Lower Hold: Tallywoman at the Port of Eilat

I was between jobs in Jerusalem when the Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973. After volunteering for a month I moved back home to Eilat, and went to say goodbye to former co-workers at a new luxury hotel. Walking into the once bright, cheerful, modern lobby I found a dark, echoing cavern - and was shocked to see the erstwhile general manager acting as caretaker.

In Eilat, a Jerusalem friend came to stay, and for a while we found work as movie extras. When filming ended in February 1974, I went to the local employment bureau. It was a novel experience because back then employers and employees found each other; jobs from the bureau were usually the lowest-paid or somehow undesirable.

The bureau was a small room with waiting area and a middle-aged, motherly woman sitting behind a desk. I was the only client. She confirmed there were no jobs in tourism and almost none to be had except, she hesitated, the Port Authority was looking for tallywomen to work evening shifts. She was taken aback when I said "'yes". Ports are notoriously rough, and it was no secret that many of Eilat's first citizens had been cons given a choice of going to jail or going to work in Eilat, and had found niches in the port. Was I sure? I was.

I was broke and hungry and needed a job, urgently.

That first shift, I was paired with a young woman who introduced me around and filled me in. With over half the port's manpower away on reserve military duty, and ships stacking up to unload, the administrative staff were working double shifts: office-work in the morning and on the wharf or in the goods-yard in the afternoon/evening. My mentor was the port manager's personal secretary-cum-tallywoman; her boss was doubling as a work foreman. That evening I was treated along with his colleagues to a spicy luff-shakshuka supper in his office. (Luff: tinned meat-loaf army rations, shakshuka: scrambled eggs with vegetables).

The manpower shortage was so acute that even retirees were rallying round. With two each of his many sons and grandsons already working there, the wizened patriarch of the Mizrachi family, spry in his 70s, sat hunched over the wheel of his small tractor, zipping strings of cargo flat-beds from dock-to-warehouse-and-back so fast, the stevedores and fork-lift drivers had a hard time keeping up.

What made the backlog so pressing, in addition to the war, was that, with the Suez Canal closed since 1967, much merchandise from Asia and Africa was trans-shipped via Israel, trucked from Eilat to Haifa or Ashdod Ports and thence by ship to Europe. In the other direction, Eilat's major export was phosphates in bulk, loaded at the southern end of the wharf and almost completely automated.

I learned the work quickly in the goods-yards and warehouses. Tallymen were assigned to a team of 6-8 stevedores, sometimes with a forklift and driver or more rarely a mobile crane and operator. At the start of each shift we received a work assignment and visa (documentation) from our team foreman to load a shipment onto a waiting truck; we would proceed to the location listed on the documents, deliver same to the warehouse manager to locate and log, and the truck would be loaded. It was the tallyman's job to keep track of cargo, documents and the time it took to execute the job. Once it was done, we hurried back to the foreman to get the next assignment, breaking only at 7pm for half-an-hour's subsidized dinner in the big dining room.

Every job has its own vocabulary: ours came with the Jewish stevedores of Salonika who manned the ports of a young Israel nearly 30 years earlier. It was a hazardous job. Varda! meant 'danger' and was usually shouted – and when it was, everyone moved somewhere else, fast.

Depending on the type of cargo and the time it took to load, a premium above basic salary might be earned for a speedy loading time. But premium ratios were hopelessly outdated because the types of cargo and handling methods had changed. For example, a work team could earn a premium on rolls or plates of sheet metal which were handled either by crane or fork-lift, while pallets with cartons or sacks or bales, needing more time and manual labor, earned little or nothing. Container shipping was just beginning, and in any case most cargos at that time came from small or medium-sized ports in Africa and Asia not yet equipped to handle them. We had everything from bales of carpets to paper sacks of cement, and walking past the locker of Warehouse #3, where sacks of spices were secured, was a heady experience indeed.

In fact, there was quite a disparity between visual and olfactory input. Surrounded by tan desert roofed in blue sky, blue sea to one side, the port was almost monochrome in shades of grey cement, cinder block, asbestos and pavement, with some cardboard and burlap browns. By contrast, it was the aromas and smells that emphasized where we were and what we were doing.

For three months, I roamed the goods-yard with the work teams as winter morphed into spring, eating dinner with them in the dining room or exchanging a meal ticket at the commissary for a yogurt and pack of cigarettes. The salary was excellent and I managed to pay my overdue bills.

The cold desert wind could bite and embed dust and grit in clothing and hair, and once my woolen gloves became impregnated with cement from a late-night shipment: the importer had waited months to pick up the consignment and it had been rained on, turning the sacks into lumps almost impossible to load.

The stevedores were mostly a pleasure to work with, from many different backgrounds and almost as many countries. They quickly learned that I wasn't phased by cussing or bad language; for some it was the only language they knew, so 'intent' was more important than 'content'. Also, I took my job seriously. Nor did they come on to me or make passes. A couple of family men did try to charm my pants off and a nice young man was looking for a wife, but I wasn't interested. The environment itself was hazard enough without entanglements: a steel plate once dropped behind me with a terrifying thunk; I was almost run over by a truck; a long nail just missed passing through my foot, and once I tripped over my own purse-strap – which was the only time they heard me cuss. During rare lulls we would sit around talking and telling jokes and one glorious evening, lounging on sacks of beans, I listened to a political science discussion that would have done credit to any university.

Out in the wind, even in winter, we had to drink enough water to stay hydrated; we were always supplied with a cold jerrycan because "no water" was a legitimate reason for work stoppage. Once, in summer, the entire port ground to a halt for nearly half-an-hour when the fork-lift driver with the 10-jerrycan rack didn't show. (Rumor had it there was a hot poker game in one of the warehouses.)

The only person I actively disliked/distrusted was an ex-pimp. On the other hand, two managers I liked and respected had an interesting back-story: they had been cat-burglers until one was caught and received a longer sentence for refusing to name his accomplice. His partner waited for him to get out of prison to split the proceeds of their last heist, then they started over in Eilat and made successful careers at the port. And Marion (an ex-embezzler) who was a tallywoman for Sherutei Menayah ('tally services') became a very good friend.

More and more men were being released from the army and one day I was told my services were no longer needed. I begged to stay on, which is when I learned why the Port Authority only hired men for permanent employment: of a group of twenty women once hired to work as tallymen only three remained. One married a stevedore, was a mother of three and refused to work evenings; the second was promoted to the offices; and the third had great notoriety among truck drivers.

There was another option, however. A foreman introduced me to Ben Shimon, the office manager of Sherutei Menayah, which did the tally work for Dizengoff Shipping Agency. I was hired on the spot. The pay was not as good and it didn't come with meals, but I'd still be in the port and could work either morning or evening shift – or sometimes both.

This was a different kind of tallywork, on the wharf. Two tallymen, representing the Port Authority and Sherutei Menayah, were assigned to each ship's hold and had to keep track of everything being unloaded. We worked mostly on the quayside, waiting for each pallet to swing down over the ship's side. If we were lucky there was a shady spot to sit on the crane's base between pallets; if not, we stood out in the sun or sometimes in a hot, dark ship's hold, scrambling to write everything down before the pallets were whisked out of sight.

Each tallyman was supposed to work independently but often it was impossible: cargos were moved so fast that we barely kept track of the 'marks' (3-letter shipping addresses) for each consignment; we compared notes at the end of the shift to make up our tallies. We were aided by the fact that cartons and sacks were always loaded the same way: two across end-to-end with three-in-a-row, the next layer the opposite, three-in-a-row and two end-to-end, creating a binding effect allowing 3, 4 or 5 layers of cargo per pallet, 5 items per layer.

We worked inside the holds as needed: U/H – upper hold, T/D – 'tween decks, L – locker and L/H – lower hold. The notations on our work roster were always in Latin, so "4T/D & L" translated to "No. 4 hold 'tween deck and locker". The levels of each hold were separated by movable steel beams crossing the width of the hold, across which were laid metal-bound wooden floor-boards to create the floor of each level, similar to hatch covers.

I soon had opportunities to work upper holds and 'tween decks, but everyone said I would not qualify until I'd worked a lower hold. Marion especially cautioned me: the first time she'd worked LH one of the stevedores jokingly told her "there's a rat". The next thing she knew she was on deck. No one could figure out how she made the two-story climb so fast – hence her nickname "the flying tallywoman".