It’s August 1960, a world in black and white; the British summer echoes to the sounds of The Shadows’ Apache, Hank Marvin’s echoey, vibrato-heavy guitar evoking for English listeners the quintessential Native American brave, and outselling their collaborator Cliff Richards and the naïve singalong charm of his ballad Please Don’t Tease Me. The 1960s was for now an unseen presence lurking just off stage, and Britain, six years on from the end of wartime rationing, its cities cratered by the Luftwaffe, was a country on the cusp. Behind, the war and its privations; ahead, the shopping malls, high rise flats, motorways, that, whilst now often composing the bleakly familiar syntax of the modern world, embodied at the time the hopes of a new, cleaner, brighter, fairer future.
A young couple have driven their six-year-old son from industrial North Derbyshire, up the tedious A1, crossed the Firth of Forth by the old car ferry, and eventually reached the rural county of Fife; here the boy is left with his grandparents, with instructions to be good, and some parental anxiety. It will be their first separation. This done, they headed for London, boarded the gruelling boat train to Ostend, en route to Darmstadt, a city in the Hesse region of Germany, near Frankfurt (the journey “was murder”, wrote the young wife, in a series of letters to her parents, now in a trunk in my attic, where they have lain since my mother’s death and the sale of the family home).
At this point I should come clean. The young couple are my parents, the six-year-old boy my brother; I was not to appear for a few more years.
Their Darmstadt trip was under the auspices of the brand-new town twinning arrangement, linking together peoples divided by war. Twin towns were amongst the many noble and idealistic phoenixes rising hopefully from the ashes and rubble of war, reflecting what Churchill movingly described in his 1946 Zurich speech as the necessity to “recreate the European family”. Churchill, the great visionary, recognised that no European peace and prosperity was possible without Germany, and his evocation of a “spiritually great Germany” would have been immediately appealing to my Germanophile parents, lovers of Goethe, Schiller and Heine.
And so they arrived, and found themselves- well, I’ll allow my mother to pick up the narrative again- charmingly accommodated in “a very old house on the river bank” by “a very nice young couple, with two children, Marianne (10) and Manfred (8)”. Herr G*******, an English teacher at the local school, was looking forward to showing his guests around a new, resurgent and better Germany in his little Volkswagen (“very noisy to our ears”- my mother again). My parents’ faded colour transparencies suggest a pleasant itinerary combining old and new, pretty villages alongside the new housing projects rising from the rubble of allied bombing raids.
But this is where the story all goes wrong. The following day, returning from a sight-seeing tour to Bad Konig, and again in my mother’s words, “A car tried to overtake us, hadn’t nearly enough time, and there was a head-on collision. The two cars, or one of them, then hit us. [Herr G] was a cautious driver”. The past tense here is not accidental; my parents’ affable young host was killed immediately, and I’m moved by my mother’s loyal vindication of her kind host.
My mother spent a month in hospital with concussion, her head encased in ice, forbidden to sit up, and it was an extended Scottish sojourn for my brother, who remained blissfully unaware of his close brush with orphanhood.
I’ve always tried not to dwell on the crash; not only for its tragedy, but also for the very real possibility of my never having existed; there but for the grace of God.
However, I’ve been rereading the archive recently. I found myself pondering its pathos, its reflection of a moment in time; and, more specifically, the children whose father never came home after that hospitably intended drive. I wondered what they’d been told, and how impossible it would have been for their mother and grandmother- it was her house, and she lived on the top floor, overlooking the river Main- to comfort or console them on that faraway day and in the years that were to follow.
And then, this being the 21st century, where there are no secrets, I thought I’d see if I could find them. And, this being the 21st century, I did. My imagination had subconsciously formed an image based on my parents’ photograph of an eight-year-old boy in lederhosen, so it was almost a surprise to see images of the retired professor of music; he looke distinguished, a scarf wound nonchalantly around his neck in the bohemian manner of European academics.
Now, having prised open this particular version of Pandora’s Box, I had a decision to make. Did I reach out to this stranger, to whom I’m oddly bound by tragedy? I felt an urge to tell him how welcome his father had made my parents feel, and how much they respected him. And that his death, that August day sixty-three years ago, was not in any way his fault. I wanted to propose that if ever he happened to come to Cornwall, perhaps I might repay that hospitality in some small way.
However, I was also wary. Was I, the inveterate Romantic and teacher of literature, simply seeking narrative resolution? Was I turning these real people into characters? What right had I to disturb the past, in search of a cinematic sense of resolution? Wary of throwing an unnecessary pebble into the still waters of memory; wary of the possible consequences of returning a seventy-year-old man to his eight-year-old, vulnerable, painful self. The past is a foreign country, and one must tread carefully there, not trample heavily in heavy shoes.
And, I really did not know the answer. It could have ended so differently- had my parents died, I would not be here to have these thoughts; but it didn’t, and I am. Hesitantly, I shared the story with family, friends and colleagues, and the general view was yes, go ahead- what’s the worst that can happen? And thus armed, and ignoring one or two dissenting voices, I set about establishing email contact. The opening gambits of Facebook and LinkedIn drew blanks, my requests all presumably being dispatched into trash, as phishing. In the end, I tried his last place of employment, the Bochum Musikschule, asking whoever received the email to forward it, if possible. And a week later, I received a response! What a surprising email, it began; and yes, your name seems familiar, a distant memory…
And thus began our correspondence. Manfred, it soon became clear, is an Anglophile, visiting the UK every summer. And, led by fate or coincidence, they had- just before my email pinged in- booked a holiday in Polruan, a mere hour’s drive from my home in West Cornwall. That they had never visited the Duchy before seemed right.
And so, on my birthday, I awaited their arrival at Penzance station, built in the full fervour of Victorian optimism to connect London with the remote far west. Manfred and his partner Sigrid were to be guests at our annual street party, whose high point is a table football tournament. We competed as Bochum Wanderers, accepted defeat graciously, and applauded my son Tom and his friend Olly, who won the trophy. On Sunday we crossed the causeway connecting the mainland to the dreamily romantic St Michael’s Mount; on Monday they took the early train, arriving in Bochum twelve hours and two changes later.
So, was it worthwhile, stirring the past? Through my mother’s letters I’ve gained new friends, who plan to return next year, learned of Manfred’s idealistic and successful initiative to get music teachers into Germany’s primary schools. We also confirmed that his father and mine were both, until 1945, fighting against the countries they loved.
In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, there’s a wonderful moment; on a remote shore, in a brewing storm, a baby has been abandoned. She’s just been named Perdita, the one lost for ever, by Antigonus; it’s the last thing he does, his fate suggested in Shakespeare’s celebrated stage direction Exit, pursued by a bear. But Perdita is found, by a shepherd and his son, and in a wonderful exchange, the son describes Antigonus’ gory death, whilst his father relates his discovery of a baby, summing it up memorably: thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born. The line has always resonated with me. I asked Manfred what, if anything, he recalled of my parents’ visit. He reflected a moment, and said, definitely: his shoes. I said to my mother, he has heavy shoes. And what these recent months have shown is, surely, that the past can be revisited; but only in the lightest shoes, the shoes of the dancer. And then, perhaps, things new-born can take shape.
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