Drop ten, turn and Face.’ Quilty’s Football Yarns 30 Study and travel.

‘Drop ten, turn and Face.’ 

Quilty’s Football Yarns 30

Study and travel.

Returning home to London after six months on Kibbutz in 1977 was difficult. Not least because I realised it would be tough to become what I had set my heart on. Becoming a teacher. Walking out of Parmiter’s in early in 71’ with Billy Lee had meant I had booked a future price to pay. I had to take a few steps backwards to go forward to finish my education. My cousin Kim had done teacher training up at Tottenham Teaching College, so she arranged an interview for me with the Dean. I reasoned that my seven years of work experience might get me some consideration. I was bitterly disappointed. The best they could say was,

 “Get one A Level and we will make you an offer”

My response was to say “If I study, I won’t get one, I’ll actually get three A Level’s and won’t be training here!” And so it was. I left Tottenham Teaching College that afternoon with the fire of intention burning fiercely in my heart.

Immediately I went to enrol at Hackney College, Stoke Newington Campus. At school I’d actually started A Levels with English being my favourite. However, at 23 my interests had shifted and I went with Economics, History and Political Science. 

Sometimes in life you tell a little white lie to make things a bit more straightforward. This was the case when I told mum I was going to train for teaching. It was complicated. I needed two years for A Levels, three years for an Honours Degree and a year Post Graduate study. Six years all up. In the event I was training to be a teacher for six years. Simple. I just said it was a six year course. Not everyone has such supportive parents. Whether going away to travel or stopping work to study, at that time, you were doing a less than typical thing. I always said the fact that 95% were content to do the regular thing allowed a few to be irresponsible and swim against the tide. After my Tottenham Teaching College experience, Hackney College provided me with a great platform for my re-entry into education. Della Bishop for Politics, Lawrie Patterson for History and Frank Moore for Economics all challenged me in different ways. Della through discussion, Lawrie through story-telling and Frank through analysis. Between them they awoke me to ideas, helped build a framework for understanding and most importantly gave me my passport to eventually head up to Leeds University for four years in the cold harsh north.

Early in the summer of 78’, after my first years study I set off again back to Israel with three mates. Gary Collins, Johnny Colbert and Steve Pearce. We going back to Tel Katzir for four months. To say that I had missed the Kibbutz was an understatement. To me the Israeli Kibbutzniks came across as abrupt group. They were very straight and told things with no frills. We worked and played hard. That said it was probably the life experience that taught us all how to stand still and reflect. Being out of our normal societal loop we rarely carried or needed money. Food was literally a smorgasbord every day exposing us to tastes and combinations we’d rarely seen previously. Because our months often raced by the good and bad were usually accentuated. Almost to a person there, we realised how lucky and privileged we were to experience Kibbutz life. Taking three other boys from East London was a bit of a risk. Settling into the communal way of life it entailed, wasn’t easy but Gary and Johnny got stuck into the physical banana work immediately. Unfortunately, young Stevie Pearce found things a lot harder. He was probably homesick, struggling with a new culture and became mentally very defensive, being surrounded by so many foreigners. At the time there a large group of American students on Tel Katzir doing ‘Ulpan’ a mixture of cultural exchange and study. Gary did what he always did. He found ways to entertain himself often at the expense of the American students we were working with, tormenting them non-stop. Johnny just went with the flow and I think he had a good time. One night the other three had gone to prank the Americans who were sleeping in the bomb shelter. Storming in with flour and stuff they were out to wake them up making a mess. Not the best thing to be doing in the middle of the night on a border Kibbutz! They were followed down the stairs by armed security guards who must have close to doing something serious hearing the commotion. A close call.

The way things worked on Kibbutz was that you worked for six days a week and accumulated an extra day off which could be used for a week’s travel. Israel is a small but very diverse country. We were in Galilee near the Golan Heights. Just an hour’s drive north, was the Lebanese border.  Just five kilometres north east was the triple border between Syria, Jordan and Israel. The capital Jerusalem was two hours due south through the Jordan Valley, Nazareth due west and Bethlehem and the Dead Sea just a bit on from Jerusalem. 

The Old City of Jerusalem is a wonderful place. It is a walled city steeped in history and when you enter it, it is like going back in time. Safe to say it is my favourite City in the world. The ‘Via Dolorosa’ is a route famous for its 14 ‘stations’ but many would not realise how steep the incline is up to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The name ‘Via Dolorosa’ means ‘Way of Sorrow’ and it is a street believed to be the path walked by Jesus on his way to the cross. The city is so mesmerising that on one occasion I wandered alone for a few days on my own. The next morning I awoke to see massed crowds on the streets. Puzzled I asked someone what was going on. “It’s Easter” they replied. I’d been away from London a while and completely lost track of time and dates. That year was the one where a new Pope had been elected but had quickly died. I was in Jerusalem while the Catholic’s were choosing a replacement in Rome and the faithful were abuzz.  We often stayed in the old city and my favourite place was the Lutheran Hostel in a building probably over a thousand years old. The hostel itself had men’s and women’s quarters. One night while sleeping in one of the top bunks I had a nightmare and jumped across toward an alcove window in the wall. My neighbour sleeping in the bed below shone his light on me as I squatted in the alcove. When he asked what happened I just said, “The bed was chasing me”.

This wasn’t the only animated dream I had in Israel. On Tel Katzir I always worried about the way people drove the tractors at speed around Kibbutz. Crazy Israeli drivers! I worried that the young kids would get hurt. On this night I was sharing a room with two other volunteers. In my dream some young children were in the way of a vehicle that was backing up toward them. Instinctively I moved to push them out of the way of danger. In reality, I had jumped up out of bed, lifted a coffee table full of bottles, after shave and chocolate, and thrown it across the room. With a crash, it bounced on the tiled floor, broke into two and hit my unsuspecting mate’s bed. My other room-mate had quickly jumped up and grabbed me as I waded through the floor of broken glass and after the table. After I awoke and everything had calmed down, I looked at the coffee table and knew in my woken state I could not have even lifted it, let alone throw it! Strangely enough no one came to see what had gone on. It could have been terrorists or whatever. We always joked that the British volunteers slept with their passports under their pillows. They obviously had faith that attackers would do a document check before proceeding!

Eventually it was time to return to London for the second year of my A Level study. The boys had gone off a bit earlier to travel across Europe before heading home as well. Another time had passed on Tel Katzir. I was leaving but knew I’d be returning again one day.