Worlds apart

THE ten Palestinian children looked uncomfortable with the traditional dish of North Shields cod, chip and peas, courtesy of the Queens Head, on the windswept headland of Cullercoats.

Not that the food wasn’t delicious, nor substantial.

It was both. It was what to do with the cutlery. In the Shatila Refugee Camp, in Beirut, knives and forks are rarely seen.

And when the children clustered excitedly round a council flower bed on Whitley Bay seafront, urging us to take photographs, it was because flowers don’t exist in the cramped, claustrophobic alleys of Shatila. Nor trees. Nor grass. Nor open spaces There are no playgrounds, or swings or roundabouts, which explained the children’s frenetic dash when spotting an adventure playground.

I lived two months at the end of last year in the squalor of Shatila, a forgotten place of no street names, pavements, street lights, nor during my time, any sound or sight of birds.

Buy a map of Beirut, and there is no reference to or mention of Shatila, despite 17,000 people living in an area the size of a cricket field, and despite it being in existence for 60 years, when tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homeland with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Lebanon, the first country to the North the refugees reached, is a grudging host, and would prefer Shatila, and the country’s other 11 Palestinian refugee camps, did not exist.

The school’s head, Samiha Shehad, says: “One luxury for the girls is to wake up in quietness.”

Shatila, a camp of poorly constructed thin-walled jerry buildings, and terrible overcrowding is one of the noisiest places imaginable.

One objective was to write a book springing from the extreme culture shock to a relatively comfortable westerner of such a location.

In the 21st Century, no one should live in a place like Shatila, but around the world, millions do.

I also had the madcap idea to create and perform a play with the children of the camp. We did it, with the world premiere at 8.30am in the school playground on my last day.

The children, with no previous knowledge of theatre, and only the most basic grasp of our language, incorporated dance and physical theatre, and performed it in English to the curious camp residents. We built a makeshift stage, scrounged sound equipment from a Beirut shop, while teachers made costumes and props.

Equally madcap was the idea to bring the children over here to perform a more advanced version of the play. After raising more than £22,000 over the past ten months from the Arts Council, North Tyneside Council and many other public and private sources, this has also happened. I returned to Shatila for a week’s rehearsals – badly timed for Ramadan, which saw us staggering hours long through scenes in intense heat, and without sustenance.

The children toured the play, Croak The King and a Change in the Weather, based on my own fable about a greedy conceited monarch’s come-uppance, to the Customs House, South Shields, Saville Exchange North Shields, Bellingham Town Hall in deepest Northumberland, and ended up with two dates at the magnificent venue, The Sage, Gateshead. They played a total of eight performances in seven days, almost all sold out.

THE sight of the ten Palestinian girls and five teachers in the sleepy village of Bellingham was remarkable.

At the village’s Riverdale Hall Hotel, when offered swimming facilities, despite the presence of several burly weekend male residents tackling the strenuous Kielder Challenge, the girls plunged in – wearing their pyjamas.

Everyone who met the 12 and 13 year olds, or saw them perform, was blown away. Many people were in tears at the play’s end, and gave standing ovations.

Nothing fazed them. Given a tour of the BBC in Newcastle, they provided an instant weather forecast on demand, and when suddenly asked to perform a scene from the play live on BBC Radio Newcastle they did so without a second thought.

Despite the culture shock, sudden distance from parents and punishing schedule, the play grew in strength every performance. They never missed a line or move, had no prompter and learnt to project their voices like true pros.

They themselves suggested a new, more optimistic ending to the play than in the original book, which we incorporated, just as they themselves decided to perform the Dabka, the traditional Palestinian dance, after every performance.

This guaranteed, at every venue, that the joint was jumping.

And they were fascinated by our shops; intense sessions in Primark, George at Asda, and Peacocks, buying pink girly things with the subsistence money we were able to give them.

After the three sessions, the assistant head, Najeeba Khatib, pointed to one of the girls and said: “Look at Bahija, she has been in three shops and she has bought nothing.” I asked why this was. “Because she doesn’t know what to do. You see, she has never been shopping.”

Their departure was intensely sad. After eight days of laughter and song during the minibus journeys, their final trek to Newcastle airport was in silence, punctuated only by soft sobbing. Shatila is not an easy place to return to after such an experience.

But there are moves to set up more long-term cultural connections with the camp and already the Northumbrian Language School, in Whitley Bay, has offered two short Shatila scholarships next year.

It is also worth remembering that this achievement, from the fiercely macho Middle- East, a region where women’s voices are seldom heard, was all-female.

■ Camp Shatila – a Writer’s Chronicle, by Peter Mortimer (Five Leaves Publications) is launched tomorrow, at 3.30pm at Durham Book Festival.