Israel (4)

Reluctant tourist

Benny Green

Although I went to Israel once, in 1965, I can't say I really wanted to see it. Not that I have anything against the place, but the truth is that I have never really wanted to see anywhere. I am the worst traveller, the most bored sightseer, the most unsociable tourist

anyone has ever known, the kind of stay-athome who packs sandwiches for a trip to Upton Park, and who, long ago, used to take tea at the old Euston Station just for the pleasure of being close to so many trains without

having to catch any of them. While I am not

proud of my Insularity, there is no point in trying to hide it either, and I knew what Is rael would be like before I got there. The county cricket scores two days late, no cheddar cheese for breakfast and bedroom curtains

too thin to stop the sun from waking me at some filthy biblical hour illte five in the morning. I did what I could to fortify myself by packing Trollope and Wisden, and the support of those two gentlemen, to say nothing of my wife's, just about managed to get me through two traumatic weeks.

The sightseeing was all right if you like that sort of thing, which I hate. Talk about sheer comical futility, somewhere in the house there is a snapshot of me astride a camel at Jericho, a town, by the way, which seemed about to Stir at last from the torpor of centu ries by building itself a decent football stadium. That was the day our guide pointed to a

small hillock which Jacklin whould have brushed aside as a mere bunker, and announced that this was where David slew Goliath. I then invited him to pull the other one, which he promptly did by saying that soon we would be coming in sight of a lump of rock known to all the local guides as Lot's Wife. At this point a retired accountant from Salford sitting in the front seat, who had

.clearly had enough, peered through his window and exclaimed, "Well booger me if it isn't Esau and Jacob," at which an American couple wearing seersucker polaroid cameras flung themselves over to that side of the bus in frenzied anticipation of apocalypse.

Then there was the obligatory visit to a kibbutz, which reminded me of the experiences years before of my old friend DA who, having heard that a kibbutz was a place where nobody worked for money, and being a man who had devoted many years to not working either for money or anything else, took himself off to Israel on the next boat. The authorities there took one look at him, saw that he was likely to scare the cattle, and put him to work picking apples, but after ten minutes and eight apples, he was overcome by vertigo and fell out of the tree on to the head of a 108-year-old Ukrainian rainmaker who had lived through the horrors of the Russo-Japanese War without ever being half as terrified as he was now. After that M was taken out of the orchards into the farmyard. where he was told to stand on a cart and stack the bales of hay being forked up to hint by his fellow-farmers. Fifteen minutes later he had disappeared from view, and it took the frantic unbaling of half the kibbutz population to uncover him again. Finally he was asked to wash up in the communal kitchens, but on the first day they had to evacuate the place to save everyone from being swept away by the tidal wave of detergent foarn caused by M's liberal sprinkling technique. He left the country after that, mindful of the suggestion that he might be able to further the Israeli cause more effectively by getting himself appointed to the Egyptian General Staff.

At the end of the first week of my visit, bY which time I had started reading The Three Clerks for the second time around, and had learned to defeat the blandishments of the morning sun by retiring each night with one of my wife's natty chiffon scarves tied over my eyes, I had ceased even to go through the motions of looking over the biblical sights.

The end came for us one morning when We

. found ourselves at the bottom. of Mount Car:

mel without the energy or the inclination to go to the top of Mount Carmel. The official

guide looked at us in disbelieving horror. " You mean you've come all this way, right to the foot of the Mount, and now you're refusing to go up it? You can't not go up it. I never heard of such a thing." In the end I convinced him, at which he thought about it for a moment and then came up with his solution. Reaching into his jacket pocket he said, " Look, I like you. You seem a nice couple, so I tell you what 1.01 going to do. Take these, wear them, and nobody need ever know you're a couple of frauds." And he thrust into my hand two small, lapel badges certifying that their wearers had, been to the top of Mount Carmel.

It was not till the night before we nevi home that I recognised any close affinities be,' tween the locals and the Anglo-Jewish envi; ronment of my childhood. Someone told us 0' a social club where you could get a decent game of table tennis, but when we found the place the doors were locked and a small bat angry crowd was smouldering on the front steps. Eventually someone fetched the care taker, a youngish chap from Birminghtull who kept waving the keys in the faces of the frustrated ping-pongers and shouting that when he didn't play, nobody played. The crowd screamed and shoved to a man — es" cept me. I was laughing in recollection of a hundred identical squabbles in my earl teens, when all ninety members of the youth club I attended would spend five evenings a week finding new ways of contravening IV! like never take both feet off the ground while playing snooker, never knock-up before a table tennis match for more than ten rallies, never throw medicine balls out of the fil;s,t; floor windows and so on. It was just like being at home. Even so, we caught our plane next morning, just to make sure.