Christmas was never full of joy in the Holy Land (From Worcester News)

Christmas was never full of joy in the Holy Land

2:36pm Monday 19th December 2011 in Mike Pryce By Mike Pryce

THE first time Jim Morrison saw Jerusalem, wise men bearing gifts had nothing to do with it.

Instead, coming the other way along a dusty road out of the city was a convoy of British Army lorries.

As they passed, Jim noticed the back of each vehicle carried a coffin draped in a Union Jack. They were the bodies of British officers who had been killed in a Jewish terrorist attack on the King David Hotel the day before.

Welcome to the Holy Land.

Signalman Morrison spent two Christmases in Palestine in the years immediately after the Second World War while the British struggled to keep the peace between rival Arab and Jewish factions.

He said: “As soldiers we weren’t allowed to fraternise with either.

Get too close and you might get a knife in the back.”

For a young National Serviceman it was a rude introduction to the cradle of Christianity, where peace, love and forgiveness seemed to be pretty thin on the ground.

Jim said: “We were based at a camp at al-Sarafand, near Haifa and most of the leisure time was spent in there. Every night outside the camp you could hear machine guns going off and explosions as the Arabs and the Jews fought each other.

“It was a big place with shops, a swimming pool and a cinema, so there wasn’t much need to go anywhere else. I remember one night I was in the garrison cinema watching the film Canyon Passage, which starred Hoagy Carmichael and Susan Hayward. On the screen there was lots of shooting in a gunfight when all of a sudden a terrific explosion rocked the building. I fell to one side and a group of soldiers I had been sitting next to, all landed on top of me. I thought: ‘If the roof comes in, at least I’m covered’. It turned out a group of Jews dressed as soldiers had got into the camp and detonated a bomb. It was a very lucky escape.”

One of the films Jim particularly remembers shown at the cinema was The Outlaw, which featured Jane Russell and would have been considered a Christmas present for a soldier at any time of the year.

He said: “There weren’t really any great celebrations at Christmas. The officers used to serve the men at dinner and afterwards there was free beer in the NAAFI but that was about it.

At the time every soldier used to get 53 free cigarettes a week from the Army, so on Christmas night we would get the free beer and take the cigarettes and go for a ‘smoker’ in the canteen. That was our Christmas.”

Jim, now aged 83 and living at Kempsey, near Worcester, was born near Newcastle upon Tyne and his father served in the Middle East during the First World War – in Egypt with the Royal Flying Corps. When Jim was called up for National Service in 1946, he was first sent to France, where his unit was given cold weather training, kitted out with winter coats and long johns and put on a boat at Toulon. It was some surprise, therefore, that when he disembarked he wasn’t in some frozen Norwegian fjord but walking down the gang plank in the sunshine of Port Said harbour.

Whereupon the great coats were taken away, tropical kit was issued and he was sent off across the desert in a lorry to Jerusalem.

Jim’s job was as a driver in the Royal Signal Corps. He said: “The first 15 hundredweight lorry I drove had no cover for the driver.

They nicknamed it the ‘pneumonia truck’. I drove this for several weeks and then they gave me a Canadian Ford 15 hundredweight, which was much better and remained with me for the rest of my service in Palestine.

“I always travelled with a soldier as a guard in case of trouble.

Sometimes there would be two, one in the front and another in the back. If the route was known to be particularly dangerous there would be an escorting truck as well with two guards.”

Jim’s cargo would sometimes be goods or sometimes simply messages from one Army point to another.

He said: “Every day driving was a new adventure. You never knew what would happen.”

One one occasion, while driving through an Arab village, a young lad ran out and collided with the back of his truck. Jim knew nothing about it until an angry group of locals caught up with him and surrounded his vehicle. He was taken by the Palestine police to an old fort – “It looked just like something out of the French Foreign Legion” – and quizzed before being let go.

Just as he left the fort, roaring up the road came some of his mates in an armoured car. They had heard about his plight and were about to mount a rescue mission.

Jim said: “In the front of the armoured car was an office clerk waving a Bren gun. I knew he’d never even been off the camp in his life, let alone fired a gun. I couldn’t help but laugh but I was grateful for their support.”

Another time, after escorting a mobile crane to Jerusalem, he arrived too late to catch the return convoy and so slept in the city. The next day he discovered the convoy had been attacked and the vehicle he should have been in had bullet holes all down the back of the cab and blood was being washed out with a hose pipe.

It had been neither a silent nor a holy night in the land where Jesus walked all those centuries ago.