Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics by Martin Brandon-Bravo Read Free Book Online Page B

children we would bring them up in the Jewish faith, giving them so to speak, a hook to hang their hat on, and what they did when they were adults would be up to them. As it turned out we have two great sons of whom we are justly proud, Paul born in 1967, and Joel in 1971. Both the boys have great families, and we have enormous pleasure and joy in seeing our grandchildren growing up. Our eldest Paul, with an environmental honors degree, after spells in a few jobs and one with RBS, decided he would never work for a corporation again, and is happy running his own gardening business. The youngest made it to Oriel - Oxford - and after a spell in the music industry is now the CEO of the UK branch of Travelzoo, a highly regarded online company in the travel and entertainment business.
    I’d never been overly religious, but going to Israel at that time, certainly gave me a feeling I’d not experienced before. The bible became a history book, rather than just a religious tract, and I read it through on return home. At that time, I believe on a Sunday evening, was a TV programme where a very Jewish sounding David Kossoff, a brilliant actor, sat in on large high backed throne, with children gathered at his feet. He read from his version of the Bible, telling the story of those times in his own way, as perhaps only he could. It became reading for our boys whenever I was around at bedtime, which sadly I confess was not as often as I would have wished.
    I recall standing in the center of Be’er Sheva by the well in the centre of the old town. The Israelis appeared to have policy of leaving the biblical towns untouched, and building the new alongside the old town, which also carried the old biblical name. Looking down we realised you could not have moved this central well from place to place, and this therefore would have been the same well as had been there since back in biblical times. That sense of history came through in a way I had never experienced, even when visiting old churches or monasteries at home or in Europe. We visited all the well known biblical sites, and down to Elat on the Red Sea. In the desert just north of Elat was a kibbutz, home solely to West German youngsters who felt that helping the desert to grow was in some way helping to put right the evil their elders had committed during WW11. One thing struck us was that on a hill just south of Jerusalem and looking west to the sea, we saw row after row of young trees growing, helping to restore the land from a desert to the land of milk and honey of yesteryear, whilst looking east towards Jordan it was just barren. Sally of course planted the traditional tree that all visitors did, I recall for the equivalent princely sum of seven and sixpence. Many Jewish people from around the world pay to have a grove of trees planted to commemorate someone in their family they may have lost, and an appropriate plaque would be fixed to a tree or rock. However I cannot say that some of the plaques weren’t moved around when it was convenient to do so.
    Tel Aviv, which was our base, was of course a largely new town, but walking to the adjacent Jaffa took us back centuries. Caesarea, Galilee, the place of the walking on water, the site of the Sermon on the Mount, Nazareth and above all Jerusalem were places where you just soaked up the history of that tiny country. The narrowest part of the country at that time was the site of Latrun, where from the eastern border to the sea was just ten miles. At the southern end of Lake Galilee sits one of the earliest Kibbutz; Degania. At its entrance is a burnt out Syrian tank from the 1948 war, left as a memorial of that conflict, and to show that it was the closest the Syrians got to that settlement. In Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which was part of the old city and sat on the border, illustrated the problem that still faces everyone today. The “churchyard” to the rear of the church was accessible to us, but at the rear was