I Went Abroad «

I Went Abroad

Thursday 26th October 2023

I only travel for a purpose. Pure travel – no thank you. This time there was to have been an opera in Prague followed by a dinner. Harry Rollo was giving at Leipzig.

As you know, Poor Little Rich Gays re-built the Bloc after the Wall.

In Prague the weather was glorious. So golden and warm. We didn’t leave the museum apartment except for lunch out and gym visits. Anthony Mottram sits on a bicycle for 40 minutes which merits a Starbucks stop-off afterwards – with cake. Even though it’s nearly dinner time.

Everyday Anthony Mottram learns a foreign language, plays a musical instrument and sits on the bicycle. It’s a routine but it’s gruelling. A hotel-style breakfast is laid out with a strong savoury arm. Then most of it is returned on the fridge. Cooking in the Museum apartment is exactly as if would be if you had a kitchen in a corner of the Raphael Cartoon Room at the V&A. So much floor worry. Will the parquet be marked? And a pervading disbelief – this can’t be a kitchen.

So gruelling is the routine that Anthony Mottram succumbed to a cold. Maybe it was Covid 19. Have you heard of it? All engagements were cancelled, only two lunches having been achieved previously. Anthony Mottram’s gallerist was up and down but sales were coming in just in time. Prague is like London was in the 1980s. Full of young people doing well, all thanks to the efforts of Anthony Mottram and others over 36 years. An older English man at the other lunch had recently escaped death and gone on holiday by car to Lubeck. I think he’s a friend of Her Majesty. It’s hard to grasp the ex-pat panoply in Prague. Many are Counts or relatives of Hitler, real or imaginary Royalty, dealings, the business world, possibly hush-hush, straddled between the tax regimes of various countries.

So I had to go alone to Leipzig, by car because there’d been an unaccountable surge in rail fares. Perhaps I passed through the Sudetenland, so longed for by Hitler. A certainty was the sign for Therezenstat, place of horror.

At Leipzig, Harry Rollo and Mercury Mr Kitten were at the Grand. Outside was the coach of the Bayern Football team. Somebody had put up a barrier so a crowd thronged behind it. We had cake adjacent and never saw a footballer. Harry Rollo said many masseurs would have been imported into the hotel, for sure.

But the really sensational discovery that Harry Rollo has made is really sensational: that if you have one cake it’s a lot less than two, half as much in fact. What a breakthrough! Whose meaning could not be denied. There’s very little of Harry Rollo left; he’s sensationally reduced, as a result of this sensation.

Otherwise in Leipzig, it was memories of Janacek who was a student there. His path was traced for Harry by a private expert. Janacek was incredible and brooked no opposition.

In the evening, the performance was given and was world-class. A small girl, a genius, played an imaginary violin throughout in her seat in the front row. The birds in particular were real but new, as never seen or heard before, in the performance hall. So it wasn’t a performance really but more real than most things that aren’t a performance.

I couldn’t have loved it more.

On the way back to Prague, a road sign said, ‘Colditz’. ‘It can’t be,’ I thought. That Colditz was in northern Germany. But it wasn’t. I drove up. It was the actual Colditz. Few now will remember all the Colditz survivors knocking around the Rotary Clubs in our youth, giving talks, writing books. Colditz – the elite prisoner-of-war camp for officers, grim fortress, impossible to escape from, although the place buzzed constantly with escape plots. Tunnelling away for a year under the ‘horse’ in the gym, Douglas Bader playing his oboe to signal that the coast was clear… and so on.

Now there’s a dusty little museum and a handful of British visitors. Honestly, Colditz Castle is an imposing old rabbit warren, but attached to a nice little town, quite historic and the countryside around pleasant. I think people get it confused with ‘Where Eagles Dare’. Mainly it must have been so boring. Trying to escape passed the time. To hear the old Colditz hands, though, you’d think the entire course of the War depended on them getting out. It was an elaborate game really with the Germans. Those who got caught were not shot. Sometimes they had to endure a spell of ‘solitary’ – with someone else.

When I was telling Val about Douglas Bader playing his oboe at Colditz, he said, ‘Oh yes, Kenneth More.’

Oh those Saturday afternoons of the 1960s, wall to wall Second World War movies. Dear Precious Kenneth More. Until quite late on I was worried sick there’d be Germans around every corner or that they’d come rushing up the stairs at night, having arrived by submarine.