Mummy and Daddy did talk about the war — not in huge detail, but as a child you somehow glean things when something serious is going on. There were ration books and lines of POWs in blue uniforms marching down Cornmarket, but I didn’t really know what had happened until much later on. Once I was old enough to understand, it cast a shadow from which I have never escaped.
Obviously my parents’ friends and father’s patients weren’t all Jewish but, nonetheless, I was steeped in Jewishness. Every time somebody came on television, Mummy would say, ‘He’s Jewish.’ We were thrilled when Frankie Vaughan got to number one in the hit parade. He was called Vaughan because his grandmother said to him, in her thick Yiddish accent: ‘Frankie you are my number vone [Vaughan] grandson.’ I still look at every cast list at the end of television programmes to see who’s Jewish.
I even had a Jewish penfriend, through the Jewish Chronicle’s Children’s Page. We corresponded for some years. She lived in South Wales, in a little town called Tonypandy. There was once a flourishing Jewish community in South Wales. Merthyr Tydfil has one of the loveliest synagogues in Britain, now disused, but do visit if you can; sheep graze nearby high up, overlooking the town. Whenever I can, I visit synagogues; as religion dwindles and congregations age, the synagogues close. I want to keep alive the past and support parish churches in the same way. Religion isn’t important to me, but I want to acknowledge the people who took on the challenge of continuing their heritage in a strange land.
When I started at Oxford High School, Mummy went to see Miss Stack and announced: ‘We have our own religion and I don’t want Miriam to attend lessons about the New Testament.’ Now I regret that I’m ignorant of Book Two. I could have read it for myself — I never did. During assembly, which was Christian where hymns were sung, or during choir practice, the few atheists and Jews at the school used to go to another classroom. We read poems, which the teachers thought was a punishment, but actually it was a pleasure. We were always very aware of being Jewish, and I never let anyone forget it. That’s still true.
When I was in the First Form, one of the other children said to me, ‘You killed Christ.’ I said indignantly, ‘I didn’t.’ And she said, ‘Yes, you did! You’re a Jew and you killed Christ.’ I was upset and I went back home and told Mummy. Straight away, without a second’s pause, she said, ‘Right, I’m going to the headmistress.’ She always confronted things head on. She arrived at the school and marched right up to the office. I don’t know what she said to Miss Stack. It wasn’t the child’s fault, after all, she’d just heard it from her parents, but she never said anything like that again.
From my earliest memory, a little blue collection box made of tin and decorated with a star of David, marked ‘The Jewish National Fund’, sat in our hallway. Every Jewish household had one, and everybody put coins into it, and it all went towards the charity collection for the building of the Zionist dream.
As soon as I was old enough I wanted to go to Israel; I bought the lie that we were all taught as young Jews, that the Arabs had no right to be in Israel, that Israel is an amazing country which should belong only to the Jews, where clean water flowed in places that had never had it before. European Jewry had been almost obliterated, but here was a country where they survived, where they flourished, where they were in charge of things — it meant life: it was the future; it was hope.
I was in my late teens when I first went to Israel. It had become a popular pastime for young Jews to volunteer for work on Israeli kibbutzim. I had become friendly in Oxford with the niece of one of my father’s patients, a girl called Naomi Assenheim, born in Israel of Romanian parents. She was staying further up the Banbury Road with her uncle during her holidays. She lived in the Galil (Galilee), on a moshav (a less rigorous socialist construct than a kibbutz). She completely believed in the system. The accepted version of the kibbutz was that it was a rural settlement, peopled largely by Russian immigrants, who worked hard on the land. Children were separated from parents and brought up by other members of the community. It was pure socialism in action, an experiment in communal living. I wish the system had continued: the kibbutzniks were idealistic, decent people. They didn’t hate Arabs, and perhaps Israel would have developed differently if their energies had fuelled the land.
Naomi suggested that I go to a kibbutz in the Negev desert called Urim, so I did. I was frightened of flying, so I went by boat. I was quite a larky girl, on my own on an intrepid adventure, and I loved the experience of sailing, but my cabin was down in the bowels of the ship and very noisy and smelly. All the officers looked handsome in their white naval uniforms and one of them noticed me: travelling solo, with big breasts. He came over to me as I was sitting on the deck, reading. ‘Do you like this perfume?’ he asked, and showed me an enormous bottle of scent. He sprayed a bit on my wrist. ‘It’s lovely,’ I said. He smiled, ‘It’s yours.’ I demurred but he made me take it. He insisted I spray it liberally all over myself. It was jolly nice.
Then he said, ‘We have a cabin up on the top deck looking to the sea, with its own porthole. Would you like this cabin?’ ‘Oh, is it available?’ I asked. He said, ‘Sure, I’m an officer. I can arrange it.’
‘Oh, how lovely of him!’ I thought.
I asked an orderly to schlep all my luggage up several decks and all that day I flounced about the cabin, enjoying its facilities, luxuriating in my good luck.
After supper in the first-class dining room, I went to bed. At about two o’clock in the morning, I woke with a start. The officer had let himself into the cabin. ‘What are you doing?’ I cried. ‘Oh, darling, you didn’t think I’d send you to this cabin and you would be all alone.?’ he crooned. ‘But I thought that you were giving it to me…’ I stammered. ‘Sure, it’s yours, but we share it, yes?’ he said, sliding into bed alongside me. I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want that… that wasn’t… I didn’t think that’s what you wanted.’ He said, ‘What do you mean? I’m giving you a beautiful first-class cabin, and you think it’s just like that?’ ‘Well, yes. I did,’ I said, firmly. Less pleasantly, he said, ‘No. If you want the cabin, I have to share it with you.’
I got out of the bed, repacked all my things and returned to my lowly cabin in the middle of the night. I didn’t feel scared; I didn’t think he was going to rape me; I knew all I had to do was start screaming and there would be people right next door — he would have got into trouble. I was seventeen: it had never occurred to me that there would be a price to pay! How naive of me: I felt angry and embarrassed at my stupidity; I told nobody, I just thought ‘What a fucking creep.’ After that, I avoided him, and he avoided me, and that was that. I was in steerage for the rest of the voyage.
The boat docked at Haifa. The arrivals hall was chaotic, packed and boiling. The heat hit you, as if you’d walked into a wall — it almost knocked you over. I looked up at the notice over the entrance arch: ‘If you will it, it is no dream’ — a quotation from Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. That’s what he said about the state of Israel in 1880; it was eventually realised in 1948. It took a long time for Zionism to achieve this result.
I was excited to be in Israel, eager to discover what escapades lay in store for me at my kibbutz, and eagerly boarded the train for the Negev. When I got there, they said, ‘Welcome. So, you are going to wash and dry the dishes for five hundred people.’ That was my job. I thought, ‘Fuck that!’ I hadn’t travelled across the world to be doing dishes for my whole stay; I wanted a job in the open air. I told them that, and I was transferred to the fields, picking oranges.