1/6/98

When Eilat was a one-doc town

Dapper and correct, Britishly proper in speech, posture, bearing. He's 82, wears a tie, and his idea of a casual nosh is smoked salmon, J&B and cashews. And his name is Reginald.
    Ah, these tourists.
    Dr. Reginald Morris may seem like a fish out of water here in Eilat, but he's a local, not a tourist: he's lived here for 40 years, Eilat's second doctor “and first hippie.”
    “Back then, you could walk along the beach and never see another person. We used to go swimming in the nude. Totally nude. Although they used to say that when Dr. Morris goes swimming, the only thing he wears is his tie.”
    The Yorkshireman was barely over his honeymoon in 1958 when he and Fay came to Israel for a medical conference. They toured the country and fell in love with Eilat, then a one-horse, one-hotel outpost of 4,500 souls.
    “Everyone was so nice to us. There was a man who brought us “The Jerusalem Post” every morning. We thought, “This is paradise!” (I don't think he was saying this to be polite.)
    “Anyway, we were walking along the beach, Fay and I, and we turned to each other at the same moment, as if by mental telepathy, and said to each other, 'Why don't we come live here?’
    “The Ministry of Health asked if I'd like to start a medical center here. I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity, a long holiday.
    “The wages were terrible, worse than death. It was difficult to get staff in those days. Nurses didn't want to come to Eilat, and you couldn't convince a doctor to come here. People were sent here for punishment in those days; judges would say, 'Oh, go for a year to Eilat.'
    “We gradually built Eilat Medical Center to be a respectable hospital, but of course the ministry had no money. I had to schnorr. I got a lot of money from Canada, from Hadassah-Wizo.
    “I was begging the ministry to send me doctors; I needed a gynecologist and finally they sent me one. And we get a call from the hospital, they have a woman bleeding badly. So we went, and he took one look at her and said, 'She's a Druse. I'm not going to examine her.' I was absolutely flabbergasted. So I had to, you know, turn on the rank, and said 'I'm ordering you.' I sent him packing.
Then I discovered that every hospital in Israel had thrown him out. We were the last.” He laughs heartily.
    Turning on the rank was not difficult: Morris had been a senior medical officer in the RAF. His finest memento from the Big One is a samurai sword, property of the only man Morris killed in the war.
    When the '67 war loomed, high casualties were expected. Morris was put in charge of medical facilities in Eilat and requisitioned 1,000 hotel beds. “Know how many were used? Zero. Ha ha! Not a single casualty.”
    He mulls for a moment. “I suppose it can be told now. There was a huge deception on the part of the army. They sent every 15 minutes a heavy aircraft to the air-strip facing Jordan, ostensibly offloading materiel of war. but it was the same aircraft. It came in, landed, took off, went over the hills, landed again. From Jordan it looked as if we were sending in transports. And convoy after convoy would come down the main road, in daylight, pulling halftracks and guns; all day long these convoys would come in. But it was the same convoy. It went up in the hills, went 'round, came back.”
Eilat too was fooled, bracing for a major invasion.
“The ruse was so successful that the local army commander here didn't know what was going on. I had to know when the war was starting, I had to implement my plan. I phoned him every half hour, he said he still didn't know. By the time he knew anything, the war was virtually won.”
The Morrises raised two daughters and a son in frontier conditions, and all left for the wider world, yet they came back to settle in Eilat.
“In the early days, the heat was a bit grim. We didn't have air conditioning, what we had was very primitive: Fay used to sit in our one-room flat in her bikini throwing water over herself with a bucket. But it was fun, a lot of fun.”
Fay is a wonderful, gregarious character. I didn't meet her -- she was in the Philippines -- but Fay lore swirls all about town. One Eilati recalled a favorite Fayism: “If I stop talking, I fall asleep.”
A country doctor and demure background wife they are not. She was for many years Britain's consul-general in Eilat (their daughter now fills the post) and is still active in a gamut of public activities.
    A specialist in tropical diseases, Morris has been here and there, and their richly decorated home shows it: artifacts from Kenya, Indonesia, Bali, Thailand, Vanuatu, Ethiopia, Japan; there are daggers from all over the world.
In addition to tending the wounded in Burma, he's done stints in Ethiopia, Thailand and Sudan. (And if you think that was a challenge, he was also doctor to Paula Ben-Gurion.)
    A different kind of challenge was taking charge of medical services for Sinai Beduin after '67. “It was hard at first to get their trust, until I had a few lucky, spectacular successes, then they flocked to the meeting points. I couldn't persuade the women to let me see their faces. It's forbidden to show their faces to a strange man. Their bodies, they didn't mind. You know, under that heavy black cloak, they have the most colorful underclothing. Like Turkish belly dancers.”
It was in Sudan in 1984 that he met Clarence, who has lived with the Morrises ever since. Clarence is an alligator.
“Crocodile. He's a crocodile.”
Yes. Anyway, “I was in this Nubian village in Sudan, and they were extremely hospitable to us, as only people who have nothing can be. As I was leaving, they handed me a little basket, and I opened the lid and there were two little creatures inside, the length of a toothbrush. And I thought, “What the hell am I going to do with these?''
He managed to sneak them through Egypt and all the way home, where he built them an enclosure. Not long afterward, they escaped, and the other was run over.
So how big is this alligator now?

“HE'S A CROCODILE! He gets so upset if you call him an alligator. A crocodile has a more pointed snout, a different teeth arrangement, and the bumps are different. And the attitude is totally different: the crocodile is much more ferocious.”
Clarence is three meters long. For petting purposes, the Morrises also have an affectionate, lap-happy, black cat.