I was 24 when I arrived in Palestine in 1946, and it was thrilling. I’d never set foot outside England, but after the second world war I felt a great urge to escape the greyness of austerity Britain, so I applied to the Colonial Nursing Service.
The first big difference was that the sun was shining, which it didn’t do much at home. And, while I’d been told to expect all sorts of shortages, it was a land of plenty; nothing like England, where everything was rationed, even clothes. I thought I would never stop eating. It was the first time I’d had anything like hummus or little baby courgettes or any of the lovely Mediterranean food. There were Viennese coffee shops with sticky cakes and gooey stuff. And Jaffa, where I was based, was the centre of the orange export trade.
I worked as a sister at the government hospital. The nursing staff was a mixture (when I first got there, it was Jews, Arabs and Armenians) but the patients were mostly Arab. It was a very pleasant atmosphere. There was a good bus service to Tel Aviv, so I’d go to look at the shops and have clothes made; there were all these lovely dresses with full skirts and tight waists.
There were a lot of British people stationed in Palestine at the time. The country was full of British army, and the colonial way of life was still in existence. Newcomers wrote their names in a book at Government House, and were invited to all sorts of exciting gatherings: I would never have rubbed shoulders with the people I was introduced to otherwise. But the situation had been rumbling for a while, and everybody was wondering how things were going to work out.
I met my husband, Stanley, at the swimming club in Jaffa. I remember the first time I saw him – he was a very nice shade of brown, having served in various places all through the war. We married in February 1948. By this time, the state of affairs in Palestine had become unsafe, following the UN vote to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. People on all sides were being killed, and most British civilians had already been evacuated. While the situation was worrying, I didn’t feel unsafe. But I was naive.
At the end of April 1948, we were told a convoy was coming to take us to the airport. We were disappointed to leave, but there were no two ways about it: the day before, the airport had been looted and the customs building set on fire. The army was guarding the runway, and we were flown in an RAF plane that was unpressurised and very noisy. They served tea and coffee from flasks. I hadn’t thought about media attention, but there were others on board who were much more newsworthy than us, such as the mayor of Jerusalem, who had had his braces nicked by a bullet that had come through his office window a few hours earlier.
Landing at Heathrow, I had hoped our return would be temporary, but a month later I found out I was pregnant, and that rather changed everything. After a few years, though, we were fortunate to work abroad again.
Looking at this picture now, I am reminded of how excited I had been to live abroad. But the picture also makes me sad: Stanley is dead, and I’m 95 and a bit frayed around the edges. The situation in the Middle East upsets me, too: there are good people on both sides, but I can’t see how it’s going to end.
• Interview by Candice Pires
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