We were fellow-articled clerks in the early 1960s. We sat at desks opposite each other, and all that gazing at each other must've done something because on the last evening in town before I was to board the train to Bremerhaven where I would board the ship to Australia, we had our first and last night out.
I wrote to her from Tilbury, then from Curaçao at the Panama Canal, and again from Papeete in Tahiti and Auckland in New Zealand. Once I was settled in Australia, I wrote to her from Canberra, telling her that I had started what looked like a promising career with the ANZ Bank.
It wasn't the thought of her that made me decide to return to Germany after two years, but rather the feeling that I wasn't quite ready yet to shed my "Germanness". I had written to her throughout those two years, and I wrote to her again from every port that brought me closer to Germany, where I arrived in the middle of winter in December 1967.
Few people in those days had a telephone, and so I stood on her parents' doorstep unannounced. Luckily, I had completely forgotten to buy a bunch of flowers which would've made me look even more foolish when her mother took me into the lounge room where she was sitting next to a man whom her mother introduced to me as her daughter's fiancé.
The rest is all a bit of a blur but I don't think I even sat down, but beat a quick retreat into the cold night outside. I stayed for some nine months, during which I worked for three different banks in three different cities, earning more at each one than I had at the previous, to save enough money for my return fare to Australia. It was never quite enough, and so I took a job in South West Africa for six months to top up the kitty.
I was back in Canberra in April 1969, and back at the same bank. Having picked me up from where I had left them a little over a year ago, they weren't too happy when I decided to leave again at the end of the same year to go to New Guinea, and on from there, and on and on and on ...
Never during all those subsequent years, when I lived and worked in a dozen different countries, did I ever think of writing to her again, but while I lived and worked in Greece, I heard that my father was seriously ill, and so I flew back to Germany to sit with him for a couple of weeks, and then returned for the last time for his funeral in January 1984.
I was totally unprepared for the funeral and inadequately clothed for the German winter. Yet, I had to sit it out to meet all the family I had always avoided to meet and never really known nor liked before. The feelings must have been mutual because even my brother, older than me by thirteen years, whom I hadn't seen since he left the broken family home when I had just started school, never even shook hands.
I knew no-one else in my old hometown except ... and so I looked up her parents in the phone book. Yes, they had a phone by then and, yes, her mother answered it. "She no longer lives here", she told me, not knowing who I was, and gave me another phone number under another name. I rang, and what followed was an excited conversation during which she told me that she had got married to that man who had sat next to her, had given birth to two sons who were now in their teens, and would I come over for a champagne breakfast in the morning.
Next morning I took a taxi to what was a far out-of-town suburb where she and her two boys and her husband and her husband's mother lived in what was every German's dream, an "Eigenheim" on its own 500 square metres of land. It seemed she had married well. Her husband was at work and the boys at school, and her mother-in-law in her own room upstairs, and we talked as if the last twenty years had never happened.
Before I called a taxi to take me back to the city, she said she would ask her husband if she could go out with me the following evening, which we did, first to a Greek restaurant where I impressed her with my few words of Greek, then to a bar, then to another bar, and then we went for a long walk through the old city which had gone dark and quiet.
She told me that her mother had lied to me when, all those twenty years ago, she had introduced that man who was now her husband, as her fiancé, and that she had often wondered how her life might have turned out had she followed me to Australia. I didn't have the heart to tell her how miserable those penniless first two years had been, and that the thought to take her with me had never occurred to me.
A few days later, I was back at work in Athens, and more than a year later, I was back in Australia, going through the turmoil of trying to find my feet in my old home. During all that time, we kept writing to each other, right into the age of computers and the internet and WhatsApp.
Then, fast forward another twenty years, came her surprise: would I like to see what I had written to her from 1965 to 1967, and again from 1984 until what by then was 2015 or thereabouts. Every postcard and every letter I had ever written: she had kept them all while living in that "Eigenheim" on the outskirts of the city, raising two children, preparing school lunches, doing the laundry and the dishes and cooking dinner, and perhaps dreaming all the time of being somewhere else.
A month later a large DHL-parcel arrived with a covering letter which read, "This is just the half of it. If you want the rest, let me know." This wasn't so much a time capsule as a timebomb! The real bomb arrived some years later, in late 2022, when one of her sons sent me this email:
"Hallo Peter, hier ist der jüngere Sohn von ....... Ich habe die traurige Pflicht auch Dich zu informieren. ...... ist am 23.11.22 verstorben. Die Beisetzung fand in ...... statt. Ich hatte deine Nummer in Ihrem iPhone gefunden, konnte Dich als den Auswanderer zuordnen und eine kurze Suche brachte mich auf eure Website." For a translation, click here.
For fifty-five years she had grown old in what is every German's dream, an "Eigenheim". Now I have also grown old in my Australian "Eigenheim".
I realised I'd grown old when I read that my first girlfriend had died!
