School
In Germany you start school when you are six, or close to six, years old. The German language is easy to learn to write, because words are written pretty much the way they are pronounced, but at that time, for reasons hard to fathom, the American system called “Ganzheitsmethode” (whole word method) had been adopted. You didn’t learn to write by sounding out words letter by letter but learn to read and write whole words from the start. The family next to us had a boy who was one year older than I was, Bernd, and when he started school, his mother talked about how hard it was to learn to read and write the new way. So my faintly worried mother bought me a slate tablet and some chalk pens. The alphabet was written all around the tablet, on the wooden frame. Capital letters and small letters. I started to practise, playfully. To write letters and words. Well before school started, I wrote my own little shopping lists when Oma sent me to the grocer’s about 150 metres away, across the river in Wupperhof. The widow who owned the shop saw one of my lists, asked me who had written it, I told her, and of course word spread through the valley. Soon people made remarks to my mother and grandmother, that “One should not do that” – namely teach kids to read before school, but they shrugged that off, quietly pleased with what I was doing.
The school year started after Easter, and in 1955 I started at the Primary School in Widdert. Starting with me was Ulrich, a boy living with his parents in the same building as we were, and Wolfgang, a boy from Wupperhof. School normally started at 8 am, but geginners started a little later, and so the three of us were sent off together. It was a narrow path uphill, first past some cow pastures, and then into forest: beech forest and then plantation pine forest. Dense and mysterious, uphill, on and on. No houses anywhere near. At the top of the hill there was another stretch of farmland, fields and a chicken farm guarded by friendly St Bernhards. Finally we reached the village – or perhaps edge-of-town suburb of Widdert. It would be about a kilometre and a half between Wüstenhof and Widdert. Then we followed the road to the school.
We were late fairly regularly, because Ulrich and Wolfgang used to play with growing stands of bushes, pretending they were driving a car and the sticks were gear levers. I used to stand there and urge them to move on, but that had no effect. They were not keen to go to school. No adult ever went with us. I remember once being allowed to go home early because I had done all the work, and when I turned into the path towards the forest a woman outside her front door urged me not to go alone that way, but to take a much longer way home along the main road to the next cluster of houses, called Bünkenberg, and down a path that had a few houses. I did not listen to her, but I was very scared as I went into the forest, and I ran all the way home. I think my fear of forests, that feeling of an unsafe environment, stems from there, and I know it will never leave me.
After one year, another Grundschule (Primary School) was opened, or rather re-opened, in that little place called Bünkenberg, on the road from Widdert to the city, and closer to where we lived. That path up the hill was wide and had houses; it was no longer scary to go to school. I went there for three years, and I liked school.