, it was an odd choice. His cold blue eyes blink for the first time and he heads back down to his place.
Fuck it’s hot! Don’t move. You’ll be killed. When I was little I’d wake up and run to get into bed with Mum and Dad. It was always a massive mistake but I never learnt my lesson. Once in the bed they’d fall asleep leaving me wide awake, sandwiched between the two of them unable to move. This was me now. Don’t move, for fucksakes don’t move. I lie there most of the night terrified John Rambo might push that long piece of cold, forged steel up through the series one boxset-thin mattress and into my ribs and soft, fragile organs within.
At some point I nod off, when I wake up it’s morning and I’m still terrified so I lift silently into the air and still horizontal I levitate off the bunk and gently land on the floor, silent like an autumn leaf. There’s not a wobble in sight. The bunk beneath mine is empty, the bed is made with a coin-bouncing, military precision. My nightmare has gone. He was so lucky.
Later that morning I appear at the Project 67 office in Tel Aviv. Apologies are made, as are phone calls, and I’m shown a list of kibbutzim with available places for volunteers. Some of the others have places already in mind: a couple want to go down near Eilat for the beach and constant sun, some near Jerusalem for the history, Haifa for the . . . container port? I chose one at random. I say random – I really fancied living high up in the mountains, all the other would-be volunteers wanted the relentless organ-frying heat of the Sinai Desert. That was not for me so I chose a kibbutz called Bar-Am, high in the mountains in the far north of the country about two hundred metres from the Lebanese border. I’d considered climate over safety. What a bell-end.
I was given enough shekels for the bus ride north, a set of instructions and a contact list. An hour later I was in the old Tel Aviv bus station, hung-over and famished. It was here I stumbled into my first piece of good falafel-fortune. I find one stand among many and it does great falafel, they have a unique selling point and it’s this: as long as your pitta bread is intact you get free refills of the crispy falafel balls. What a joyous discovery! I find the secret is applying the minimum amount of tahini. It’s not easy but it ensures you keep the bread intact for longer. I think I had three refills. It’s enough. Three is more than enough for even the chubbiest of Rabbis.
It’s almost time for my bus. I grab a cola-style drink and a bar of chocolate with cartoon basketballs depicted on the wrapper and get on the coach, which dreamily is air-conditioned, lovely! I settle down for the ride, I like bus journeys in foreign countries, it gives you a chance to see a lot relatively quickly. The journey takes about four hours. Sitting alone on that bus gave me a chance to think about where I was and why I was there.
Tel Aviv, apart from the art deco sections, which are beautiful, and the beach, again Copacabana-esque in its loveliness, was a bit of a hole. Don’t get me wrong, I saw less than five per cent of the place but none of it looked finished to me. Maybe it wasn’t? Bomb damage? The Intifada? First Gulf War? I guess these things all take their toll on a place.
Once out of Tel Aviv things brightened up a bit. The weather was great, on my left I could see the bright blue Med and I was heading north fast. I like moving, north, south, whatever, just keep moving. Between Tel Aviv and Haifa is a dense corridor of industry, a busy, heavily populated strip of land sandwiched between the sea and the desert. That’s Israel all over.
We stop in Haifa and I have to change buses. I’m stood loafing around eating another falafel, of course. I watch a car, can’t quite remember which type, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say a white Peugeot 306, it hammers into the station at pace and an elderly, kindly-looking Palestinian man jumps out and leaves the engine running. A small amount of hell breaks loose, a light panic rises among the folk, soldiers begin hesitantly to remove their battle rifles from their shoulders and start shouting things in Hebrew. People swarm away from the car, sirens begin. This is a fucking car bomb.
I’m about to be torn apart, first by the concussive blump of the pressure wave and then by razor-sharp sections of the white Peugeot 306. The panic begins to reach a crescendo and the kindly Palestinian man comes running back out of a shop holding an armful of bread. He is immediately surrounded by twenty IDF soldiers pointing Galil assault rifles at him. It is now the Palestinian man’s turn to panic. Poor fucker. He only ran in to get some bread, he’s now one bad decision, one quick movement away from being killed. He’s roughly pulled from the car and led away. The mood immediately lifts as people laugh at the crushed loaves on the pavement. I’m stunned. I stagger onto my bus and leave, heading north towards the mountains.
My bus stops, it’d been nice and quiet before now. The doors hiss open and the bus fills with essentially thirty or so catwalk models. Sexy sexy sexy women in army uniforms carrying a selection of sexy assault rifles. I was frightened and nervous and terribly horny. The hot girl warrior that sits next to me senses my horniness, she doesn’t return my desperate attempt at a smile, she moves her Galil assault rifle around so it’s now sitting between us. Bit rude.
The warm weather and the gentle bumping of the bus sends her to sleep pretty quickly. As we bump along the muzzle of her rifle comes to rest on my thigh (as a rule heavy assault rifles don’t really come to rest, they dig in and this one was really digging in).
I’d never seen a gun until two days ago and now there are probably sixty on this bus alone, one of which is leaving a red circle on my chubby white thigh. I decide to push it off a bit. As soon as my paw brushes the unrelenting iron of her Jewish killbroom her eyes spring open and her finger skips off the trigger guard and onto the trigger. How did she know?
‘The, the, your, um, your gun is digging into my leg, miss.’
She huffs loudly, she’s starting to fall for me, I can tell. The rifle’s pulled and repositioned away from me. Please don’t go off. I fidget nervously. I press my head against the vibrating window and doze off.
When I wake up the bus is quiet and almost empty. The war models got off at a kibbutz called Sasa. I wish I could go there. The next stop is me.
I’m always a bit sad arriving somewhere after a long journey when it’s dark. I want to see what a place looks like. That said, I like the surprise of seeing it the next morning but I guess I’m impatient like that. Night is falling rapidly and the bus belches me out. The doors hiss and it rumbles away leaving me stood on my own, surrounded by sticky warmth and a cacophony of the loudest night sounds imaginable. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard cicadas and it’s fucking loud and beautiful.
In the failing light I shuffle downhill towards a brightly lit guard hut. Seeing me, the soldiers inside trudge out, rifles slung low, they clearly don’t see me as much of a threat. What they’re guarding is a massive gate, thick steel, bright yellow. Fences run off left and right to who knows where. The ten-foot-high perimeter is topped in acres of razor wire. It looks like a category A prison, a place whe
re only the hardest fuckheads need apply, but it wasn’t that, it was simply a farm.
When I see the rifles I slow, then stop, there’s a slight standoff while I’m worked out. After speaking Hebrew to one another they wave me forward. More Hebrew is spoken. I show them my passport and the letter from Project 67. There’s head nodding. This is good. The soldier inside does something to a lever or a button and an orange light starts spinning on the gate. The giant portal slowly pulls back. I wonder briefly if they have a T-Rex. I’d like to say I remember a giant siren making an ERR URR-ERR URR noise as the gate withdraws but that would be false.
I’m given directions to a work office, a small room under the dining hall in the main building of the kibbutz. Even in the tightening twilight I could see the place was covered in trees. It was dark and warm, the whole place smells like pine and forests. I’m not in Kansas anymore.
The release and relief from my responsibilities mean the tiredness has caught up with me. The bright lights hurt my eyes, and people stare. I was lost and new and gleaming white and everyone could see it. I was relieved to be there, proud at what I’d done but feeling very alone. A sudden dawning of what I’d done shuddered over me.
I knock on the door. Someone shouts something from inside and I enter. A woman who looks like Nana Mouskouri sits behind a table that’s stacked high with paper. She stares at me through her thick, black-framed glasses. She is the embodiment of the seventies. It was 1991.
‘Ken!’ (Hebrew for yes.) I shuffle in, my rucksack banging the frame of the wooden door. She smokes and tuts and refuses to look at me. She gestures at a chair. I struggle to sit. I give her my letter. She reads it and finally she regards me. Softening slightly.
This is Vicki. Over the next couple of months I get to know her and really like her. She was a hard woman, blunt, direct, no fucking around. She wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and didn’t suffer fools gladly but I was always really cheeky and she liked it.