WHEN I look back at that summer in Germany, I can still smell the tang of vinegar at the pickling factory and how it knocked you back at the gate that first time. But after a week, sure you never smelled it any more, but you probably reeked of it.
And as we sat half dozing on the 5.30am bus to get to the early shift at the gherkin factory in our pale blue overalls, the fine commuters of Hamburg may have wrinkled a nose or pulled out a lace hanky to dab a dainty mouth, but they were too polite to comment.
And when I think back to the factory, I remember the 3ft high platform where I stood loading glass bottles, hour after hour for a crowd of Turkish women, stationed below, waiting to fill them up and send them on their way to the ovens.
If I did not work hard enough, and they ran short of glass bottles, they used me as target practice. Dodging hard gherkins was a laugh and by the end of the summer, I had the figure I had always wanted, courtesy of the constant unloading of pallets and the frenzied ducking and diving.
Twas far from my mother and my Sunday straw hat at Mass, I was.
But that summer in Hamburg was a magical one. You learn about the harshness of life when you spend a few months pickling gherkins. It was a few weeks to us; it was a whole lot more for the Turkish workers.
After a week standing over a vibrator picking out the ugly and the misshapen and rotten vegetables, you get a true sense of what you’d really like NOT to do for the rest of your life. I had nightmares of bloodied body parts on the conveyor belt in among the gherkins.
My friend lost a precious contact lens in the vegetable mix and we never ever found it. Some stranger probably doused it in mayonnaise and swallowed it on their burger. But what are you to do?
The magic of it was the summer and the friendships forged up close to the vinegar vat. There was a kinship born on the factory floor with other students – all Irish, all together. We worked the late shift and went straight over to the bar where, on a Friday night, we’d sit until 6am, drinking Apfelkorn, eating the best mint chocolate ice cream and singing The Wild Rover and rousing choruses of “Wrap me up in my oilskin and blankets.”
We dared each other on to wilder deeds. But they were innocent deeds really. At the local fairground, we took the pirate ship ride that suspended you upside down high high above the city as the ground counted down: 10, nine, eight, seven, six...
Coins and sweets and buttons tumbled from people’s pockets as they dangled, inverted, high above the crowd.
And oh, how I regretted the double helping of pineapple Chinese chicken I had wolfed down before venturing onto that ride.
The next dare was a visit to the famous Reeperbahn where the ladies of the night were a little tired of laughing students only out for a gawk. One disappeared upstairs and emptied a pot of urine on our heads. That cured the curious.
And there were many adventures because being young in a strange country is forever a rite of passage. Tossing shoes up on to balconies late at night – mine were never returned – and hitching to Berlin to spend the night out camping in the local park. The German police tried to warn us of criminals with knives – my German stretched to understanding the warning.
But we were a big band of Irish students: “Wir sind irisch”, we laughed and trusted that all would be well and that our nationality came with an invincibility tag.
And all was fine. We lived, we loved, we laughed, we spent a glorious summer that lives on in our memories, the summer when we peeled the backs off beer mats and used them as postcards from Hamburg to Berlin to Rome to Ios – the Greek island known to us as Irish Overseas Students – where you were guaranteed to meet somebody you knew from back home.
Those were carefree summers full of sunshine and laughter. We never dreamed it could go wrong. We were young, we had our whole lives ahead of us.
But sometimes it does go wrong. When the balcony collapsed in Berkeley and six young people fell through the air, so much died with them. I did not know them or the families, but I still couldn’t bear to watch their funerals on TV.
Because we were once students out having a glorious summer of fun in a place far from home and it could just as easily have come crashing around us.
And when you are older, you want to cradle your child forever, not let them go out into that wide world – clutch them tight. But there you stand on the ocean’s edge as they dash out into the waves; paralysed on the shoreline, wanting to howl out their names.
Because this is not the natural course of things. Mothers and fathers should never have to bury their children. And what words of consolation can anyone offer?
ENDS
