I started reading a book yesterday about
otroverts
- not introverts nor extraverts - and whilst I wouldn't categorise myself as
such, I started wondering how and when I changed from a generally happy and
gregarious person into a generally unhappy and introverted person. I thought
that there might have been a clue in my various blogs about Habonim; there
wasn't, but reading between the lines here and there did give me a hint.
Until I left school in 1973, whilst I might have kept my Bristol and Habonim
lives separate, I was fairly integrated with the other boys at school. Apart
from our studies, we had sports along with progressive rock and/or folk
music in common, and externally at least I was the same as the others. Then
came the year
1973-41 in Israel, during a war, with people who were supposedly
similar to me but often as different as chalk and cheese, and often a few
years older. If that were not enough, I then spent the next four years as a
schizophrenic: during the days, I would be with people with whom I had very
little (if anything) in common, either at
university2 or during the two work periods, whereas in the evenings and
weekends I would be with my movement friends. Then I emigrated and
discovered that life on a kibbutz was not the idyll that I expected.
Reading through those blogs about Habonim, I had two more memories that I
hadn't written about previously. First,
cooking3: for reasons of kashrut, we didn't have meat at camp. For
breakfast, all I remember is corn flakes, bread with jam, and tea. For lunch
and supper, we rotated through a meal based on eggs, one on cheese and one
on fish. The egg meal was probably some type of flan and the cheese was
probably cauliflower cheese, but I don't remember what kind of fish dishes
we made. In the summer, everything was cooked over gas rings, so there
weren't that many options. On Friday nights, the leaders would serve us
salami on paper plates as a treat, although I don't think that I liked this
very much. Paper plates also meant that there wasn't much cleaning up to do.
At the camp in
19714, after a few days in bivouac tents, we reverted to a more
familiar format. In the next day or two, I 'got off' (as the ugly expression
has it) with a girl, at a speed that somewhat surprises me now (that was
when I was gregarious). A day or two later, because it had been raining, we
were playing games in the big marquee where we used to eat and have evening
activities together when we weren't outside. I remember I was running around
the marquee then something happened although exactly what I don't remember:
either I slipped, or I ran into the tent pole in the middle of the marquee
or maybe something else, but suddenly I was stunned and fell to the floor,
as if someone had given me a huge punch to the stomach. I was helped to the
medical tent, where I was examined with no real diagnosis ('stomach cramp')
and left to rest on the camp bed there. Later on, friends came to vist,
including the girl. The next day I stayed in the medical tent and slept
another night there - I had no desire at the moment to rejoin the hurly
burly. But after that, it was hinted that it was time to get up, and so I
did, rejoining my friends in our tent.
This was the year that the hormone levels were running high. Although girls
weren't supposed to be in our tents, I remember one night when the boy on my
left had a girl with him for some slap and tickle, as did the boy on my
right (they didn't stay the night). A few days later we went on our five day
hike; when my group came back, it must have been before the others as the
camp site was fairly empty. So some of us - boys and girls - piled into one
tent to sleep. Traditionally, we took down most of the tents on the
penultimate day; we were told that we could sleep where we liked for the
final night, so instead of sleeping in the marquee, my girl and I lay down
outside the marquee. All we did was kiss (and at length; our lips seemed to
be stuck together and I wondered how I would breathe) and I fondled her
breasts. Nothing else. It never occurred to either her or me that maybe I
too should be fondled.
We met up again a few weeks after the camp when I was touring southern
Britain (again, the 1971 blog), but she broke up with me by mail a few weeks
later. I commiserated with Sandy Denny's 'North Star Grassman'.
Internal links
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[2] 1480
[3] 737
[4] 95
