Flights of Fancy

                                  My father, Wattie Davidson, was a man of great hobbies. Some of them stayed with him all of his life. Fishing, sailing, skiing were excellent parts of our growing up. However, Dear Friends, I don’t know what my two brothers and my sister thought of the suggestion that we should speak German at the dinner table, particularly as we didn’t know any!! Although my brother George is now fluent in both German and French, I, however, am not. But, like much that we learn in our youth, some of it has stuck.

I remember as a student hitching my way around Europe. In those days, campsites took one’s passport as security. So there I was in Austria, in the town of Salzburg, camping and getting drunk with fellow back-packers. It is true that I had envisaged myself amidst the alpine meadows as a ropey looking version of Julie Andrews chiming about the hills being alive. “The Sound of Music” has also stayed with me since my teenage days. However, I preferred to sit at outside cafes treating myself to fancy pastries during the day and better beer during the evening. At the time those were indeed ‘a few of my favourite things’, not exactly whiskers on kittens but—? At some point, Dear Friends, I must have felt guilty at my  decadence and taken a bus to the German border with a view to visiting Berchtesgaden and Konigsee. In those days one couldn’t cross the border without a passport so it should have been no surprise when a German border guard wouldn’t allow me to enter the country because my passport was sitting in the camp-site office.

“Nix Deutschland”  was German I understood.

So I was off the bus and starting to walk down the road back towards Salzburg. But on the way, Dear Friends, I caught sight of the beginning of a path heading uphill. Rather than waste a day, I decided to go for a wee dander. I had ascended about half a mile when a wooden stake showed me the border and so, for no other reason than to cock a snoop at authority, I crossed it and thus entered Germany illegally.  I was not foolish enough to descend to the road on the German side and after a while, having proved that I could, I headed back to the post and down back to the road on the Austrian side, making my way back to Salzburg.

So with my limited German I had developed the confidence to try out a few words here and there,

“Zwei Biere,” springs to mind. “Nicht hinauslehnen” was only useful on busses and trains. Passport returned I decided to hitch to Italy.

I headed for the Brenner Pass. I can’t remember where I was when a car stopped and picked me up. In the front were a delightful,  middle-aged Austrian couple. They agreed to drop me close to the Italian border. Bundled into the back, with my hefty back pack, I settled in gratefully for the ride. After about 20 minutes I decided that I should try to make conversation and do them the honour of doing so in their own language. They had given little hint that they might understand English. So I decided to step up to the plate and instigate a conversation. I toyed in my mind with the words and eventually was satisfied that I had come up with a sentence which I thought would be a great introduction. It went,

“Entschuldigen sie mich, haben sie forellen auf Osterreich?”

They answered with a single “Ja” and I inwardly preened myself with satisfied contentment.  But a questioning look between husband and wife suggested something was awry.  It was only a momentary glance, nothing to disturb the equanimity and strutting plumage of somebody who had proved he could communicate in a second language. I was proud of myself, filled with self-confidence, ready to pick up a copy of “Der Spiegel” and thumb it pretentiously after I had crossed the border into Italy.

The journey then continued in relative silence while I mulled over something equally spectacular to say to them. Nothing came. Eventually the Pass hove into view, they pulled over and I got out,

“Danke, danke sehr fur die ummm, ride” My German failed at the last word. Nevertheless I was very happy and proceeded to walk towards the border.

I guess that I had been strolling for about 20 minutes or so, ruminating on my luck at meeting such a pleasant couple and them dropping me off way beyond where I expected when it suddenly occurred to me that as an introduction to complete strangers I had said something ridiculously eccentric.

As I mentioned before, my father pursued active holidays and it was only natural for him to teach us terms in German that related to skiing, sailing or fishing. However it was really, really strange that his eldest son should ask complete strangers, by way of introduction,  whether or not they had trout in Austria! But I knew of Osterreich from ski holidays and forellen from fishing. It had seemed perfectly appropriate at the moment. But how often, Dear Reader, do we convince ourselves that we have said or done the right thing at the time, only to awaken in the wee sma’ hours with ‘what was I thinking?’ coursing through our dreams. Ach well, some days, friends, one is the pigeon, some days one is the statue.

I believe a long delay before the food arrives in German speaking cafes and restaurants has occasionally produced this question.

“When am I becoming a sausage?”

When my brother, George, visited a few years ago and we were going out for lunch, I asked him in my Wattie-taught German what did soup mean in German.

He smiled because apparently I had asked what soup was as a philosophical concept!?

That is, I am told, a common error.

So I guess that my father had firm passions from which he rarely strayed and ones which were fads, which had us hopping from horse to horse like a Roman desultor. The trouble with the latter was the rest of us became so confident about what we thought was now our level of expertise that we did little to convince our European neighbours that we were not eccentric Brits; that the foreign language teaching in the UK was indeed excellent, which it most certainly was not. (Except if one is George Davidson but he was always destined to turn base metal into gold)

There are lifetime passions and there are casual fads, flights of fancy which know not where they may land. The German language was one of the latter for me.