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I and my army PR team were ordered to go direct from Winterberg to interview British soldiers helping flood victims in Hamburg. Returning to my barracks I was delighted to find a letter from Karina saying she dreamed of me when she dozed off on the train home to Cologne. From then I kept visiting Cologne, either by hitchhiking or train (paid from her earnings as secretary).
On my first visit to Cologne, Karina’s father Josef would have nothing to do with this foreign soldier. Her mother, Anneliese, secretly gave her some delicious home-made chocolate and almond pudding with whipped cream for her to bring to me in my pension in a container.
The youngish woman who ran the pension was flirtatiously friendly until Karina arrived. She then said coldly that it was not allowed for women to go with male guests into their room – so Karina said she’d wait for me in a nearby Kneipe while I ate the pudding. In my room I realised I didn’t have a spoon, so ate it using the handle of my toothbrush.
On my subsequent visits to Cologne Josef allowed me into their flat and was reasonably friendly – until he and Anneliese discovered evidence that their daughter had lost her virginity to me: from her bloodstained undergarments in the family wash.
Josef reacted by sending me a letter in German threatening legal action as his young stepdaughter’s guardian if I proved to be a moral threat to her. I showed it to Axel who shook his head solemnly.
I wrote back saying, among other things: “Ich bin kein Casanova. Ich liebe Deine Tochter.” (I am no Casanova. I love your daughter.) In other words, that my intentions were honorable, that I intended to continue to visit Cologne and see Karina and hoped that he would allow me to visit his home and discuss the matter with him.
Karina phoned to say he had agreed. On the way to their apartment, I had a couple of beers in a Kneipe to steady my nerves. However, Josef greeted me with a smile and a warm handshake. The letter had clearly been effective – no doubt with the help of special pleading by Karina and Anneliese.
Josef’s tendency to rigidity of views was often ameliorated, I would find, by an affectionately admonishing “Ach Josef!” from Anneliese. There’d be a puzzled “Was denn?” – What then? – from him, followed by a reluctant acceptance of her less rigid viewpoint.
Post War Surgery
A difficulty for Karina was that she had a scarred calf, the result of botched post-war surgery after breaking her leg in an orphanage.
She had been born in 1944 out of wedlock, the result of a wartime relationship between her mother, Anneliese Müller, and a German soldier, subsequently absent. Anneliese worked in a hospital in Mechernich in the Eifel region west of the Rhine, taking meals from its kitchen to patients.
She had no choice than to live at the hospital, but was forbidden to have Karina with her there, apart from weekends. She therefore left her with stern nuns at the orphanage in the nearby town of Kommern, picking her up on Saturdays and returning her on Sunday nights.
Fairly early in our time together in Cologne she arranged, with temerity, a restaurant meal for the two of us, specially to reveal to me her scarred calf- disguised with special padding beneath stockings or ski pants. She feared that the revelation would mean the end of our relationship. I told her truthfully that I did not care about it at all.
