Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
The Devil Rides Out (30 page)
A sense of foreboding descended on the three of us as we drove into East Germany. On a grey autumn afternoon with the pale winter sun slowly setting on the depressing landscape it seemed the perfect setting for the grimmest of children’s fairy tales. When we stopped at the edge of a small village for Barbara to have a look at the map I took the opportunity to get out and stretch my legs and have a fag, wandering down
into the village to see if there was such a thing as a shop. It was only a small village, nestled at the base of a vast pine forest, a collection of ramshackle wooden houses lining a street that was no more than a dirt track. The place was deserted. Smoke curling out of the chimneys and the odd chink of light escaping from the gap between hastily drawn curtains were the only indications that this strangely disturbing little hamlet was inhabited. Jesus, it gave me the creeps. I wondered if these people stayed indoors after sunset for a reason. Vampires? Werewolves? Those woods looked like the ideal habitat for a lycanthrope, and I bet that somewhere in the middle of it lay the ruins of a castle in which a vampire was already up and cleaning his teeth preparing for a bite to eat.
I became aware that a woman was staring down at me from an upstairs window. She looked the type who was more than capable of abandoning stepchildren in dense woods, just as the man who appeared at the front door to see what this stranger in town was up to was every inch the sinister woodsman, no doubt experienced at hacking up grandmothers with the axe I could see propped up against the woodpile. Giving the couple a vague wave and a nod to show I was friendly and not intent on robbing their homes or biting their necks, I headed quickly back to the safety of the car.
We got lost. Again. Somehow we’d managed to come off the official transit route and were now driving around the back of beyond risking arrest at any minute. Barbara stopped the car and I got out to have a look at a road sign we’d just passed. It was pitch black and I couldn’t make head or tail of what the sign was trying to convey. However, since I was out and about I headed towards a clump of trees for a much-needed pee. I didn’t see the ditch hidden in the dark. One
minute I was on terra firma, the next I was up to my waist in shit. I gave out a long loud howl of misery that no doubt had the locals reaching for the silver bullets in the belief that the werewolf was at large.
‘Shut up and get in the car,’ the two witches were shouting amidst screams of laughter. ‘We’re going to be banged up by the bloody Stasi any second.’
After a heritage tour of East Germany with all the windows of the car wide open to allow the overpowering stench of liquid manure to escape, we eventually found our way back on to the transit route that led to the Polish border. It was real Cold War stuff – searchlights, watch towers and armed guards with dogs who couldn’t have been more surprised at the sight of our bright red Ford Capri if we’d pulled up in the Batmobile. The border guards instructed us to get out of the car and showed us the way to a small hut that looked surprisingly primitive in comparison to the rest of the set-up. In here we presented our passports and visas and, as it was compulsory, changed our sterling into zloty. The official exchange rate was appalling so we held most of our cash back, exchanging it later on the black market for a much better deal.
My first impression of Poland was that the entire country was lit by a forty-watt bulb. It seemed that the sun rose very briefly before buggering off quickly back to bed. In Warsaw Beryl and I had to share a sofa bed in the living room, an experience that she didn’t want to repeat, claiming that she was astounded by the nasal dexterity of anyone who managed as I did to switch the light on with my nose every time I turned over. The Poles were a hospitable lot who insisted on getting out the brandy bottle the moment you set foot in their house. Polish brandy is lethal – ultra-strong
rocket fuel that had me out of my mind after the third glass and consequently clambering over Beryl in the middle of the night, throwing up over both the arm of her pyjama jacket and the living room carpet before staggering to the bathroom and collapsing under the bath. It’s to Beryl’s everlasting regret that she failed to capture the image for posterity as I lay unconscious on the cold bathroom floor wearing only my Y-fronts.
The next day, when we gathered with the family around the table in the living room for lunch, the periodic waft of residual vomit reduced the pair of us to gibbering wrecks, unable to control the bouts of hysterical laughter that took hold of us at the most inappropriate moments during the conversation, much to Barbara’s mounting fury and to bemused stares from the family. As Beryl remarked later, we did nothing for Anglo-Polish relations that afternoon.
Walking around Warsaw we felt as though the war was still on. Long lines of people, mostly women, queued patiently outside food shops, arms folded, chatting, accepting this way of life. A solitary department store stood depressingly empty, its windows bare except for a line of bottles containing a lavender-coloured liquid which I was later told was a cleaning fluid that was also popular as a cocktail with some of the locals.
Driving around we passed row after row of grey concrete buildings, depressingly neglected, and the monolithic Palace of Culture rising in the centre, built by Stalin and a constant reminder of Soviet domination. Among the beautiful older parts of the city I found the images that I’d sought in West Berlin: a ride around the dimly lit cobbled streets in a horse-drawn carriage, reminiscent of a scene from
Nosferatu
, a winding alleyway, the uneven walls of the ancient houses that
stood on either side leaning dangerously inward with age, leading to an overgrown medieval courtyard with a rickety wooden staircase leaning drunkenly against the wall of a building as it rose up into the shadows. I could see in my mind’s eye just how atmospheric Josef von Sternberg’s lighting would’ve made this place – Dietrich dressed in mac and beret, fag hanging out of the corner of her gob as per usual, leaning languidly against the wall in the shadows on the stairs, her upraised face illuminated by individual shafts of moonlight heavy with cigarette smoke, pouring down on her from above. Oh, yes, I could see it all.
We visited the Wieliczka Salt Mine, the only visitors that day, but the guide opened up nevertheless and took us round the mine, treating us to a personal guided tour, leaving us alone to sit back and enjoy the solitude of the spectacle that is the underground cathedral, complete with crystal chandeliers carved from various shades of rock salt by the miners. Curiously, when we emerged from the mine we found that we were ravenous and even after wolfing down a substantial meal of meat and two veg in the only restaurant in town we still craved more and so ordered, and ate, the same meal over again.
Desperate for a night out I dragged Barbara and Beryl to the only bar in Kamien´ Pomorski, a watering hole, judging by the depressing decor, that had employed the interior designer responsible for provincial waiting rooms on northern railway stations during the Great Depression. We sat at the only available table, which just happened to be in the middle of the room, and drank our vodka, painfully aware that every hostile eye in the silent room was on us. The men all sported a mullet, obviously high fashion in these parts, as was yellow peroxide hair with a visible root
growth of at least an inch and a healthy daub of startling blue eye-shadow for the women.
It is impossible to comprehend the horrors that took place in Auschwitz concentration camp as you stroll around on a warm autumn morning, impossible to come to terms with the knowledge that the initially innocuous-looking shower room you’re standing in once echoed with the dying screams of millions of innocent men, women and children as they choked on the deadly fumes from the Zyklon B gas pellets. I’m not going to dwell on my visit to the former Nazi extermination camp. If you want to know more about it then I suggest you watch the History Channel or go on line and look it up. But I will admit that I was stunned by the sheer size of the place and that for a long time after I couldn’t eat meat. The images I’d seen of life, or rather the destruction of it, imprinted themselves on my memory, surfacing to haunt me as I lay in bed late at night trying to work out just how and why the world went insane.
In Krakow my wish to lodge in a Fräulein Schroederesque lodging house came true. We stayed in an elderly lady’s best front parlour, one of four rooms she occupied at the top of a crumbling mansion. The migraine-inducing wallpaper was adorned with holy pictures and religious icons pertaining to every saint in the Bible. Our beds, with their horsehair mattresses, were surprisingly comfortable. Barbara’s lay underneath an enormous framed print of St Joseph, Beryl had the Virgin Mary, while I lay safe in the knowledge that Mary Magdalene was watching over me, which Beryl found rather apt. The next evening, after a delicious dinner of fish and potatoes in a dill sauce served with a side dish of my favourite delicacy, homemade pickled mushrooms, Fräulein Schroeder
asked whether we would mind if she invited her friend over to meet us. Her friend turned out to be a tiny old lady in her eighties, a former Polish princess and death camp survivor who had watched as first the Nazis looted her family’s treasures and priceless artworks and then the Communists relieved them of their land, home and titles. She was angry but philosophical, ruefully accepting her lot as she recalled grander times when the
szlachta
(the aristocracy) had strolled along elegant tree-lined avenues that bore the family name. Busts commemorating prominent and respected members of the clan had once adorned public parks and gardens. ‘All gone, all gone now,’ she said, drumming the table with gnarled fingers and staring into space, lost for a moment as she recalled a past life.
Fräulein Schroeder got out the ubiquitous bottle of brandy and I modelled a leopardskin stretch nylon polo neck I’d seen in a back street shop and couldn’t bear to leave, having an inkling that it would come in very handy in the future, to approving nods of the head from our landlady and the princess.
The princess was a devout Catholic so I thought she might like a photo of Pope John Paul the Second, waving to the adoring masses from his balcony, one of a selection that Barbara’s aunt had given me for my mother. I laid them out on the table for her so she could choose one. Her beady little eyes darted eagerly across the images of her hero and before I could draw breath she’d swept the lot from the table into the depths of her handbag. Oh well, I thought. Given the circumstances, I was sure my ma would eventually come to terms with the knowledge that she’d missed out on the chance to pass around amongst the members of a stunned Union of Catholic Mothers an actual, genuine photograph of His
Holiness himself. To compensate, I took back a souvenir plate bearing his image for her to hang on the living room wall, although secretly I thought it looked more like Hughie Green than Il Papa.
On the way home, after a long and boring drive along lonely roads, we turned a bend and were suddenly confronted by a scene straight out of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
that turned out to be the East German border. We were hauled out of the car by border guards, and then they stripped the car of everything that was in it. Cases were taken down from the roof rack and ransacked, and a large mirror attached to a trolley was run under the car to make sure no one was escaping to the West by clinging on to the exhaust. One of the guards, a bullet-headed thug straight out of Union Jack Jackson in
Warlord
, pushed me into the back of the car indicating that I should remove the seat by screaming something unintelligible and waving a screwdriver in my face. At the best of times I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea how you went about removing car seats, let alone semi-conscious at three in the morning with a gun-toting Neanderthal breathing down my neck.
‘Schnell! Schnell!’ he roared as I jabbed hopelessly at the upholstery with the screwdriver, hoping to find somewhere to put it. Screwdrivers are evil devices best left in the hands of dads and competent workmen and not entrusted to ham-fisted amateurs like me. He might as well have given me a divining rod for all I knew of what to do with it.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake get out of the bloody way and give it here.’ Barbara’s mounting fury erupted. Pushing the guard out of the way and pulling me from the back she removed the seat herself, cursing at the top of her lungs and comparing the guard to a rather uneducated porcine species.
I looked at Beryl and mouthed the words ‘labour camp’.
On the last leg of our journey on the ferry we stood on deck watching the approaching white cliffs of Dover wondering why the lyricist of the song had chosen a bluebird, a species uncommon to our native shores, and not the more homegrown seagull to fly over the fabled cliffs, coming to the conclusion that it was probably something to do with the fact that a bluebird made a far more acceptable symbol of hope than our native screaming, swooping shite-hawk.
‘Are you glad to be home?’ I asked Beryl.
‘What do you bloody think?’ Her squawk rivalled the gulls circling overhead. ‘After that ordeal?’ Pulling her scarf closer to face into the wind she slowly started sniggering. ‘Having said that, it was bloody funny though. What did you think?’
My recollections seemed to have been shot in monochrome, hard to distinguish from images imprinted on my memory from the early
Frankenstein
and
Nosferatu
films. A trip back in time to a land of perpetual darkness, a place seemingly shunned by sunlight, with brandy and doughnuts for breakfast and pickled mushrooms and fresh dill for tea. A complex land of primeval forests, graveyards illuminated by candlelight on All Souls night, oppression and ugliness, humour and beauty.
‘Well …’ I tried to find words suitable to define our experience.
‘Exactly,’ Beryl said, reading my mind. ‘Through the looking glass and back again, matey. Through the bloody looking glass.’