Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  The Ben-Gurion book and the year moved on. My handwriting was all over the manuscript as I struggled to produce an accurate text that flowed and made sense, while keeping as close as possible to the content and spirit of the original. As I finished each chapter we had the text copy-edited, retyped and set, with a view to sending it to the great man early the next year. Foges was getting more and more impatient, chewing on more and more cigars, but I was working flat out and I think he realised that. Typically, he’d found out about the poetry and jazz concerts and, intrigued and a little adventurous, he decided we should give a Christmas concert in the Aldus basement. He’d hire a piano for Michael Garrick and pay everyone (except me!). Michael brought Joe Harriott and Shake Keane with him, and Laurie and Dannie agreed to join me in reading (Laurie writing, ‘OK for the Foges Festival’). Our neighbours Arnold Wesker and Beba Lavrin turned up, too. The basement was echoey and noisy, and Foges made the great mistake of laying on far too much drink far too early. It was pretty daunting for me, but somehow we slurred our way through it and the year ended with a bang – mainly in all our heads. Fortunately Vernon wasn’t reading that day, and Dannie’s mother wasn’t there to call us to account.

  * * *

  Looking through my diary, I see there were several concerts at the beginning of 1964, including the St Pancras Arts Festival, and then a gap from May until September before they took off again in earnest. The reason was quite simple – our May wedding, though this was preceded by the publication of my book 33 Poems and the issue of Argo’s two Poetry and Jazz in Concert LPs recorded at the Decca studios. Both book and records were received more generously than they perhaps deserved to be – or so it seems now, looking back at them (though I have to say that reviewing the LPs the influential Steve Race was kind enough to write that my poems with jazz ‘sound better than anyone else experimenting in the medium’. At the time I was happy to believe him!). But for all my feelings now, the book was an important landmark for me – I was a properly published poet.

  I was also about to become a bridegroom, and with Foges huffing down my neck I negotiated a deal with him. Carole and I would go to Israel for our honeymoon and I’d try to see Ben-Gurion and get him to approve the text we’d sent him. Aldus would contribute to the cost of the trip. It seemed fair enough.

  I suppose most weddings are like a dream to those involved, and ours too seemed to have a magical quality – Carole wearing a beautiful headpiece and veil made of old lace given to her by her grandmother and looking as if she’d walked straight out of the Bible. The fact that Rabbi Dr Isaac Levy was conducting the ceremony added a further emotional tug to the proceedings. A chaplain to the Forces and among the first to enter the Nazi concentration camps, he was a close friend of both my parents and grandparents, and he spoke with immense personal warmth and passion that day, bringing tears to many eyes (including the bride’s). Douglas Hill, always the great romantic, was inspired to write a touching poem called ‘Jewish Wedding Ceremony’ which brings it all back. It starts:

  Magic in the hand that holds the ring

  utters itself – mingling with the light

  that focuses the consecration…

  After the service, there was an afternoon tea hosted by Carole’s father, and a jazz party in the evening at my sporting grandparents’ home, to which a stream of friends and poets and relatives came. Michael Garrick played, and the saxophonist Tony Coe was among the other musicians. Paddy Milligan sang and then, in the middle of it all, came a touch of comedy when the eccentric Thomas Blackburn, who’d been at the service, phoned to ask me what the stamping on a glass by the bridegroom (which always concludes the Jewish wedding ceremony) symbolised (‘the breaking of the hymen, eh Jeremy?’). I got off the phone as quickly as I could and returned to the fray! Then Arnold Wesker appeared with his son and, just when we’d given him up, in walked Laurie in his wellingtons. Carole had sent him a telegram saying simply, ‘No Laurie, no wedding’, and he had responded to her cri de coeur. But missing from the celebrations were Dannie and Joan Abse, who were in America, and so Dannie was unable to read his much-anthologised poem ‘Epithalamion’ as we’d hoped. Still, some forty years later he more than made up for it by reading it under the chupah (wedding canopy) at our daughter Deborah’s wedding to Gareth, whom she had met at law school.

  Douglas’s poem was gift enough, but he and Gaila also gave us an exquisite piece of pottery, accompanied by this note from Douglas, set out in the shape of a poem:

  This is a Hans Coper pot. Hans Coper – a Jew from Germany – lost his loved ones many years ago, but not his capacity to love. He makes his pots with love. Lately the Marlborough Gallery asked Hans to make a pot as a birthday present for Henry Moore. Is there a greater tribute than to be the potter who makes pots for an artist to put flowers in? We give you – with all our love – this vessel to put your flowers in.

  That fragile pot (which had become very valuable) sat on a shelf in our living room until, very recently, I came down one morning to find it in several large pieces on the floor. I was as shattered as the pot and I’m now looking for someone skilled enough to put the parts I collected together. It will of course have lost its monetary value, but not its emotional worth as a symbol of a special friendship. The fact that, horrifically, Douglas – that brilliant, sensitive, kind man – was later knocked down and killed by a bus adds even more poignancy.

  Tom Blackburn might have brought a touch of the bizarre to the proceedings, but in fact the day had started on a farcical note when the photographer we’d engaged to take photos of Carole in her wedding dress turned up without film for his camera. Having rushed out to buy some, he then went on at length about his broken marriage. A great start to the day! But I went many comedic stages further when we eventually left the party that night and drove to the small bungalow we’d managed to buy in Temple Fortune, having pooled our resources and taken out what seemed like a huge mortgage at the time (I seem to remember that the bungalow cost £5,000). There’d been builders finishing off a few last-minute things, and I’d arranged for them to leave the key under a stone by the front door. Carole waited in the car while I went ahead to open up, but there was no stone and no key. I didn’t want to spoil the magic of the evening by admitting this so I went around to the side gate, which luckily was open, and made my way to the back of the bungalow, where there was a small window into the bathroom. Fortunately, the top of the window opened upwards and was ajar, and I reckoned that if I climbed up I could just about lower myself head first through it. What I hadn’t counted on was the latch on which my trousers caught, leaving me more or less dangling above the toilet – until there was a loud tear and I went shooting down, cutting myself and almost landing in the toilet bowl. Finally, more than a little shaken, I emerged through the front door, clothes in disarray, blood on my arm, to carry my new wife across the threshold. She had the grace to laugh.

  Next stop, Tel Aviv.

  11

  PROPHET IN THE DESERT

  The El Al flight from London had been relatively smooth and uneventful – unlike my first trip to Israel in the summer of 1959, when with two friends, Anthony Stalbow and Jeremy Morris, I had braved the alarmingly aggressive seas of the Bay of Biscay in a small old Turkish ship, sailing from Marseilles to Haifa. On that occasion I had celebrated my 21st birthday there; this time it was my honeymoon, though of course a certain amount of work was on the agenda.

  It was to be Carole’s first time in Israel, and I was excited at the prospect of introducing her to this enthralling country which I’d travelled all over in Egged buses, from the kibbutzim in the north to Eilat (then a shanty town) in the south, where I slept on the beach. I had stayed then in a small room in Tel Aviv, which, as I was soon to discover, was just around the corner from Ben-Gurion’s residence in the city.

  Now here I was with my new bride, going through the security and formalities at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport, and as we came out into the forecourt with our luggage I was thrilled to
find an old family friend, Professor Moshe Brawer, waiting to greet us. A world-renowned geographer and an authority on political boundaries, Moshe and his delightful wife Rina had held their wedding reception at my parents’ house. He’d met them in 1945 when working as a war correspondent in London for various Palestinian papers and completing his studies at King’s College and LSE. I was intrigued to learn later that he had shown Arthur Koestler (author of the classic Darkness at Noon) around Israel on his first visit there in 1944 and introduced him to various leading Arab figures with whom he had close contacts.

  Although he and Carole had not met until then, within minutes they were like old friends, Carole relishing the running commentary we were getting from this most erudite of guides as he drove us to the Validor Hotel in Herzliya, the coastal resort on the outskirts of Tel Aviv where we were staying. If anyone could find the way there, he was the man! As Moshe left us in the hotel reception, he promised to be in touch the next day to discuss plans. Ever generous with his time, he wanted to make sure we – and Carole in particular – saw as much of the country as possible. But for the moment, finally, we were alone, tired but exhilarated. We had been given a spacious room with a view towards the sea, and were admiring the flowers and reading the congratulatory cards kind Israeli friends had sent us, beginning to relax, when the phone rang.

  ‘This is Ben-Gurion,’ a voice rasped.

  My immediate thought was that it was a prank, and for a few moments I prevaricated, wondering which of our friends it was, trying to place the voice. But slowly it dawned on me that it was no joke and that Ben-Gurion really was on the line. I had expected one of his aides to contact me at some stage to set up a meeting, but not B-G himself, and not so soon nor so urgently. I quickly changed my tone!

  ‘Come to my kibbutz at half past ten tomorrow morning,’ the voice continued, and only when the phone went down did I take in that this was the meeting I’d been trying to arrange from London for weeks. Sde Boker, the kibbutz in question, was in the Negev desert in southern Israel, a little over a hundred miles from where we were staying and where we’d planned to spend a few days relaxing on the beach, seeing friends and travelling around before dealing with the book. At that moment Sde Boker could have been on the moon, it seemed so remote and the prospect of going there so unreal.

  As things came back into focus, I realised that there was only one way to get there early the following morning, and that was by car. After a few minutes of panic and confusion and a quick look at a map, Carole phoned down and asked the bemused concierge to arrange for a car and driver to collect us at 6 a.m. After all, I was working for a man who never considered expense to be an obstacle to anything, and who had already spent a fortune on the book, including the commissioning of a special cover by the celebrated American artist Ben Shahn. I tried to remember that as we ordered the car. For the moment it seemed our honeymoon was on hold.

  Sde Boker had been founded in 1952, and B-G had gone to live there a year later when he resigned from office. Even when he returned to politics in 1955 he continued to keep his home there, and that is where he and his wife Paula are now buried. It was part of his vision of cultivating the desert, and he believed in leading by example. As he wrote, ‘It is by mastering nature that man learns to control himself.’ He felt the desert was an uninhabited area where new immigrants could settle and flourish.

  A young David Ben-Gurion, with his wife Paula, his father and three children.

  The drive itself, let alone the thought of the coming encounter, was wondrous enough, taking us directly south into the desert, past the biblical town of Beersheba. What an introduction to Israel this was for Carole, especially as the landscape and the Bedouins we encountered when we stopped at a roadside café for a drink, and the camels that milled around, reminded her of her childhood in Egypt and the small summer house her parents had in the desert, where she used to invite her school friends to stay. As for me, I had been slowly coming to terms with the thought that we were about to meet the great prophet of modern Israel, the man who had tilled the land when he came from Russia as an idealistic youngster and who had gone on to lead his country to independence and then through the desperate war that followed, and on – for being voted statehood by the United Nations was one thing, securing it when surrounded by hostile forces quite another.

  Thus it was with apprehension that I sat clutching my copy of the revised manuscript as the car slowly entered the gates of the kibbutz and the driver explained to the guards on duty who we were. We were obviously expected and they quickly waved us towards the small, bungalow-like building where B-G lived. There were soldiers with rifles outside the door, and I realised that they were puzzled by the fact that I wasn’t alone, so I quickly explained that we had just got married and were in effect on our honeymoon – and naturally I wasn’t going to leave my new wife back at the hotel. One of the guards went inside and returned a moment later to say that Mr Ben-Gurion wanted both of us to come in, which of course is what I’d hoped, though Carole was a little reticent, not wishing to intrude.

  David Ben-Gurion was seated behind a large wooden desk but rose immediately as we entered, walking towards us and pointing in a friendly way to some comfortable chairs, where he joined us. Smaller than I had expected, but with the white flaring hair I’d seen in hundreds of photos, his eyes sparkling beneath a broad forehead, he looked very much the biblical prophet. I thought of all the liberties I’d taken with the text and waited for the explosion. It didn’t come. On the contrary, B-G put us at our ease, wishing us Mazal Tov and offering us a glass of brandy to toast our wedding, which we happily accepted. He raised his glass and said, ‘Le chaim.’ He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to discuss the text I’d sent him, but instead turned his attention to Carole. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked, and when she told him she was born in Egypt, he responded, ‘Ah, the land of Moses.’ He then began to talk to her at length, reminiscing about his own childhood and his early days in the Land, as he called the country he had done so much to create – the early hardships, the malarial swamps, the good relationship they had then with their Arab neighbours, the first settlements, the importance of creating Hebrew as a modern, spoken language so that all who came, from whatever country, would be bonded by it. As he spoke I remembered reading how impressed the then British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had been when B-G told him in London how Hebrew was being revived as a spoken language. Here was history talking, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. After a while, B-G paused and looked down at Carole’s glittery sandals, asking if she had bought them in England. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘do you like them?’ ‘Well, not really,’ he responded with a gleam in his eye, ‘but I’m afraid my daughter would!’ Suddenly he seemed like a cuddly grandfather!

  With a pause in the conversation, I seized my chance and asked B-G if he’d found time to go through the proofs I’d sent him and to consider my changes and queries. ‘Yes,’ he said, handing me the proofs. ‘I’ve been through them and made a few corrections, but your English is better than mine. Let’s go and have lunch.’ And that, as far as the text went, was more or less that, and off we went to the kibbutz dining room, which was soon full and buzzing with conversation as the members came in from their morning labours under the blistering sun. I still have those proofs with his handwritten corrections, and looking at them now I’m reminded that the only thing that seemed to worry him in the earlier biblical chapters was the use of the word ‘Palestine’, which he had changed either to ‘Canaan’ or to ‘The Land’. Otherwise there was hardly anything. Ben-Gurion was kindness itself, and when I explained that we had tried without success to persuade his country’s President to write a foreword, he offered to contact Zalman Shazar himself, which he did, arranging for us to go the following week to the President’s office in Jerusalem. There we were warmly received by Shazar, who explained that he received many requests to write forewords, often from friends, and that he always refused because he felt that
in his position he should remain neutral; also that if he did it for one, he’d have to do it for all. But Ben-Gurion was Ben-Gurion, he continued, and the book was an important one, so yes, he would do it. A few days later I had a phone call at the hotel to say it was ready and we collected it.

  Keen to know our plans, and eagerly making suggestions, B-G had invited us to visit him in his home in Tel Aviv, where he intended to be the following week, and of course we were delighted to take him up on this offer, easily identifying the modest building on what is now Ben-Gurion Boulevard, close to the sea, by the guards outside. Once again we were expected and given a warm reception by B-G in his small, book-lined study, which must have been the setting for many history-making meetings and confrontations.

  That I had experienced such an easy passage when others before me had failed was not so much the testament to my editorial skills I’d have liked to imagine, but due to the simple fact that B-G’s notoriously difficult and outspoken wife Paula had broken her leg and was out of the way in hospital. She it was who’d sent packing the writers and editors and the bestselling American novelist who had gone before me, so now here was Ben-Gurion on his own, glad of the company and ready to help in any way he could. As it happens, Paula was to resurface in my life in another context some five years later, after I had left Aldus Books and gone to work as an editor at Vallentine, Mitchell. There, I published a collection of the letters Ben-Gurion had sent to his young wife in the years between the two world wars when he was away from home, travelling the globe as the political struggle to establish a Jewish homeland was at its height. Beginning in 1918 when, newly married, he was a soldier in the Jewish Legion attached to the British Army, Letters to Paula offers a remarkably human and eye-opening first-hand account of his meetings with world leaders. History indeed, and we had been privileged to spend our honeymoon (or part of it!) with the man who had been so central to it.