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Letter No 57 Friday July 4th
Major. J. H. Massey 6 Palestinian Coy. The Buffs Middle East Force
My sweet darling -
I wrote the headings to this letter at 9.0 o'Clock & it is now 11-0. It is these ruddy air raids, & the interval has been spent behind the blast-proof walls of my command post. This is the penalty of a full moon. Last night there was one, just after I was nicely asleep in bed. And the night before, just before I went to bed, but that time we were treated to the fine sight of a plane receiving a direct hit, & coming down as a sheet of flame. It was one of these Vichy French ones - they are a dirty lot of devils, really.
I am going off tomorrow midday until Sunday evening, to spend a short weekend with Arkin & his family at Naltanya, about an hours run from here. I am told it is a very pleasant place. I don't believe I have told you about Arkin. He is a Jewish Officer, who was commissioned in March & sent to me for training until his own Company was formed. Now I have a Jewish Sgt whom I have recommended for a commission to fill a vacancy in my Coy. During the time that the Sgt has been waiting for his commission & Arkin has been waiting for his Coy I have come to like Arkin very much, both as a man & as an officer - & the Sgt has been annoying me rather badly; he is too much of a German - a Yeki. And so I have managed to arrange with Col Leicester that I keep Arkin, & to send the Sgt instead to the other Coy. And there is no doubt at all that this
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2 is a good piece of business for me.
Arkin is a very pleasant little man of 28, extremely intelligent, & a very hard working & serious officer. In civil life, he was the Town Clerk - an important job in Palestine - of Naltanya. Just two months before joining up, he married the daughter of the Mayor - a good move, I expect! And it is with them I am going to stay. I'm afraid they are going to make rather a splash of entertaining the "Major" - because I nearly had to put it off on Wednesday. Arkin looked terribly disappointed & said that everything was prepared. And his wife telephoned today, when he was out, & spoke to Benn Argi & said all was ready. Oh dear - what a business - & I told Arkin not to do anything special for me.
I will write you all about it when I return. And now I must go to sleep. Goodnight precious sweet heart. Dear kisses to you xxxx
Monday - 7 July. Well, darling one, I'm back from my week end, a very pleasant & interesting one too. I must tell you about it all while the going is good - tomorrow or next day. I must have a letter from you, & then there will probably be so much to reply to & talk about, & this will never be done.
The weekend was spent at the Mayor's house & Arkin's wife is the sister of the Mayor's wife, not his daughter. His name is Benn Anni & he & his wife live in the largest house in Nalthanya, on the highest point.
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ovelooking everything & everybody else. It was a really lovely modern house, full of rich modern furniture, a few rather garish things in bad taste, but mainly very well chosen & arranged, & many good ideas. It was all very interesting, because Nahariya is a new place, started from walking at all in 1929, & Ben Ami in particular, with 2 or 3 friends, is the man who began the whole afffair. In 1929. It was just sand & swamp - no soil at all - & highly marlarious - Today it is said to be the healthiest place in Palestine. It is a very flourishing small town & a very lovely place. So it is really his town & he proudly told me that it has a future. It is really very courageous the way in which such people pioneer such a project. The swamps & malaria were dealt with by draining & dispensing & by the liberal planting of eucalyptus trees, which grow quickly & without care, & have the property of drying ground & drawing away the mosquito. And the flowers & grass & vegetables grwo well in sand, providing the ground is continually watered, when it slowly changes into soil. Everywhere in Palestine you see water laid with these sprinkler strings literally -, that is what saves the cultivation, the good water supply from February to October there is no rain at all, exactly none. Nahariya is on the sea from which cliffs rise up & from Ben Amis bore it was possible to see mount
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Carmel in the North, snow capped Mount Hermon in Syria, beyond - Away inland to the mountains of the Jordon Valley, in fom jordan - & south as far as Jerusalem. Palestine is a peculiar shape, laterally. Mrs was pleasant, charming, good looking & well dressed - Mrs Arkin quite a pretty attractive girl or young woman. She was about 40, short & somewhat rotund, but not at all Jewish in appearance. And tho her Amies have 2 daughters - aged 12 & 7 Pretty pleasant children, but rather too well dressed. That was one thing about all the women, children & grown ups - they appeared in a succession of lovely frocks, but I was not able to gather whether this was normal or mainly for my benefit. We started off with a magnificent lunch, off a glass topped table, marvelous cutlery & crockery - and wall of the dining room being entirely covered with an oil painting of the Dead Sea, & that part of the Jordan valley, the Mooble his beyond - the colouring was gorgeous, if you remember my letters from Jericho. After lunch we all went to our beds, had a rest & it made me furiously jealous & passionately sad, to think of Arthur & his wife together a few yards away, probably thinking it was a hell of a reunion not having seen each other for 3 weeks. And there I was alone, a 3000 miles away, you alone, & not having seen each other for nine months that very day. It really does peeve me, the way those Jewish officers all
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5 have their wives, take all for granted. After this we walked down & had a bathe. Marvellous sands & enormous waves, but unfortunately unsafe to go in further than up to your wasit, the pull was so bad. In the evening we went to the cinema & saw a terrible old film called "The fighting 69" with James Cagney as a fellow private, Pat O'Brien as the padre - really terrible. Then to a cafe place, where a great, fat Russian woman, sang songs, very badly in Russian, Hebrew & Yiddish. I'm very sleepy, darling. I was up at 5-15 this morning, to be here for 7-30 - & I've had a wearing day, & am feeling a little bit dead. So I'm just oing to have a drink, read your last letter aain, & go to bed. Goodnight! angel darling. Love & kisses to you & Max - & all my loving kisses to you, sweetheart xxxx H. Tuesday - July 8th I hope you don't mind this serial letter method - but as I explained before, I do eventually achieve a letter by this means, where otherwise, I should be instalment may be very brief, as I have been very much involved, & am at it again after dinner. I spent the early part of the morning in arranging the details for that, when word came that the wife of one of my corporates had committed suicide, leaving a one month old baby behind - a really dreadful affair. It seems she had been a bad neurotic case for some time,
