(Transcript)
(What about friends. Were you friends with both arabs and jews? A mixture.)
"Yes. Absolutely. My husband would take me to meet some clients and I remember he took me to an Arab wedding in Bethlehem, on the Bethlehem road and there was a harem there. It was a big family, a big Arab family, with a harem, I was invited to the harem and it was a room with women sitting in a ring. And the only chair I sat in, and they were singing and banging little drums. And one girl would get up to dance and then another one. And each one was in a more advanced stage of pregnancy. And they fingered my material, what I was wearing, because they were interested in what I was wearing.
And then I was invited into the wife's bedroom . The wife of the head of the family, she was in bed with a new baby and her mother was there - of course no English and I had no Arabic and I learned a little Arabic afterwards, but you know the mother pointed at my tummy, and I wasn't showing at all because I went shopping with Boggo and they told me what a good figure I had. I was five months anyway.
I had to go on the day that the men guests were there because I was English and I had to go with my husband, and we sat there with plates of joints plates of lamb joints and we took them. Delicious. And the vegetables were always beans in tomatoes and olive oil. Green beans in tomatoey olive oil and that was lovely too. And I do that here."
Interview with Eve Stancliffe, 21.9.10
