Confessions from a Package Tour. Rosie Dixon
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we get down to the foyer, the manager, or whatever he is, swiftly pushes aside what look like half a dozen tins of film and steps round his desk to greet us. ‘You go?’ he says, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘Is too sad. Please stay. Business never so good. Russian fleet extend courtesy visit.’
‘Out of the question, you old shit,’ says Penny boldly. ‘I’d need to be pretty hard up before I came to this dump again.’
‘Maybe we discuss new terms,’ says the man eagerly.
‘Hurry up!’ I say. ‘I think that’s a taxi on the other side of the street.’
As it turns out, it is very fortunate that I am correct. No sooner has the ghastly little man – I am certain that he never changes his clothes – started to haggle with Penny than a door behind the counter opens and one of the bleary-eyed creatures I saw the night before appears in the middle of a yawn. The second she sees us she starts screaming fit to bust and has to be forcibly restrained from throwing herself at Penny. Half a dozen other hideous hags appear hurling abuse and we are pursued into the street. It is a good job that the taxi is on the other side because a window slides up above our heads and I catch a glimpse of Baldylocks before she empties what looks like a chamber pot into the street. What has prompted this disgusting and spiteful behaviour I am at a loss to know. One would think that our humiliation would elicit a sympathetic response from our Continental sisters. Maybe their action is prompted by some deep-seated resentment of Great Britain’s attitude towards the Common Market. It is so difficult to tell with foreigners.
We drive away with fists battering against the windows and I experience a great sense of relief when I think that I am soon going to be in the company of my own countrymen. Whatever their shortcomings at least we speak the same language. Despite my desperate tiredness I will be happy to see them.
It is only when we have got back to the Hotel Antwerp that we remember about Hammerchick. He is presumably still fast asleep under the bed in our room. How stupid of us! We could have got a lift back in the coach had we thought about it. I feel quite furious with myself and even more annoyed when we cannot get through on the telephone.
‘He could stay there for days, knowing him,’ says Penny who has been swift to make an assessment of Hammerchick’s unreliable temperament. ‘I suppose we’d better go back for him.’
Hardly have I finished my groan than a combined mass of hotel staff and holidaymakers descend on us. Apparently, the first night on foreign soil has not been an unqualified success for anyone:
‘The toilet didn’t work.’
‘I couldn’t find the toilet.’
‘Somebody did potty outside the door of my room.’
‘I ordered early morning tea and a hot roll at six o’clock and the chambermaid tried to climb into bed with me.’
‘I left my shoes outside my room to be cleaned and I haven’t seen them since.’
‘You can’t get any English channels on the television.’
The worst complaints relate to the disgusting nature of the rooms and the hotel staff say that they will not go into them unless the holidaymakers do something about tidying them up.
All in all I am desperately relieved when Hammerchick makes an unexpected appearance, complete with coach, and we manage to get under way. Apparently, a madman has run amok in one of the dockside brothels and I am not sorry to leave Antwerp behind. Despite its splendid war record the city will never hold happy memories for me. I watch Hammerchick rub his sleeve across his greasy, smoke-blackened face and wonder why he is laughing as half a dozen fire engines race past us in the opposite direction. He is a funny fellow and no mistake. Something of a rough diamond but not totally bad. He must have some sense of responsibility or he would not have hurried back to the hotel and got the coach loaded so quickly.
We are on the motorway by half past nine and heading towards Liège, Aachen, Cologne and our appointment with the romantic castle on the banks of the Rhine where we are going to spend the night. I have seen photographs of the Schloss Badschweinfart and it is really something. Perched like an eagle’s nest on one of the high cliffs overlooking the river far below. I do love a romantic setting and this seems right up my street. Perhaps it will make up for my disappointments of the previous night.
In order to keep the passengers amused, I use the coach’s loudspeaker system – or megaphone, as Penny persists in calling it – to read the passengers place names and other items of interest. As I have already intimated in Lady Courier, the coach is not of the most modern variety and has been prone to breakdown on the way to the English coast. I do hope that the heady excitement of touching sixty miles an hour on the motorway and trying to keep in touch with the surging stream of Mercedes and BMWs that pour past will not be too much for it.
We reach Germany by lunchtime and take our meal just outside Aachen. I must say that the occasion is slightly spoiled for me by Penny telling me that she is ‘Aachen’ all over and especially in a couple of places that I never thought to hear mentioned by a lady’s lips. I am afraid that Penny does not live up to her breeding sometimes. I may only come from Chingford but I flatter myself that I have a far keener sense of the ‘niceties’ than she does.
Another problem connected with lunch concerns the meal itself. Most of the passengers have been expecting to pull up at a wayside hostelry and enjoy a repast of the ‘meat and two veg’ variety. This thought was possibly introduced into their minds by the Climax brochure which, I remember, sounded the virtues of ‘lip-smacking local delicacies washed down by the wine of the country’. For this reason, the appearance of a cross-section of very spicy liverwurst accompanied by two packets of Germütletoasties and half a dozen bottles of Seven-Up is greeted with something less than enthusiasm. The fact that the Seven-Up was bottled at Dusseldorf does little to reassure our customers. I sympathise with them but Penny and I are doing no more than carry out Reggy Parkinson’s instructions. ‘Ever mindful of the need to exert stringent economies in order to ensure that Climax Tours remains in an in profit situation’ – his own words – he has decreed that the midday meal be kept to snack proportions and served ‘on the move’, preferably against a backdrop of such great natural beauty that it will take the customers’ minds off the less-than-substantial fare they are receiving – as opposed to paying. Personally, I do not consider that the railway marshalling yards outside Aachen are at all beautiful but the decision to stop is forced upon us by those desperate to answer a call of nature of the most basic and – from what I can see through the windows of the coach – unaesthetic kind.
‘Comfort stops’, as they are known, are a problem and I do feel that the situation would be made much easier if a certain male element amongst the passengers did not load half a dozen crates of beer on to the coach every morning. It would probably also cut down on the singing which seems to offend some members of the party.
‘Eee! That’s a weight off my “mind your father”’ says Mr Arkright playfully, as he resumes his seat and feels in the crate for another bottle.
‘Er – yes,’ I say. ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got time to see Cologne Cathedral, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes, most decidedly.’ Mr Arkright belches noisily.
‘Manners, Don!’ says his wife, Janine.
I turn away and look out of the window to where Sid Betts is organising a roadside fry-up. Mr Betts is not in my good books at the moment. It was very naughty of him to light a fire in his hotel room – there was no fireplace for one thing. If he wanted to heat up a tin of baked beans he should not have used the foot bath as a brazier. Incidentally, Penny tells me that the floor level font is not a foot bath. It is a bidet – pronounced B-Day as in D-Day – and used for washing very intimate parts of your body in a squatting position. I find the whole idea rather disgusting and highly embarrassing. I mean, the very idea of cold-bloodedly and single-mindedly setting out to wash yourselves there! It’s unhealthy, isn’t it? Much better to give your parts a casual slosh about when you are washing something else – sort of, almost as if you did not know they were there. To do anything