INT: Yeah, and he got a job in Scotland in what year?
ED: Well David was still doing his apprenticeship but to have an Honours degree wasn’t enough to be a chartered engineer, so there was a big concern, an electrical factory, the Brush [Electrical Engineering Company], so he was doing it there, and I was there. We got married, you know, and we had a little flat and, as I say, Lil was on the way. So we went, with Lil, to Israel. I was showing off, and David was showing off, and all that. That’s another thing.
And then we really, honestly and truly did try to live there, because his mother was on her own. My family and his family were there and we thought, well, okay, we did our stint in England, we’ll go back and settle with the folks there[ in Israel].
Things were getting a wee bit better, ‘53, four, five years later, but he couldn’t fit in. Israel, as I keep saying, wasn’t like Israel of today. Everyone was shouting, there are no queues. People would fight one another in the shops to buy something, to get something. Things were very scarce and jobs, for what he was qualified to do, there wasn’t anything like that. They were not sophisticated. Electrical engineer is like an electrician, you know, doing wires and things like that, but he wasn’t like that and he stayed, I don’t know, four weeks’ holiday or something like that, and he really became very ill, he said, “Well I’m going back to [ England] to see what’s happening”.
At that time we were living in Loughborough and so he wrote to me. He said “Well there’s no way I can really live in Israel at the moment, so you stay as long as you like but I’m back to my job”, and he developed an ulcer and he really was very ill at that time. He said, “Take your time, I’m doing fine”. So, anyway, I stayed there for about two, three months, and I thought maybe he’ll get better, but it didn’t work out, so we had to go, and that’s it, we broke off with Israel, we bought a house and moved on and moved on, you know?
INT: And when did you come to Scotland, what year?
ED: Sixty-eight, was it ‘68? Sixty-eight. Michelle was born in October, we moved in in January.
