30 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Back to Barry. Your nemesis. Braughing. Your son is now sixteen, seventeen, back in his last year at school in a turmoil of anger, self-doubt and confusion. There were two things that kept me sane that last year and, at times, brought me back from the edge of despair. I’ll return to Barry later, because he was one of them. The other was the school term, that wonderful, blessed, liberating third of the year that I was lucky enough to spend as an exchange student at a state school in Rendsburg, a small town situated halfway along the Kiel canal in Schleswig-Holstein, in the very north of Germany. My exchange partner was Manfred Eckhardt, and the Eckhardts were the most wonderful of surrogate parents. For the first time in my life I rejoiced in the experience of going home every day after school to spend the evening with my “family”, of sleeping comfortably in my own bed, in my own room, and going off to school again the next day.

What bliss, Harry! You can hardly imagine what bliss that was!

It was the winter term, though, and by God it was cold in Schleswig-Holstein. Many days I walked with deep snow on the ground to get to school in the early morning, head down against a mercilessly biting wind, wrapped up in a heavy winter coat—there were no down parkas that I know of in those days—and thick woolen gloves and mufflers. It was the first time in my life that I had experienced the kind of cold that cuts straight through to the bone and leaves the body frigid.

The compensation was to arrive at the Hochschule and make the transition through the big front doors from bitter cold into wonderful, all-embracing warmth and the rich smell of hundreds of human bodies regaining body heat. And then to find myself sitting in the classroom, elbow-to-elbow with teenagers of both sexes! The difference from everything I knew about school from the age of seven could not have been more stark, nor more appealing. I fell in love (again!) from a distance (again!) with a girl named Annaliese, blond, and to my eyes totally captivating—and untouchable. Among the strange things my mind brings back with amazing clarity across the years is a moment in our classroom where Annaliese is batting at a bee that has found its way into class and hovers insistently around her head. And as she does so, she cries out—I transcribe phonetically as best I can— not “ay-nie”, “eine Biene”, which would have been correct, but “eernie”, “eenie beenie”, a whimsical, rhyming mispronunciation that even so many years later I recall as utterly charming. And obviously memorable.

And, Harry, there is this: while I was happily fantasizing about being in love with Annaliese, I was actually in love with someone completely different. Stupid, no? But how could I have known? She was an older woman, I could not have imagined such a thing. Her name was Iris. She came from Cardiff so she was Welsh, a fellow “Auslander” also in Germany on an exchange but in her case as a teacher. We often used to walk to and from school together, since she was staying not far from the Eckhardts, and when I had the car accident that ended my stay in Germany, she was the constant visitor at my bedside. She was kind, understanding, caring, always ready to listen and offer the kind of warmth and sympathy I had missed throughout my school years. In short, she was everything my deeply confused and adolescent self so badly needed at time. I wish I’d been sufficiently aware to realize then how much she meant to me—and I perhaps to her—a fellow stranger in a strange land… Did she ever understand this as I came to understand it later, when I found to my surprise how much I sorely missed her?

Anyway, that accident. Remember? You must have been out of your minds with worry, you and Peggy, when someone called to let you know. I could easily have died.

I had a friend at school, or maybe it was the friend of a friend, a year or two older than myself, who’d been able to borrow his father’s DKW for a jaunt to a neighboring town and invited me and a couple of other friends along for the ride. (DKW, by the way, in case you didn’t know, is today’s Audi, with the same linked circles in its company logo. The acronym DKW (Deustche Kraftwagen) translated into a schoolboy joke: Das Krankenhaus Wartet, “the hospital awaits”—which proved in my case to be uncomfortably true. We drank beer, had a jolly time, and it was dark already by the time we got started on the return trip to Rendsburg. The road was icy. We were probably traveling too fast. A set of oncoming headlights dazzled our driver, who baked too hard and took us into a long, dizzying skid. It came to an emphatic, screeching stop when the car slammed head-on into a farm tractor parked at the side of the road.

We ended up in the ditch. I don’t know how long I was unconscious but when I came to there was blood was streaming down across my cheek. I could hear people screaming, “Bist Du OK? Bist Du OK?” Are you okay? I thought I was. The worst thing, it seemed to me, was that there was blood dripping down onto the cover of my copy of “Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems” that I happened to be holding in my lap. They managed to free me from the wreck and prevented me from trying desperately, irrationally to remove my overcoat, despite the freezing cold. That, too, I noticed now, was getting stained with blood. The next thing I remember was being in piled into a stranger’s car, still in a daze, and driven back to Rendsburg.

The Eckhardts were beside themselves. They took me straight to the nearest hospital where the doctor stitched up two deep cuts, one above the eye, one leading back across my skull. He reported a fracture, a splintering of the skull that was apparently not serious enough in his opinion to keep me in the hospital overnight. Besides, the Eckhardts were anxious to get me back home—a mistake perhaps, but a kind intention. In retrospect, back home in England, the doctor thought I should have received more treatment for concussion than the few days I spent in bed. But at least I had constant, loving care from the good Frau Eckhardt—and those daily bedside visits from Iris that I shall not forget. Like so many good people from those days, I wish I were able to let her know today how much she meant to me. I’d love to be able to travel back in time and tell her.

Enough for one day, Harry. To be continued in my next.

With love, Peter