The Munich Dilemma
by Sinbad

Chapter 5

Their final port of call in France was Boulogne and it was interesting to the boys chiefly because it is an enormous bustling busy commercial port, quite unlike either Brest of the Channel Islands, and there was lots to see without even leaving their ship – so they didn't.

The last leg of the journey was to be the longest, Boulogne around the west coast of Europe to Bremerhaven in Germany. And it involved sailing through the English channel and into the North Sea. As the Malcolm Miller beat into the wind up the channel, it was necessary to shorten sail as the wind became more powerful and the sea became more choppy. Ricky got into trouble through climbing up the foremast and along the yard arm to take a series of photos of the ship pounding through the waves from outside the boundary of the hull. Great photographs, but the First Mate, on duty at the helm, on catching sight of the small boy up in the rigging and letting go of his hand hold repeatedly to take photos, shouted at him to get back down on deck immediately and not to be such a fool again. Realising too late the danger he'd put himself into, Ricky felt he'd been rightly chastised.

The next morning the wind continued unabated, the ship was making good progress but several of the crew were suffering from seasickness. Breakfast was a sombre affair, the boys failed to do justice to the cook's handiwork. After the meal, a watch changed and the watch coming off duty took their turn at the breakfast table. Ricky and Chris on the Main Watch were neither going on duty or coming off, but would go on duty in four hours' time. Ricky was sitting on his bunk trying to write a letter to his mother for posting when they got to Bremerhaven, when he noticed a stream of lumpy liquid running across the floor and directly under his bunk. Following it to its source, he saw that it was running off the corner of the table, where there was a gap in the lip which ran around the table to hold things in place in the event of rough weather. There was a river of whatever it was, running diagonally across the table from a porridge bowl that was overflowing onto the table. A porridge bowl with a very green-looking trainee sitting over it, a porridge bowl whose level was rising rather than dropping. Everyone else had finished their meal and left the table, just this one boy sat miserably at the table. Ricky took these things in and understanding dawned on him about the nature of the stream flowing under his bunk and he was suddenly overcome with a need of his own. Just as the watch leader arrived and took in the situation, cast about him for someone to detail and spotted Ricky, calling “You. Clear that up!” Ricky, desperate to escape into fresh air, looked beseeching pity at the watch leader and shook his head before dashing up the stairwell onto the deck and across to the lee rail where he stood, breathing deeply the clean, fresh air and ready, should he feel the need, to lean over the rail and deposit his own breakfast into the ocean below. In the event he didn't need to do that but it was ten minutes before he felt able to venture back into the mess and find the watch leader and apologise for running out on him. Someone else had cleaned up in the meantime and the green crewman was no-where to be seen.

That was the one and only time on the trip that Ricky felt seasick. Chris wouldn't say whether he was sick or not.

For the last day of the cruise the weather cleared up. The wind dropped to a dead calm, the sun came out and it was hot. The off duty boys took advantage and lay out on the foredeck sunning themselves. Ricky climbed the rigging and took photos pointing downwards at the sunny deck, photos of little x-shaped forms of boys spreadeagled in skimpy shorts and nothing else, trying to get a tan to take home as evidence of their adventure. A couple of the boys managed a light burn but no-one got a tan, the sun wasn't strong enough for long enough. And when the Malcolm Miller motored into Bremerhaven dock it was cold and grey.

Thirty-nine trainee sailors disembarked from the tall ship and dispersed into Bremerhaven, most heading for the railway station. Chris and Ricky were among these, but unlike most of their shipmates their adventure holiday was not yet over. At the Bahnhof they checked the timetable and found the express train that would get them to München at eight in the evening, after a five hour journey. They queued at the ticket office and bought their tickets and then waited on the platform for their train. It wasn't too difficult to manage – they had both studied German at 'O' level and everything was signposted clearly and explained on noticeboards. Using a public telephone was a little more complicated – they had to work out how to use it and it wasn't the same as in Britain, and neither were the tones you heard in the receiver. When Ricky dialled his father, he almost put the phone down because he confused the ringing tone for an engaged tone. Fortunately his step-mother answered almost immediately, before he had reacted to the tone. After exchanging pleasantries he told her what time he and Chris would be arriving in Munich and she told him that his father would pick them up from the station.

The railway journey was an adventure in itself. The carriages were new, clean, light and airy, and the engines (two of them, one at the front and one at the back) were sleek and streamlined and fast. After they'd spent some time looking at the landscape shooting past their window, Ricky the scientist wasn't satisified.

“We've got to find out how fast we're going. Have you got a pen and paper?”

Chris rummaged in his rucksack and found a notebook and a pencil, which he offered his friend.

Ricky pointed out the kilometre markers along the side of the railway line and Chris, whose watch had a sweep second hand, called the start and end of a minute while Ricky counted markers. They did it three times and counted three, three and four. On the first blank page in Chris's notebook, Ricky wrote the numbers out, and then added them up and divided by three to work out the average, which came to three and a third. Chris objected, saying that they wouldn't get an accurate result from such a short count, and suggested doing it again but counting for five minutes instead of just one. They had plenty of time so they did three counts of five minutes each and got sixteen, seventeen and sixteen. The average worked out at sixteen and a third which was the number of kilometres they were travelling per five minute count. He multiplied it by twelve to get the speed in kilometres per hour and wrote down 196km/h. That seemed very fast but the boys were more used to thinking in miles per hour so Ricky divided a hundred and ninety-six by eight and then multiplied the answer by five and wrote the answer down as 122.5mph. Neither of them had ever travelled that fast on land. They continued watching the scenery flash past with a new respect.

At such high speed it is perhaps not surprising that they travelled from the extreme north of Germany to the capital city of Bavaria in the extreme south in just five hours. The train stopped only twice, at Frankfurt and again at Heidelberg. They got off the train at the enormous Bahnhof at Munich and watched the train move on, heading for Austria and Switzerland. Chris suddenly thought how odd that a train could start in one country and end in another. Such a thing wasn't possible from England. Unless you counted Scotland, of course. Or Wales. The boys were watching the tail of the train with its sleek engine move past the end of the station canopy and around the corner out of sight when they heard their names called and turned to see Ricky's father striding towards them. Ricky ran up and gave his father a hug, Chris noticed that even at seventeen he was still a head shorter than his father. Then Chris took his turn and politely shook hands with Mr Taylor, eye to eye. Chris was as tall as the older man, but not nearly as broad.

“Thank you for having me, Mr Taylor. I hope I'll be no trouble.”

“Go on with you, Chris, you should know you're always welcome. We're delighted you could come, you'll make Ricky's holiday much more fun because I have to work and he'd have been deathly bored in the house on his own. Come on both of you and we'll get home. There's a meal waiting for you, I expect you're hungry?”

That question really didn't need answering and on arrival at the terraced four storey house and after shaking hands with the new Mrs Taylor they were soon sat around the dining table and eating beef casserole and jacket potatoes.

This was Ricky's first visit to his father since his posting to Munich and his first visit since his father's re-marriage to Sophie. He knew Sophie, of course, but not yet as a member of the family, and he wasn't at all sure how the relationship would work out. She wasn't his mother and he couldn't think of her that way, but he was apprehensive that perhaps that was how she would want to be treated. He had a mother, a perfectly good one, and it felt disloyal to be considering someone else as a mother. Especially someone much younger than his real mother. It didn't seem that it was going to be a problem, though. Sophie seemed friendly but not at all motherly, content to accept Ricky as her husband's son without being her son too. Ricky was relieved and hoped it would continue that way.

Both boys were keen to see the house. It was much smaller than the houses they'd been used to in Jordan and, in Ricky's case, Ghana, more the size of the houses both families occupied in England. And it seemed even smaller than it actually was because it was tall and narrow, four stories high but only two rooms on each floor. The top floor was the master bedroom and its own bathroom. Below that were two more bedrooms – the guest room and another with two single beds that Ricky and Chris would be sharing. And there was a bathroom between the two rooms. Below that was the kitchen and dining room, with a hatch linking them, and at ground level was a big comfortable lounge room and a hallway running from the front of the house and the front door right through to the door to the small garden at the back. There was even a basement below, with a laundry room and a store-room. On each level of the house was a landing connecting to the stairwell, and in the wall a top-opening flap covering the entry to a chute that ran right down the house to the laundry room in the basement. The boys had some fun with that when they unpacked, and tipped all their dirty clothes into the chute for washing.

Roger Taylor suggested that they should have an early night and the boys were not reluctant to turn in, they were both more tired than they had realised, and they just stripped off and pulled their pyjamas on before rolling into bed and falling asleep almost instantly. Neither of them thought to turn the light off, and Roger found the light still on the next morning when he looked in on them before setting off to work. He turned the light off and let them sleep.