Spitfire Girl (21 page)

‘Gordon Levett...’ He too was English. Lean and hungry looking. Ex-R.A.F. He seemed to know Kastner and Shameer.

Kastner took charge immediately and shepherded us to an adjoining office littered with maps and charts.

‘Here’s the dope,’ he said without preamble. ‘As you know the Arabs (he pronounced it A-rabs) are determined to stop the Spitfires from getting through to Burma and have closed the old route via Cyprus. Air Services have, of course, cancelled their contract. The Israeli Government have decided to supervise the flights themselves using a different route and have appointed me as leader.’ He smiled apologetically at me as though acknowledging that there was a remote case for my leading the flights.

‘How many flights?’ asked Sonny.

‘I am not sure yet. Seven aircraft have already been delivered by Air Services. Right, Jackie?’

‘Right,’ I clipped in mimicry.

‘That leaves twenty-three to be delivered. There’s four of us; that’s six flights with someone unlucky on the last trip.’

I looked carefully out of the window.

‘Now,’ he said seriously, ‘for the route.’ We crouched around him as he laid the maps on the floor and pointed to the route heavily scored with red pencil. ‘To avoid Arab territory we’ll be flying direct from Israel to Diyarbekir in Turkey for our first refuelling halt. From there due east over Turkey until we get to the Iran border then we can turn south for Kermanshah. From then on it will be plain sailing to Abadan-Sharja-Karachi-Jodhpur-Cawnpore-Calcutta and Rangoon. The trickiest leg is the first from Israel to Diyarbekir. We’ll have to go well out over the Mediterranean to avoid Lebanon and Syria. If we get intercepted, they’ll shoot and ask questions afterwards. We’re all individually insured for ten thousand Sterling,’ he added with a puckish grin.

I looked at the maps. The new route, 500 miles longer than the old, curved like a question mark around the Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

‘What do you think, Jackie?’ asked Kastner, with the deference due to my recent experience.

‘The Diyarbekir-Kermanshah leg looks a bit grim if the weather is bad.’

We pondered over the dark mauve shading, mountains, that flanked the route and surrounded Kermanshah.

‘Yup,’ agreed Kastner, ‘but there’s no alternative. We’ll just have to make sure the weather is O.K. before we take off.’

Wise words, I thought, but Meteorology is not yet an exact science.

We discussed the route, visas and fuel carnets before Kastner closed the meeting. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to discuss details in Tel Aviv. I’m leaving almost immediately to test the Spits. You’ll be leaving for Israel on the tenth of January, Gordon here will take you around to El Al’s office to collect your plane tickets. Liaise with him and Shameer. O.K.?’

At El Al’s office in Regent Street we sat waiting for our tickets. On the walls were stylized photographs of orange groves and antiquities. We were a little shy with each other.

‘I’m glad we’ve got a contract. You have to be careful with these people,’ I observed, for want of something better to say.

‘What people?’ asked Levett, eyebrows raised.

‘Oh, you know. Jews.’

‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘Tell me.’

Pedant, I classified him immediately, and changed the subject.

R
eg, resigned, and Jill saw me off at Taunton. We were
blissfully unaware that it would be nine months before we met again.

In the El Al Constellation it was not long before we became Sonny, Gordon and Jackie. Sonny, a raconteur, sipped coffee – ‘I always go on the wagon when I’m flying’ – and spun splendid tales of the good old days of flying. Gordon drank beer and was monosyllabic. I tried to make friends.

‘Do you know Kastner?’

‘Yes.’

I tried again. ‘When?’

‘During the war. The Arab-Israel war.’

‘Flying?’

‘Yes.’

Levett. Levett? Oh Lord, he’s Jewish. I flushed at the memory of my gaffe in El Al’s office.

‘What’s Israel like?’ I asked meekly.

‘Dreadful place,’ he said ironically, ‘full of Jews.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean...’

‘I know,’ he said wearily. ‘Some of your best friends are Jews.’

A little later the air-hostess served coffee and biscuits.

‘Pretty girl,’ I observed hopefully.

Levett grinned. ‘Yes, she’s Jewish. A Jewish girl in a Jewish plane flown by Jews to Jewland. You’re in a tough spot.’

‘
Touche
.’

We got along a little better after that. And slept.

L
eo, wearing an outrageous Miami beach shirt, and
slacks, welcomed us at Lydda Airport. ‘Hiya kids. Good trip?’ I glanced at Sonny, old enough to be Leo’s father, but his good-natured features smiled.

‘I’ve got rooms for you at the Yarkon Hotel in Tel Aviv. It’s near the beach,’ he added. Overhead a Spitfire swooped low in welcome before climbing steeply away in the warm, brilliant sunshine. ‘That’s Hugo. He’s helping with the testing.’

There was a crush in the airport reception lounge. A babble of German, French, Slav, Russian, tears and emotion.

‘What’s going on over there?’ asked Sonny.

‘New immigrants. It’s like that every day,’ answered Leo. ‘The population of Israel has doubled in the last two years.’

‘What does ‘‘Shalom’’ mean?’ I asked.

‘Peace be with you.’

Shalom. Shalom. I liked it and tried it out on the chauffeur, a German Jew. He was delighted and insisted that I sit next to him on the drive through eucalyptus and citrus groves to Tel Aviv. The six-figure number tattooed on his arm, he explained, was a concentration camp number.

During the drive he told me about Israel. Its conception was simple. A stroke of the pen by the British Government of 1917 who promised a ‘National Home’ in Palestine for the Jews scattered two thousand years before but still retaining their mystical yearning for their homeland. Gestation was uneasy as Arab and Jew fought bitterly over the interpretation of the words ‘National Home’. For thirty years Britain administered the Mandate and was torn between the insoluble contradiction of establishing the Jewish ‘Home’ without prejudice to the rights of the Arabs already living in Palestine. This was a problem that only Solomon could solve. The British Government, a dubious rose, between militantly belligerent thorns, and certainly no Solomon, terminated her responsibilities by, in 1948, ending the Mandate and evacuating. An open invitation to the Jew and Arab to let force equate the irresistible and the irremovable. Birth, then, was bloody. The Jews, alone as Britain was alone in 1940 but with no English Channel or air force to prevent invasion, were attacked by Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. ‘Don’t ask me how,’ continued the chauffeur, ‘but we won.’ The invasion failed and
Israel
was reborn after two thousand years. A unique atavism.

‘Today,’ concluded the chauffeur as the outskirts of Tel Aviv punctuated the sky-line, ‘we are eight years old and still struggling for life against the Arab blockade.’

A few days after our arrival in Israel we drove out to the nationalized aircraft overhaul base – ‘Bedek’ – at Lydda Airport, to test the Spitfires. Sonny and Gordon had insisted that I wear my scarlet jeans and a white sweater that had shrunk a bit in the wash.

‘Hiya, kid,’ welcomed Leo, appraising me with a gleam in his eye. ‘That’s the stuff. It’ll kill ’em.’

It did. Work stopped as we walked to the hangar to collect our flying gear.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ shouted Leo as I scrambled into a pair of overalls.

‘I can’t walk around like this,’ I protested.

‘Nuts to that.’ He grabbed the overalls and, with a cheer from the mechanics, threw them back to the storekeeper.

With a profusion of willing hands I climbed into a Spitfire, started up and taxied past the grinning mechanics and worried-looking executives.

After take-off I climbed in wide circles to 25,000 feet. Levelling off and looking down I felt a curious wave of anger and reverence. Beneath me was the land of the Bible where once walked the Son of God. Now the Son of Mars was rampant. At this height I could see in the brilliantly clear atmosphere the Egyptian border at Gaza and the Israeli communal farms where every man, woman and child sleeps with a rifle by his side after a day spent in the fields under the sniper’s itching finger. To the east, sheltering in the Judean hills lay Golgotha, and Jerusalem; that sorrowful city of God split in two by a barbed-wire no-man’s-land populated only by bullets and white-painted United Nations jeeps. Beyond the hills the salt waters of the Dead Sea reflected from a thousand feet below sea-level. To the north the Sea of Galilee pin-pointed yet another no-man’s-land, the Syrian border.

I could see Israel; north, south, east and west. A cramped verdant sliver flanked on three sides by desert and with the Mediterranean completing the encirclement. Inside Israel’s borders were the scars of industry, the rich promise of cultivated land. Beyond was the flat emptiness of desert and neglect. The Jews ask for very little, I thought. It was such a tiny piece of land for so much protestation.

Hugo met me after I landed.

‘Be careful, Jackie,’ he warned, after we had reminisced. ‘Two of our Jets were sent up after you.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘You flew too close to the borders. ‘‘Radar’’ thought you were an Egyptian.’

We had lunch in the works canteen. It was a salutary experience for me. I wish every anti-semite could spend a day at ‘Bedek’. There, on the aerodrome, was Israel. Every virtue, every failing, was there in cameo miniature. I entered the canteen with concealed patronage. I make no apology for that though there is no excuse for disliking the Jew. My parents should apologize; my school; my Church; and literature that has made the Jew the butt of man. I do make an apology that I had to have an emotional experience, a personal lesson, before I could attack the thick slime of anti-semitism nestling in my subconscious mind. Not all can go to Israel, and leave humble and ashamed.

Sitting opposite Hugo and myself over lunch were Jews from Germany, England, Latin America and Yemen. At the next table were Russians and Slavs. Sprinkled amongst them were Nordic-looking youngsters, toughly built, blue-eyed and confident. ‘Sabras,’ explained Hugo. ‘The Israeli nickname for the new generation of Jews born in Israel.’ The Jew from England was an engineer. Ex-R.A.F. complete with moustache and a hearty manner. I looked around the sea of faces. Listened to the fascinating babble of seven, eight different languages. My eyes flitted from complexions Anglo-Saxon to African. From features classically Semitic to the refined decadence of the English aristocrat. From manner courteous to aggressive. But as every eye caught mine the twinkle and smile of welcome and friendship was unmistakable.

The dark-complexioned were from Morocco and Yemen explained Hugo. New immigrants pitchforked into the twentieth century from a way of life that had not changed since the greatest Jew of all had died. They spoke only Arabic. The language of their cousin-enemy. ‘One of them had a nasty accident this morning,’ said Hugo. ‘They won’t
sit
on toilet seats; they think it’s unhygienic. They insist on standing on them despite orders to the contrary. One of them slipped, broke the porcelain and gashed himself to the bone.’

I shuddered. Hugo nodded. ‘Just another of our problems.’

After lunch I rose to return my dirty plates to the counter when a passing mechanic, his hands calloused with work, took them from me with an exquisitely expressed: ‘Allow me.’ I sat down, bewildered.

I left the canteen, as I left Israel a few months later, knowing that to dislike the Jew is not only cruel. It is stupid. For what
is
a Jew?

On the beach a few days later Gordon and I lazed as Sonny swam. The next day we were taking off for our first flight to Burma.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to forget that you and all these people are Jewish. I’ve never had such a warm welcome. They’re all the same, the ‘‘Bedek’’ crowd. The staff at the Hotel Yarkon. Do you think they are
trying
to impress me?’

‘Maybe. Unconsciously. I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘Most of them earned the right to sympathy by what they went through in the concentration camps. But they want to forget that, want to be judged by what they have done here in Israel. They are glad that you are here, that you can see what they’ve done. That you can return to England realizing that a Jew isn’t an usurer or a wide boy in the East End but a chap who can build this,’ he waved his arm, ‘out of the desert. Sorry,’ he concluded, ‘I’ve got a bit of a fetish about Israel.’

‘By the way,’ he added, as Sonny joined us and we got up to leave, ‘not that it’s important, but I’m not Jewish.’

*
In answer to a subsequent protest by the British Government at this treatment of British pilots engaged on a lawful delivery flight of Burmese-owned aircraft from Cyprus to Burma the Lebanese Government stated that their action was justified in that the aircraft flew over Lebanese territory in a westerly direction instead of easterly as specified in the original clearances obtained by the Burmese authorities in London. In view of the fact that the aircraft were turned back from Iraq at gun-point this explanation is, to say the least, frivolous. The truth is, of course, that when the Lebanese (and Iraqi) authorities gave the original diplomatic clearance for these flights they were not aware that the Spitfires had been sold by Israel to the Burmese. Once this became known to them, as a result of newspaper reports, they immediately plugged this leak in the Arab blockade of Israel.

Now think of all the good it does,
To cross so many lands;
Remember that the world is yours,
You hold it in your hands.

1955

In the remainder of this book I have selected and described only one – the fourth – of the six ferry flights that I completed from Israel to Burma (in addition to the two flights from Cyprus undertaken with Air Services). I should point out that Banting and Levett have given me permission to use their proper names whereas Kastner, being a Jew, had no option but to request the use of a pseudonym.