A friend of my host, another veteran of the Luftwaffe, secured our admission into the admiring circle around the ace aviator. She was beaming and shook hands with my host and his wife and their teenage children. Then she turned to me and held out her hand.
That was when my host made a mistake. “Our young house guest,” he said. “Er ist ein Engländer.”
The smile froze, the hand was withdrawn. I recall a pair of blazing blue eyes and a voice rising in rage. “Ein Engländer???” she squawked, and stalked off.
Like my father, it appeared, she had not quite forgotten, either.
BACK TO GERMANY
The following year, 1953, I returned to Germany. The farming family outside Göttingen could not have me back, so I went to stay with Herr Dewald and his wife and children. He was a schoolteacher in Halle, Westphalia.
Back then Germany still seemed like a country under some form of occupation, even though the German Federal Republic had been formed under the chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer in 1949. But the old Germany was divided into East and West, with the capital of West Germany not at Berlin but in Bonn, a small town on the Rhine, chosen because it was Chancellor Adenauer’s hometown.
The reason for the impression of occupation was the omnipresence of the NATO forces, which were there not to occupy but to defend; it was NATO that held the line against the expansionist Soviet bloc, which had, until his death in March, been in the grip of the brutal tyrant Joseph Stalin. Westphalia was in the British Zone, which was studded with British Army camps and air bases. This force was simply known as the British Army of the Rhine, and its vehicles could often be seen speeding through the streets. The invasion threat from east of the Iron Curtain was seen as very real.
The eastern third of Germany was behind that Iron Curtain and part of the Soviet empire. It was known as East Germany or, weirdly, the German Democratic Republic. It was very far from being democratic, being a harsh dictatorship with a nominal German Communist government eager to do the bidding of the real masters, the twenty-two divisions of the Red Army and the Soviet embassy. The Western powers retained, by treaty, only one enclave, the encircled West Berlin, stuck eighty miles inside East Germany.
The infamous Berlin Wall, completing the encirclement of West Berlin, would not go up until 1961 to prevent the constant flow of East German graduates pouring out of the technical colleges and universities via West Berlin to seek a better life in West Germany. But the general air of threat after the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49, which nearly sparked World War III, meant that the British Army, far from being resented by the Germans, was much appreciated.
In my own class, I had a more practical use as a guest with a German family. Using my stiff blue passport, I could enter a British base, go to the on-site duty-free shop, and buy real coffee, which, after years of drinking bitter substitutes, ranked with gold dust.
I arrived in Halle after the break for the Easter holidays of British schools, but before that of German schools. As Herr Dewald was a teacher and his children were still at school, it was thought practical that I should attend the German school until its holidays began a fortnight later. Here I was, very much a figure of curiosity, the first Britisher they had ever seen and presumed to have fanged teeth or at least a forked tail. There was considerable mutual relief that we all looked much the same. Both in the Dewald home and at the high school, my German was improving rapidly.
A characteristic of German society that I was introduced to, and that somewhat bewildered me, was the worship of nature, the open countryside. Having been brought up amid the fields and woods of Kent, I pretty much accepted Mother Nature as just being there, with no need to adulate it. But the Germans made great play of going on long walks through it. These were called “Wandering Days.” The whole school, age group by age group, would be lined up to go on these country hikes. During the first I ever went on, I noticed something strange.
While a similar group of British kids would simply amble along in an untidy mass, the German children within half a mile had somehow formed themselves into a column, rank upon rank, three abreast. Then the walking slowly transformed, with all the feet coming up and down in unison until we were marching.
This was soon accompanied by singing, specifically a song I can remember sixty years later. It started “Whom God wishes truly to favor He sends out into the wide world to see His miracles in mountain, forest, and field.” All good, healthy stuff.
After a while, I noted a stick had gone up into the air at the head of the column, held high so that we could all march behind it. There was no flag, but soon a hat appeared on the stick, like a sort of banner.
We were now deep in the forest, marching down a sandy track behind our leader, singing away, when far ahead a jeep appeared, speeding toward us. It was a British Army vehicle; I could make out the regimental insignia on the front mudguard, and it was clearly not going to stop.
The children broke ranks and jumped to one side to let it pass. It was open-topped, with a redheaded corporal driving and a sergeant beside him. As it swept past, the corporal leaned out and shouted something in a clear East London accent. As the tail disappeared down the track and the sand and dust settled, the German children gathered eagerly around me to ask, “Fritz, what was that the soldier called out to us?” I felt it wise to be diplomatic.
“He said, ‘Have a happy Wandering Day,’” I reported.
They were delighted. “Ach, Fritz,” I was told, “your British soldiers are so nice.”
I had not the heart to tell them what he had really shouted. It was: “Practicing for the next time, are we, lads?”
There is simply no substitute for Cockney humor, and obviously a certain amount of reconciliation was yet to be achieved.
I spent a third vacation with a German family the next year—the Dewalds again—and by 1954 I could pass for a German in Germany. That, too, was to prove extremely useful when, a decade later, I was posted for a year to live in East Berlin and, after shaking my secret police “tail,” used to disappear into the heart of East Germany.
LANGUAGES
It is sometimes thought that to speak a foreign language—really speak it rather than just get by with fifty words, a phrase book, and a lot of gestures—it suffices to master grammar and vocabulary. Not so: those are two, but there are, in all, three further aspects to passing unnoticed in a foreign language.
Third, there is the accent. The British are spectacularly useless at mimicking foreign accents, and there is absolutely no substitute for starting young and living with a family in the foreign country involved, with the one proviso that the family should speak hardly a word of the student’s language. With English now the common language of virtually the whole world, this is harder and harder. Everyone wants to practice their English.
But after the accent comes the slang. Perfect, academic language is an immediate giveaway—because every people sprinkles its native language with phrases that appear in no dictionary or guidebook and simply cannot be translated word for word. We do not even notice how often we do this, but it is constant. Listen in a crowded bar or at a lively dining table, and it will become clear that in almost every sentence a speaker will use a colloquialism that will never be taught in any language class.
The last aspect is even harder to quantify or imitate. It is the body language. All foreign languages and the speaking of them are accompanied by facial expressions and hand gestures that are probably unique to that language group and are picked up by children as they watch their parents and schoolteachers.
Thus, when in 1951, at the age of thirteen, I went to Tonbridge School to try for a scholarship
in modern languages, I recall the senior teacher in French, Mr. A. E. Foster (always known in the absence of political correctness as Frog Foster), sitting in some bemusement, facing a small boy jabbering away in French complete with colloquialisms and gestures. A few days later, Mr. Logie Bruce Lockhart had the same experience in German. I got the scholarship and transferred to the upper school in September.