Sunday, August 19th 1945

In the morning after breakfast, we went to the C. of S. service in the chapel of the hostel and left for Haifa.

The C. of S. truck was driven by an Army driver, not the regular driver. He had, therefore come out without tools and so was rather annoyed to find that his petrol feed system was continually getting clogged and our progress was consequently somewhat erratic. Through Kefr Kenna we hit a goat, one of a herd being driven along the road, but the goat didn’t appear to be hurt, nor to mind very much, so we went on through Nazareth and stuck completely on the hill climbing out of the town to the South, near the turning where the Haifa road leaves the Affulch road. Our driver caught a bus back to Nazareth and returned with a length of rubber piping with which he proposed to make a siphon and provide an alternative feed. In the Middle East nobody seems to notice a wait of an hour and a half or so, by the roadside.

Eventually however, we were able to start off again, and we ran along the ridge to the North of the Plain of Esdraelon, and through the Balfour Forest. This big British afforestation scheme covers a great area. The trees are mainly coniferous, and are of different varieties.

Below the Balfour forest we ran onto the plain, studded with Jewish collective farms, and growing here mainly grain. Ahead we could see the wooded slopes of Mount Carmel, a good distance off. The truck was giving more and more trouble and eventually our very exasperated driver pulled up outside a West African camp, borrowed tools from them, removed distributor and filter assembly, joined input to output with the tube he bought in Nazareth and we drove right ahead to Haifa.

By this time it was quite late, so we made straight for the NAAFI where I had arranged to meet Maurice Stedman and had lunch. After an hour or so as he had still not arrived, we assumed, as we had arranged, that he was on duty, and so we decided to make our way towards Jerusalem. Frank didn’t seem keen on hitch-hiking, but by the time he had elicited the information that Egged were booked up for a fortnight ahead and that we could only travel by train on production of a movement order or written permission from the R.T.O. we decided to look for a truck. Two Army vehicles were leaving for Gaza and promised to take us as far as Ramallah. We left shortly afterwards and ran a bus service which would have been very profitable had it not been free, all the way along the main North-South road.

Out of Haifa, a curious mixture, partly a modern port with high office buildings, warehouses and big European shops, partly a typical Arab town very strictly divided by the “Out of Bounds” line, we ran along a fairly narrow plain between Mount Carmel and the Med. Inhabited mainly by Arabs. The country was grassland of a rather poor quality.

To the South of Mount Carmel the plain opens out and becomes very much more fertile. From here across the Plain of Sharon and right the way to Gaza in the South, the road runs through a country of vineyards, orchards and fertile gardens. In this area lie the majority of the Jewish settlements.

However we did not stop, except for a lemonade and cakes at a roadhouse, and travelling fast, eventually reached the Jaffa-Jerusalem road at the Sarafand roundabout just south of Ramallah. No sooner had we stepped off the one truck and crossed the road than another picked us up and took us straight to Jerusalem in company with two Colonels three or four Majors, a number of Captains, and one Lieutenant, as well as several ladies returning from a day out in Tel Aviv. This democratic Army! We arrived just after dark, and had dinner and got installed in a room back in St. Andrew’s hostel.