Part one:

I sat in the train carriage feeling separated from the scene around me. I was starting my journey by rail down to Dover; across the Channel by ferry, across France to Marseilles, then by boat in tourist class to Israel. I had lived with this group of girls who were weeping with regret of leaving their parents behind, on a farm in Somerset where we were being selected as Kibbutz community living material; for two weeks and knew them intimately.

I wished that I could weep, or wanted to weep with regret of leaving my mother behind; but I could not show this emotion. I was coldly glad that I would not see my mother for a year. I desperately wanted not to be this introverted, person whose emotions were locked away in an airless box inside me. But my life had only prepared me to let fate carry me where ever it wanted to dump me. In fact I was amazed that eighteen year old girls could show such infantile behaviour.

I looked out of the window at my father; a quiet, reserved man who loved me but had taken the route of supporting my mother instead of me; and my mother who rejected me every day of my adolescent life angry that I did not fit into the mould that she had caste for me; standing on the station platform, with a group of parents assembled to wave their children goodbye.

I just sat and waited for the train to take me away from a life that had no music for me and prayed that I would find some release; a new life, a new world, in the year ahead. Little did I know that my journey would take me to finding a man who could melt my carefully structured shell.

We arrived in Marseilles only to find that there was a dockworkers strike and our trunks would be left in France; perhaps for weeks. Sweating anxiously my group leader shepherded us onto the ship where we made ourselves at home in the women’s dormitory. This was 3 rd class travelling .

I went through the motions of unpacking and passively allowed another girl to take the top bunk.

I had not yet caste off the persona that my mother had created for me. She had moulded me into the role of a secretary/model; ideal marriage material. In reality I was intellectually starved and was not ready (perhaps never ready) to settle down to suburban family life.

I was wearing the heavy makeup that I had been taught to apply at Lucy Clayton Modelling School; it had become my mask to hide my real self from the world; and walked like a model. My appearance did not endear me to the other girls in the group. My withdrawn personality isolated me further.

Why was I travelling to an unknown country having signed a contract to volunteer for a year on a Kibbutz? My father had observed me moving around the house in a morose manner, clashing with my mother and hating the dead end job life had thrown at me. Looking back I can see that it had been a difficult situation for him. How could he stop his wife who easily became hysterical and his teenage daughter from fighting?

I had pleaded with my parents to let me share a flat in London with some other girls but my mother had insisted that this would open me up to pre marriage sex and drugs.

On day when we were sitting around the fire listening to the radio, my father folded back his newspaper and exclaimed, “Look Diane, this is just the chance you need. You can join a volunteer group and work for a year on a Kibbutz in Israel.”

Oh great, I thought. How ironic. So you don’t want me to have a flat in London but you are prepared for me to go to another country for a whole year. Well if that is what you want I’ll go!

It did not occur to me to tell him he had hurt me. I kept my thoughts to myself.