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bombs fell.'
    She looked at me quietly. Then she smiled: 'I'm a bit disappointed that you pinned down my age so quickly.'
    'I am sorry,' I said.
    'Oh, it's fair if it shows,' she protested holding her hands forward. 'I'm "White Cliffs of Dover" vintage, all right. But you got the other thing wrong. The bombs. Jesus Christ, you wouldn't have got me in that business. I spent the whole time in Bermuda. Every last day of it. I remember watching the Duke of Windsor playing golf in August 1940. I was having a lesson at the Mid-Ocean Club from the professional. In those days I was something of a golfing girl wonder. And that was while brave old Britain was standing alone. She was standing without the duke and without me, just to name two.'
    'He couldn't help it,' I said. 'As I remember.' She wasn't being loud about it, talking quietly and not rattling it off like someone who has told it many times as a joke.
    "No, it was none of his fault,' she agreed reasonably. 'It must have been nasty for him to be playing golf in Bermuda while all that bombing and suchlike was going on. He holed out from a bunker at Riddells Bay I remember. There was a picture in the paper.
    'But I could help it. And I wasn't going to budge. My father had gone scurrying back to the old country to do his bit, whatever his bit was. He was put on cutting up ration books and he got killed by a fire engine one perfectly peaceful lunchtime in Birmingham. I suppose that's counted as a war death, isn't it?'
    I laughed. Her dress was low, over one shoulder and her right breast was swollen out half clear of the downward slope of the material.
    'My father was something like that,' I admitted. 'He deserted from the Army two weeks after war was declared. He simply cleared out, and then dropped dead from a heart attack in our front parlour. The War Office, through some strange process, sent my mother a telegram informing her of his death, just as if she didn't know. In a way we were quite proud of him. He was one of the first British soldiers to go.'
    She laughed like a girl. Then she became quiet and said: 'It was splendid tonight. Quite superb.'
    I nodded my thanks. 'Something happened to everyone,' I said. 'It was like going for a ride.'
    'If you had been a Jew I would have thought it was the emotion of this immediate time,' she said. She spoke now very correctly, not lightly as she had done while talking about Bermuda. 'The audience was full of it. Just exploding. And it caught the orchestra too.'
    I smiled my agreement. 'There was a feeling,' I said. 'And I don't have to be a Jew to know it. Are you Jewish ?'
    'Christ no!' she said quite loudly. 'I'm an Israeli, I suppose. I married one of the buggers. He's a reserve officer, a colonel this week, I think, and tonight he's out on the Golan Heights waiting for the Syrians. He's a soil engineer, always picking up bits of dirt and running his fingers through it treating it like gold. He's very nice really. A bit Jewish though. Not that he can help that. He can't wait to get into Syria just so that he can start stealing the earth from their back gardens. He says it's unique around Damascus.'
    'People want to fight for odd reasons,' I observed.
    'Ah, he wants to fight for the fighting too,' she said. 'They all do'. Her fingers took in the room. 'They're all so bloody effervescent. They're like the damned sixth form. All in love with somebody, and then somebody else. Can't wait to get out of school to have a battle with the kids next door.'
    'And the kids next door also want a fight,' I pointed out.'That's the damn pity. Typical too. That's another lousy school.'"What will you do if it starts?'She pouted. 'I'll tell you what I'll be doing,' she said determinedly. 'Playing golf.''Like nineteen forty,' I said.
    'Right. I shall go up to Caesarea and I'll play golf through until either the Jews win or the Arabs arrive to rape me or whatever.'
    I laughed but then I thought she was serious. 'Why don't you go home to England then