Graham Hurley's Blog - Posts Tagged "news"

Memento Mori


We live within sight of the sea. Indeed, our view of the sea happily fills every window at the front of the house. We also row twice a week on that same stretch of the ocean: beyond Dawlish and back, to Budleigh and back, or upriver when the gods of the deep are in a stroppy mood. So we kid ourselves we’re on handshake terms with this stretch of coastline. How wrong we were.

Nothing could have prepared us for the last week or so. First the traffic jam of weather systems emerging from the storm nursery off Nova Scotia, then thundering east, gorging on the jet stream, deepening by the day, until they arrived in the Western Approaches, took a final vindictive breath, and helped themselves to great chunks of the coastline.

Images on the internet, and across the media, at first beyond belief, have become the small change of daily life. Cars half-submerged. Drain covers dancing on plumes of raw sewage. A torrent of brown water coursing down streets towards the town centre. Ice cream kiosks at drunken angles. Exposed footings on the new seawall. Seafront shelters half-destroyed. The wooden steps from the Harbour View café reduced to matchwood. And now the railway line into Cornwall. Gone.

We joined the other gawpers on Tuesday night, timing our arrival on the seafront to co-incide with high tide. The roads had already been closed, flashing blue lights reflected in every window, but you could still wade through the floods to get close.

From a distance, seen from the length of Alexandra Terrace, the prom appeared to be under shellfire: huge gouts of wind-driven spray, three, four, five storeys high, that same creamy-brown. Pavements – a hundred metres inland – already ankle-deep in seaweed, driftwood and miscellaneous plastic. And the raw physical shock of each new wave, a shuddering thud you could feel in your bones.

Then, stepping out of cover, the immense shock of the wind, a wind I’d never felt before. Minutes earlier, a guy on telly had warned of 92 mph gusts recorded off Berry Head. You can see Berry Head from our front window. 92 mph? On TV it sounded deeply promising, like news of a new theme park ride, but out here in the flesh you began to wonder. You listen to the voice inside you counselling prudence. But in the name of history, of living to tell your grandkids the tale, you soldier on.

The police weren’t keen on letting us anywhere near the seafront. A cunning detour took us through one of the back routes. Either way, that same Tuesday night, we emerged at the bottom of Victoria Road. Bent double against the wind, I found the shelter of the new – as yet unfinished – restaurant beside the docks. From here, judging your moment, you could see the whole curve of the seafront, a blur of towering explosions. One look was enough. That same evil colour, the churning tide, the spume torn to rags, the howl of the wind. The sea we know and love (knew and loved?) was eating everything. An animal on the loose, madness made visible.

Back in front of the telly, we towelled ourselves dry. The weather is evidently jammed in storm mode. Another traffic-jam of low pressure systems queuing up, ready to burst over Exmouth. And Dawlish. And Torquay. And Porthleven. And the dozens of other coastal communities hastily recalibrating their cosy rapport with the ocean.

This is getting personal. There’s lots more to come. God knows what we’ve done but it must be truly wicked

I’ve just finished Olivia Laing’s excellent The Trip to Echo Spring, rightly shortlisted for last year’s Costa Biography Award. It’s a beautifully written exploration of the swampy badlands between creative endeavour and the crutch some writers use to make it to the end of their journey.

Ms Laing takes the train and a couple of flights to criss-cross the US and try and figure out what happened inside the brains (and livers) of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, Raymond Carver and poet John Berryman. The travel passages alone are worth the purchase price but the real clue’s in the book’s subtitle: Why Writers Drink.

Why, indeed. A quote from John Cheever was one of many that caught my eye. He’s trying to nail that special delight that can attend a successful session at – in those days – the typewriter. “It’s a sense of ecstasy”, he writes. “As simple as that. The sense that this is my usefulness and I can do it all the way through. It always leaves you feeling great. In short you’ve made sense of your life.”

These are large claims to make but I think I get the drift. A particular image that unlocks a landscape, or a passage of dialogue so unexpected that it sets the narrative panting off in a totally new direction, are part of the pleasure and the mystery of becoming a writer. The stuff of raw experience, cured in the smokehouse of what I can only call the imagination, can leave you astonished, a little bit shaken, but altogether glad. Where did that line come from? Who gave that character permission to tear a hole in my careful plans? And will this strange magic work tomorrow? And the next day? And the day after that?
In this context, Cheever uses the word ecstasy. Amongst a handful of definitions this can mean a trance or trance-like state in which a person transcends normal consciousness. In my experience, this is exactly what the process of writing can achieve when the juices are flowing, and you’ve got the engines on full power, and the flap settings are bang-on, and you haul back on the control column and kiss goodbye to gravity. You’re up there with the angels and touch-down, if you’re lucky, is many hours away.
But here’s the irony. I’ve been drinking regularly for my entire adult life. Over the last fifty years, I can’t think of a day when I haven’t had a drink. I tell myself I’m probably not an alcoholic because I never drink during the day but the rhythm of our lives is fine-tuned to the click of the fridge door opening at six’o’clock.
Am I dependent on that first glass of Perlenbacher lager (Lidl: £4.99 for six 500ml bottles)? Yes. Do I have another one afterwards? Yes. And do we open a bottle of red to bless the meal that follows? Of course. So what lies at the bottom of all those glasses? In a word – yes – ecstasy. I’m tranced. I’ve transcended normal consciousness. I’m back in the clouds with the angels, a subtly (and sometimes unsubtly) different person. Another word for this, of course, is pissed. But writers tend to avoid the obvious.
So here, says me, is the proof that writing a book and taking a drink are keys to the same door. Come nine’o clock the meal is done, the bottles are empty, and I go back upstairs to review the day’s work. Thanks to alcohol, this is revision plus. Why? Because I’m a different person. Because I take the words on the page wholly by surprise (or maybe vice versa). Because everything I’ve done that day seems new…and sometimes off-key. And so I change a sentence, rewrite a paragraph, adjust a character, and next morning – back on terra firma – those revisions have always made an improvement.
So what are my conclusions here? Number one, writing and booze are the same short cut to a different you. Number two, I owe more than I should comfortably admit to the blessings of Perlenbacher. And number three, I feel no less lucky on both counts.
The Trip to Echo Spring can last a lifetime. I’ll drink to that.

The “M” Word


Writing is a strange game. A contractual hiccough delayed the start of this year’s book until 2nd January. The Killing Stone will be the third in the D/S Jimmy Suttle series, and explores the onset – and the consequences – of madness. This happens to be a hot topic just now, not least because the safety net we fondly believe to be in place is, to be polite, fraying. There are holes through which potentially dangerous folk can easily slip. Beneath lies the murderous netherworld inhabited by the seriously deranged with untold consequences for the likes of Jimmy Suttle and his esranged wife, Lizzie.

Researching the current state of mental health provision took a while. As ever, experts in the field were generous with their time and I began to build a frankly alarming picture of the kind of chance encounters that might lie around the corner if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One clue lay in a conversation with a uniformed Inspector in Pompey. He spends a great deal of his working day dealing not with the bad but the mad and had come to the conclusion that – in his phrase – coppers had become “the para-military arm of the Social Services”.

Whatever the truth behind this glum reflection, I owe it to my advisers to let them have sight of the first draft before it goes off to my editor. That way, for everyone’s sake, I can at least make sure that the book is factually accurate. But these are busy people and to be fair I have to budget a month to make sure that they can give the MS a decent read. Given two more weeks for a re-write, plus a tight delivery deadline, and that left me with a month and a half to sort out the first draft.

100,000 words in six weeks might sound daunting but over the last half dozen books that strike-rate happens to be a comfortable average. I get up at eight, start work at half-past, take a break mid-morning to knock off some exercises and sort out the food for the evening, return to the PC around midday and then work through to six. We go rowing every Wednesday morning, which bites into the writing schedule, and I never work at weekends. But a day at the keyboard normally yields 17 pages, which is around 5,100 words. Do the maths, allow for hangovers, acts of nature and the odd rogue virus, and six weeks starts sounding more than possible.

But this year was different. The key lies in the “M” word: Momentum. To date, I must have written over thirty books, and in the process there comes a moment – quite beyond explanation – when that cage of circumstance and event we call the plot closes around the characters and the book surges forward. From that point on, in my experience, you’re riding the Severn Bore. Just stay upright on your fictional plank – day after writing day - and the sheer force of what you’ve mysteriously unleashed will power the book to its conclusion.

In some books momentum happens earlier than in others. Once, it never happened at all. I fell off my fictional surfboard and the book was never seen again. But this time, with The Killing Stone, the “M” word kicked in on day two. Just twenty something pages from the start, I was up and surfing. The days sped by. Seventeen pages by six’o’clock became twenty pages, then twenty three. My all-time record was twenty seven. That’s over 8000 words. I started on 2nd January. By 17.56 on 28th January, I was done. 101,943 words in three and a half weeks.

The weather undoubtedly helped. We haven’t done much rowing. I had flu for a week or so but oddly it made no difference. Ignore the thumping headache and the runny nose and the words kept coming. In fact the sheer delight in surfing all those narrative waves became a kind of Ibuprofen-Plus therapy. Create a world in which no one has flu and you can send the virus packing.

Already, just two weeks later, the writing of The Killing Stone has a strange, almost disembodied feel, as it if never happened. Was that me at the PC? Day after day? Surrounded by tissues and scribbled reminders to re-locate this plot point or that? And come the third week of that furious month, when I closed on the finishing line, did I really have that genius idea for a wide-screen denouement? Scored for birds of prey and a killer in a black cassock? And when my last-minute bid for extra research took me to the very top of the town’s tallest church tower, did I really stumble on a real-life crime scene? Known to just a handful of locals as…yes…the Killing Stone?

No clues. No conferring. God willing, the book should be out in time for Christmas. Cue for a Lem-Sip. Or maybe a beer.

Here’s a thing. It’s Sunday morning and sunshine invites us back on the water. The wind has disappeared. The last storm has tossed our boats around in the compound out back, damaging one of them, but the beamy Safran is still intact. We rig it up, stow the coffee and fruit cake in the bow, and head for the beach.

The tide is high and last week’s storms haven’t quite finished with us. Waves curl and break. We need to plan this launch.

Knee-deep in the surf, we keep tripping over mystery obstacles. Storm-tossed rocks. Half-digested bits of building. Jagged bits of masonry that could tear a hole in our precious boat. We remove as many as we can, clear a corridor to open water, and push off.

Today’s expedition takes us along the coast to Dawlish. The sea is livelier than it looks. Past the Langstone Rock, we start to wallow in the backwash from the sea wall. Ahead, the line of containers that have badged every news broadcast for the last ten days: the makeshift breakwater shielding the now-famous Dawlish Breach.

We call a halt, break out the victuals, and inspect the repair operation. After ten minutes, we’ve counted just four guys in the hi-vis gear. It is, to be fair, a Sunday but a couple of million people to the west rely on this rail link and the visible effort is underwhelming. Money no object? We begin to wonder.

By the time we get back, the falling tide has revealed most of the beach back in Exmouth. The gleaming sand is littered with yet more debris. We hand over our boat to the next crew and set about clearing a twenty five metre safe zone for both launch and retrieval. We’re currently refurbing our new home, Exmouth’s magnificent old Lifeboat Station, and money – as ever – is an issue. The last thing we need are hefty repair bills for our tiny fleet.

A lot of the debris has already been sucked down by the sand. These are sizeable bits of brickwork and masonry. Think crowbars. Think wheelbarrow. Within minutes, we’ve mustered a sizeable workparty. A mountain of rubble begins to grow beyond the high-water tideline.

And here’s the thing. It’s the first sunny Sunday in yonks and the beach is packed with walkers, kids, dogs, the whole seaside schtick. Many of them are curious about what we’re up to. Is this some kind of community initiative? Don’t we have better things to do on our precious weekend?

One couple have just picked their way along the beach as far as Orcombe Point and back. They’re young and active. They report a wasteland of storm-tossed debris. They describe it in apocalyptic terms – unbelievable, really dangerous – yet their grasp on what might happen next remains remote. Someone will presumeably come along and sort it. Job done.

Tossing another ball for the Labrador, they’re intrigued by our efforts. We do our best to explain that most of this stuff comes from self-interest but they don’t really get it. Aren’t the council supposed to do all this? Why break sweat when the job belongs to someone else?

We’ve still got two boats on the water. The beach is still a landing hazard. I mumble something about all hands to the pump, about mucking in, but they don’t get the hint. Yeah, right. They smile. Call the dog to heel. And stroll on.

Our little strip of beach cleared, we retire for more coffee. In a curious way, we’re surprised by what we’ve done. Jonno says we’ve missed a trick. A photo or two would have done the club no harm at all. Robin suggests we ought to do this thing professionally. Rockbusters Inc. Mike Drew, on the other hand, has doubts about the whole enterprise. Another blow, he points out, and the beach will be full of debris again.

But that’s not the point. We’ve achieved something. We’ve swopped half an hour’s sweat and effort for the knowledge that – at least for now – we’re not going to rip the bottom out of one of our boats. Plus something else. After two weeks of serious humility – or maybe helplessness - at the hands of the Weather Gods, we’ve posted a small but important victory.

Money no object? Fat chance. Rely on your own efforts. And stay afloat.

Fifty Years On


Half a lifetime ago, back in my university days, I was debating how to take maximum advantage of the long summer vacations. Three months was a long time. The world was at my feet. Where should I go?

The problem, of course, was money. Like every other student, I was skint. A decent stretch of bar work would give me enough to get by for maybe a month but after that I’d be sleeping on the beach. Then I happened on an ad for holiday contracts in Israel. Sign up for six weeks apple-picking in a kibbutz and they’d give you a return air ticket plus all found. The Middle East is two thousand miles away from Cambridge. Perfect.

Israel in 1966 was a very different country: the gutsy little David surrounded by trillions of hostile Arabs. It was the product of a brave experiment in communal living: left-wing, hopelessly outnumbered, but determined – after the nightmare of the Holocaust – to survive. To my generation it ticked all the boxes.

I flew out in mid-July. We landed at Tel Aviv in late afternoon. The heat was brutal. The kibbutz had sent a truck to collect us and for the rest of that day we rumbled north along the coastal strip, the hot wind in our faces, standing in the back of the truck. If you were looking for a taste of the pioneer life, this was definitely the real thing. Another box ticked.

Kibbutz Shamir lay at the top of the Hula Valley, where the stillness of the Northern Galillee breaks against the circle of mountains that climb into Syria and the Lebanon. The swamps in the valley had only recently been drained but already a small army of kibbutzniks had created a mosaic of gleaming fish ponds and hundreds of acres of neatly laid-out orchards.

The truck began to climb the foothills of the Golan Heights. Shamir was a scatter of terraced housing units behind a wire fence. At the heart of the kibbutz was the communal dining room, sheds for thousands of chickens, and a newly-built swimming pool. In the cool of the evening, it felt deeply promising.

I spent a month there that first summer. Every morning, we students got up at three in the morning, showered under cold water pipes, then queued for the truck that took us down to the orchards in the valley floor. Two hours apple-picking earned us hot sweet coffee from the superviser’s urn, and the beginnings of a spectacular dawn. At eight we returned to the kibbutz for breakfast then clambered back into the truck for another four-hour shift. Even at this time in the morning it was getting seriously hot. We climbed ladders, picked apples, ate the odd windfall, and drank our body weight in luke-warm water.

By mid day our work was done. Back at the kibbutz, the truck parked in the dirt space behind the dining hall. On the raised platform beside the huge chillroom, the women in the kitchens would leave stainless steel canisters full of pulped fruit. Fresh from the chillroom, condensation beaded on the gleaming canisters and even now – nearly fifty years later - I can still savour the icy kiss of that magical juice.

After lunch, and maybe a nap, we lounged by the pool and compared notes. On Thursday nights, the kibbutznik who ran the Shamir film society announced the movie of the week. The screen was a white sheet tied between two posts. I remember lying on the still-warm grass watching Battleship Potemkin as the wind sluicing up from the valley floor rippled sequence after sequence. This was life in the raw and we loved it.

The following year, 1967, brought a crisis to the Middle East. By early May, the Egyptians were threatening to close the straits of Tiran at the bottom of the Red Sea, thus isolating Israel. The Jordanian and Syrian armies were massing to gobble up this precious sliver of territory beside the Mediterranean. At its thinnest, the waist of Israel between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem measured just 36 miles. One bite, and the plucky little Jewish homeland would be no more.

For my generation, angered by the messiness and brutality of the American intervention in Vietnam, the fate of Israel seemed a very black and white issue. The Jews were the good guys, the Arabs the new Nazis. I’d spent serious time in the apple orchards of the Upper Galilee. I knew that Shamir, tucked up against the Syrian border, would be hopelessly vulnerable to the first wave of Russian-built tanks. For the first time in my life, after years of studying Rupert Brooke and George Orwell, I began to understand how it must have felt in 1914 and 1936. Time to express solidarity.

My best mate was a guy called Steve whom I’d known forever. I told him about Shamir, and about the coming conflagration, and we agreed to offer our services. Quite what we could bring to the Israeli table was never clear but we hitched to Istanbul, bought a ticket on the last boat to Haifa, and toasted the coming war with a couple of bottles of Efes as the golden minarets disappeared in our boiling wake.

By the time we got to Haifa, of course, the war was over. Waves of Israeli fighter-bombers had destroyed three Arab air forces in the first six hours of the conflict, while ground forces expelled the Egyptians from Sinai, pushed the Jordanian Army out of the West Bank, and routed the Syrians on the Golan Heights. By the time we got to Shamir, the old border was no more. No longer could you throw an apple into Syria. To do that meant a lengthy trek east through the minefields. After six days of intense fighting, we found ourselves in Greater Israel.

It was a strange summer. Shamir was full of Jewish volunteers, many of them South African, who’d headed north to offer a sacrificial arm or leg for the cause. Like us, they had a great deal to get off their chests and apple-picking didn’t quite do it. Our only salvation was the fact that the kibbutz truck that took us down to the valley floor every morning had been under fire in Sinai. There were shrapnel rents in the metal cladding and when we massed in the darkness to clamber aboard there were fights to see who could sit closest to this priceless evidence of battle.

That summer Steve and I spent three months in Shamir, and I returned again the following year. One of the many friends we made was a kibbutznik called Avram Eilat. Steve fell in love with his wife at first sight and we spent many afternoons on the patch of grass outside their tiny quarter.

Avram was a good-looking guy, black curly hair, fluent in his deliciously broken English, and had contrarian views on more or less everything. Like every Israeli his age, he’d fought in the war but didn’t seem to share the eurphoria that had swept the country. I liked him a great deal. We talked about our separate ambitions. He wanted to make it as a photographer and an artist while I already had four unpublished novels to my name. One day, we promised each other that we’d somehow break through. One day, we’d earn a living from doing something we loved.

I left university in 1968 and over the decades that followed Israel began to change A huge influx of Russian and Sephardic (non-European) Jews altered the political balance. The country drifted steadily rightwards. A rash of settlements appeared on hilltops on the West Bank and queues of Palestinians lengthened at the interminable Israeli checkpoints. The kibbutz movement also suffered, like a sandwich curling in the heat, and a tide of consumerism swamped the collective spirit that had underpinned the Israel I’d known and loved. This was suddenly a country awash with shopping malls and luxury yachts. Then came Gaza.

By now it was 2008. Lin and I had decided to spend Christmas in the Middle East. We took a series of trains across Europe, lingered in Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest and spent an unforgettable Christmas Day at a café beside the Bosphorus. Over the days that followed we rode more trains east until the line ran out and we were obliged to take a taxi across the Turkish border to Aleppo. New Year’s Eve found us looking for somewhere cheap to stay in Damascus.

The next morning we awoke to huge street demonstrations, an ocean of green flags. There were riot police everywhere and the freezing wind was spiced with tear gas. Neither of us carry smart phones, and we do our best to avoid any form of media, but Lin was curious to know what was up. I mumbled something about Arab street theatre but she wasn’t convinced. Then, after an awkward conversation with a forceful jihadist, we learned that Israel had begun to bomb and shell the Gaza Strip.

On reflection, it was a very bad time to be white and Anglo-Saxon in either Syria or Jordan but we kept our heads down and pretended to be French. Riding south on yet another bus, I caught sight of a familiar mountain nearby to the west. The last time I’d seen Mount Hermon – one of the biggest peaks in the Middle East – was half a lifetime ago. For three long summers, its looming shadow dominated our lives at Kibbutz Shamir. So what had happened to plucky little Israel in the intervening years? How come the heroes of my late adolescence had somehow morphed into a right-wing bully-state suppressing the Palestinians, bombarding women and children in Gaza, and breaking every international treaty in the book?

We flew back to the UK from Amman in the second week of January, 2009. From my cabin window, I could see grey columns of smoke still billowing from the ruins of the Gaza Strip. That image stayed with me in the years that followed and this spring we’ve decided to fly to Israel to try and take the pulse of the place. Our flights are booked for June. We plan to stay a couple of weeks.

Last Monday, curiosity led me to try and contact my old friend Avram Eilat. Would he remember me? Was he even alive? A Google search threw up his name in seconds. At 73, Avram Eilat is now one of Israel’s leading artists, much feted. With some hesitance, I pinged him an e-mail. We’d be in Haifa, where he evidently lives, in early June. I doubted my name would mean anything but might there be any chance of a meet?

Hours later came a reply. Hallo from Israel, read his e-mail. What a surprise! So many years have passed and I still remember you as the young English writer…

The young English writer? I raced downstairs. The guy’s still alive, I told Lin. Nearly half a century has passed and the guy still remembers me. This has to be more than serendipity. This has to be an encounter just waiting to happen.

God willing, we all meet in June. Stay tuned…

Just returned from Israel and the West Bank. Extraordinary trip. The last time I went was 48 years ago but even at 19 I was older than the fledgeling Israeli state. It was the end of my first year at Cambridge and the long summer vacation yawned ahead. I was as skint as every other student I knew but I badly wanted to put serious distance between myself and the UK and spotted an appeal for fruit pickers on an Israeli kibbutz. In return for a couple of months in the orchards, they gave you a return flight, a bed, free food, and pocket money of (as I recall) a quid a week. Irresistable.

The kibbutz – Shamir – lay at the top of the Hula Valley in the Upper Galilee.
The truck that had picked us up at Tel Aviv airport bumped through the orchards and fishponds on the valley floor and then wound up the zig-zag road that dead-ended at the kibbutz gate. Shamir, in 1966, crouched beneath the border with Syria. Armed patrols stood guard at night, and during the day – through borrowed binoculars – you could sometimes spot Syrian troops watching us. One of my fellow fruitniks, a blond art student from Geordieland, strayed across the border one afternoon by mistake. She wanted to sketch the kibbutz from above and was surprised to find her view suddenly full of soldiers. Arrested, she was marched away and ended up in a cell in Damascus, charged with being a spy. We never saw her again.

That summer gave me all the insights I thought I’d ever need into the Israeli psyche. With half a dozen other immigrant labour, I found myself amongst a bunch of sturdy pioneer farmers, most of them from White Russia (today’s eastern bit of Belarus). Every working day started at three in the morning when we mustered in the warm darkness in a patch of dirt behind the dining hall for the truck ride down to the valley floor. At six, a tractor turned up with a canister of thick sweet Arab coffee. We returned to the kibbutz for breakfast before sweating out the rest of the morning on our ladders amongst the trees. By midday, having picked our body weight in apples, we were done.

It was a memorable stay. The kibbutzniks were friendly and the way of life opened doors I never knew existed. A cashless society? Nothing private? Nothing owned? Kids growing up together, sleeping together, eating together, seeing their parents maybe a couple of hours a day? This was the closest I’d ever come to the collective dream, to socialism in the flesh, and it seemed to work. As far as I could judge, people were content. Everyone spoke their mind. Every opinion counted. The food was wonderful – home grown, mega-healthy, beautifully prepared – and there was a brand new swimming pool on the hillside overlooking the valley.

On Thursday nights, there was even a film club. After dinner, as dusk fell, we’d sprawl on the grass in front of an impromptu screen – three sheets stitched together strung from two poles – and watch that week’s offering. Looking back, once I’d adapted to the slow rhythms of kibbutz life, I don’t think I’ve ever been so physically healthy and mentally content. One of my enduring memories was watching the The Battleship Potemkin as the pram (and the baby) bumped down the Odessa steps as the wind from the valley rippled across the screen. Unforgettable.

A year later, in May 1967, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran. With her southern port of Eilat blockaded, Israeli intelligence reported Arab armies massing on every border, determined to drive the Jews into the sea. Prime Minister Eshkol agonised for days about the appropriate response but finally succombed to the urgings of the Israeli military. The IAF struck at first light on the 6th of June, effectively destroying three Arab airforces – Egyptian, Jordian and Syrian – on the ground. Six days later the war was over and the world awoke to a new player in the Middle East: a much bigger Israel that counted Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights amongst the spoils of war. At the time, given the alternative, this appeared to be something of a miracle. Little did we know what was to come.

Like thousands of other students, I volunteered to fight in Israel. On reflection, it was a callow and probably naïve reaction to the drumbeat of media headlines that paved the path to the Six Day War. For one thing, it was hopelessly impractical – what would I have done? – but in the shape of my apple-picking summer at Kibbutz Shamir, I had a tiny stake in this looming catastrophe and it seemed to me, as it seemed to so many others, that simple arithmatic put the moral case beyond dispute. Little Israel was surrounded by trillions of Arabs determined to finish Hitler’s work. Something had to be done.

And so I and my best mate – Steve Brown - hitch-hiked across Europe. We felt martial, armour-clad in our brave young convictions, but by the time we got to Istanbul, the war – rather worryingly – was as good as over. Israeli tanks and infantry were mopping up the spoils of victory and by the time the ferry landed us at Haifa, Israel was a land of celebration. And so we headed north again. To pick more apples.

That long summer, with the giddy realisation that we were part of history in the making, will stay with me forever. Shamir was no longer at the mercy of the Syrian Army. The frontier had been pushed back across the Golan Heights and once Israeli combat engineers had cleared pathways through the minefields above the kibbutz, we could explore what had so recently been enemy territory. A hour’s trek took you to a pool amongst the rocks. The safe paths were marked by lengths of white tape, skittish in the wind, and we carried guns in case of attack by feral dogs, but I’ll never forget the feel and taste of the water in that pool. It was fed from springs deep underground. It was ice cold, welcome balm after the long climb, and it seemed to speak of peace and a kind of deliverance. How wrong I was.

Over the decades to come, Israel moved steadily rightwards. The peace treaty of 1979 restored Sinai to the Egyptians but no way were successive governments going to relax the army’s stranglehold on the rest of their winnings. UN resolution 242 demanded a return to pre-war frontiers but occupation of the Golan Heights and the Palestinian West Bank kept declared enemies at arm’s length. The Golan Heights was largely depopulated but the West Bank teemed with Palestinian Arabs. Israeli settlements began to appear, along with fine new roads and countless checkpoints. In flagrant contravention of international law, Israel had turned the Palestinian homeland into a giant prison.

By now, of course, I was getting on with my life. I worked in television. I wrote books and TV scripts. I was aware that my hero Israelis had become the snarl on the face of the Middle East but it all seemed a long way away. Memories of Kibbutz Shamir had faded and it was becoming harder and harder to join up the dots.

What did apple-picking have to do with Sharon’s brutal compliance in the massacres of Palestinian refugees in the camps at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon? How come the guys I’d shared summers with were giving Arab families such a hard time? I had no answers to these questions, and aside from a vague suspicion that history had got the better of me, it was all too easy to park those adolescent memories somewhere safe and get on with the pressures and pleasures of a busy life.

Then, in 2008, Lin and I decided to spend Christmas somewhere warm and interesting. We took a series of trains across Europe and ended up in Istanbul. Christmas Day took us to a café beside the Bosphorus – grilled sardines and chips washed down with serious helpings of Efes lager – and the following week we headed for Syria. As far as the promised warmth was concerned, the Rough Guide turned out to be a dud. It was snowing by the time we got to Damascus and –travelling light - we barely had one pullover between us. I got flu on New Year’s Eve, and stepped groggily into 2009 to learn that the Israelis – once again – were bombarding the Gaza Strip.

Operation Cast Lead, as they called it, outraged the Syrians. The smell of tear gas badged demo after demo in central Damascus and the Star of David, roughly chalked, began to appear on paving stones on the road to the souk. Helpless in more or less every other respect, angry Arabs made the necessary detour to stamp on the face of Israel.

It was impossible not to ponder what was going on. On the bus into Damascus, I’d noticed the familiar hump of Mount Hermon on the near-horizon. This landmark, one of the biggest mountains in the Middle East, had also loomed over Kibbutz Shamir and all those summers ago I’d always wondered what it looked like from the other side. Now I knew, and that knowledge – coupled with the slaughter of women and kids under a rain of white phosphorus – made me feel deeply uncomfortable.

Back in 1967, in the face of nationwide euphoria, one or two lone voices had warned against what was starting to happen on the West Bank. Wiser statesmen would turn an overwhelming victory into a permanent peace. The theft of land, with all its attendant brutalities, had no place in a decent society. This had cut little ice at the time but nearly fifty years later the real bills for the Six Day War had fallen due. Unthinkably, Israel had become a by-word for oppression and many Arabs – angry and helpless - were beginning to talk about ethnic cleansing.

This was no time to be white and Anglo-Saxon in the Middle East. As the Israelis tightened their grip on Gaza, we fled to Jordan – no less hostile – and then took a ferry down the Gulf of Aqaba to the Egyptian port of Nuweiba. This is the Sinai peninsula. The coast stretches north towards Eilat and in January is normally a favourite destination for holidaying Israelis. With Gaza in flames, the usual visitors had wisely decided to stay at home and so the resorts were deserted. We found a grass hut on the beach, swam three times a day, and waited to return to Amman for the flight back home. As the Airbus reached cruising height after take-off, I could see the smoke still rising from the ruins of Gaza.

That experience found its way into Borrowed Light, the penultimate book in the D/I Joe Faraday series. Faraday, on a birding expedition in Sinai, ends up in hospital in El Arish after a car crash that nearly kills him. He shares the hospital with casualties from nearby Gaza – most of them kids – and what he sees on the wards thickens and deepens a despair that is to have profound implications. I think I understood that despair, and five years later we decided to go back to Israel and see for ourselves what had happened to the Israel of my apple-picking days. It was no coincidence that Borrowed Light was dedicated to Kibbutz Shamir.

A couple of weeks back, we landed at Ben Gurion Airport at half past one in the morning. The queues for immigration were huge and shuffled very slowly forward. An hour and a half took us steadily closer. The booths were manned by uniformed officers, many of them women. Some of them might have stepped off the cover of a fashion magazine – cool, poised, cold-eyed, dismissively attractive. When you finally made it across the white line, they quizzed you about your background, your plans, and why you had stamps from Syria and Jordan in your passport. They demanded to see hotel bookings, contacts in Israel, and evidence that you had a return ticket. They wanted to know about your itinery, and why a trip into the West Bank was so important. This is called “profiling” in the trade, and we must have passed muster because we finally got the slip of paper – don’t lose it – that headed us towards the Customs channel and the Greater Israel beyond. As a welcome to the promised land, this struck me as a bit off-message. We need to know about you. We need to be sure you’re not going to hurt us. You’re a stranger here, not a guest. Behave yourself.

The days to come took us to Jerusalem. We stayed in an apartment, rode the tram, explored the Old City, and did our best to let the place seep into our bones. The Israelis have an astonishing story to tell and a day at the Israeli Museum, and then Yad Vashem, will give you all the clues you need to begin to understand the pickle they’re in. Yad Vashem chronicles the Holocaust. Young Israelis mill around, some bored, some profoundly moved, shuffling slowly en masse from gallery to gallery. This is recent history in the raw, presented with sympathy, anger, sorrow, and what I can only describe as genius. You emerge at the end, confronted with a jaw-dropping view of the Judean Hills, and you understand at a single glance what these people are doing here. Europe made it tough for them. Europe nearly killed them all. And they’re not going to let it happen again.

That, at least, is a step forward. It doesn’t begin to excuse what’s happening in the West Bank and Gaza but at least you start to suss how one nightmare can so easily lead to another. To my knowledge, there weren’t any Arabs at Auschwitz and Treblinka, but – as the Israelis are only too eager to point out – their enemies share the same dream. To get rid of the Jews.

Hence the armed state. Hence the gun-toting soldiers on every bus. Hence the hostile arrogance of the immigration officials. Hence the checkpoints into – and across – the West Bank. Hence the wall that bites into Palestinian land and hands it to the settlers. Israel is more than a fortress. In the most bitter of historical ironies, it’s become a vast ghetto, armed to the teeth, a show-piece democracy in the roughest of neighbourhoods, a still-young nation dedicated to the simplest of propositions: its own survival.

The results aren’t pretty. This stuff is all anecdotal but you watch, and you listen, and after a while you conclude that Israelis are uneasy with each other. People – on buses, especially – seem glum and somehow walled-off. They don’t talk much. They rarely laugh. By definition, most of them have come from somewhere else and their defensiveness shows. By every metric – GNP, infrastructure, consumer choice, average earnings – Israel has been a blinding success yet little of this seems to have translated into anything close to happiness. These are deeply intelligent people. Many Israelis still have a profound respect for learning, for reading, for the rabbinical disciplines of the yeshiva. So maybe they understand they’re on the wrong side of history, that force alone can’t protect them against an uncertain future, that one day some form of accomodation will have to be made with their Levantine neighbours, above all with the West Bank Palestinians.

We spent a couple of days on the West Bank. Palestine is a very young society. The birthrate has become one of Israel’s darker nightmares and there are kids everywhere. After the showpiece developments of Tel Aviv and Netanya, soaring apartment blocks with Mediterranean views, the place has a Third World feel. It’s dirtier, noisier, more chaotic, more human. Israelis warned us against travelling alone yet in the teeming cities of Ramallah and Hebron we never once felt threatened. Ask a stranger the directions to a hotel or where we might find the best café, and he’ll do his best to oblige. And if he can’t speak English, he’ll find someone who does. We happen not to be Jewish but we’re self-evidently white and very definitely come from the West yet none of the burden of recent history seemed to matter. You’re guests in our land. Welcome.

After the glumness and self-absorbtion of Israel, this came as something of a relief. The average Palestinian might have to survive on a tenth of the Israeli average wage but in ways too subtle to quantify, they seem happier. These people, we thought, have warmth and grace. Their society, despite all the problems it faces, still works. Above all, they know who they are. And – dare I say it – where they ought to belong.

There are more than a hundred Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Illegal under international law, they hog the high crowd, steal the best water, and proclaim the historic right to a land that has belonged to the Arabs for millennia.

We spent one morning in the company of a Palestinian called Hani, who lived in a village near Bethlehem. He took us on a circuitous route to Hebron, passing settlement after settlement. The newest ones are trailer parks. Longer established settlements are a sprawl of pink roofs, heavily guarded. Collectively, they represent a long-term investment in land that isn’t theirs to own.

It happened to be Friday, the holiest day of the week for Muslims. The Ibrahimi Mosque lies in the middle of Hebron. As the final resting place of Abraham and his family, it is the third most sacred site in Islam. Israeli settlers have established themselves bang next door. In order to pray in the mosque, Palestinians must pass checkpoint after checkpoint under the cold gaze of heavily-armed Israeli troops, while elderly Jewish couples off the tour bus queue at the souvenir shop next door. Simple tact might be one key that unlocks the door to peace. Given Muslim sensitivities about worship, about the importance of their religion, what are the Israelis doing?

It gets worse. The Hebron souk used to be the heart of this city but the central alley is now netted to catch the rotten fruit and heavier items tossed away by Israeli settlers living in the apartments above. Soldiers are everywhere, gazing down from control points. You can taste the tension – the aggression – in the air. And yet the settlement building goes on. Possession, say some, is nine tenths of the law. And here’s the living proof.

In our final week, we left the West Bank and headed north, into the Upper Galilee. In a way this is how the journey began, in Kibbutz Shamir. Forty eight years later, I wanted to check it out.

The bus took us to Kiryat Shemona, Israel’s northernmost township. It was bigger than I remembered, and visibly more prosperous, but still a mess. We hired a car and headed across the valley. The weather happened to be misty. Half a lifetime ago, you could see clear across the valley, from Syria to the Lebanon. Not today.

I’d acquired directions to Shamir from the car hire company. Within minutes, we were amongst the lush greenness of the fruit orchards. Memories flooded back. Left here. Then right. Then onto the road that zig-zagged up the hillside towards Shamir. Looking back, I could see the dull metallic sheen of the fishponds. Pickled carp, I thought. With yoghurt and dill-flavoured gherkins for breakfast. Then back to the orchards.

We rounded the last bend. Above us, Shamir seemed to have grown. Then came the guardhouse and the barrier gate. We’d seen the same structures on the West Bank and both seemed new. We pulled into the designated parking zone and got out. Israel is the land of queues. This one had formed in front of the guardhouse.

The woman in charge spoke perfect English. As I later discovered, she’d emigrated from Canada in the seventies and settled here in Shamir. I did my best to explain about my glorious summers down in those same orchards, about the Six Day War, and about my curiousity to see what had happened since, but while she was sympathetic she said there was no chance of getting into the kibbutz itself. Sure, I could drive around the perimeter road, get a feel for the place, but security was tight just now and rules were rules. I tried again, explained I’d flown thousands of miles, got myself in a state of high excitement, promised my wife a peek at my dreams, but she wasn’t having it. The perimeter road. Ten minutes. Max.

And so we drove round. It was evident within seconds that the Shamir I’d known, the ramshackle old kibbutz of my fondest memories, had gone. In its place was a sprawling estate of new-looking houses, of carefully tended gardens, of ticking hoses. A grid of factories occupied an industrial estate and a mountain of shipping containers were awaiting the trucks that would take them to the coast. As the perimeter road looped round the kibbutz, there were even roundabouts.

Roundabouts? Kibbutz Shamir, the place that had haunted my dreams for so long, the bunch of sturdy pioneers that had taught me so much, had become a corner of Basingstoke: affluent, orderly, and doubtless mega-successful.

We checked some of this out when we returned to the guardhouse. The woman in charge was more than happy to talk. She was able to bridge the years since the late Sixties and she confirmed the evidence of our own eyes. The kibbutz, the way of life I’d known and loved, had gone. The kids no longer grew up together. People drew a wage. They owned their own houses. You had to pay for everything. In other words, after years in deep space, Kibbutz Shamir had gone for re-entry and was back with the rest of society.
Was that an improvement? Definitely not. Were there things from the old days she missed? Of course. Would she ever consider moving away?
She thought about the question for a long moment. Then she shook her head.
“I’m too old”, she said, her eyes straying to the window. Yet another truck was waiting at the gate. She punched the button and raised the barrier. The driver barely spared her a glance.