More reminiscing—I can't stop the flood of memories of my
youth from overwhelming me. Today
I am in a reverie about my first journey abroad, in 1952, when I was an
oh-so-young 22. A memoir of most
of that trip, spent in England at a summer job, is part of a previous posting [1]. But the summer also included two brief
stays on the Continent, which were not accompanied by the self-confidence I had
when I revisited the Continent ten years later [2].
Flying across the Atlantic was uncommon in 1952—it was a
long and uncomfortable flight on a DC6 propeller plane, which we would now call
small, with refueling stops in Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland. Almost everyone took a boat then, as I
did. My boat sailed from Hoboken, NJ,
to which my mother and I drove in her car. She saw me off with a mixture of hugs and anxiety on both
our parts. As I sailed away, still
waving to her on the dock, I realized to my consternation that I had the keys
to her car in my pocket! I later
found out that she—always one who planned for the unforeseen—had an extra set
in her purse.
I learned an important lesson from that incident: there are
situations when you cannot uncast the dice, so obsessing about their roll is
futile. I would be enisled for
five days, unable to turn back the clock or the boat to return the keys. Those who rush to and fro nowadays,
accustomed to instantaneous action and response, cannot know the sense of total
relaxation such a suspended state imparts: one is unalterably in the hands of
Fate. In this case, Fate was
accompanied by the camaraderie of a boatful of boisterous youngsters like me, almost
all on their first trips abroad, together with a seemingly limitless number of
cases of Heineken beer. (It was a
Dutch ship.)
We docked in Le Havre, most of us then taking the boat-train
to Paris. On it, reality brought
us down to earth with a thump: the still-omnipresent, depressing reminders of
World War II. The landscape was
quasi-lunar, with craters pockmarking it everywhere, and the ruins of as-yet
unrebuilt villages standing as signs of the carnage less than a decade
before. It was a blessing to
arrive in undamaged Paris, which had been declared an open city by both sides.
On this leg of my trip to Europe, I stayed in Paris only
overnight, the following day taking a boat-train to Calais, then progressing by
ferry across the Channel to Dover and on to London by train, and the next day
to my summer job in Essex. As I
reported in [1],
London had not at all been spared destruction, as had Paris; desolation from
the Blitz was everywhere. As a
sheltered American now amidst it, I could not fathom what it must have been
like to live there through the War.
At the end of the summer, my exhilarating job in England
completed, I returned to the Continent.
I flew to Brussels (my first airplane flight), spent a few days of
sightseeing there, and then went by train to Munich. Again the landscape showed the War's devastation, as did
Munich itself. What idiocy, I
thought, that supposedly civilized people descend over and over again into such
ruination! I must confess, though,
that I couldn't sympathize with Munich as I had with London. I felt just a schoolyard
indignation—"You started it!"
More sober reflection would have reminded me that children and others
who had nothing to do with starting the War had nonetheless died horrible
deaths in Munich as well as in London.
None of us, alas, is much removed from Paleolithic feelings of
vengeance.
After the spartan food of England, which was still rationed
and lean after the War, my stomach was unprepared for the richer fare and heavy
sauces of the Continent. That, and
my angst at traveling alone in countries whose languages I didn't understand,
precipitated a debilitating round of stomach ailments that impeded my
enthusiastic tourism. By the time
I reached Munich, I needed medical help, so I took a series of trams to an
American military hospital, showed my passport, and pled for assistance. (It was thankfully forthcoming in the
form of an examination and medications.) In Zurich, my next stop, I checked myself for two days
into a clinic, whose nuns put me right, even with no common language between
us; I could dredge up only a few words of Yiddish, which I hoped would have
close cognates in German.
It was only when I went on to Paris for a week, joining a
friend who had worked at the same company in England as I had earlier in the
summer, that my health and equanimity returned to normal. I stayed in a student dormitory at the
University of Paris, and found I was able to eat its cafeteria fare, even to
imbibe from the carafe of wine that magically appeared on each tray. "A meal without wine is like a day
without sunshine"—a new experience for me.
As I said out the outset, my roving on the Continent in 1952 was not
underpinned by the aplomb that my more mature self had on a lengthier junket
there ten years later. It would
have been so nice for this naïf in 1952 to have had the ability of today's 22-year-olds: press a few
buttons on a Skype-enhanced cellphone and seek succor from friends and family
at home. In 1952, when the only
means of conversation with someone in the States was a public-telephone call,
prepaid at $5-10 per three minutes ($50-100 in today's currency), I was forced
to remain incommunicado—a frightening experience for the then-me, daunted to be
so isolated for the first time in my life. I felt a surge of relief as I returned to Le Havre, there to
embark for home and familiarity.