Kids behind barbed wire
Between 1949 and 1951, my mother, sister Hazel and I lived in a small transit camp at El Ballah about a mile from the Suez Canal. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by British soldiers. Whichever direction you looked, there was nothing but flat hard sand and the occasional ship passing by on the Suez Canal . For adults, it must have been sheer hell and the only thing they had in common was a longing to be anywhere but El Ballah. For us kids, however, it was fantastic. We only went to school in the morning and, in the afternoon, were allowed to swim in the canal. We lived in shorts or swimming trunks and only tidied ourselves up for church on Sunday. I could spend hours just watching the cargo ships and passenger liners passing up and down the canal and dreaming about what it would be like to work on them. The area had once been a huge shallow saltwater lake which filled with water from the Red Sea and shrunk at certain times of the year. The sand there was still full of tiny seashells. Many biblical scholars now believe that Moses led his people to the promised land through El Ballah and that the ‘sea crossing’ took place just to the north of the camp.
