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Letter No 28 28 Mar 41 Friday
Captain J. H. Massey 6th Palestinian Company, The Buffs. Middle East Forces
My dearest darling - I'm afraid I don not feel in good form at all for writing to you, but I want to write you another letter, & I certainly do not want to do anything else, so I will just do my best. I hope I shall improve as I go along - & if I don't, you must forgive me.
Sunday, March 30th. If you have had my letter card, from yesterday, you will know that I gave up trying to write this & went away for the weekend, yesterday - & now I am back again, & feel a new man, some know the saying, "all work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy" - well I don't want to play, & don't feel like play, so it is all rather difficult. I shall have to go away for the weekend more often, thats the only thing. It was simply marvellous to get away from here, & realise that I was not going to be available on the telephone in the Mess or that somebody would not know I was in my room, & come along with some damn thing or other. And that I would not be back the same night, to hear that Private Janowicz had been taken ill on g ward, or that Private Becklinski had gone absent again, or some bloody thing. I was only away for 30 hours altogether, but it was grand & most interesting & I will tell you all about it shortly. I feel full of life & hope now, instead of rather dull & dreary & blank - I hope it will last. Really, on Friday night, I felt simply awful, & I'm glad now, that I did not go on writing, & send the results on to you. You would have been bored stiff.
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2 I wonder if you think I am an good correspondent? Up to now, I have felt quite pleased with myself, and also felt that you would be quite pleased with me too. But now, on looking at my piece of paper, I'm not so sure. The average 11 pages a week, which is only fair - and in the whole month of January, I only wrote you 3 letters totalling 19 pages, which is terrible, and I cannot understand it. Because almost all my spare time is spent in writing to you, and I'm certainly always thinking about you. In January I did pretty well reach bottom, through not hearing anything from you, and then I left Egypt on the 7th, and became up to the neck in work. But now, suddenly, instead of feeling rather satisfied wtih myself, I don't feel that at all. In March, I have been quite good, and if this reaches 8 pages, I shall have written you 63 pages in 10 letters in a month. I do hope you have not felt neglected, darling sweet. I think perhaps you will have, because I'm finding that as soon as you or I begin to write about a thing, the other does the same and we seem to be thinking so much alike - have you noticed? And you have mentioned in your last 2-3 letters, the question of being neglected and having faith in me. Oh dear, what have I been doing. I thought I was so good, and now perhaps I'm not. Figures count most and you cannot possibly know that I spend hours and hours just thinking about you. I only hope that you are satisfied with me, my darling - that my letters really and truly convey to you what I do think about you. And I hope too, that those few letters I sent in
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Jan/Feb by sea mail do not take an unholy time to reach you. Peter also seems to be refreshed by his weekend. He is skipping playfully round the room, in and out of the four pools he has made in the last couple of hours. I keep popping him out, but he seems to like doing it here best. But he is a grand little chap, and marvellous company already. He knows me alright, and is beginning to know his name. Dressing and undressing are much more interesting than before, as he dances round doing his best to get hold of a sock or my trousers or anything - & if I am too quick for him, he just goes for my leg, with teeth as sharp as needles. He has a wooden box, with an army blanket in it, but very much prefers my bed, and whimpers like a baby to be picked up onto it. Now he has a collar, with my name and address on it. The man in the shop gave me that and a brush, for no charge as I had just spent £50 of the Company's money in his shop, on sports gear of various kinds.
And now, to tell you about my trip. As I told you in my letter card, Ben-Arzi came with me, and we went by car, which was provided free of charge, which was very pleasant and helpful. We left just before 1.0, and had lunch at a fairly dirty little roadside place, but the Hebrew food was excellent, and it was very cheap. It is probably the first and last time they will have any officers there, unless we go again. But it is so pointless to have a English food in Palestine, for a lot of money, and taking 1 1/2 hours to have it - when, as we did, you can have a very pleasant omelette mixed in with some strange but tasty
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4 sausage, good bread, and good coffee, and the dog fed too on scraps thrown in from the kitchen, and all for 4/- for both of us including 2 large bottles of beer - and finished in 1/2 an hour. We then carried on, and went to one of the Jewish colonies - they call it a Kibutz - which I gather means a group or gathering. There are hundreds of them all over Palestine, but I will try and tell you about this one, and then explain afterwards in what ways, apparently, they differ from each other. The name of this place was Mishmar ha 'Emeq, which if you have a map, you will see is about half way between Haifa and Jenin, on the main road. It was very intersting, darling, and I want to try and tell you all about it, and so I had better begin with a sort of preamble. These Kibutzen are the direct result of Jewish immigration, and the first ones began about 20 years ago. The people were mainly very poor, and money was extremely limited. The basic principle was to found a community, within which everybody worked, and worked hard, and which could be made, as soon as possible, self supporting in the fullest sense. The root of the whole business is agriculture, in other words food. There were no thriving or developing industries for these people to come into, and there was no unemployment pay. And so the only answer was work. I don't know the history or development or evolution of the idea- but the Kibutz I went to is, now, self supporting. They produce every ounce of their own food, except certain minor auxiliaries, and have enought left over to be able to buy clothes, farming implements, building materials, toilet things, books, electricity, and give people
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seven days holiday in the year. The method of living is communal. Married couples, or couples living together, have a room, and each man or woman, having left school, has his or her own room. Washing and bathing is central and feeding is central. In this one, there are about 150 adults. Mainly, the buildings are solid, modern, enlightened, and good looking - for the rest, they are wooden erections, money and labour not yet having got as far as them. The school, for example, is a marvellous building, on a hill, and looks like a modern head office of some well to do firm. All the classrooms are large and light, it has a fine flat roof, its own up to date kitchens and dining hall - and all the children live there - 4 each in a room of their own. On the other hand, the adults kitchen and dining hall is a wooden place - they said that was not important for them and they could wait - the children came first, and a new threshing machine next, and so on.
The food is plain and not plentiful - but very wholesome and perfectly adequate. The allowance is 9d per day - that is the budget they have to adhere to, if they are going to keep out of debt. And everybody works, very hard, 6 days a week. If a man wants something extra for himself, he can only get it by putting in extra work on his free days. And if the Kibutz wants something extra, that also can only be achieved by voluntary extra work. For example, they wanted to have a swimming pool. It was out of the question to have one built for them - and the amount of land they have to cultivate in
