Thrilling Cities by Ian Fleming

Author:Ian Fleming
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues
ISBN: 9781448182053
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1963-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

HAMBURG

SHE WAS A big girl with a good figure. She wore nothing but a frilly white bathing-cap and short black bathing-trunks. During the fight in the pool of peat mud she had become streaked with the stuff, and one wondered how she would ever get clean again. With a ferocious shout of ‘Huzza!!’ she put her head down and charged the smaller girl with ferocity. The smaller girl gave a realistic ‘Ouch!’ as the bathing-cap hit her square in the stomach, she then described an elegant cartwheel over the larger girl’s head and fell with a dull squelch into the black morass. There was clapping and cat-calling from the predominantly male audience. The referee, a girl in gold lame, began to count.

It was two o’clock in the morning in Hamburg. I was in the inner heart of the notorious St Pauli night-club district. This heart is appropriately called ‘Die Grosse Freiheit’ – the Great Freedom – and in this small area survives the last bastion in Europe of ‘anything goes’.

I had come here by way of Ostend, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Haarlem, Wilhelmshaven and Bremen on the first leg of what was to be a six-thousand-mile tour of the thrilling cities of Europe.

Appropriately enough, as I thought, Europe had greeted me with flowers – so many flowers that in the end one was almost sickened by the profusion of graceful stalks bowing to the northern, Simenon weather and by the eternally smiling faces.

Rotterdam was in the grip of the spring Floriade and then, from Leiden well past Haarlem, the thousands of acres of tulip and hyacinth fields spread their patchwork quilt over the dull landscape. Even the rubbish heaps in the fields were composed entirely of flower petals, and the Belgian cars driving back after the week-end were decked in huge garlands of red, yellow and my own Bavarian-Tyrolean mixture told me just how long I would have survived on Wangerooge!

These war-time memories, that one had thought banished forever in 1946, come back in a town like Wilhelmshaven where the giant V-boat pens still clutter up the harbour front, and where vast chunks of blasted concrete lie among tangles of rusted metal. One seems still to hear the ghostly strains of ‘Wir fahren gegen Engel-land’ whispering of the days before the bombs, the days of Iron Crosses, of daggers of honour and of secret weapons that would win the war for Germany. And then one hears the giant whistle of the bombs that shattered the dream. It was good to escape these ghosts for the warmth and life of Hamburg.

When the referee had counted to nine, and the taller woman was standing facing the audience with her hands clasped victoriously above her head, silently the smaller one got up from the mud, took two large handfuls of the stuff, crept up behind her adversary and crammed them down the seat of her bathing pants. With a howl of delight from the audience, the fight went on until, appropriately, the smaller girl tripped

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.