After I had completed my basic education of eight years of primary school - or "Volksschule" as it was called then - there were no 'vocational guidance councillors'; the only one to guide me was my hard-working stepfather who came home each evening, tired and worn out, with plaster of Paris under his fingernails.
I remember him as a thoroughly decent man who had known nothing but hardship and hard work, and who had been a bachelor all his life before my mother got hold of him and he suddenly found himself to be a "father", which is what I never called him as it was too late for me to change sides. He was "Onkel Erich" to me, and a good uncle at that.
Only once did he try to interest me in becoming an "Insulierer" like himself, which meant working high up on some rickety scaffolding and covering hot pipes in the same plaster of Paris which was always stuck under his fingernails. The attempt turned out to be a total disaster as, during a fifteen-year-long post-war starvation diet, I just hadn't grown strong enough to keep up the pace, and he left me to find my own way.
Have you ever heard a boy say, 'I want to be an accountant'? Me neither. 'I want to be a doctor', yes. Or an airline pilot. Or an astronaut - well, maybe not an astronaut, as the only 'astronaut' at the time when I was still a boy had been Laika, a Soviet dog. But an accountant? No, never!
I had absolutely no idea what I was going to be, but my grades from my final year at school - which were all "sehr gut", with the exception of "Religion" and "Naturlehre" a mere "gut", and "Sport" even "mangelhaft" - suggested that I would neither be a good priest nor a good scientist nor, least of all, a good athlete, which left me just one option: office work.
How I found that advertisement by a large insurance company offering an articled clerkship to someone who had completed schooling at high school level or, better still, "Abitur" - which is the general qualification for university entrance - is now lost in the mists of time, as is the source of my 'chutzpah' that made me think I would even get a look-in as a mere "Volksschüler" or primary school-leaver, but a look-in I got and an interview and several weeks later my mother, as my legal representative (I was still only fourteen years old), had to go in and sign my indenture.
Yes, accountancy was part of my articled clerkship, but so was actuarial work, contract law, economics, business correspondence, and business ethics - what's that, I hear you ask? no, it's not the place north of Sussex - and it was not at all clear yet that one day I would sail the wide accountancy instead of, say, tame wild lions which, it must be said, I came nearest to when I spent almost a year as an accountant in Africa after I had started my transition by having spent two years in banking.
And so, on and on I went, using accountancy more as an excuse than as an end, to travel the world and having lots of fun and many adventures in more than a dozen different countries without ever having to call on the support from "The League for Fighting Chartered Accountancy".
