As a young man, I had for a couple of terms, studied German at evening classes. My father-in-law retired and in Search of occupation decided to come too. The teacher was Mr. Reinach, a refugee from Hitler's Third Reich. He was a purist in the use of language and although only recently resident in England, his English was immaculate. Only once did he slip, when he said: "a lustful boy", meaning "a lusty boy", and from some polite smirks on a few faces he realised that he had made a mistake and asked for synonyms. These were promptly provided by the class and ranged from "lecherous" –my own offering -to "randy" from a demure-looking young lady who should not have known what we were talking about.
That same evening, he was carefully explaining to my father-in-law who had failed to grasp it earlier, the intricacies of case and number in respect of nouns and pronouns. Knowing my father-in-law, I could tell that he was not listening, but had dropped into the private world of the elderly. After Mr. Reinach’s masterly summary, taking probably twenty minutes, my father-in-law said: "I'm afraid I shall never ‘get' all that – but if you can teach me a sort of pidgin-German, that will do me.
The look on Mr. Reinach's face lives in my memory and has afforded me many a quiet chuckle over the years.
But the same years had largely robbed me of the slender results of two terms. As we circled Dusseldorf for over an hour, waiting for ground-fog to lift, I mentally raked among the ashes and came up with a few unpromising items. While not quite in the position Negley Farson, who started his Arabic studies with: "The eunuch is in the garden of the Caliph" - my stock of German seemed just as remote from everyday life. I could still tell the story of Little Red-Riding-Hood, recite a German version of there's a hole in my bucket", announce that "the East wind is bitter cold today", refuse a cigarette or ask for a copy of the Radio-Times. And then a mental fog closed in, but below, the mist had cleared and we landed in sunshine.
The Export manager of the German firm I was visiting had brought his eighteen-year-old daughter with him to meet me, setting a standard which subsequent hosts around the world failed to live up to, for she was as fresh and beautiful as the morning itself. In Australia, later, I shared the back seat of my host's car with his large dog, which under a pretence of playfulness, was trying to sink his fangs into my jugular artery while I, simulating friendship, tried to throttle him. The Australian said that the dog and I were "real cobbers" but the dog knew better.
My hotel at Velbert displayed a letter from Bismarck, acknowledging with thanks a comfortable stay there. This was for me, a new light on one of the characters from my history books; I had never associated the "Iron Chancellor" with this sort of small civility. Certainly, it was a very clean and comfortable hotel and if I almost received drei Martini instead of dry, this was entirely my own fault. As Velbeit is near Essen, I had expected a grimy, industrial setting and was pleasantly surprised by green and rolling hills. But this is not part of the tourist's Germany; here are no castles, gorges or Rhine-maidens. The Rhine is wide and purposeful as it flows across a plain, with Dusseldorf on its right bank.
Business kept me too busy for sight-seeing, but one evening I saw a most respectable strip-tease act, selected by my host because he wanted to include his wife and daughter in the outing. Certainly, there was nothing to shock them; the stripper at the end of her act would still have been considered ever-dressed on many beaches. Feeling, perhaps, that this had been dull fare, my host mimed a strip-tease of his own – provocatively taking off imaginary stockings and throwing them coyly at us; unclipping an imaginary brassiere and turning his back to us as he whipped it off, then holding it exultantly aloft by a non-existent strap as he turned to face, us.
It was the best night-club entertainment I on the tour. His plump and jolly wife almost shook the room with her laughter; his daughter gave the indulgent smile with which the young view the antics of their parents.
During my final afternoon and evening, I visited Wuppertal which has a monorail suspension railway dating back to 1898, giving a bird’s-eye view of the countryside and congestion-free travel to and from the town. On the way to Dusseldorf, I saw the name Neanderthal on a signpost and asked if this was the site of the relics of Neanderthal Man, since, apart from assuming it was in central Europe, it had never occurred to me to wonder where Neanderthal was. My colleague not only confirmed this but obligingly turned off the main road so that we could go through the museum; he had been intending to go there himself but had lived in the vicinity a bare quarter of a century, so he had not had time. There had been much rain and the lane from the road to the museum, through a wood, was dank and marshy. The 70,000-year-old bones were there, looking more like something the dog had not bothered to bury than the remains of a remote ancestor. There were cave paintings from France and Spain together with other relevant material, all well displayed in a smart museum.
In Dusseldorf we walked along the broad Kaiser Allee, photographed each other against the background of the Rhine and, finished the evening with beer, schnaps and a meal at an inn.
My colleague was taking his schnaps medicinally, for a cold, he told me, though this did not involve any discernible difference in the method of drinking it. Everyone I had spoken to in Germany had a thick cold - no doubt the wretched weather was responsible. The sunshine which had arrived with me had been extinguished and rain was falling from leaden skies. We sat silently with glasses in front of us, looking out into the gloom
I felt perfectly at home.