It was always good to get back to Germany and normality,
well; relative normality. It was usually
pretty quiet after a long detachment as people would take time off to be with
their family. It was a nice slow pace of life but gradually it would build back
up again. Many of us would be training
hard for the upcoming rugby season. I
had even been chosen to represent the station in a rugby sevens competition. These competitions were very serious and it
was a great honour to be selected.
Normally there would be fifteen players per team, now; still on the same
sized pitch, you would field seven players. To make
this even better, the competition was to be held in Berlin.
We had to catch a military train in Braunschweig and that would
take us to Berlin. I was so looking
forward to seeing Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, even the Berlin wall
itself. There were lots of rules and
regulations to follow and it was quite unsettling to have armed troops, the
train guard, running up and down the carriages.
The train was used as a symbol of Western opulence and was almost as
luxurious as the famous Orient Express.
The food was first class and they even had their own labelled wine. The Russians played their version of the one-upmanship game
as well, by placing thousands of tanks beside the tracks at a tank depot called,
I think, Kirchmoser. They weren’t aware
that some of us knew the tanks didn’t work.
The train would stop at a place called Marienborn where the
Russians would inspect and stamp the travel documents. There would be an Officer Commanding the
train and a Warrant Officer, both British Army, along with an interpreter who
would disembark and march along the platform.
It was very interesting to watch and almost as weird as a Monty Python
sketch. The British Army guys would be
ramrod straight, snapping to attention and slicing out salutes while the
Russians were very casual and relaxed, almost disinterested. We had been told that the game to play at the
border crossing was to try and get the Russian guards to move.
You are probably aware of the guards at Buckingham Palace who
famously refuse to move or even grimace, no matter what the tourists get up to. What we would do with the Russian guards is that,
once the party of people had gone inside the station to inspect the travel documents,
we would throw bars of chocolate, or packets of cigarettes, so that they would
land close to the feet of a guard. The guards
were supposed to be standing to attention and not allowed to move but the temptation
of a brand new packet of twenty Benson and Hedges, or a bar of Cadburys chocolate,
would be too much for some of the guards who would bend down, take the item and
squirrel it away in his pockets.
This of course would send up a roar from those on the train and
was quite entertaining. There was some
kerfuffle along the line, at Helmstedt, where the engine had to be changed to
take us across East Germany and then changed again as we arrived at Berlin. The journey was really interesting and was like
trundling through a sort of time warp.
Passing through train stations where the station signs would still be in
old Germanic gothic script, seeing steam trains and horses and carts rather
than trucks or lorries was strange. Perhaps
the weirdest sight would have been huge women in bra and trousers swinging pick
axes and heaving shovels along the train tracks.
We had the usual security brief on arrival and were given a
list of places that we should not visit.
The main Hofbrauhaus in Berlin was number one on the list and of course it
was now the first place we intended to visit.
For the first night we loaded up on beer in the rugby club at RAF
Gatow. Again it was interesting to be somewhere
so connected to history such as Gatow, which is where the famous Berlin airlift
had come in to. We met many of the other
teams who would be playing in the competition and sized up the opposition. We then headed for Berlin itself. There were lots of suggestions about where to
go. Many of the guys wanted to visit the
large brothels where they put live sex shows on as part of the entertainment. I
don’t think it was because they were perverts but more because they had never
seen anything like it before.
Someone spotted an Irish pub and it was decided that we should,
have a few pints of the black stuff. Sort
of went against my beliefs to drink Guinness in Berlin especially with the vast
range of beautiful German beers on offer.
Someone else was buying so I didn’t complain. I do remember that there were about one dozen
of us and the barman lined all the pints up along the bar. We were told to wait until they were all
poured before anyone touched a drink.
With the final pint poured I was invited, as an Irishman, to taste the
Guinness and give my opinion of it. I
took a sip, set the beer down and explained that I thought it was shite.
We walked out of the bar and left the beers sitting on the counter. I don’t think the barman knew what hit
him. We legged it, laughing our heads
off to the Hofbrauhaus. This was supposed
to be the best one in all of Europe.
There was a fantastic atmosphere.
The place was heaving with people and a full sized German oompah band
was giving it some wellie on the stage.
The beer was served in huge litre steins and was very nice indeed. We were told that no one had ever managed to steal
one of the steins from the Berlin Hofbrauhaus so of course the challenge for
the evening had been issued. Quite close
to us was a table full of young men who looked to us like football hooligans.
Turns out they were members of the French Foreign Legion so
we got together for an evening of entente cordiale. If we had met them an hour or two before that
might have proved to be an interesting evening drinking Irish Beer in Berlin
with some French chaps. They were good
fun and we had an excellent evening. I
managed to snag a stein from the Hofbrauhaus and still have it with me today however
I doubt very much if I could drink half a dozen steins of strong German beer
these days. Waking up with a hangover
the morning of a rugby match was quite common so I doubt very much if any player
in the competition was on top form that day.
We were put out of the competition in our first match by RAF
Bruggen. Bruggen had fielded a side of
excellent players. All of them
represented the air force at rugby and were, as they say, as fit as a butchers
dog. In a way we didn’t mind, we could
stay by the main pitch, watch rugby and drink beer in the sunshine. For the final we saw RAF Gatow versus RAF
Bruggen, the team that had put us out.
Before the match the Bruggen chaps stayed out on the pitch, most of them
were wearing official RAF kit, rubbing the fact that they were so good, in our
faces. They were passing balls to each
other but in a sort of show off way.
A few minutes before the match the Gatow team came out. They looked to be a heavy set bunch while the
Bruggen fellows were young fit athletic types.
The match started and once Gatow had the measure of Bruggen, experience began
to take over. Yes Gatow were a heavy and
slow menacing lot but they could tackle and the Bruggen guys didn’t like
it. The Gatow guys would commit to a
tackle and even if the Bruggen guy had passed the ball on he was still taken
out. There wasn’t enough of a gap
between the crunching tackle coming in to play and the ball being passed for it
to be considered a foul. It was a
brilliant demonstration of skill and experience against fitness. Gatow unsettled the Bruggen guys and won the
competition.
That evening we experienced all the sights and enjoyed a
thunderous party at the rugby club before taking the train the next day back to
the West. In Monchengladbach, as we
moved from one train to another, we found a kiosk selling Kokkinelli, our
favourite free tipple from Cyprus. We
had been filling up on wine on the train anyway so it would have been wrong not
to buy some Kokkinelli. While waiting
for our train someone spotted a busker and we all went over and joined in. Some of the guys went around the commuters
and travellers collecting, while the more naturally gifted among us sang and
danced. It must have been one of the best
days of his busking career and we had fun too.
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