Wihelmina.

“Do you know Streatham?”

The speaker was male, seemingly young and spoke English without much of an accent. The street was lit by a few lamps strung out along its length but the trees along its unpaved sides provided shadows enough to hide the speaker from our view.

We stopped walking, utterly surprised to be suddenly addressed like that in the middle of nowhere and in a foreign country to boot. Eric recovered first. He said, “Quite well, do you know it?”

“Oh yes, I was a student there. Two years ago, I attended the, he paused as though searching for a word, College of Further Education.” “My father said I must go there to improve my English because I will be the boss at the Gasthof when he retires.” “You know the Gasthof.”

It was a statement not a question and it was only too true, we knew the Gasthof. Every evening after dinner we would go along and drink beer there and chat about the trips we had made that day, what we had done in our free-time and inevitably, the attractions of the girls we’d seen along the way. At the Gasthof the locals largely ignored us, except for Wilhelmina, the barmaid, who cheerily sold us the beer even though she must have known we were underage – or at least we would have been in England. Here in the Rhineland, maybe in all of Germany for all we ignoramuses knew, fifteen-year olds could drink beer freely. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know that we were still at school because during the day we had to traipse about wearing our uniform blazers and in any event, the village was so small that everyone knew who we were.

The village was, and I suppose still is, called Nieder Heimbach. Nieder means lower. You’ll not be very surprised to learn then that much higher up the valley, Ober Heimbach lorded it over us and over the village between us, Mittel Heimbach. The inhabitants of these villages, though eternally locked together by nomenclature, citizenship and language, had a habit of regarding themselves as living almost in separate States and seemed to radiate a sort of amused contempt for their Lower, Upper or Middle neighbours. Oddly enough though, their attitude to actual foreigners, to us anyway, was friendly, we were greeted, as was the habit in that Catholic region, with a cheerful Gruss Gott wherever we went. But to be greeted in English and to be asked about a place so utterly without attraction for tourists or even for Brits who hadn’t been born there was, shall I say, surprising.

The young man emerged from the shadows at the side of the road, holding out his hand in the formal greeting that Germans of all ages and classes used in those days. I grasped his hand, hardening my grip as I always did so that no one would think I was weedy. “Gattinger,” he said. I gaped at him, all my cool gone. Eric whispered through clenched teeth, “Say your name!” I quickly obeyed feeling angry and foolish because in the heat of the moment I had forgotten that bit of the briefing.

Now that he was visible, I could see that our new acquaintance was, maybe, three years older than we were. Eric asked him his first name, we gave him ours and we all laughed aloud, perhaps because Seamus must have seemed alien to him and Wighard sounded pretty odd to us. Wighard told us he was waiting to go to University but was still attending some classes at Grammar school, though he called it a Gymnasium which made us think at first that he was keeping fit while waiting. He told us that he had a regular girlfriend and that he was going to study Theology at University but was also very interested in international politics and instantly proved this by asking, “What do you think about Macmillan?”

“What do you mean,” I blurted out, instantly regretting the fact that I sounded so naïve. I began to sweat with embarrassment. I could not remember a time when I had not reacted in this way to simple questions about almost anything but particularly when the questioner seemed to be a man or especially a woman of the world. In those days one had to be cool to be in but I could hardly ever manage it, though once in a while I managed to fake it. Now of course, I assume that back then almost everyone else was faking it too but if they were, they hid it better than I was ever able to do.

Wighard explained, “He put out many ministers, did he not?”

“Yes,” said Eric gravely. “He looks and talks like a country gentleman but he’s really utterly ruthless.” I knew that Eric had got that opinion from his father but I didn’t say anything.

“Oh yes,” Wighard said cheerfully. “All politicians are like that.” “Even our Adenauer, whom your newspapers think is a saint, is really a ruthless swine.”

Eric laughed and changed the subject. “You going to be a priest then, Wighard?” “Theology, I mean?”

Wighard shrugged, “No, at least I don’t think so, I have a girlfriend and, well, you know?”

We knew alright, of course we knew. Masters were in the habit of asking us, on average once a term; whether we thought we had a vocation to the priesthood. It was just another trial Catholic schoolboys had to go through in those days but it was annoying. When I was first asked, I didn’t know what to say, as usual I just looked embarrassed but then I hit upon the notion of saying, that I didn’t think I had a vocation yet, as though the question were still open. Seemed to satisfy the inquisitor without committing me to anything. The problem, of course, was girls or even, God willing, women. How on earth we wondered could you go through life without sex? Needless to say, nobody I knew had done anything more adventurous than groping at that time but we were all very sure that we could not, so to speak, take the pledge.

It was getting late so we quickly arranged to meet at the Gasthof on the next evening. Wighard, magnanimous on his father’s behalf, cried, “The first two beers on the house!” as he disappeared down the street.

Later in bed, held firmly in place by the weighty goose-down quilt, I thought about the conversation with Wighard and that led me on to thinking about girls and that, I guess, was what made me dream hopefully of Wilhelmina.

Sick Kids

The children’s hospital was on the edge of our town in those days, though now of course the town has quite swallowed it up. When I was five years old I had to live in the hospital for a few weeks having been stricken with the worst bout of asthma that I had ever known even though I was, by that time an experienced asthma sufferer. It refused to yield to vapour rub and red flannel, the treatments I had had up until then and so I was taken to the hospital to see the specialist.

In telling me this, my mother adopted the slightly hushed but emphatic tone she used when speaking about an eminence of the Church. As a child, of course, I accepted this unreserved and uncritical respect for such people as natural but as time passed, I learnt, as most people do, that such feelings are simply an example of the awe which we humans are apt to experience in the presence of anything arcane and mysterious. Unfortunately, my mother never lost her innocence in this regard and so, as I grew older, we often quarreled about it.

My father told me in his straightforward way that he would soon be taking me to the hospital where I would stay for a while so that the doctors could make me better. Having never been away from home before, I felt odd about it. I liked the idea of a trip but I was nervous about being away on my own and sure that I would miss my family. I asked my father what I would do at the hospital. He said that the doctors would try different treatments until they found one that would help me. I asked if they would put the vapour rub on my chest; he rather doubted it.

I was sad to hear that because having the vapour rub put on was extraordinarily pleasant. I used to squirm with delight as my mother rubbed the slightly sticky stuff onto my chest. It smelled of mothballs but the feeling of it oozing across my body was thrilling. And after I had experienced it once or twice even the smell became pleasant because it heralded relief from the awful, gasping, chest-wrenching fight for breath which I so often experienced when an attack happened.

My father took me to the hospital in the car. I loved driving in the car. We had a Buick with a bench seat in the front, which in those pre-seat belt days, meant that I could sit right next to him as we whizzed along. Even now I like to drive fast but now I understand why I like to experience the primitive thrill of speed but when I was a child it was all sensation; like being on a rollercoaster or tobogganing downhill.

When we got to the hospital, I was surprised to see that it was set in a park. A vast green field edged with trees surrounded it and grassy slopes led down from the building onto the field. On our way to the carpark, we passed quite close to the edge of one of the slopes and it was then that I saw that, what I had taken from a distance to be blue blobs were actually children all dressed in blue shorts and shirts. Accompanied by nurses, they were running around on the field and rolling down the grassy slopes. I did not know what to make of this and asked my father who the children were. He told me not to bother him; he was looking for a parking space and needed to concentrate. I waited impatiently until we were parked and then asked him again but by then we were headed into the hospital building and he was preoccupied again.

Eventually, we reached an office where a nurse welcomed us. My father answered her questions, then handed me over to her, told me to be a good boy, said he would return that evening and left. I worried at first but the nurse was kind and I soon felt quite happy. She told me that the children I had seen outside were also patients, then explained that patients meant children who, like me, were at the hospital for a while because they were sick and had to be made better.

The hospital smelled clean and disinfected. The smell reminded me of how our house smelled after Mrs. Breitling had cleaned it but other homely smells were missing, no coffee or tobacco, for instance. The nurse showed me around but the little ward kitchen was odourless and too white. Our kitchen at home was yellow and red; colours that made me feel warm, and even when no one was cooking, it smelled of spices and the green herbs my mother grew in pots and kept on the window cills.

The nurse told me that her name was Anne-Marie and that she would look after me in the daytime and that another nurse, called Josephine, would look after me at night. Anne-Marie told me that it was just about time for lunch and took me to the room where everyone ate their meals. Most of the tables and chairs were child-size but there were a few bigger ones for the nurses. The children in blue were crowding into the place by the time we arrived but to my intense disappointment they ignored me. Anne-Marie took me to a table, found me a place and told me to remember it. “This is your place, Anton,” she said, “Until you leave, this will be reserved for you.”

I liked the food. We had a stew of meat and vegetables which tasted warm and smooth and which almost filled me up but when I saw that there was apple-strudel for pudding, I found my appetite again and took a big piece because, next to gooseberries and custard, strudel was my favourite pudding. I took a big mouthful and savoured it. At home my mother always told me to chew everything seven times and then swallow. But I loved the rich cinnamony taste of strudel too much to do that with it. I looked over my shoulder at Anne-Marie; she just smiled at me and said nothing about chewing or swallowing. I relaxed and chewed slowly and lightly, just letting the strudel disintegrate in my mouth before swallowing small amounts of it.

After lunch we were all taken to our wards for an afternoon rest. As I fell asleep, I felt warm and easy in my mind and I remember thinking that I didn’t mind too much about being in hospital.