A Tale of Three Cities: Part 1

This entry was originally published on 26.3.2012; Part 2 was published on 7.4.2012

I’ve never ridden on the Marrakesh Express though the idea does appeal.  

In the summer of 1969, with the sound of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first hit already deeply embedded in my subconscious, I took a trip in a different direction. Nevertheless this was a journey that would ‘sweep cobwebs from the edges of my mind, (as I) had to get away to see what (I) could find’.  

I was just 17 and had never been abroad on my own. Apart from a couple of family holidays to the less than exotic beaches of Belgium, I had joined three school trips to the continent. France(1963), Austria (1966) and a pioneering expedition behind the Iron Curtain to what was then Czechoslovakia(1967) are all worthy of future blogs. Under hawk-like gazes of gaggles of teachers, itineraries were meticulously planned and finely tuned. Opportunities for extemporisation and personal exploration were extremely limited.  

A trip to Germany, youth hostelling along the Rhine was organised with two old school friends from Portsmouth, Pete and Rob. They were good companions and veterans of the various school trips during which we had shared many hilarious episodes.  However, a year’s separation had prepared us in different ways for our ‘Aufenthalt in Deutschland’.  

After finishing O levels, I left the relative tranquillity of Portsmouth and sunny Southsea for the hubbub of the capital. Simultaneously, I exchanged the prosaic formality of a public school for the earthier tone of a local state grammar. The naval and church traditions that defined the values of Portsmouth Grammar were altogether different from those of my new school.  I left behind the sons of Royal Navy officers, local vicars and chartered accountants. Located in a cluster of Nissen huts thrown up at the end of the war, the sixth form at Orange Hill, in Burnt Oak, Middlesex housed an altogether different constituency.  In addition to the skinheads and tough-nuts and rough diamonds there was a significant number of fellow first and second generation British-born Jews.  We were the sons and grandsons of immigrants who had escaped the pogroms of Czarist Russia and survived the Holocaust. Altogether the school entertained a potent social and cultural mix that was generously exposed by a bunch of gifted teachers to all that London had to offer.  Even so, while making the most of my new environment I had stayed in touch with Pete and Rob and we planned a summer trip together.  

The journey started with the misleadingly named boat-train from Victoria.  There was no Eurostar in those days.  In fact the train took us to Dover from where we caught a passenger ferry to Ostend and, from there, another train to Koblenz.  We spent the first night in a foreboding hilltop castle that operated at a level half way between a hostel and Colditz.  At Koblenz we started a cruise down the Rhine.  Our tickets enabled us to debark and re-board at towns and villages along the way.  We stopped off at various places including Rudesheim where I got totally pissed for the first time in my life.  It took us all two days to recover from quaffing vast quantities of cheap Rheinwein that gushed from kitchen-like taps in the wall of a cellar bar.

A week of gently sailing the sunlit Rhine enabled us to check out the Lorelei, visit castles and, subsequently consume more considered volumes of Rheinwein.  I discovered that travelling could be something more than a pre-organised trip and wholly reliant on timetables prepared by bureaucrats.  I persuaded the others to ignore parental prohibitions of hitchhiking.  From Saarbrucken we hitchhiked to Luxemburg via Trier.  Pete and Rob went together; I went on my own.  By mid-afternoon on each of the two days we met up at the youth hostels.  All I remember of Luxemburg was a strange valley in the middle of the city, the radio mast and two whole days of continuous, unrelenting, heavy rain.  Pete and Rob had had enough.  On the third day the sun came out and they headed for the station and a train to Ostend.  

The atmosphere of the trip thus far had affected me profoundly.  The ease with which we were able to meet and relate to people of our own age from all over western Europe and others from America who were a little older was genuinely exciting.  This was the era of Arthur Frommer’s ‘Europeon Five Dollars a Day’, the Vietnam War and Easy Rider.  The world was our oyster and I, for one, was keen to explore its every corner.  I had money that I believed I could make last for another ten days or so and school was out for at least that and more.  

Bidding my companions a ‘gute reise’ I took a bus to the outskirts of Luxemburg.  I was aiming for Paris.  I had been invited to visit by Christian Nicourt, a Sorbonne student from the suburb of Drancy who we had met in Mainz – or perhaps it was Saarbrucken.  It was only after returning to England that I would learn that Drancy had been the site of an internment camp from which French Jews rounded up by the Nazis were sent to Auschwitz.  

Arriving at the motorway ramp, I held up a handwritten sign that simply said ‘PARIS’ and stuck out my thumb.  In the days before iPods, or even Walkmen, I could do no more than sing to myself the theme I adopted for the trip: Canned Heat’s ‘On the Road Again’.  

It took me a few hours not to get very far.  A little way out of Luxemburg, a farm truck picked me up and dropped me close to Metz – perhaps no more than 50 miles from where I had started.  Less than confident that the Alsatians would lay on a direct ride to the capital, I made my way to the nearest station in a village called Onville.  Doing my sums, I reckoned that if I didn’t eat until the following day, I could afford a twelfth class train fare to the Gare de l’ Est.  A few hours later I was at the home of Christian’s parents that was minus said parents who were en vacances elsewhere.  Visibly delighted that I had unexpectedly shown up, Christian welcomed me in.  It was the eve of a holiday weekend and the first of several of his friends who would sporadically populate the house over the coming few days were already in evidence.  The weather was grey and overcast, Christian and his friends were anything but.  

In between eating, drinking and listening to music, I managed to get myself to a few of the tourist sites - the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Couer and even on a Bateau Mouche.  More exciting than that, was taking the wheel of the Nicourt family Deux Cheveux, even though I had not then actually passed my driving test.  The worse for wear from endless bottles of Beaujolais not so nouveau, memorably, we circled the centre of Paris at 5 am on a Sunday morning as Pigalle finally began to get some sleep.

For all of that, the highlight was hanging out with a group of twenty-something, arty Parisians who wouldn’t believe I was only just 17.  Some of them had played an active part in the student unrest that had gripped Paris during the previous year and which was part of a general upsurge in such activity that was continuing to sweep across campuses throughout the western world.  It all seemed somehow terribly romantic.  Most of them spoke little more English than I spoke French and some less.  We all worked hard at communicating with each other.  We talked about every subject imaginable and I learned more about France and Paris and French culture than I had in eight years of studying French in school.   However, despite my best efforts my spoken French, although improving by the day, was insufficient to pull any of the girls.  

The few photos that I have of the crowd that came and went chez Nicourt instantly take me back to those five wonderful days as does the soundtrack that was played and played over and over, again and again: Joe Cocker’s grandiose arrangement of ‘With a little help from my friends’; his strangulated vocal crescendos ripped apart the seams of the modest house.  Then there was The Stones’ ‘Beggars’ Banquet’ album and, in particular, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.  Patting our thighs in time to the bongo intro and enthusiastically chanting the ‘ooh-oohs’ of the chorus, we debated whether Jagger was really the devil incarnate or if it was all a clever marketing ploy.  Even those espousing the former knew the latter to be the truth.  I was also introduced to the erotic delights of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’.  When this hit the turntable, it was a cue for some of those in couples to indulge in activities that required some privacy; the rest of us speculated whether or not Serge and Jane had actually been ‘doing it’ when they made the record or if it was all a clever marketing ploy; once again, even those espousing the former knew the latter to be the truth.

As the day of M. et Mme. Nicourt’s scheduled return drew near, all hands were on deck to clean up the house and dispose of rubbish, a large proportion of which consisted of empty bottles.  Sleeping bags were folded and packed away as the general detritus of a five-day house party was removed.  One of Christian’s friends kindly volunteered to drive me the relatively short distance to the Autoroute du Nord.  Before I left there were Gallic kisses on the cheek and pledges of undying love and fraternity, even a tear or two was shed.  

Although I did subsequently exchange a couple of letters with Christian, I have never seen him since.  I often wondered what happened to him and his friends, those whose names I remember – Laurent, Dominic, Marie-Christine, Yolande – and those I don’t.  Apart from the memories of those few days that we shared together, now they are all just faces in photographs frozen in their twenties forever.

It was another overcast morning, a Tuesday if I am not mistaken, when I scurried out of Dominic’s car towards the autoroute entry ramp with a handwritten sign that simply said ‘ANTWERP’. I was on the road again.  

‘Marrakesh Express’ is the first track on the first and eponymous Crosby, Stills and Nash album released by Atlantic Records in 1969; I have the original vinyl as well as the CD re-release. Canned Heat’s ‘On the Road Again’ is a 45 RPM vinyl single released in 1968 by Liberty Records. ‘With a little help from my friends’ by Joe Cocker was a single originally released in the UK on the Regal Zonophone label in 1969; it’s on the album ‘Cocker Happy’ which is a compilation originally released in 1978 by Cube Records and re-released on 2CD set by Castle Communications in 1988. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ By The Rolling Stones, originally on Beggars’ Banquet is included in the 3CD set released by Abcko in 1989 as The London Years. ‘Je t’aime…moi non plus’ is the title track of an album of that name by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg released in 1969 by Phonodor.  

Aufenthalt in Deutschland was the name of the German Textbook series that Pete, Rob and I had used in studying for our German ‘O’ level.