1989 by Peter Millar

Author:Peter Millar [Peter Millar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129116
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Published: 2011-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

The next day she reported the details of our walk around Quedlinburg old town, that I paid for lunch for everyone (I put it on my expenses – it was fairly legitimate), and that afterwards I insisted we drove back via Magdeburg to take a look at the cathedral.

While we were there, however, she noted that ‘M disappeared for about ten minutes. No explanation for this was given.’ Col Lehmann has put a large felt-tip double exclamation mark next to this. And he would be right. I had indeed been ‘up to no good’: my detour via Magdeburg was not just to see the cathedral, but because I had been told there was an active branch of the Swords to Ploughshares movement in town, centred on the priest’s house a few hundred metres away. I had snuck off to take a look and chat with a couple of kids who told me I would be best going to a different church. They told me the address and tried to draw a rough map.

Back in the car ‘Pauline’ noted a crude sketch on a piece of paper and reported that I asked her if she knew a ‘Heimholzer Strasse’ in Magdeburg where there was supposed to be an ‘interesting old church’. She told me no, but then adds, ‘It came up that there was a Helmholz Strasse’. Her switch to the anonymous third party is unsurprising: it was her son Jochen who told me. We drove there and located the building the lads outside the priest’s house had directed me to, the St Michael Community Centre. ‘Pauline’ reported: ‘M parked about fifty metres away and went off with his wife, leaving us in the car for about half an hour. Then he returned and we continued the journey to Berlin without further interruption.’ All true. I had for the first time made contact with a Swords to Ploughshare ‘chapter’, if such a word could be used for such a diffuse agglomeration of individuals, outside Berlin. No doubt ‘Pauline’ and the Stasi would have considered it ‘hostile’ behaviour, possibly worse, but to me it was just journalism. If ever a serious opposition movement was to develop in East Germany I wanted to be in touch from the ground floor, and similarly if ever the ‘organs of the state’ decided to clamp down on these disaffected young people by imposing jail sentences on them, I wanted to be sure their friends had ways of getting that information into the Western press. My only regret in hindsight, is that perhaps I should have anticipated that Jochen’s mum wasn’t just the nice old lady she seemed to be.

Col Lehmann was impressed. He noted tersely on the bottom of her report: ‘This source is reliable. Any verification of the information contained in this report must protect the identity of the source.’

She obviously had a long chat with Jochen about me afterwards. Two weeks later, for the first time – a signal mark of the general incompetence

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