I opened a cupboard and some old photographs tumbled out. I looked at them and suddenly the memory of a wonderful adventure came back. .58 years rolled back and my young self took centre stage.This is his adventure.
Robert didn`t choose the French town he was travelling to. Nor did he choose the love story that would soon take hold of him. He couldn`t have known when he reached the school. He just knows he is fitting badly into his job as lector, teaching English to farm pupils who knew how to drain a tractor sump, shear a sheep and castrate a bull. They don`t know Keats or Byron and don`t want to. Robert`s 19, a bookworm and doesn`t play rugby. Social death. The pupils don`t want to learn English and he doesn`t want to teach them. He wants to meet the girls but doesn`t know how. It`s the late sixties so he can entertain pupils by translating the words of Beatles` songs or describing his entirely fictitious castle in Scotland with the ghostly serving staff in kilts as the Loch Ness monster bellows in the background. All of this will suddenly change.
Despite himself he makes a few friends and becomes fluent in French. He`s even offered a lonely girl he decides he doesn`t want. Walks in the country mean encounters with huge World War graveyards . .Clearly a hopeless case who didn`t know he had a secret friend. Paid far too much for the small amount of work he does he takes a jaunt to Paris. In the youth hostel on Rue Vavin he catches sight of a dark-haired beauty but how can he get to know her?
Well he doesn`t have to do a thing. The following morning he is chatting to her..This Wendy who will give him a lifetime of memories Later that day they are exploring Montmartre together. Then he`s visiting her regularly, all with no effort on his part. His guardian angel has taken charge. A few weeks later their quite unexpected adventure begins. After a night in a hotel in Lille they set off to hitch-hike to Germany still not much more than a decade after the war. He speaks German as well as French and this proves invaluable. Their trip through France is in the stylish car of the charming, if lustful, Maurice who provides them with a much more luxurious hotel stay.
Then the trip meets the first threat in the person of a psychotic truck driver on the road to Mannheim. Afterwards Wendy gets a veiled marriage proposal from a very wealthy German over lunch. In the dreamlike town of Heidelberg they get their first real appreciation of how beautiful and evocative Germany can be. They reach Nuremberg and see the chilling, haunted desolation that was Hitler`s parade ground but this is followed by a young soldier taking them to a "Weinstube" by the river where they are introduced in romantic surroundings to exquisite wine. Then more of the unworldly grandeur at the fairytale castle of Neuschwanstein before they go through the Alps to Austria.
More beauties and adventures follow and more interesting people cross their path. Robert is abandoned one day as Wendy goes skiing and he explores the strange world of the tragic King Ludwig while trying to grasp what Wendy has done to his life and his soul. Together again they reach the Bodensee .
After delighting in Alpine magnificence they begin the long trek to Berlin, the grim potential flashpoint between the superpowers. Before that they have an interminable wait in the snow at Innsbruck before being rescued by delightful Hungarians. More adventures and new friends await them before standing on the soulless monument to human cynicism that is the Berlin Wall, built solely to prevent human happiness.
So, what next? How will the guardian angel that has lifted Robert from dreary aimlessness to romance, adventure and delight deal with him now? The story is entirely true, surprising a sit often is.