Partying in the Sunshine
The tasks on Kibbutz Ma’anit of sloshing out the latrines, hacking down banana trees, and mopping the dining room floors didn’t interfere too much with our partying, except that we had to get up at 4 am to avoid the heat, and the Israeli woman unlucky enough to be in charge of us got livid from time to time.
In the Britain I had happily left behind me, the unemployment rate was higher then (1980) than it is now, Thatcher had just come to power, and a nasty recession was about to start, but we never thought or worried about that kind of thing, and looking for ‘a proper job’ was the least of our concerns.
Nor were we interested much in the ideology behind the kibbutz movement. (Long! ) Before us, Helen Mirren had worked as a volunteer on a kibbutz (she apparently followed a boyfriend), and so had Bernie Sanders. Even Chomsky had lived on one too, on Kibbutz HaZore’a, for a few months with his wife in 1953, and had been very impressed by the experience.
There were no glittering stars on our kibbutz, of course, but we had parties every night and lots of romance and flirting and everything was intense and stimulating because we were curious and adventurous – that’s why we were there.
Most of us were Northern Europeans, with some New Zealanders, Canadians, and Australians too. There were also quite a few nutters around, similar to the types I came across elsewhere in the Middle East decades later, when I was trying to teach English at a university in Riyadh.
One particularly colourful chancer who crossed my path was a Londoner and Scientologist called ‘Chris’ who I met in a hut on a haphazard hippy-type encampment by the Red Sea, near Eilat, on a hitchhiking expedition down to Sharm el-Sheikh.
I was with a new acquaintance called Gail. Gail was from Manchester and I liked her flat vowels and sense of humour, and since neither of us was as sexy or flaxen blonde as the Scandinavian girls on our kibbutz, hitchhiking wasn’t too hazardous.
By the time Gail and I met Chris ( “well actually it’s ‘Christ’ “, he confided within the first 30 seconds ), he had seduced most of the young women travellers who were staying on the encampment, partly because he was handsome, but also because he had all kinds of tales about being in contact with Mary Magdalene (“alive and well and working as a waitress in Sydney” ), Joseph (“got a nice little shop in Hackney, very happy”), and of course himself, self styled as Jesus – right there in the flesh and blood, and in the Sinai Desert to boot .
Out There & In Here 