by Nick Frost
Vicki was the leader of the volunteers, our mother away from home. She drew up the work schedules, gave us what we needed, at times told us off. She was an avid smoker. She also had a little dog that followed her everywhere, a mean and nasty little dick. I’m getting ahead of myself but the little dog was later badly injured after being hit by a car. I think it must’ve severed his spine, he followed Vicki down to her office one Tuesday as normal but the little thing was dragging his back legs behind it. Limp, dead. It didn’t seem to dampen his spirits anyway. He was still a mean son of a bitch. I asked Vicki what was going to happen to him. ‘I have to put him down.’ I laughed, disbelieving her. She didn’t laugh. She meant it. Two hours later there’s the noise of a single shot from a high-powered 9mm handgun. We never see him again.
This was a way down the line though. For now she looked at me like a sweaty human shit sitting behind her desk, which is exactly what I was.
Kibbutzniks have a wariness of volunteers, the travellers so necessary to them at the busy harvest time but generally overlooked as just a bunch of sex-crazed alcoholics who needed to be avoided at all costs. In hindsight they were actually spot on. It takes a lot of hard work and time to gain the trust of the Israelis.
The details of what happened after this point are a little hazy. I have a memory of other Israelis getting involved and me being led up to the dining room. It was massive, more than capable of fitting all six hundred residents in comfortably, which it did every Friday during Shabbat meal and various high days and holidays.
I sit alone watching other people eat supper, I enjoy the pleasant murmur of a conversation I can’t understand. Vicki returns with a housing list and I’m assigned a bed in a four-man room, she offers me dinner, and I accept. I wish I hadn’t the moment I see the horrors on offer. I have never seen so much veg and salad and unknown grains and pulses in my life. I never realised that food came in so many colours. For me food had always been brown and beige and a crossover between brown and beige, a colour I’d come to know as Broige. Also some yellow. The bread was nice though and the butter was diamond white in colour, I should say that ice-white butter takes some getting used to for an English like me, for the first few weeks it feels like I’m eating dripping.
I eat, I try and eat, I pack up my tray and then I’m led down to where I’d be living. It was a nice gentle stroll downhill to the two, two-storey blocks that housed the animals, us. They were squat white-ish buildings with an area of tattered lawn in the middle. People sit around swigging from bottles, laughing, a fire blazes. I see a young man with a guitar and I panic slightly, fuck it. I steady my ship. A new start means it was a time to accept new things, new people. Just let it go, Nick, please, please just let it go, it’s just a guitar for fucksakes.
I’m introduced to people. New people. Something I’m not really very good at.
‘Hello,’ someone says.
‘Also hello.’ It’s standard basic human interaction. I’m terrible at it and it frightens me. I smile a bit, I seem like an oaf, I’m embarrassed and shy.
‘Where you from?’
‘London.’
‘Cool. See you later.’
‘Okay. Goodbye.’
The blocks are tatty, paint peels and there’s broken glass on the floor, a million fag butts, a dented kettle lies dying in one of the hallways. There’s very loud music, chatting, laughter. I buzz a bit, the first inkling that I could grow to love it here.
My new room’s upstairs, first on the left. The door’s blue and covered in stickers, they do a bad job of hiding the odd boot and fist hole. There are three other boys in that room and by god I can’t for the life of me remember who they were. Please forgive me. In that tiny room were four beds, four tiny metal-framed beds with pancake-thin mattresses. The bed in the bottom left of the room is free. I unroll my new sleeping bag and stick it on the bed.
I get shown around, the shower room has many cracked tiles. The toilets are thick with limescale, like a Mother Shipton’s cave of chuds if you will. The place is dirty, cobwebs everywhere, vast cathedrals for our arachnid overlords. Other rooms are visited, cheery ‘Hellos’ are waved. People come and look. It was always a thing when someone new turned up. I was led to the common room. Wow, what chaos. What a shit box. I love it. It was two rooms knocked into one; the walls were covered in graffiti, there was a kettle, a toaster and a big old TV bolted into a large wooden box on the wall.
About thirty people were lying on the floor on cushions watching MTV and drinking heavily. Some girls made toast and passed it around the room. I did a lot of awkward, what I like to call Edgar Wright-style waves. It’s basically mouthing the word ‘Haloo’ silently and waving at the same time.
The deal on the kibbutz is this: you’re there to work! That’s it. You work for six days a week, six or seven hours a day, and in return they feed you, clothe you, give you alcohol and cigarettes and anything else you need/want, you even get paid a little bit, almost £30 a month! Sweet. They didn’t necessarily care what you did, except fighting and drugs – fighting and drugs were out. Anything else as long as you worked hard seemed to be fair game.
In the summer you started early to avoid the crushing heat of the day. It meant you finished early too. Your working day was 6 a.m. until 12.30 p.m. and then the rest of the day was your own. Simples.
In the winter it was cold and dark in the morning so you’d start a bit later which meant you’d finish later. Some jobs, like picking cotton or working in the vast fishponds, were about an hour’s drive away in the superheated Bekaa Valley. You’d start at 4 a.m. and be finished by 11.00 a.m. Lovely.
That first morning though my little travel alarm goes off and I groggily get up and follow the others. My first ever job was to work in the apple-packing factory. If kibbutz jobs were the army, apple packing was definitely the infantry. A boring, easy, tedious, meat and potatoes kibbutz job.
The factory was pretty big, exciting, it was the first factory I’d ever been in. The main section was a cavernous warehouse with a brick room on one side and offices up to the left, in the centre was a giant machine. The apple packer. I was instructed to sit at a low stool on one side of a long conveyer belt. Above was a machine that channelled empty apple boxes down to us ready to be filled. We all sit waiting.
A round and chunky Israeli man with tight permed hair bustles to the front of the conveyor and utters the words I will hear many times, ‘Guyth come to thee pleath.’ This is Eli Azer and he has a lithp. He’s one of the good guys, quick to laugh, and heavy handed with the volunteers he liked. I was to receive over six hundred dead arms from him in the next few months.
Later I’d do impressions of Eli Azer to make the other volunteers laugh. Boom! Dead arm! When the phone rang in the office a loud bell would ring across the whole factory, it was always for Eli Azer. A voice on an intercom would cut the radio and the factory-wide PA squeaked to life, ‘Eli Azer, Eli Azer, telefon mer ve shtayim.’ Essentially it means ‘Eli Azer, telephone line 102.’
I discovered I could do a pretty good impression of the voice from the office, so sometimes I’d sneak off the work line, use the phone as an intercom and say the words, which would then blare out across the factory. We would laugh so hard watching Eli Azer trot to the phone to find no one there. Eventually they caught on and I was rumbled. Even Eli Azer found it funny in a kind of ‘now you’re going to get a really fucking dead arm’ kind of way.
That was to come. For now he kept his distance from me. I was an unknown. He, like all the Israelis, had to ascertain what my work ethic was. Am I there to work or am I just going to drink and fuck about? I guess it’s also some kind of defence mechanism; being raised and living on a kibbutz means that people leave, volunteers by their very definition are bound to be transient. Don’t get close to us. You’ll be hurt when we go.
We gather round and watch Eli Azer pull apples from a hopper; he packs them with a speed I never could’ve imagined from sausage fingers like his. What a talent. There I was
thinking you’d just stick them in a punnet. Each different size and type of apple had a different technique. A technique designed to fit exactly the right amount into each punnet. Clever. Easy. Boring.
After the lesson a buzzer sounds and the machine creaks into life. The apples tumble down onto the conveyor, you pack them, face them up real pretty then you do it again and again and again. Once you’d done two boxes, you’d drop your little packing plinth down and roll them onto another conveyor that led to a workstation we called Wrapping and Stacking. This was where the cool kids in the factory worked. Jobs on the kibbutz were very hierarchical. The longer you’d been there, the harder you worked, the better job you got.
Later in my kibbutz experience I myself would become a Wrapper and a Stacker. I’d intercept the apples as they thundered down the roller thing and sling the boxes, with great accuracy and just the right amount of power, onto a pallet until they were seven or so feet high. Four cardboard corners would be secured around the stack and then you’d use a really annoying ratchet machine to bind the whole wobbly lot together. It was a good fucking job. If you worked strong and fast you could move thirty tons of apples a day. It was a point of pride to see how many tons you could shift. After doing this job for a couple of weeks you got giant, well-defined forearms and shoulders. Furious wanking also helped.
Whatever jobs you did – except if you worked down in the fields – you’d work for a couple of hours before breakfast, and it took some getting used to. When I wake up I usually need to eat immediately. A hooter would sound and we’d hammer up the hill towards the dining room to feed. Breakfast was rushed and primal; as a volunteer I was hungry most of the time. We’d spend a lot of time talking about the food we missed and what we’d love to eat right now – weirdly it was usually roast dinners or McDonalds with the odd Full English thrown in for good measure.
I was a fussy little sod back then when it came to food. Crisps aside, I essentially didn’t eat any vegetables. It was like this until I was thirty or so when my taste buds changed and I couldn’t get enough of the things. At this point though I’m a strict carnivore, crisps aside, so being in Israel surrounded by nothing but crisp, fresh salads was an absolute fucking nightmare. I eventually found things that worked for me and stuck to them.
Breakfast was all about the eggs on toast, soft boiled eggs, mashed up in a bowl with mayo and plenty of black pepper. The problem with breakfast eggs on kibbutz though is they never seemed to be fully cooked. I love yolk and I think yolk with cracked, black pepper to be one of the greatest flavour combinations known to man, but I hate food which is gluey or snot-like or shrouded in jelly. I was in Japan once with the lovely Joe Cornish and had to eat a lot of McDonalds as everything came shrouded in gluey phlegm. (A slight over-exaggeration but you know what I mean.)
Sometimes at breakfast I’d open nine eggs just to find one usable egg. Let me tell you a 9:1 usable egg ratio is a really poor egg ratio. All those wasted embryos! The food was generally bad, not bad per se but bad for me. That said, the longer you were there the more scams and angles you could find.
If you knew where to look in the kitchen, what pots or pans to peer into, you could find the delicately poached chicken breasts they cooked specifically for the elderly Holocaust survivors. This insensitive scam, though delicious and meaty, was essentially a bit naughty. It was fine when it was just me on the sniff but when the other meat-craving volunteers caught on the gig was up. We were warned off and rightly so. Imagine surviving the horrors of Auschwitz only to have some fucking Herbert half-inch the only food left you can stomach.
Still, you could supplement meagre rations a few ways, toast and ketchup being one of them. I still to this day love toast and ketchup. Another was to befriend the guards in the guard house. They always had tons of food. On a Friday night after the disco (more on the disco later) I discovered that the soldiers would cook chips. Wonderful handcut, proper chips. The Israelis would fry half an onion in the oil first before putting the potatoes in. It gave the chips a unique oniony flavour that was delicious and quite unforgettable.
If you were nice/pissed enough and hilarious they’d give you a big bowl of those lovely, oniony bastards. A few times they’d even drop me back to the block in their battle jeep afterwards. I’d usually try and ponce fags en route too. Naughty.
After breakfast we’d amble back and pack more apples until the coffee break at about ten-thirty. Coffee break was fun, we’d gather in the break room and the Israelis would bring out nice biscuits for dunking. It was a chance to chat about packing apples and have a laugh with our Hebrew overlords. After break I’d have another couple of easy hours’ work and that was that, the work was done.
Essentially every day, every week, on the kibbutz was the same. It was like being in a prison for alkies. Any deviation was to be mistrusted and embraced. Apple packing was the first job most people did. Generally you did one job for weeks, if you showed a natural flair for one thing chances are your gang boss would want to keep you there.
Before apples could be packed they had to be picked and that meant working in the orchards which were lovely. This was one of the kibbutz’s main jobs in the summer. They’d need all the volunteers they could get to bring in the harvest. I liked working in the orchard, it was hot, the sun was always shining and you could eat all the apples you wanted.
You also got these lovely buckets made of canvas that you’d strap on with a harness (I love a job with equipment). Once the basket was full you’d shout the Hebrew word for basket, ‘SAL!’ Someone would turn up, take your basket, give you a new one and on you’d go. It was great, you’d chat, talk about food, who you fancied, who was fucking whom, music, family, anything, sometimes silence would reign and you’d enjoy that, it was sweet.
The volunteers, like me, were fuck-ups from all nations. Adventurers, drifters, gap-year kids or people just heading through. Swedes, Danes, South Africans, Kiwis, Australians and loads of Brits make for a heady mix of ideas, cultures and boozing styles. As a guy on kibbutz the holy grail was a new group of Swedish girls arriving. What a treat, so blonde and shiny, hair glinting like freshly cut gold.
Water and coffee were very important things in the orchards, if either was left back in kibbutz it’d cause a real stink. Someone would have to go back. We’d take our midmorning break sitting in the shade of the apple trees, they’d bring ice creams, what a wonderful treat. Sometimes while picking you’d hear a volunteer shriek loudly. It’d be one of two things, either chameleons, which took great pleasure in grabbing on to the hands that reached into leafy canopies looking for apples, or little furry grey tarantulas that would nestle under the stones and logs at the base of the tree. Terrifying. Sometimes if you were lucky you’d see volunteers stumbling backwards screaming with a chameleon attached to their arm. Big funs.
The kibbutz had acres of orchards; one of my favourites was right on the border with Lebanon; actually most of the kibbutz was on the border with Lebanon, but this orchard was right on the border. We’d heard a rumour that if you threw something at the security fence (a fence that runs the entire length of Northern Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan) tanks would come! Working in the closest orchard our curiosity got the better of us. After much hysterical debate, one of us did it. A big apple was found and we – notice I’m saying we – flung the fucker over the kibbutz fence and into the security fence beyond. The first time we did it we absolutely shit ourselves panicking, we lay trembling under the trees, I needed the toilet so badly. After some silence and nothing happening, we first heard and then watched two tanks rumble up to where we’d tossed the apple. Holy Balls. This was the coolest thing ever. After the first time it got less stressful and slightly less fun but we endured. I thought it important for the defence of Israel that the tank crews be well drilled.
I’ve always thought that if I didn’t do what I do now I’d want to work on the land or as a water sheriff. The kibbutz was generally perfect for this, plenty of chances to be outside.
&nbs
p; So when I looked at my work rota for the week and saw I’d been assigned to work in their plastic factory it was a real blow. The only upside, it was air-conditioned. Lovely, lovely, cold, really expensive air. The plastic factory had two basic jobs you could do. One was done dressed in a white clean-room hygiene suit. You looked like the Oompa Loompas that send Mike TV across the studio in Willy Chocolate and the Wonka Factory.
It wasn’t a fun job, the stuffy Israelis in that factory meant chatter was not encouraged and the day always seemed to go on and fucking on. The plastic factory, Elcam, made one thing and one thing only, the little plastic valves they’d put in your arm if you were unfortunate enough to ever need a drip. Essentially it’s a small plastic chamber with a needle at one end and two wheels the other end so one could direct or restrict the flow of intravenous medicines. (Where did that come from?) And that was it. For six hours we’d turn a tiny valve onto a tiny screw. For six hours. Not much talking, just screwing. A few clever people brought Walkmans (if you’re not sure what they are, Google it) but generally we’d work in silence, save for the odd inevitable giggle outbreak.
The other job in the plastic factory was worse, much worse. The shift would run from midnight until 6 a.m. and it was a job for just one person. Tonight it was just me. Me and my mind, which can be difficult at the best of times, to be honest. Joining me tonight is a giant machine that does something and the soothing ping of their onsite reactor. The reactor was used to irradiate and sterilise the product. The ping was an indication that everything was okay. Why the ping couldn’t just happen when shit gets fucked up I’ll never know. If I was lucky someone would let me use a cassette player so I could try and blank out the pings and beeps of the factory with a well-worn tape of house mixes.
Being in that place alone at night made me nervous, especially if the gap between the pings suddenly lengthened, even by a fraction of a second. My imagination being what it is, I’d often see myself in the centre of a Three Mile Island-style melt-down, immolated in an atomic power throb. STOP THINKING!!! Near enough every five minutes I’d spin around convinced there was someone sneaking up behind me. It’s the same feeling I get snorkelling in the Med.