Synopsis of "Struggling Free (c. 112 000 words)

 

Palestine, the Promised Land, has been promised once too often.  Its conflicts and contradictions during the years of the British Mandate lead directly to the deaths of a Muslim property owner, Ahmed al-Zeid and a British policeman, Peter Monteith.

Three women watch the events unfold:

 

·        Suzanna Haddad, a Christian Arab, working as a skivvy for a British family.

·        Dalia Leitner, a refugee from Germany, now living in a village in the Sharon Valley

·        Patricia Quigley, spending a pre-college year in Palestine with her parents.

 

Plot Outline

 

When World War 2 starts, Patsy, keen to do her bit, and Dalia, hoping to spy out information for an underground organization smuggling Jewish refugees into Palestine, both take typing jobs at the Police HQ in Haifa.  Suzanna, too, moves to Haifa from Jerusalem, with her employer, Jim Shepard, a British undercover agent.

 

 Suzanna is the first to be caught up in the developing tragedy, when her brother, asks her to find out if Jim Shepard knows that his close friend, Ahmed al Zeid, is an Axis agent.

 

Patsy is enmeshed when she falls in love with Ahmed al-Zeid, who shares her passion for archaeology.  Desperate to escape a manipulative and abusive father, Patsy agrees to marry Ahmed.  When Ahmed fails to keep an assignation, and she hears nothing from him broken-hearted Patsy assumes that Ahmed’s relatives have dissuaded him from marrying her because she is British and Christian.

Dalia involves herself when, on orders from her secret organization, she cultivates the acquaintance of Police Inspector Peter Monteith, a close friend of Jim Shepard.  Peter turns to her for comfort after he and his squad kill two Nazi agents and secretly bury them on a lonely mountainside. Touched by his vulnerability she falls in love with him

 

However Peter Monteith belongs to a strict fundamentalist Christian sect and insists she converts before they can marry. She does so, unsure whether either her conversion or love are genuine, since they provides her with so unique an opportunity to go through Jim Shepard’s papers.

In the course of a ramble, one of the Shepards’ children overhears Inspector Monteith tell her father that they are passing the spot where he and his men buried two Axis agents.  Back home the distressed child tells Suzanna about the awful smell there and the reason for it.

 

Suzanna passes the information on to her brother who recovers Ahmed's body and vows to kill Peter.He achieves his purpose a week before Dalia and Peter are due to marry.                                                                

 

Devastated Dalia has a nervous break down.  When she recovers, she repudiates her conversion, and, reverting to an earlier ambition, starts a degree course in arid land agriculture in Jerusalem.

 

Patsy learns of Ahmed’s death from an Arabic friend.  The friend also tells her that the assassin who killed Peter believes a British woman betrayed Ahmed to the police, and is seeking to kill her too when he discovers her identity.  Patsy leaves both Palestine and her parents to stand on her own feet, finding fulfilling work with a hush-hush unit in Cairo. 

 

Suzanna, appalled at the consequences of her actions, leaves the Shepards and starts on pre-nursing training at a village near Megiddo.   When she learns of her brother’s plans to assassinate Patsy too, she manages to prove to him that Patsy is innocent of betraying his friend. When Patsy returns to Palestine for her father’s funeral Suzanna lets her know that she is no longer in danger.

 

In the last chapter the three girls meet by chance on the hill at Megiddo, all better equipped, than when they first met, to deal with the traumatic events of the next seven years.