12 Home by Worms

My memory is ungrateful as well as unreliable. I sometimes remember people who have hurt or annoyed me better than people who have been good for me. On my way home from Lebanon I was invited by two of my fellow volunteers, one Egyptian, the other Italian, to stop off on the way home and visit their families in Cairo and Rome.

That was easy because the ferry stopped off in Alexandria on the way to Naples or Genoa, but I have no picture of these kind people and cant remember their names. The memories I have of Cairo and Rome have more to do with later visits and film images than with those first encounters. For Egypt I cherry-pick from TV documentaries, and my time in Rome is patched up with clips from Roman Holiday, the film with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, and possibly Ben Hur as well.

Alexandria was first stop on the Turkish ferry back from Beirut, with just a short run south to Cairo. This 1956 visit seems more significant in retrospect because Britain and Egypt would soon be at war. Perhaps some Egyptians were more aware of what was brewing than I was. I had hardly got off the gangway before a uniformed official greeted me courteously in English, asked where I was going and if I needed help.

Any reserves on my part stemmed from memories of unctuous acolytes and grasping taxi drivers in Jerusalem, This man said he was from the tourist ministry and radiated goodwill. He asked nothing from me, except where I was going so I showed him the slip of paper with my Cairo hosts' address. He led me to a taxi rank and stopped by a big car already two thirds full. After a few words in Arabic with the driver, the passengers inside made room for me. My guide  said I would be dropped off near the address I'd given him, and one of the other passengers would show me the way. He told me what fare I should pay, shook my hand and wished me a happy stay in Egypt.

Some of the road from Alexandria to Cairo was through green irrigated land, some across desert. It was not just a sea of sand, but rough and stony in places. We got glimpses of the Nile and palms before darkness fell. Suddenly what the headlights picked out ahead was no longer road, as though a tide of sand had covered it.  The driver kept going unflustered and the car seemed amphibious. Then the road reappeared and I may have drifted off. As we approached Cairo, my fellow-passengers gave me a nudge and pointed out through the window on our right. By now the moon was up ;and what I saw was not just palms but PYRAMIDS: ultimate cliché, pure geometry in triangles of black and white moonlight. I dont know how we came to pass by Giza on the way to Cairo from the North? Am I inventing that first sight, or did our road swing right almost bypassing the city before turning in from the west?

I'm ashamed to have no image of the people I stayed with, their home, what we ate, how we got around the city. Not even their names. Another case of Image-overlay? I was back in Cairo four years later, with a rented a flat in an unfinished apartment block (I'd bumped my head in Oxford and been told to take a break from intellectual work, found a teaching job instead, at the nationalised Victory (ex-Victoria) College in Cairo.)  After years ducking out of God Save the Queen at home, I stood to attention each morning for Gamal Abdel Nasser's national anthem, and read Wuthering Heights as a set book with a class of Egyptian and Gulf-state Arab boys. Loved it, first time for all of us. From my room at the school,  I moved into town. From my bare flat, I looked out on a busy little street and a stall that sold old nuts and bolts. I bought myself an old green bike. One day, after a bus-ride out of town, I found myself on a policeman's bike. I had been trying to photograph a donkey, against a backdrop of bougainvillea, when the policeman pulled up beside me. 'No pictures,' he said, his free hand making sure I understood. The wall behind the creeper concealed an army base. He put my camera in his tunic pocket, took my arm and told me to come with him. We set off on foot, him holding me with one hand and his bike with the other. It was a couple of miles to the police station and when the mid-day sun got too hot for us - the natives feel it too! - we agreed to double up on his bike. At first he sat in the saddle and pedalled while I sat on the crossbar, then we swapped around. It wouldn't have done to arrive at the station with my arresting officer caged between my arms, so we got off before we came in sight and resumed our custodial walk. By then we wished each other well, and his report must have tallied with mine: weren't tourists more interested in donkeys and pretty flowers than humdrum national defence?

At the Cairo Museum, I had another set-piece dream-come-true, the shock of the expected. Here was the golden mask of Tutenkamun and his gold-flake chariot, spare as a racing bike or Italian trotting cart - eat your heart out Boedica. Did the Romans pick that up their chariot-racing from Egypt, or were some horsemen always happier in carts? 

One received image leads to another, I was about to add the long-necked Nefertite to my trophy-list, only to find that her head was in Germany, not Cairo at all...  How did I get from chariots and bikes to trotting carts? At my prep-school - Frilsham House, now buried under the  M4 - there was an Italian boy in my dormitory. When others reached for the Beano or Comic Cuts, Jeger pulled out a wad of trotting-papers sent to him by his father in Italy.

I fondly remember this boy Jeger - our headmaster called him Georgie J - because he was the only other boy in the school who voted Labour in the school mock-elections held to mark the post-war national poll of 1945. Maybe Jeger sided with me because being a foreigner made him feel different. He may also have been a Jew though that never came up at school and it's only now that I realise his parents may have sent him to England for safety. None of that crossed our minds as we celebrated our proxy victory with a Labour landslide nationwide. For some reason I'd been nicknamed Labour Hard-boiled Egg, though I wasn't hard and my christian-name, Greg, was hardly ever used at school. 

When I went to Rome in 1956, I never thought of asking after Georgie J. My Italian work-camp friend had stayed on in Lebanon, so it fell to his elder sister to show me round. She had a job and her own red Fiat 500, and took time off to drive me round. The picture I have of her might as well be a fashion shot.  Skirt swinging, she runs up a flight of stone steps, turns and looks back in a swirl of dark hair. 'Guarda...', she says when I join her at the parapet above, as if opening a window on the cityscape below.

Another close-up sticks with me. Not the sunlit bella sorella but a male back-view in the shadows of a church. My hosts' apartment was on an upper floor overlooking the Piazza del Popolo. One day, with my guide at work, I went out on my own. I noted the name of the square so I could ask the way back if I got lost but didn't get far. Across the square was a church, less imposing than some others we'd seen. The door was unlocked so I went in. What struck me was an ill-lit painting on a side wall.

I had not heard of Caravaggio, the figure I took to be Jesus was hanging head-down on a topsy-turvy cross that some workmen struggled to lift. This victim's expression was not holy but distraught. Up-staging him and outshining his face was a workman's bum, as he strained to lift the weight. 

  

Now that I conjure the picture from cyber-space, I discover that the man on the cross is St Peter, not Jesus, his dismay focussed on the long nail through his hand. This crucifixion has no conventional wooden + but a contorted human x.

Legend has it that Peter had moved from Antioch (up the coast from Lebanon) to take charge of the new Christian community in Rome. When Nero came after him, Peter tried, as once before in Jerusalem, to escape. On his way out of the city, he met Jesus (in a vision) heading the other way. 'Quo vadis?'  Peter asked (that the Hollywood epic might be fulfilled). Jesus replied that he was going to be crucified again. Peter too turned back to face his punishment. Unworthy to stand in the image of his master, he had himself nailed upside-down.

From Cairo to Rome, then back to Germany. Two more work-camps would see me through the winter and into the last lap of my two years 'alternative service.' The first camp was another self-build housing project near Worms, the second, over Christmas, in a smaller Rhineland town called Bruhl.

Our Diet of Worms – unless it was our diet of Bruhl – came out of seven-pound US food-aid cans of orange processed cheese and homogeneous red jam. We took this gunk in various combinations, cooked or raw with greyish bread. Like most English schoolboys of my age and class, I'd grown up with jokes about the Diet of Worms, farting Vaterland and Martin Luther's indulgences. When I got to Worms, I never found out where the excommunicating Diet was held, nor even the whereabouts of Wittenburg and the church where he posted his demands. I'd passed my History A Level, but any knowledge acquired lay dead or asleep in my head. I was pinned firmly to present routines and possibilities, work and play, the prettiest girl in sight, red jam and orange cheese.

So why don't I have a clearer memory of the people and what went on from day to day? The Worms project was with a community housing co-op or 'seidlung' (settlement). Some of the co-builders must have been 'displaced persons', a familiar word at the time. Poles, East Germans? The Iron Curtain was already in place, and our school history had never got much further east than Germany.  I knew there had been a Hapsburg Empire but not what that entailed, apart from Austria, battles with Turks, and an Emperor whose nose came so close to his jaw that he fed through a spout. Perhaps he was the one who sat on a ballroom floor crying 'I'm a poached egg, don't touch me.'? 

Deviation

More recently I've had my own serious thoughts on the Diet of Worms, not the assembly that summoned Luther, but the sort of worms I sometimes sever with my spade....
We under-estimate these peristaltic ancestors of ours, the way they move themselves through the earth by moving earth through themselves. Worms, as Darwin noted, are world-changers. They're also a metaphor for the way have always taken in the world as we engage with it.

The primordial worm lives on in us, almost literally. Between our brains and the arms and legs we reach out and and walk about with, there runs not only a spine and spinal cord but the formidable worm of our digestive tract. It no longer moves us directly through the world, but delegates that other business to an array of more peripheral organs and limbs. These accessories may fancy themselves, but serve mainly to keep our grand old gut in the state they've made their own for the last hundred million years.

From my elevated human vantage point, I also note that what I often feel most deeply – the physical sensations of emotion – are registered more in gut than heart or brain. When I feel 'upset' my digestion upsets too. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't some vestigial adjoining site, precursor and template for subsequent losses and challenges. Whatever happened after our birth to the inside end of the umbelical cord? What became of the bits of us that found themselves redundant when the grand central supply-line was cut  and the entrance port sealed off?

Where did that all go? Did no scar, trace or echo of that severance remain? Could such dramatic change go entirely unregistered? Would not a palimpsest remain, to be retraced in the light or dark of subsequent events? That might become a natural repository for later losses, fears and challenges.

When I mentioned these musings to a teacher-acquaintance, she pointed me to this:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

Back to the German city of Luther and Liebfraumilch -  'lovely woman's milk' and/or tribute to the Liebfrauenstift convent and nuns who made the wine. What I noticed about the surviving vineyards was the way they came right into town. A Leibfraumilch hoarding stood amid sooty rows of vines, in the triangular spaces between converging goods and passenger lines.

Like Mannheim, Worms was battered by allied bombing. Pierre Ceresole, the Swiss founder of the SCI, had organised his first workcamps after WW1 to make good war damage and reconcile old enemies. Some of the enemies did not take kindly to each other, but our later camps may have had subliminal benign effects. They were organised by the SCI's German branch, International Zivildienst (IZD). We didn't think of ourselves as peace-makers, but took each other as we came, living and working together as best we could across the usual barriers of race and language. Fewer people spoke English then. We made no special effort to address our differences or dig up the past. We got on with digging trenches, weather permitting, and with each other more or less as we worked and joked, drank and danced at weekends. Our half-built estate was unusual in that it already had a social centre, a nissen hut that served as meeting room and cafe-bar, with a platform for bands and wooden floor with chairs and tables around.

I dont remember much about our work or the houses we were helping build, but for a while I fetched and carried for a big South-German bricklayer. As I see him now, he crouches toad-like in a manhole at my feet, almost filling the square hole as he shapes the bottom round the open drains.  When he runs out of mortar, he looks up at me and shouts 'Shpeise.' That sounds to me at first like German for 'shit,' but then I understood or he explained that the word began with  s not sh.  'Speise' means 'food' and the slurred beginning was his accent, or a speech defect.
This 'speise' was not food but mortar, as in now or 'schneller.'  So I'd shovel a dollop past him onto the board in the hole. When I was slow to understand or respond, he sometimes abused me in a not-unfriendly way.  'Dolborer!'  was a word he used, if I heard it right. He tapped his head as he said it, so I thought that 'dol' might mean dull, and 'borer' have something to do with  'born'... Born stupid. dimwit? Macht nicht. 

At home and abroad, over the years, I grew familiar with coded rudeness among men on building sites and in heavy industry. Insults also express the closeness implicit in 'work-mates'.  In jagged, noisy places, soft words get lost. Shouted insults get across, take us to each other and the edge where Cain and Able meet. It's an old brink-manship, between sword-hilt and handshake, and the better we know each other the ruder we can be. When my brother worked as a trainee in the Ebbw Vale steelworks, he knew he was accepted  when a furnace-man brought a heavy hand down on his shoulder and said 'You're a right buggar, Martin.'  But the edgy banter has a darker side: take it wrong, show yourself hurt or fail to answer in kind and it turns to bullying - at work as in school.

Our foreman on the Worms site was a kind old veteran, Herr Vetterman. He carried the plans in his head, knew what needed doing and gruffly got the message through language barriers to us.  He drank too much and knew we knew he knew. His face was wizenned, like the fine-lined mug of a chimp behind bars. He made do with his rag-tag labour force, irregular deliveries, clapped-out equipment, flood or freeze.  As he set the fire in the hut each morning, he sent one of us  to the shop for his beer ration.

The high point of my time on the site was driving an old Ford tipper-truck that served  to carry sand and materials round the site. I had learned to drive before leaving home, had a go on a farm tractor but never a lorry before. In those days you often had to double-declutch between lower gears, but this lorry had no lower gears, except in reverse. To get it moving you had either to make sure you parked on a downhill slope, or tap-dance between clutch and accelerator to coax it to walking speed. Once over ten miles an hour, you were riding high, but risked spilling the load on a bend. The pleasure was in the challenge, as with the boy mahouts who competed to ride to ride rogue elephants.

When it froze too hard to dig or mix, we did maintenance jobs, knocking the layers of stone-dry cement and concrete off barrows and cement mixers.  Herr Vetterman did his best to keep us busy and warm and we took extended breaks round his stove. In Switzerland, the man I remembered was Clemente, chipping away at our bit of the Alps. Here in Germany it was a carefree American. His name's gone, but not the refrain he chanted as he chipped away at his fossilised mixer drum.  'Cement mixer, putty, putty...'  once, twice, a hundred times. We thought he was improvising and began joining in. He said this worksong was not his own but a comic one he'd heard in America. Now at last I've found it:

Cement mixer, putty putty 
  (x 5)
A puddle o’ vooty, a puddle o’ gooty,
A puddle o’ scooby, a puddle o’ veet concrete.
First you get some gravel, pour it on the vout
To mix a mess o’ mortar
You add cement and water
See the mellow roony
Come out slurp slurp slurp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKdrnTTDTqo.

The words harked back to warmer days, before the frost turned water, sand, cement to stone, when the mixer could have done its job. The version of the ditty that I found was by Slim Gaillard, a black entertainer switching between guitar and piano, sometimes with his hands upside down. We could have done with more jitterbug warmth in the shell of a house where we lived, one stove in the living room, gas rings for cooking, spare  blankets to seal off unplastered door- and window-frames.(There are much flimsier refugee camps around Syria as I write, Christmas draws near etc?)

Weekend evenings were a welcome break. Work-mates and residents filled the nissen hut, with music and dancing as the evening wore on.  I remember sitting with Herr and Frau Vetterman, and him leaving me at the table with his wife when he went back to the bar. I had learned a few words of German and she had a few in English. With that and the beer, we had the illusion of communication abd with the noise of the band we had to bend our heads close to hear each other. As more people crowded the dance floor, I tried an opening-line I'd picked up at a youth-club dance-lession in Mannheim. 'Darf ich bitte?'  May I, please? And with something like 'Thank you kindly,' Frau Vetterman stood up and took my hand.  Among all the other couples on the floor, across an age-gap older than me, we felt comfortable in each other's arms, no more need to talk..

Later in the evening, a fight would break out, or we would guess as much from the shouting and clacking of furniture out of sight. The music stopped... Then a hidden ring-master called 'Musik!'  and the band struck up again.. Combatants separated, ejected or reconciled, glasses refilled, all's well that ends...another genial knock-about and home to bed.

On one day off from Worms – unless it was from Mannheim  the year before - I took a trip to Heidelberg. Somebody told me there was a clinic where I could sell my blood.That would pay for the day-trip and leave me a mark or two in hand. Heidelberg was in the American zone, with enough English around to make it easy. Everything went as planned.  I found the bloodbank, alll clean and correct. I was in and out in half an hour, then swanned around to the Red Ox inn...

As advertised by Mario Lanza's  'Student Prince' film and drinking song.. I'll spare you the Youtube clip of  his 'Drink, drink' on a table top. My measure of red blood was turned to red wine but I had mixed feelings about the Red Ox kitch, unless that set in later when Heidelberg follies blurred in with later ones at Oxford. When I matriculated at New College, I wore a hydrangea in my mortar-board, but the Latin gobbledygook and gowns didn't stop there. For dinner in 'hall' long gowns were required for Scholars, short for Commoners. Bemused by this nonsense, I recalled meeting an otherwise rational young German taking pride in the fine white line of a duelling scar on his forehead. One evening, as we sat down to dinner at New College, a brainwashed fellow student 'sconced' me for appearing  - not for the first time - without a gown.

Why did this feel like an offer I could not refuse?  Perhaps because if I failed to gulp quart of beer without a pause, I would be expected to pay for it. The drink put me off my dinner, but I was also fed up with myself. Why did I not brush the challenge aside, refuse either to consume or pay for a drink I hadn't ordered and sit down sit down to my oxtail soup?  Manners Maketh Man, archaic nonsense seeps from crumbling structures into impressionable heads.

I had no remorse or embarassment after selling my blood in Heidleberg. If that was prostitution, I felt quite pleased with myself. Pride in guilt? No harm done, I'd got away with it, and a private bloodbank was hardly the House of the Rising Sun. Not long ago, I saw a picture in the paper of a sex-worker on a protest in London. Her poster read 'Better sell your body in Soho than your mind in the City,'

Next stop, Bruhl, and I've no idea now what work we did there. The building we lived in had a church-like look, a warm kitchen where we ate - orange cheese, red jam? - and a tower with a winding staircase. One night, after a festive meal that may have been our Christmas dinner, I climbed to the top of the tower with a young Dutch woman in a sari or sarong. She had been brought up in Indonesia, and put on the wind-around silk dress in honour of the occasion. When we got to the top and looked out on a Brueghel winter night, I realised she was shivering, and put an arm round her waist. Her body felt warm through the silk, but very thin, all ribs and vertebra. I felt sorry for her. She talked about her family leaving Indonesia. They must have packed up in a hurry after Pearl Harbour, and she made it feel like a fall from paradise.

From my own colonial relations, I've sometimes had the same impression. Partly it's the cold,  loss of tropical sunshine, status, servants and cheap drink. Repats sometimes seem like the cartoon creatures that keep running in the air when they're over the cliff. Back home after the war, as Labour began letting go of colonies, the indigenous middle classes had already got used to cooking for themselves, with hoovers and washing machines to lighten the load. Great-uncle Chunky had retired from the Sudan political service to a flat off the Earls Court road and a bottle of whisky a day. He cooked his own dinner and put on a dinner jacket to eat it, seemed cheerful whenever we met. I noticed – or my mother remarked on - his tiny feet. Apparently he'd had a thousand square miles to govern and police with a little platoon of askaris.

The other side of the world, in the Philippines, Aunt Lorna and her children spent the war in a Japanese camp (as I write her son Rupert, my contemporary, lies in a coma after a collapse of his immune system). In Kenya, my mother's sister Erica married a German gold-miner and got interned by her own government when war was declared. When the Mau-mau won, Erica and her family left Kenya for the UK. Erica and Rudi hated it, went abroad again, and  their children spent their holidays with us.

On Boxing Day, or was it New Year's day, in Bruhl I walked out across the snowscape with a man called Andrew Rutter. I had recognised him from school, though he'd been several years ahead of me. Now on this glittering holiday, we had more time to get to know each other. The land between the town and the Rhine was flat and would have been too soggy to walk across without the snow and frost. There were no hedges or ditches between most of the big flat fields.so we could walk straight to where river should be. On the way,  at what might have been a dividing line between two fields, we came to an arch of thorny trees. A lych-gate between nowhere's, and we stopped for a moment under the leafless twiggy branches. With a few berries, perhaps, left over by the birds. By mistake or on purpose that I bumped into one of the scrawny tree trunks. That shook a silver rain of frost onto our heads, and down our necks. That was the trick, and the treat was in the glitter of crystals floating down around.

Today I chanced to read of a UCL experiment where human guinea-pigs were paid to give themselves and others electric shocks for money. It turned out they were more ready to take the pain and cash themselves than to profit by hurting others. Might this apply to suicide bombers too, their own first and most certain victims.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1114/181114-rather-harm-selves-than-others-for-profit

Before we knew the Rhine was just ahead, we saw what looked like a pantomime ship sliding across the fields, but when we got to the water's edge there were no more boats in sight. The river flowed too fast for ice to set on it, too fast for us to keep up with at a normal walking pace. When we threw in a bottle or can for target practice. it left us behind while we looked for stones to throw..

I  remember things Andrew said to me. He hoped to become an architect, but first he wanted to work his way around and help build things himself - learning his trade from the ground before drawing castles in the air. He described some time he'd spent on a community project in West Africa. When he took off his shirt or vest, people would come up and slap him on the back. His skin was unusually white and they took his freckles and moles for insects biting him. He'd been flattered but confused when a woman told him she'd like his babies. When I began writing this, I emailes our old school - which I had once been asked to leave - to see if they had his address. They did. I've not yet answered a long letter I got from him, with drawings of buildings he helped preserve in WInchester. I'll send him this in return in case he remembers it.

From Bruhl, it was.home to England and the last few weeks of my 'international service.'  As usual, that journey runs into earlier and later ones. I have postcard images in mind of vineyards, castles on crags along the Rhine. Plus my own down-to-earth ones of tarmac, grass and gravel verges, traffic coming and going. Often there were roads on either side of the river. When I could see across, there seemed to be more traffic on the other side. I visited no castles but crossed several bridges and paid for ferry crossings in the hope of a better lifts. Big cars rarely stopped.  It was mostly smaller, older ones, and lorries or vans. I formed a prejudice against fat Belgians in big cars. They seemed to travel a lot but never stopped, unless one did but censored it to save my prejudice.

Hitch-hiking can be a way of NOT seeing the world, narrowing it down to tarmac, a barcode of hopes and disappointments. At major junctions and roundabouts, there was a loose etiquette between hitchhikers: first come, first out, the latest arrival going furthest down the road and acknowledging the others on the way. Sometimes it made sense to double up. A car that stopped might have room for more than one, a girl might welcome protection and her new companion be more likely to get a lift with her. We may have set out to see the world, but  the means became the end, a roller coaster of highs and lows, starts and stops.

Sometimes, if the driver was only going another two kilometers there would be another let-down. One cold evening, I got dropped off at a small side-turning, not in a town or village but with the dark river on one side and a few houses and old buildings on the other. The bank of the river was built up, to shore up the road and/or provide a morring for barges and river boats. None of the houses looked inviting, the buildings were empty, disused perhaps but surely locked. There were no open sheds or haylofts for me and my sleeping bag.

Then about 50 yards ahead of me I saw the dark hulk of a boat against the quayside not far from the road. If it was a barge lying empty, there might be some flat, dry space inside. As I approached, I realised it was not a barge and not quite empty. At the far end was a deckhouse, with a glimmer of light through a shuttered window.  I nerved myself up to knock and ask if they might have a space below deck.

B efore I could say Hans Schmidt, the door was opened by a friendly young man. He must have noticed my rucksack and seemed neither surprised nor annoyed when I asked about the hold – I knew the word for sleep and pointed back down for the hold. 'Come in' he said, making way for me through the narrow doorway. In and down into a warm little cabin living room. In a kitchen space beyond stood a young woman who left her stove when he called and came greet me. When he'd explained my presence, she offered me coffee. As I drank it they asked where I'd come from, where I was going and...had I already eaten. They must have been about to eat and now they set another place. When we finished eating, in what I feared might be a parting gesture, they offered me drink. When that was finished, they pushed in the chairs on one side of the table and opened a sliding door in the wooden cabin wall. Inside was a little box-bed almost filled with a fat duvet. Better than hay in a manger, or getting dropped off at an inn by a Good Samaritan. 

Or being eaten by wolf in grandmother's clothing. I slept like a baby, and when I came out of my box in the morning, they had coffee waiting again. Over breakfast, the offered me a job as deck-hand. That must have been what the box bed was for. I almost jumped at it, but I was supposed a 'conscientious' objecter with another couple of months of international service to do with IVS.  A ride on a river boat wasn't quite the service I'd been excused the army for, and I could hardly renege on my deal with IVS. I told them how much I wished and thanked them for their kindness, but had to say No.

Did I? I've always half-regretted it, especially since I cant remember what if anything I did for IVS when I got home. Another petty paradise lost. What could have been better than spring and summer on a river boat?  Tough and bronzed as we whizzed downstream between those cliffs and vineyards, stately cities, smoky Ruhr to mighty North Sea ports. Then turn about, reload and push our bow-wave back upstream.

 
I said goobye and trudged back onto the drab old road. Between Bonn and Cologne I must have turned left, west in the direction of the chanel and Calais. With hitching, you never quite which way you'll go, your route the sum of other people's, unfolding as you go.  'Heaven knows how we will get there...'

 https://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=youtube+woyaya&ei=UTF-8&fr=chrf-yff29

I cant remember getting home, or anything from my remaining months with IVS in London. Had the IVS hostel and office moved from Pembridge VIllas - in W11 not far from where we'd lived at the end of the war - to Oakley Street up near King's Cross? Perhaps my family had already moved from our little red house in a field to a substantial stucco pile on the road out of Wokingham. That may have been later, while I was away somewhere else. Wherever home was I was glad to get there, like any more or less prodigal son, happy to see my parents, brothers and sister again. 'Bless Daddy, Mummy, Martin, Richard and Susan,' in that order from my childhood bedside prayers.

But who the hell was that Hans Schmidt? Here's a choice of two. The first resembles my father as a young man, the second my step-grandson now aged 10, the third's a German conductor. And then there's that chariot.

 

 

How on earth did such narrow wheels not get stuck in the desert sand or cultivated land around the Nile? Or was the face of the earth quite different then, the Sahara teaming savanna...flat as a showcase floor?