Contents
Dedication
Part 1
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part 1
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Supporters
Copyright
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type nativity5 in the promo code box when you check out.
Thank you for your support,
Dan, Justin and John
Founders, Unbound
I was deeply touched by the generosity of friends and strangers who supported this book. The full list of honour is at the back, but there are special shout-outs that I want to make here, to five people who, between them, put up more than half the crowdfunding total.
Guy Weston’s intervention last Christmas was a game-changer. You’re beyond kind and generous, Guy, and even paid for lunch that day. I look forward to our pilgrimage. And special thanks to my fellow travellers Richard and Alison Cundall, to Will Lewis for blind confidence in me, and to Melvyn Marckus, who has generously edited and read more of my writing than is strictly healthy.
I’d also like to thank the Rev’d Charlotte and Bill Bannister-Parker, Richard Bridges, Sarah Macdonald and Sian Kevill of MAKE Productions and Sir Kenneth and Lady Warren for their generosity, variously of wealth, spirit, lunch and Oxford.
Thank you all – I couldn’t have done it without you.
For Marcelle and Eric – you know why
In darkness, and in secret, I crept out,
My house being wrapped in sleep.
– “The Dark Night of the Soul”,
St John of the Cross
Part 1
Prologue
We were helping Israel to close its borders, to turn in on itself. As word had spread through the Samarian hills to the east, a pathetic trickle of Palestinians, a fresh generation of refugees, had grown into a crowd more alarming as families sought the security and health services of the Sharon Plain. I heard Hebrew as well as regular Palestinian Arabic.
We were young then, Sarah and me. I think we believed in humanity. How long ago that seems. We’d been co-opted to offer humanitarian support between Bat Hefer and Tulkarm, just by the reservoirs, and provide some order for the crossings of the new fence.
The border guards were a mixture of Magav police and military and were meant to defer to our UNRWA bibs – it stood for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, but we said it was “Rather Walk Away”. They kept directing families of all ages into a holding pen, a high flat-wired fenced area about the size of an English suburban garden, complete with a shed at the bottom end, where shamefully there was a single chemical latrine, some emergency medical gear, such as stretchers, as well as a metal chest of flares and, we always suspected, mustard gas.
Sarah had started to warn the men as the air grew more still towards evening that the pen was growing too crowded. Sarah was always firmer than me. I may have burnished the image in the intervening years, but I picture her now standing brace-legged in high-waisted khaki trousers, her field phone sticking above her blue bib like a badge of authority, leaning slightly in to a Magav officer on her walking stick and telling him what to do with her question: “Are you going to seal the muster station and order open process?”
I tried to remember what I’d read five years before about crowd-control errors at football stadiums. There were some children pressed up against the fencing with older siblings behind them. But they were only curious, not being crushed. I smiled at them and they stared neutrally back, running the wire between dry lips.
Sarah heard the cry first. She swung round with her eyes to the distance, as if she was looking at the mountains. Then I heard its second, louder version, somewhere between exhalation of fear and an imprecation.
“Shit,” murmured Sarah and ran with her loping gait to the UN jeep.
She unlocked the med box with the bundle of keys at her waist and pulled at the handles of a bag, about the size of a rolled sleeping bag.
“Follow me,” she called, heading for the gate of the pen.
She was dodging bodies and catching shoulders. We made it to the back of the pen, where a woman in a blue silk weave lay, her knees splayed like an open oyster. A boy knelt beside her, too young to be her
