Liverpool Stories
The stories on this site are not included in my book.
The tales are snapshots of my life in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, and the echo chamber of the Mersey Sound that in the sixties resonated around the planet like an acoustic Tsunami. The stories cover a period of 50 odd years and so they touch on every aspect of my life from the rites of passage to the passing of youth. I hope you enjoy them.
Working Nine to Five
By
John Williams
It's over twenty five years since I was in Israel, and things have changed so much so that I sometimes wonder if the people I knew and liked are still in the land of the living. In spite of the passage of time I retain memories that are as vivid to me now as they were then. The burning heat of the Jordan Valley scorches my mind still as I recall the burnished sun set in a cloudless sky, a dazzling pearl lodged in a shell of shimmering azure. Finding somewhere cool to relax was a major problem as the very air throbbed with a sultry beat. Eventually the kibbutzniks provided us with gadget called a desert cooler. I still don't understand the physics of the contraption, other than it was made of metal and was jammed into the window aperture.
All I know is that it roared like a Sherman tank and created a hurricane of cold air so fierce that it stripped the beds of sheets faster than a maid in a vampire's bedroom. Whenever I walked the short distance from the cabin to the communal dining room I was reminded of the time I worked in the sapping heat of a glass factory. The only difference was that the furnaces in the bottle plant were sometimes allowed to cool down.
After a breakfast of hard boiled eggs, cucumber, tomato and peppers I would visit the 'econarium', the communal larder, and receive my daily manna, in the shape of a watermelon. Without the guarantee of its life saving moisture I would not have been allowed to work in the cotton fields. Quite often someone, usually an old woman from the laundry, would insist on soaking a towel in cold water, and then drape it around my rapidly wilting neck. Then it was time for the most thrilling event of the morning because it was in Israel that, for the first time in my life, I drove a four wheeled vehicle. Nothing exotic of course, just a John Deere tractor, but to me it was as if I had been let loose at Le Mans. The Israelis didn't seem to care that I had no experience of driving or even tractors. I had expressed a desire to work in the fields and so they simply obliged. I was after all a volunteer, not a conscript.
It could be asked why I opted for the near desert conditions of the cotton fields when there was the alternative of working in the fish ponds. Well, the pools might have been cooler but they held a peculiar danger. You see, the terrified carp would occasionally leap over the nets and crash head first into the nearest volunteer who would, perforce, be wading, thigh deep, in the water; with the consequence that some latter day Simon Peter would be left screaming in agony while clutching his fish-battered balls. If they think I'm working there they can whistle Dixie I thought, and volunteered for the land of cotton.
The drab green fields stretched out toward the Jordan river and were kept irrigated by a system of portable pipes mounted on wheels. It was my job to drag the pipes from one area of aridity to another.
For weeks all went well, but then I was paired up with a new volunteer, a Jewish guy from New England. Now to me the kibbutz was simply a communal farm but to Samuel it was the kitchen garden of Solomon's temple. Everything he did was a form of dedication to Eretz Israel, and the simplest task was invested with piety. What this meant was that every single step of the irrigation procedure had to be checked and re-checked by him and so my task, which was normally finished before the midday sun had reached its sadistic zenith, dragged on until late afternoon.
The other field workers, both Israeli and volunteers, observed his antics with astonishment, but I could relate to his sense of pilgrimage and so toiled on, listening to him for three weeks while he droned on about his excitement at the thought of visiting his sabra cousins in Jerusalem. One Friday we were moving a long length of pipe and as usual Samuel and myself had difficulty communicating as he was a hundred metres distant. Anyway, I thought we had established a simple code, a wave, to indicate that it was safe to drag the pipe away from its position, but I was wrong and so, acting on the signal of his waving arms, I opened the throttle of the tractor.
Perhaps Samuel had forgotten that the signal to stop was two hands slashing the air horizontally because when he saw that the cable was tied not to the mobile pipe but to the ashtutza, the main water source, he began waving at me like an intoxicated bookmaker. Thus it was that a gushing geyser lanced its watery way to the heavens. It took hours to repair the damage.
When I was leaving the field that Friday, exhausted by frustration, I crushed a kibbutznik's metal tool box beneath the tractor wheels. The owner of the box, who was working inches away from the wheels of my tractor simply looked at the box and shook his head. I suspect he had seen everything in his time.
On the following Sunday I was surprised to find that Samuel had not returned. I asked one of the kibbutzniks, a sardonic looking man called Itzhak, if he knew what had happened. Itzhak looked hard at me, and I noticed that there was a hard twinkle in his eye. He told me that Samuel had left for Jerusalem on Friday before Shabat had begun.
Oh, I said, So he has met his cousins at last and is staying with them?
Well, replied Itzhak, He met his cousins yes...but no he didn't stay with them
Why not? I asked.
His eyes glinting wickedly Izthak retorted, Because when he got there he found out that his cousins had become Christians, Jews for Jesus, and he caught the first plane to America!
Old Jewish joke.
An old man wails,
'God can you help me? I sent my only son to Israel and he became a Christian.'
God replies sadly, ' It's funny but the same thing happened to me!'