As I walked past the Kibbutz Be’eri blast holes, I wished Dawn French had been alongside me

After she chirpily implied Israelis were crying over spilt milk rather than spattered blood, I wished Dawn French, comedian and mother, had been standing beside me.

I saw and felt the eerie ghost town Hamas had wrought from what was once not only a home for 400 families but a centre of liaison between Jewish men and women and their Palestinian neighbours. I wish I could have pointed Dawn towards just one of the nearly 400 memorial posts for the dead youth denied their tomorrow.

“Eternal child. Full of Joy and energy. She brought special magic to every place she went. Food was her passion and an inseparable part of her personality. She was in the advance auditions for The Chef Game show. She was a perfect aunt – fun, funny, loving and pampering… She was murdered on the Mefalsim curve at 7.05am. She left a huge hole in our hearts.”

Still, a honeymoon is no time for anger and it was a combo celebration at the laser-lit Botanical Gardens: an 85th birthday for David’s brother, Mike, Unesco heritage chairman, and a Sheva Berachot for the blushing bride and groom – both pushing 80. Poems were written and recited, songs were sung, tables thumped, emotions articulated. The next day brought a choral concert in a Scottish church. The first song was David’s guilt-ridden lament for his rebel son Absalom. The crystal soprano notes brought a lump to my throat and pierced my sense of reason, as only music can. I wept for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters everywhere.

That evening back at the hotel, I saw on the news that Sir Tom Stoppard had died and the lump returned in full. Sure, he was 88 and had been famous and successful for almost 60 years. Everyone in the theatre has a Tom Stoppard story but my all-time favourite was when Harold Pinter suggested to the producer Michael Codron that the Comedy Theatre, which had put on many of his plays, ought to change its name to the Pinter Theatre. Michael, notorious for his silences, held his tongue. Later that day, Tom came into the office and Michael told him that Sir Harold wanted the theatre renamed The Pinter.

Tom thought for just seconds and said;

“Wouldn’t it be less trouble, all round, if Harold just changed his name to Harold Comedy?”

As the obituaries pointed out, Tom wore his fame lightly. Harold Pinter from Hackney, actor and revered playwright, did not. He loathed America and Israel equally and had little to say about his own Jewishness. Tom came late to the same table Harold was so eager to leave. His own Jewishness was hidden from him after his mother, brother and he fled Czechoslovakia for India, acquiring along the way a very British major as a stepfather.

Once he embraced his heritage he set out to understand it himself by writing his seminal play, Leopoldstadt, and the rest is theatre history. Due to no special skill of mine other than “injewition”, I could have told him he was Jewish when I first met him in 1972. I was small fry, “playing as cast” and understudying Diana Rigg in Laurence Olivier’s company at the Old Vic. Tom’s stunning and metaphysical springbok of a play Jumpers was a huge hit but none of the 20 odd people in the play, nor its director, knew what the heck it was about. Philosophy, showbiz, love, acrobatics?

The charmed and charming author sat in rehearsals smiling and smoking, but not telling. It was so obvious to me from the rhythm of his writing and the crackle of his wit and wisdom that he was a very old soul and every bit as Ashkenazi as I was. Zelig-like, I had met Sabrina, his wife, at a literary festival only days after they themselves first met. I was delighted for her. I think she must have given him peace. Far from home as I am, I found myself wondering where I might send my condolences.

A day later I had more sad news: my dear friend, actress Sandra Caron, died in Los Angeles. I was not surprised because our monthly chats had stopped and I couldn’t reach her but it shocked and saddened me still. She was the sister of Alma Cogan and starred in several Carry On films. If Alma was the girl with the laugh in her voice – all shimmer and shot satin – her younger sister, to counter the razzle dazzle, was all velvet and drawl. The two of us first worked together in 1969, in a terrible production at Watford of John Osborne’s rather terrible play Inadmissible Evidence.

We spent hours together, helplessly giggling, fat address books in hands, trying to get a date – either of us – with anyone, until we finally gave up at midnight, just as her dour and doughty mother, Fay, applied the final shellac of hair lacquer and headed out for the Victoria Sporting Club. Sandra was a constant in my life and it took a massive inner talking-to to get back into sun and sand and honey and moons and the beauty that is Eretz Yisroel.

About which, more next week – involving facial coffee, healing dolphins, a ballet camp ban in Birmingham and kosher Marmite. Bet you can’t wait.