(Part 1: can’t you hear that whistle blowing?)
(Part 2: rise up so early in the morn: north and east)
(Part 3: I spent cities like a handful of change: south)
(Part 4: you’re so ambitious for a juvenile: west)
(Part 5: I walked alone: west again)
4 May 2018
I was still limping the following morning, and my foot had come up in a spectacular bruise across the base of my toes. However, movement was less painful than it had been the day before, and I made it down to the station with only a token amount of wincing and cursing.
No train this time, though. I was taking the OuiBus – a very convenient service, which I’d booked online on John’s recommendation the previous day, and which would take me to Geneva airport. This was a much quicker way of getting back into Switzerland than retracing my journey to Martigny, spectacular as that had been.
Mont Blanc came out from behind the clouds just as John was waving me off. It seemed to be my luck with mountains. The OuiBus ride was a pleasant run through the foothills of the Alps, all green in the sunshine, and put me down in Geneva at an entirely sensible time to buy lunch before the next train.
French-speaking Switzerland was less mountainous than the parts I’d travelled through so far, but was still lovely. I let it slip past the window – Neuchâtel, Lausanne – lakes, narrow, pointed buildings, and a gentle green landscape.
At Basel I changed onto a train going north into Germany, and found myself in a compartment littered with newspapers and food wrappers. The landscape outside was not much more inspiring: cuttings lined with dusty concrete, with a few half-hearted trees here and there. We were approaching the Black Forest, though I had to say I couldn’t see anything of it. Why am I sad? I asked myself, and came to the conclusion that it was time to go home. I reached Karlsruhe, just as rush hour was getting going. I checked and rechecked the map: I had no desire to walk in the wrong direction on my injured foot.
It was the last night of my three weeks abroad. I’d been comparatively frugal up to this point. I couldn’t walk far on this foot of mine. For all these reasons, I’d booked a room in the Schlosshotel, and hadn’t flinched when the price went into three figures. The area in front of the station entrance formed an oblong, with the station and the zoo forming the long sides, and the hotel one of the short ones. I checked in – entirely in German, to my gratification – and took the lift up to my room. The lift was, I understood from a sign, an historic monument, but it still seemed to work all right.
My room was on the top floor, and looked over the square – which meant that I had a fantastic view of the trams. It seemed appropriate for the last night: they’d been a running theme of this trip. I took a shower and had a look at my foot. The bruising had come up in an even more impressive purple, but it wasn’t hurting so much.
[warning: after the picture of the tram, there is a picture of my bruised foot]
Then I took the lift downstairs again and limped a little way around the square, peering through the gates of the zoo to see what I could see (flamingoes, mostly) and looking for somewhere to eat. In the end I ate dinner in the hotel restaurant: a celebratory meal of pancakes with the local asparagus, and a glass of fizz. I enjoyed my own company, as I had, I supposed, most of the time.
5 May 2018
For the last day of my journey I’d planned to head north via Mannheim and Cologne, taking the slower route along the Rhine. Getting to Mannheim was easy enough. I tripped getting onto the train, but didn’t sustain any further damage to speak of. When I got there, however, I discovered that the train I had my eye on was running late, and if it got much later then I wasn’t going to have time to do things the interesting way.
I hung around on the platform, watching other trains, and tried to dislodge the earworm that the name Mannheim installed. Many hymn tunes are named after places, and I’ve spent enough time in church choirs to be able to match them up without really thinking about it. Aberystwyth: Jesu, lover of my soul. Wareham: Jesus, where’er thy people meet. Much closer to home, Coe Fen: How shall I sing that majesty? Mannheim is Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us.
My train got later and later. I realised that I was not going to get the leisurely journey alongside the Rhine. Not if I wanted to catch the Eurostar I was booked on. No, it was going to be an express train dash to Frankfurt. I dragged myself grumpily onto the ICE and resigned myself to a boring journey on a boring fast line. A complimentary packet of locomotive-shaped gummy sweets mollified me a little.
When I got to Frankfurt, I realised. In my end is my beginning. Of course I had to go back via Frankfurt. The towering glasshouse of Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was where it all started, over a decade ago when I was an au pair in Germany. Back then, I was mostly using the Hauptbahnhof for the S-bahn. I only went outside the city by train twice, once to see a friend who lived in Würzburg, and once on my first great continental railway journey, back to England for my future sister-in-law’s wedding. But that wasn’t really the point. The first time I’d looked at a departures board and saw trains listed to Fulda (another hymn tune), Bruxelles-Midi, Stuttgart, and realised that I could go anywhere, that was Frankfurt. And the book that had won the prize and funded the whole trip, that had begun here, too. The first map of Stancester, the first diagram of the different relationships between the six characters at Alma Road, those were drawn out on my aunt’s dining table in Ober Erlenbach.
Between finding a postbox and feeding another euro into the lavatory gates and buying a cheese roll and dragging myself and my suitcase along platform 18 to zones D to F, I thought of my twenty-two year old self and wondered whether she would have believed that we’d actually get here. She might have done. She dreamed big. She wasn’t necessarily so good at making things actually happen, but that’s fine. I’ve learned how to do that over the years since.
On that first Frankfurt-London journey, back in the autumn of 2007, I went all the way from Frankfurt to Brussels. This time I had to change at Aachen, and get a rail replacement bus to Welkenraedt. Back through the Ardennes, back through Liège, back to Brussels.
On the Eurostar, I got out my diary, and I wrote:
I’ve just been sitting watching the northern French landscape go by, all lush and green, and golden in this evening light. When I came out the trees were more or less bare.
This isn’t the end of anything. This is about understanding that it’s all mine for the enjoying, that much more is possible than I ever thought, that in fact I can have both/and.
The couple opposite me are celebrating 44 years together and (I think) 38 years of marriage. Four children, six grandchildren. They’ve just been in Bruges. Loved it.
People say I’m brave, coming out and going around on my own, but it’s never felt like something I couldn’t do. My confidence with regard to specific tasks has improved (today I went to Sam’s Café in Bruxelles-Midi, which I didn’t have the nerve to do three weeks ago) but I always knew I’d find a way around it all.
Little moments of luxury elevate the whole thing. Last night at Karlsruhe, today getting a meal in the Eurostar, and the stale rolls and decaying tomatoes, the frayed carpet and cracked washbasin at Hamburg, don’t seem relevant. I’ve had my fun. And how. Another time I might… but that’s the thing; there can be another time.
Kathleen Jowitt 