The Community of Sweden has advised me that it is closing down its site and moving across to Farcebook, so I copied my only contribution to CoS and will perpetuate it here as a sort of prequel to Clod Nine LOL
It may stir up memories for some of the old pals mentioned - or better not...
My first visit to Sweden
I first travelled to Sweden with a school friend in 1961 on our way to Cuba to help Fidel Castro defeat Batista. We had heard there were banana boats going to the Carribean from Sweden, so we hoped to catch a lift...
My pal, Martin Schmorl had been jilted by my sister, and I felt betrayed by my beautiful young actress friend Christine Lange, thus escape into male heroism was the only option :-)
Somehow, we remained stranded in Stockholm's Kungstraed Gardens (sp?), drinking endless cups of tea at the Tetley pavillion and talking to the migratory foreigners for whom this was THE meeting place..One of these was Jean-Pierre Palassy.
We worked when we could, usually in restaurants, and spent lots of time in one particular cafe in Kungsgatan, where we ogled the flickorna passing by...
We had taken over an empty boat in the harbour for our quarters, and that worked out fine - until one night when a huge drunken Finn came down through the hatch swearing and brandishing a big knife. Luckily he had had just a little too much sprit, so we managed to escape unhurt.
Shaken by this incident, Martin departed the scene. He went back to Hamburg, was forgiven by his father, learned the book-selling trade thoroughly and took up steam trains as a hobby, I heard later.
Jean-Pierre and I each shacked up with a vaenninna, which seemed only natural to us at the time. Mary-Birgitta still lived at home, and her mum didn't bat an eyelid! What an amazingly modern country, I thought.
I don't recall much of those few summer months now, except that I learned Swedish 'against my will' - I thought it was a ghastly language at first, but somehow it insinuated itself into my brain, particularly if spoken by the girls... (In fact I believed in those days that Sweden was populated by two totally separate and different peoples: Swedish men, and kvinnorna (sp?) ). In time though, I began to really enjoy the language and its soft, lilting tones, particularly when one heard a girl tell her compices "Va soet han aer" in passing :-)
It couldn't last. I was working as a diskplok (sp?) in a restaurant one afternoon when my colleague Alex Wachsmuth from the deutsche presse-agentur looked up from his table and said "Aren't you even going to say 'hello'?!". (I had been due to take up an assignment in Berlin when I absconded to Sweden; in fact I had already sent my luggage and my Vespa there by train... My father, who was with the Foreign Office, had the German Secret Service search for me in East Germany - at least that's what he told me later.)
Suffice to say that I returned to Germany and accepted a posting to the Munich office of the dpa.
Obviously, this couldn't last. Somehow four years in Brazil had sensitised me against the German way of thinking and being... I lacked the ambiance of the Latin exuberance as much as the warm climate....
Strangely attracted to Sverige, though, and longing to see Mary-Birgitta again, I traipsed up to Stockholm once more in the following summer, met up with my friends including Jean-Pierre, and worked in Gamla Stan in a posh place called Baeckahesten, behind the grill bar. I remember causing some consternation, when, having pocketed my pay and changed shirts, I parked myself in front of the bar and became a paying customer!
Eventually, J-P followed a girl to Nynaeshamn and made me join him 'in the provinces'. We spent a very nice couple of months there, me working at a local hotel, until the season ended and we found our working permits revoked! Apparently, the Finns returning from their summer activities in the north needed to overwinter in the south, and took all the available jobs back...
J-P and I returned to Stockholm but, unable to find work there, hatched various idiotic plans to get some money: at one stage, we intended to rob a post office in the park at the diplomatic quarter, waited for nightfall to enter, unarmed - then meekly asked for the price of a stamp to Germany/France...
We were by then so hungry that we considered robbing one of those automatic food dispensers on a building wall, but there was a guy buying his whatever who took forever to complete the transaction. We got talking and he invited us to his place for dinner. We sat on a couch and started feeling a little uneasy when he dragged out photo albums with lots of boy pictures, so we politely thanked him and took our leave...
We ended up at the railway station, picked a south-bound train and spent the night in the toilet to escape the ticket collector.
The train went to Goeteborg, a fine city, we found, and would have spent some time sightseeing, except we were still starving. Jaevla Finns! By lunchtime we brazenly sat down in a restaurant, ordered, ate and drunk - and when the time came to pay the bill declared bancruptcy and offered to work off the price of the meal in the kitchen.
The waiter called the police, and a very understanding policeman actually paid our bill out of his own pocket! Such unexpected generosity is not easily forgotten, but after nearly 50 years I can no longer recall his name. Unknown Swedish policeman in Goeteborg: "ce n'etait rien qu'un peu de miel, mais il m'avait chauffe le coeur, et dans mon ame il brule encore, a la maniere d'un grand soleil", as Brassens sang at the time.
The following year I went to Paris to collect Jean-Pierre for another sortie to Sverige; we drove up in a huge black 'Traction-Avant' Citroen, taking turns to arrive quicker! I gave up driving the black beast when I came out of a tunnel in Goeteborg on the wrong side!
J-P went to Nynaeshamn of course, but I stayed with Mary-Birgitta, who I expected to marry. I found a steady job in a cardboard factory across town, got used to getting up jaevla early to be on time, worked with a redhead from Munich called Verena (but that's another story!), my working permit was indefinite, and I didn't mind the ice and snow everywhere.
I might still be in Stockholm, and I'm sure would have enjoyed every moment in the beautiful city, had I not conceived of the idea of becoming an importer of British Oxygen's new invention of a carbon dioxide-powered 'corkscrew'.
So early in 1963 I said haelsa till to Mary-Birgitta to try end stitch up a deal with B.O.
Tyvaer! Nothing came of it, I was stranded in Munich, was beaten on the head with a steel bar by some assailants in Schwabing, turned back out into the February night by a hospital after some stitches (those Germans had their principles, and aiding and abetting homeless youths was not one of them:-).
An old school friend from the Landschulheim am Solling, Brunhild Ritzenhoff, put me up in her Schwabing flat while I recovered (she moved in elsewhere for the duration), then I found myself living on top of a wardrobe in a garage whose main occupant was an American inventor. Sont aer livet...
My luck turned that year - or was it the next year? - when I met Bianca, a Polish-Italian girl from Berlin who somehow managed to get me on the straight-and-narrow... I started work repairing lighters and electric razors, answered an ad by Reuters news agency, was interviewed by David Sells and the rest is, as they say, history.
How we ended up in Australia with four kids in tow is a long story...
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