“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 20 : The Case of the Crippled Fire Engine
In 1974 the little roads in Ramat Yishai were full of pot holes. The water tower needed maintenance but the Secretary to the local council believed that the village lacked only one thing … a fire engine. To find a fire engine had been Betzalel Cohen’s primary ambition since coming into office. He searched the papers and made enquiries until one day he found just what he was looking for in a small town which had bought the engine from a larger town near Tel Aviv and they had got it from Kibbutz Bet Alpha, whose business was the manufacture of fire engines. In fact this shiny red monster had been constructed from a light lorry produced by the American company Fargo for use during the Second World War. These brown lorries had been used in the service of the NAAFI and eventually some had turned up in Israel.
Kibbutz Alpha built fire engines from these trucks by putting a tank on them, giving them a petrol engine, pump, hoses and valves and painting them a bright, glossy red. Betzalel was duly impressed when his eyes first alighted on the third-hand fire engine for sale. It was, after all, specifically built for use in small, rural communities. His joy was so great that he bought in on spec without even having a professional check the mechanics and he bought it with the council money on a repayment system to be spread over ten years. Was that some kind of a guarantee? It was delivered to Ramat Yishai and a place was proudly found for it right next to the council offices.
Now one day, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, council handymen under instructions from the Secretary were burning the thistles on the waste ground around the two small buildings housing the village nurseries for children from eighteen months to two years old and from two years to five years old. The children finished nursery at one o’clock. It was a very hot day with a dusty wind blowing from the desert in the south. Nursery school was in full progress and as I rode past on my bike to the nearby post office, the children playing outside, including my Matti, were quickly herded into the nursery and the doors and windows firmly fastened as the wind continued to blow billows of smoke around the nursery buildings. I could hear the children coughing and crying.
The new antique fire-engine was standing nearby in case the fire got out of hand – an occasion no doubt organised by the Secretary for its first trial by fire. A man was getting it ‘primed’ as it were and the vehicle appeared to have about as much pressure in its old hose as might be expected from the intermittent peeing of an elderly gentleman. There was also not enough hose on the reel to cover the whole area of burning brush so the engine stood first at the back of the nurseries and then the driver laboriously reeled up the hose before driving it to the front of the buildings to start unreeling again, at least prepared for some kind of action.
I quickly parked my bike outside the Post Office where several mums were gathered chattering loudly about the children and the smoke but doing nothing else about it. Grabbing the phone on the counter, to the surprise of the postmistress, I asked for the Secretary’s number and getting him directly shouted at him to get over to the plot ‘maher, maher’ (fast) to make the men beat out the fires as quickly as possible, adding in curt and direct language what I thought of his management and timing for testing his new acquisition .. meshigine! Dark looks came from the postmistress who, being yekke (square), told me the public had no right to use the post office phone.
The other mothers stood ogling me as though I’d just landed from Mars. Ignoring them, I ran across to the baby nursery and commanded as firmly as I could, “everybody outside please”. The nursery teacher, Rachel, a lovely but rather shy and gentle girl, obviously wondered what she should do without authoritarian permission but agreed to evacuate the small building with my help. With each of us carrying the youngest in our arms, we marched the other toddlers holding hands in pairs to the Post Office on the higher ground well away from the wind direction and smoke where they were kissed and cuddled and their little faces washed in cool water.
The lumbering engine stood dismally to one side of the road with hoses dangling having proved itself pretty much of a white elephant under duress. It turned out that the fire crew recruited from the village had been ‘dry trained’ and not entirely sure how to proceed with water. The appointed fireman was still doing his best to maintain an emergency service with the limp hoses when his engine died. After a number of spluttering attempts it started up again and was able to reverse away from the creeping fires, having no chance of hosing itself down if the fire got out of control.
By the time Bezalel’s car came screeching around the bend I was already running towards the second nursery to go through the same operation, the Secretary hot on my heels echoing the command that the children should leave the building. We totally ignored each other. Not so much smoke had penetrated the closed windows of the bigger nursery and, to be fair, Bezalel got the burning fully under control within fifteen minutes with other men joining in the beating, leaving only an acrid smell in the hot air.
The fires virtually out, it was decided that the children should not go back to the smoky nurseries but could proceed to the primary school for the rest of the morning. They were assembled again into neat crocodiles and with the help of a number of mothers toddled off to the smoke-free zone of the primary school to cause a happy distraction until it was time go home.
Later that day a shiny red fire engine, sadly impotent, was inspected back on its parking lot. Its tank was found beneath the red paint to have rusted in several places, exhibiting numbers of little and larger holes so that under any pressure it leaked like a sieve. Additionally, images of a broken-down fire engine itself catching alight and exploding in a fireball remained etched in the imaginations of all who later jokingly told the sorry tale of Betzalel’s pride and joy.
We do not know everything that was said at the next council meeting about this embarrassing matter but the subject was avoided in the street in front of the Secretary, who could be very tetchy and outspoken and was not renowned for a sense of humour. We later heard that Betzalel told council members they had been swindled and he would therefore be paying no further instalments to the other council from whom he had bought the fire engine and who in turn, having never had to use it, stopped paying their ongoing instalments to the previous owners on the same grounds and so on …..
And so the village fire engine gradually lost its brilliance as the pine trees under which it was parked dripped their pine needles and dropped their cones over its body. As time passed it slowly sank into a sad decline … a reminder perhaps that all that glistens is neither red nor gold … just a cheap deal.