Pork Pie: Five Tales from a Medic's Journey

By David A Fitzmaurice

This collection of short stories is vaguely autobiographical but also draws on the experiences of others. He would particularly like to express his respect for Lieutenant Blair Mayne, who is re-imagined as the central character in Courage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Astoria Publishing
• Release date: Apr 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838433819

Book preview

Catalyst

Chapter 1

We returned to the kibbutz office in Jerusalem for the third time. They said they’d found us a place in the north of the country, on the Lebanese border. For the next five months, our time would be spent on Kibbutz Sa’ar.

‘We’ comprised myself and David, both eighteen years old and in the middle of a so-called gap year - a phrase that didn’t exist in 1982. We called it a ‘year off’. We were Thatcher’s children but radically opposed to her. She wasn’t popular at the time but turned that around shortly afterwards by invading a small group of islands nobody had heard of in the South Atlantic. It played into the nationalist jingoism of the time.

David and I had known each other since primary school. We were both from lower middle class backgrounds, both had recently finished at a Catholic grammar school and both had university places awaiting us on our return, mine at medical school.

We had left Manchester two weeks previously on New Year’s Day and via hitchhiking, boat, plane, train and taxi, ended up in Jerusalem. We had been planning our travels for a couple of years. We had spent the time before Christmas going around Europe and this was the second phase of the plan, which was to culminate at the World Cup in Spain. I had got some money together through working at a hotel in France the previous summer but we were led to believe that money wasn’t a big issue on the kibbutz, where in exchange for labour, all food, clothes and accommodation were provided.

There were three of us travelling before Christmas but Martin had decided to stay in Manchester and join us once we’d settled in Israel. The story of how that panned out could fill a book on its own. It was better in terms of travelling to have just two people as a lot of the time we were hitchhiking, which is well-nigh impossible with three.

Having gone to the usual New Year’s Eve party, it had been agreed that David’s mother would take us to the M6 Knutsford junction, where our journey would begin. We were dropped off before noon and armed with rucksacks, a tent and a hundredweight of chicken legs, courtesy of David’s mum, we were at last ready to set off.

Chapter 2

We had a fair amount of experience at hitchhiking, although this was mainly restricted to the UK and France. We’d taken to hitching to France for holidays a couple of years previously. Prior to Christmas, we’d expanded our horizons slightly but stayed within northern Europe, mainly Germany. I’d split up from David and Martin and gone on to Scandinavia but Norway in November is not really a place where you want to be sleeping rough.

So we were not fazed by what lay ahead of us as we stood on the side of a motorway slip road. It was a cold day but there was a bright blue sky and it wasn’t raining. Rain is a nightmare for the hitchhiker. No-one wants to stop and no-one wants to let you into their vehicle. We were vaguely optimistic, if a little hungover, and we hoped to be in Dover that evening. The initial destination was Athens, where we planned to work our passage to Egypt, hopefully Alexandria, and get from there into Israel.

Our plans were inspired by my brother, who had taken a year off after university with the aim of getting to South Africa. We’d also read Laurie Lee for O level. My brother had taken the more sensible route of buying a car but we didn’t feel this was necessary or desirable. We were confident in our abilities.

The planning had mainly taken place in the Moss Vale, a pub in Urmston where David and I lived, and comprised poring over maps of Europe and the Middle East. We had at one point considered hitchhiking to India via the old hippy trail but this was impractical due to the situation in Afghanistan.

The idea to go to Israel arose loosely from the fact that my father’s business partner was Jewish. Phil was from Dublin and was by no means an orthodox Jew. He observed the normal rituals such as not working on the Sabbath but did not dress in the clothes of the Hassidim nor try to outdo his co-religionists by sporting a large homburg hat. He had taught me a few Hebrew words and had tried to teach me the Hebrew alphabet.

Phil’s main influence was in relating stories of the early kibbutz movement which played a huge role in the eventual decision to found the state of Israel in 1948. I make no judgment on the validity or otherwise of this decision. What interested me was the idea of the kibbutz as a working example of practical socialism whereby all property is communally held and everyone takes responsibility for everyone else. Given the bad press socialism had, and continues to get, it seemed that if there was practical proof that it can work, then I wanted to be a part of it.

I had little notion of what constituted a kibbutz beyond the fact that most were dependent upon agriculture and fruit picking. They were generally rural farms, although some more modern ones had small-scale industrial units.

Non-kibbutzniks could experience this environment in the form of volunteering. As we understood it, this meant working for a few hours a day in return for board and lodgings. There were a couple of UK-based agencies at the time which would, for a fee, sort out a placement. We considered this unnecessary. We were confident that we could sort ourselves out if we could get to Israel and, perhaps more importantly, we didn’t want to pay for flights.

Chapter 3

Our first lift came after around thirty minutes when a large petrol wagon wheezed to a stop on the hard shoulder. This was always a great moment. Wait for more than half an hour and you get despondent, worrying whether you are in the right place. We had started from here before so we were not too worried but it was still a great relief.

There is a ritual conversation that takes place when a vehicle stops, whether it’s an articulated lorry or a Volkswagen Beetle.

Where you heading lads?

Trying to get to Dover tonight, I said.

You’ll be lucky! Pretty quiet on the roads today.

No rush, we’ll see where we get to, I replied truthfully. We weren’t in a hurry.

Well, hop in. I can take you as far as Watford Gap. Stopping there for my dinner.

Thanks mate, that’s great.

This was a great start. All the way down the M6 and a fair way down the M1. Not a million miles from London.

We were used to motorway services and transport cafes. They were the best places for getting lifts but the downside was competition from other souls doing the same thing. There was no real etiquette in these situations. It is the driver’s decision who they want to pick up.

The conversation was generally pretty banal. A few minutes of ‘where you going?’, ‘why?’ and ‘where you from?’ followed by a bit of banter about football and then mostly silence. I guess the deal was that in exchange for a lift, you are supposed to provide some entertainment or at least a little distraction. It has to be said that neither David nor I were, or are, particularly good at small talk so we were not exactly an ideal choice but on the whole, we tried to keep our side of the bargain. We would take it in turns to try to amuse our driver but when David asked if it were safe to throw a cigarette out of the window (neither of us smoked at the time) as he was hauling petrol, I realised it was going to be a long few hours to Watford Gap. I gave up and went to sleep. Pretty unforgivable for a hitchhiker.

Chapter 4

And so, we were on our way. The previous July to December when we travelled around Europe, David and Martin had met me in Blois in France and we bummed around France and Germany, returning home for Christmas. This was really a prelude to the main adventure, a kind of Hobbit before Lord of the Rings. We’d been grape-picking in France and worked at a religious retreat in Germany. It was all pretty safe and we were never that far from home. This second phase was a different kettle of fish.

The basic plan was simple enough but with hitchhiking, you are always dependent on lifts. We had picked up a few basics. It was no good hitching going into somewhere; it was always best to pick up a lift on the way out. On one later occasion, this led to us walking virtually the length of Rome just to get out of it. There were known black spots. Lyon, for example, was a stumbling block so notorious that you would decline a lift if that’s where they were going to drop you. Birmingham is probably the UK’s worst, although I’m sure others have their own no-go zones.

This first lift, then, was pretty good. It took at least three hours to get to Watford Gap services. All these places have separate facilities for lorry drivers. The tachometer had recently been introduced which limited how long they could be on the road and they had to have regular rest stops. Although we had been pretty useless in terms of providing distraction, our driver said he would pick us up again in forty-five minutes if we were still there. He was heading into London.

There were two other hitchers at the services. They were considerably older than us and had the glazed, indifferent look that we’d get to recognise at a thousand paces. Bearded and bandana-ed, both with handwritten signs, one saying ‘London’, the other ‘Dartford’. We nodded hello but didn’t talk. We’d usually ask how long they’d been waiting, where they’d come from, that kind of thing, but these two didn’t look like sociable types.

It was getting on for four o’clock, still light but not too far away from darkness. It isn’t impossible to hitchhike in the dark but you have to start thinking of the practicalities of where to spend the night. We could really do with getting to Dover, even if we couldn’t get a ferry until the next day.

As luck would have it, the first car that stopped was going to neither London nor Dartford but Brighton. Whilst this wasn’t ideal, we could always sleep in Brighton if necessary and head for Dover the next morning. It shouldn’t be difficult to get a lift along the coast, even if it was to be a series of fairly short journeys. We jumped in, David in front, me in the back. It was a large BMW.

Where you going lads?

Trying to get to Dover, said David.

You don’t want to be going to Brighton then?

It’s fine. We can get a lift along the coast.

If you say so.

He was a travelling salesman for a shoe company based in Brighton and heading back from Liverpool, where he was from, to start work the next day. He wasn’t that much older than us and an Everton fan. This sat well with both of us, me a City fan and David a United fan. We both disliked Scousers in general but Liverpool fans were the worst of all (still are, come to that). We had the usual banter about football. Everton weren’t a bad side then and were getting better. This passed the time and we were in Brighton in three hours. He kindly dropped us on the coast road out of the town. There was a park nearby we could sleep in if necessary but we decided to give it another hour to see if we could actually make Dover and maybe even get the last ferry.

Chapter 5

It took a further four hours via several very short lifts along the coast road to get to Dover. It turned out people didn’t commute this way. By the time we finally arrived, the last ferry had departed and the ferry terminal was shut. We were about to go and find the train station, a regular sleeping spot for rough sleepers, when David, for reasons unknown, suggested we look round the back. His uncanny knack for finding things would serve us well over the coming months.

An unlocked door at the rear of the building led us directly into the waiting room. I guess if we were of that nature, we could have robbed the vending machines. But we simply curled up on the uncomfortable plastic chairs and fell asleep.

I’d known David since we were seven. His family had moved to Urmston from north Manchester and years later, they were still considered ‘newbies’. We became close friends. Both second generation Irish Catholics from essentially working-class families who’d done good. His mum was a legend. You couldn’t step foot in the house without being force-fed. Wherever you were and whatever the time, she would always come and pick you up. His father was a quiet Ulsterman, a contradiction in terms if ever there was.

We became very close through primary school but even closer at big school. This was some eight miles from where we lived. My father would take us to school in the morning and we would get two buses home each afternoon. We had a similar sense of humour, generally sarcastic, and a shared moral outrage at the way the ruling classes lorded it over the less fortunate. It still irritates me how wealth is seen as some kind of moral superiority. I have nothing against wealth per se. Most wealthy people have had to step on the bodies of their colleagues to get their money yet they act as if they have the keys of the kingdom and the answers to society’s ills when in fact they are generally the cause of them. David shared these views and probably held them even more strongly.

The third of the triumvirate was Martin. He came from north Manchester and was one of the most naturally funny people I have ever met. He doesn’t feature much in this tale but he was very much a part of the whole year off. David and I organised a day off from the kibbutz to meet Martin in Tel Aviv. He didn’t get off the plane he was supposed to be on. We eventually rang his house in Manchester and enquired of his mother where Martin was. She simply called Martiiin in a high-pitched voice. He was still in bed.

The three of us were pretty inseparable but we were very different. David,