`I´m Kurt, I´m 11, and I´m incorrigible´.
- The Sound of Music (1965)
And so it begins, the spring camp season in Germany. Along with 5 other English speaking foreigners, I am the `governess` of 50 German children, 10 girls and 40 boys between 7 and 16 at
English Football Camp on the beautiful shores of Lake
Werbelliner just 55 kilometers north of Berlin, though already into the depth of the Brandenburg woods. Our camp ground is a B-grade resort
reminiscing a miniature city of lodging houses (sleeps about 70, complete with deer antler light fittings...), picnicking and sporting areas, communal dining
cafeteria, mini video cinema, cabaret and various tiny shops and
of course an over priced Internet cafe. This caters for the East Germans who likes their holidays like their ordinary lives - orderly, symmetrical, minimalist and somewhat sterile...
The lake is a calm, glass like oblivion that changes colours constantly under the spring sun, surrounded by a thick cover of
Nordic pines and small hills, covered in spring buds on the verge of exploding into a sea of mint green and pink glosses of cherry blossoms. But underneath this innocent backdrop, there lied secrets that only the trees knew, and the water remembered. For its not so often spoken by the locals, about how the
Werbellinsee Retreat began life as a training camp for the Nazi Youth (exactly the same age as our campers... to give things a spin), built in the 1930s by the SS, complete with secret bunkers that is hidden under a few of the lodging houses, and a few tucked deep into the hills. Year after year Camp Counsellors like myself have tried in vain to uncover the whereabouts of them on wandering walks during a break, often somewhat challenged by the posted warning signs about asbestos
infested sheds and buildings that surrounds the main camp ground.
My day would begin in the dorm I shared with a fellow colleague, the delightful and
exuberant American songstress Amy. At 0725 usually the younger boys across the hall wakes up and begin their chaotic morning routines of not finding their t-shirts, exploded toothpaste tubes and chasing insects. 0815 a German breakfast of cured meat, cheese, cured meat, cheese and cured meat. Tad heavy, but in hindsight, completely necessary for the demanding day I was about to taken on. 0930 an hour and a half of pure English with Baroness
WaWa who of course perfectly
enunciate her
kiwi monovowel for the 10 to 11 year
olds. The half hour break at 1100 usually involved me collapsing in bed from exhaustion and the children dosing up on sugar on some really quite dramatically horrible collection of sweets,
ranging from a
whitish marble coloured marzipan the size of a
tennis ball, a bottle resembling one of those roll-on deodorant sticks except the liquid that comes out is brown syrupy goo, and all kinds of liquorice that a 80s child could never have dreamt of. 1130 is `
rotation class´ where each of us teachers take another teacher´s class to talk about each of our own countries/culture. My chosen topic for this camp is ´New Zealand Sports`. I try and challenge the imagination of these kids a little, but try picture me having to explain that
black water rafting doesn`t actually involve water
that's been dyed black, nor does i
t involve a raft, but a rubber tube and that one wears a miner`s helmet and headlight and hang out with glow worms. Though I was just as surprised to discover that there is a different version of kite surfing in German. Lunch at 1215 sharp is probably one of my most feared hours of the day. This is the only meal of the day that´s eaten hot for the Germans, which the penny pinching house staff likes to serve the cheapest roast and boiled meat and potatoes and beans. Usually we end up feeling bloated and
lethargic to face the endlessly
sportastic afternoon.
At 1330 the boys and girls would have already changed into their ever-colourful football gear awaiting the arrival of Richard the (hot=) English football coach. The obsession with football starts from infancy, an indoctrination of
kulcha that I don´t think I could ever understand. Mark my words, teenage boys with rich
parents take the opportunity of football to ingratiate their lust for the latest fashion - silver shoes, orange shoes, green and black sparkled shoes, shoes with a side string strap, shoes with a flat flap, shoes with
Ronaldo or
Podolski charactures. On the field they push, shove, squabble, hurt themselves, cry, swear, spit, and act like half their age (which is not very much at all) a lot of the time, but then I see the passion burn in their eyes, between
their grinding teeth and even the youngest, smallest boys pick themselves back up after a fall and carry on despite what must be the most excruciating pain. One of the boys, only 9, had been kicked in the same place on the right shin at least 4 times this week, and though it drove him in tears, after he rolled on the ground holding his knees, he still got up and charged on. That´s a standing ovation to me. And the sweetest
comradery of carrying each other home when a friend had really really hurt themselves....
Dinner is pretty much a repeat of the breakfast
smorgasboard with the addition of a few cold salads -most of them would be drenched in mayonnaise: potato salad in mayonnaise, shredded ham in mayonnaise, orange and mushrooms in mayonnaise, prawns in mayonnaise, picked eggs in mayonnaise, shredded herring in mayonnaise, etc etc, you get the picture... There would be the occasional roll mop, which disgusts me enough with the thought, but to top it all, on evening we were served the brown vinegary pickled
fishballs marinated with carrot and turnip? in a jelly sauce. For those of you that know me, I love food, I adore food, I worship food. I enjoy food so much that I even have a food blog. I will eat anything and everything. But for the first time in 20 years, I spat a mouth full of picked
fishballs out because it honestly tasted something like Courtenay Love´s vagina after a hard night out in Malibu.
In the evenings our
irreverent and reluctant Director usually pulls some sort of fancy evening program out of his arse - there was the scavenger hunt, a Wacky
Olympics, a fashion show (which brought out the
transvestite in all of us), and then a last resort of watching the ill-fated
Bayen vs Barcelona game for the boys. One evening we did do a fantastic bonfire out at the lake, where,
of course, none of the Team had to lift a finger because we all know what pyromaniacs these Germans are. Do have to say, kerosene flavoured
marshmallows did give me a bit of a strange
hallucinating high, which lead to me telling an extraordinarily
peculiar version of ´
Tiger Aunt´,
ie. the Chinese version of ´
Little Red Riding Hood´. Though I
secretly hoped that the bed wetting that evening was caused by my scary story than that dodgy chemically
enhanced meal that was given out...
And were you one of those children that wondered what the teachers got up to after they sent you to bed? In between the
after-work beers (which, unlike my London routine, had somehow been pushed back till 11.30 in the Director´s bedroom), dirty sheep jokes (blame it on the Scotsman on the Team, not me...) and fags, we take phone calls from dissatisfied parents (
Hi, my daughter says everything taste like plastic, why??), and worry about Johanna and Pascal, the young budding lovers of 15 and 14, because they have the
tendency of sneaking into each other´s bedrooms at night and make mayhem for the other children in the dormitory, and one of two kids who just won´t make friends. One evening the amusement did surround ´who shat in the shower´when we discovered a very large stool in the boy´s showers. After dressing up as The Ghost Busters to ceremoniously clean things up, some quite convincing conspiracy theories did emerge from this overqualified group of children-minders to give Agatha Christie a run for her
money. And you´d think that it should all be over by 1am? No, there are bats in the dorms to shoo out.
Transylvania is just around the corner,
isn´t it?
My most memorable moment however belonged to
Laurenz , one of the 10 year
olds in my English 1 class (he is also the only one that has guinea pigs as a pet cos he´s allergic to everything else). Having discovered a loose baby tooth, he and his friends wiggled it ferociously through out the course of the class. He simply came up to me unannounced and opened his mouth. I was only trying to figure out what he was trying to tell me in German, and right there he popped his tooth out
in front of me, blood, saliva, broken white bits and all. The children broke out into hysterical laughter as my face turned pale and slightly green in horror and confusion.
At that moment, I realised that I had forgotten the joy of innocence, the delight of discovering these things about life for the first time, that restless carefree feeling of living from one fun day to the next. Every graze, every tear, every stolen
Pringle chip and every spoonful of honey meant more to them than what I can now imagine. That need to pick that fight, that need to prove that you can, that vulnerability, and that courage to just cry when you need to. I´
ve been given the chance to be fourteen and a half for the second time, but could I? All this waiting to grow up, being misunderstood and underestimated, feeling completely ignorant of the world outside of an endless suburbia, learning everything the hard way... what a throwback. There is that something mysterious about the adult world of complicated and practised social games, cunning network of unspoken rules, dangers of sexual intrigue, and where
privileges and responsibilities weigh exactly the same on the shoulders. So when I am here you can´t make me go back. But how wonderfully interesting it would be to predict how some of these kids will turn out as adults. I really have high hopes for some of them. Others will sink into
bastardom very easily, but others, I am sure, will be some of the most interesting German individuals like the ones we would have met on those backpacking trails, and probably discover by accident sunbathing naked in Abel Tasman National Park. And others? they would no doubt write about that stupid camp with the stupid foreign teachers that talked crap about
black water rafting in those ghastly footballer autobiographies that the nation would flock to buy. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
