LITMIR.BIZ

      3

       What Do You Really Know?

      Before I could go to university in the autumn of 1969 there were nine months to kill. For the first few I worked as a waiter in the Angel, a whitewashed, bow-fronted old coaching inn on the High Street in the nearby market town of Pershore. It was very different from my previous jobs as a builders’ labourer, Christmas postman, hospital porter or fruit-picker. Catering was something else: when they were sober, most of the rest of the staff seemed to be either fighting or fucking each other. It was only Paddy, the head waiter, a short Irishman in an ancient dinner jacket and with thinning, slicked-back hair, who kept the place functioning.

      It takes a moment or two to appreciate how bad – and yet how good – British food used to be. At home, our mothers worked with ingredients which were generally unprocessed, and which certainly hadn’t had huge quantities of sugar and salt added to them by multinational corporations with not the faintest care about what they were doing to the nation’s health. In my childhood, eggs were stored in a solution of isinglass in a preserving pail. Meat was kept in a pale-green metal meat-safe with a grille on the front to keep the flies out. When refrigeration became widely available it seemed like a work of magic. But how many people could have imagined that the provision of potentially life-saving temperature control would see the triumph of junk food?

      In the 1960s it was quite rare to see fat people: the mark of poverty was exaggerated thinness, not obesity, something which is now very often entirely reversed. Those who could afford to eat out did so in dingy rooms with red plush curtains, starched napery and a carpet you didn’t want to examine too closely. A posh meal consisted firstly of a prawn cocktail, which was mainly chopped lettuce smothered in pink sauce; followed by a grilled steak; and finally a Black Forest gâteau – a chocolate sponge with cream and cherries – the whole thing accompanied by a bottle of Blue Nun or Chianti in a straw container. Men who were trying to show off to their girlfriends tended to order a Steak Diane, which the waiter had to cook on a spirit burner at the table. The final stage of this process was a nightmare for the novice such as myself, for it involved the addition of a liberal splash of brandy, resulting in a bonfire in the pan which was more or less certain to singe your hair and eyebrows and leave you looking ruefully through the smoke at the smugly grinning diner, now more confident than ever that he was going to get his leg over. You retreated to the kitchen smelling like a blacksmith’s forge when a horse is being shod. I considered myself lucky the flames didn’t melt the blue jacket I had to wear, which, in keeping with the modern mood of the times, was made of some artificial fibre which promised to ‘drip dry’ if I ever got around to washing it.

      After three months at the Angel I had saved enough money to take myself abroad. My politics at the time were even more incoherent than they became later. Conventional political parties were dull, and like most young people at the time I was much more interested in Bob Dylan, the Who and the Kinks. The early years of the twenty-first century have seen a massive withering of support for mainstream political parties (at the time of the 2015 election I checked the Liberal Democrats’ membership statistics and discovered there were eight times as many members of the Caravan Club). Though parliamentary politics was quite as unattractive in the sixties as it is today, mainstream parties still had mass memberships. I knew I certainly wasn’t a Tory, but the spectacle night after night on the television news of angry trade union leaders trooping in and out of 10 Downing Street, demanding the settling of grievances, wasn’t much of an advertisement for the paradise promised by slippery old Harold Wilson’s Labour government either. I decided to take myself off to see what life was like on kibbutzes, the utopian collectives in Israel.

      I have never felt more alone than on the night I arrived at Tel Aviv airport, emerging into a crowd of expectant faces awaiting the arrival of friends and relatives and knowing that not a single one of them was waiting for me. I caught a bus into town and spent the night at the local youth hostel. The next day I took another bus into northern Israel, and found the kibbutz I had made contact with from England. I was full of enthusiasm and half-baked ideas about socialism and communal life.

      Kibbutz Yif’at, in the great fertile plain below the Sea of Galilee, turned out to be a tremendous disappointment. The kibbutz movement was inspiring in its insistence on the dignity of work and the sharing of earnings. The principles were wonderful: groups would gather, work the land together, and live as small democracies, electing their leaders. Families might have their own modest houses, but children would live separately from their parents for most of their lives. Everyone would eat together from a collective kitchen, and each kibbutz would have a school. Money would not change hands. It was a seductive idea to a young person, and the kibbutzim did a remarkable job in establishing the state of Israel. In the (slightly anti-Arab) cliché, they ‘made the desert bloom’.

      It was hard work all right, out in the fields picking oranges and grapefruit, laying irrigation pipes or mucking out the cowshed. Yif’at was a well-established kibbutz, and there were perhaps a couple of dozen foreign volunteers working there. The only other British person was Peter, a croupier from Glasgow. The others included earnest Zionists from Eastern Europe, a deserter from the US Navy, a couple of Vietnam veterans (American and Australian), a Czech, and a brace of quiet Latin Americans. Since the number of Jewish pupils at my school could have been ticked off using the fingers of one hand, it took me a little while to work out what they all had in common. The scales fell from my eyes when I signed up to take Hebrew lessons. The great attraction of these was that if you attended the classes you only spent half the day toiling in the fields, and the rest of the time sitting in a classroom. On the first day the teacher pointed to each of us in turn and asked us to introduce ourselves. I was sharing a desk with my friend the croupier, who to my astonishment answered, ‘Pinhas.’

      ‘But you’re Peter!’ I whispered.

      ‘She wants your Jewish name,’ he replied.

      Mumbling

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