These Reflections, it now strikes me, will eventually cover seven decades or more—he writes hopefully—which coincide with the length of time I have occupied my space on this Earth. Now, whenever you write about your own life you run the risk of referring to events that have no relevance to the lives of your readers, which is the principle reason why I have hesitated so long before going public. Memoirs are by their very nature deeply personal and perhaps only one’s nearest and dearest can fully share the memories. Then, of course, there is the fact that many, if not most, of one’s readers have no idea of the historical settings of these memories. Take East Germany, for example, or the German Democratic Republic as they liked to call themselves. How many of you can recall the building of the Berlin Wall or the wall along the border between East Germany and the West? Trump’s Wall with Mexico is to keep people out of the USA whereas the East German Walls were intended to enslave the population and stop people from leaving. I was caught somewhere in the middle.
In those days, straight after leaving university, I was full of piss and vinegar, full of energy, entirely confident and ready to take on the world, to wage a one-man war against the Evils of Soviet Communism. Just so you know, in 1936 John Steinbeck used the term Piss and Vinegar in his novel In Dubious Battle and again two years later in the more famous novel The Grapes of Wrath. The noun Vinegar has existed in English since the 12th century and by the 1920s vinegar had come to mean vitality and energy, just like vim and vigour.
So there I was, working in Germany with students, most of whom were refugees from the East; some were border guards who had deserted their posts, weapons in their hands, and risked death by jumping the Wall. It seemed only natural at the time for me to become their link between their new lives and friends and family members they had left behind. Getting in and out of East Germany was not easy, even for a Brit. I could take the one train available or I could drive along the one permitted autobahn route, which was what Hitler had called his motorway. Both options were fraught with danger and quite unpleasant interrogations by the East German Security Forces. Or I could fly, which was prohibitively expensive, and land in West Berlin. Whichever way I chose, I always ended up at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the only crossing point between East and West Berlin.
It was only with time that I realized that my frequent trips had attracted the attention of the Stasi, the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit, the Ministry for State Security, the Secret Police, one of the most hated and feared institutions of the East German communist government. As a matter of routine, all visitors were subjected to rigorous checks when entering or leaving the checkpoint. Gradually, these controls became extremely intrusive and unpleasant and I realized that time was running out for me. At first I moved freely around East Berlin meeting contacts and delivering messages, not written but verbal, for obvious reasons. I began to notice I was being followed and took measures to shake off my shadows until one day a ‘well-wisher’ advised me to stop my efforts and simply enjoy the attention I was getting. I had been acting suspiciously, she said, and that was the worst thing I could have done.
Interestingly, it was much later that I also discovered that my efforts were being monitored from ‘our’ side too. I was on vacation in the Canaries with the family when we were ‘befriended’ by an American couple, as sometimes happens on holiday. They said they were diplomats. The next time I ran into the man was in Vienna, Austria—just by chance, of course—and then later a third time in Leningrad, Russia when he admitted that he worked for ‘something like the CIA’. I never saw his ‘wife’ again. He admitted that they had been following my exploits since my Berlin days. Because our books were used all over the world my ‘globetrotting lifestyle made me an interesting contact. For much of every year, I spent time in dictatorships, for want of a better description, both left- and right-wing, that needed help with the teaching of English. We agreed to stay in touch.
My profession gave me easy access the world over, but the authorities always made sure that they had my activities under some sort of control. I learned to live with it. In Indonesia, for example, where I spent many years working with government, writing textbooks and holding workshops in schools, colleges and universities on many of the numerous islands that make up that vast country, my visa clearly stated that I was not allowed to ‘attend, visit or work in any institutions of education’. Each and every day, I was breaking the terms of my visa and the authorities could have swooped in and removed me whenever they wanted to. Now that was living on the knife’s edge! Exciting, I’d say.
