Climbing the Stairs Read Online Free PDF Page A

used to doing it. Well, we didn’t.
    We went and found our room and put our things in and went off down the sort of main street and found a place where people were sitting outside and we sat there drinking beer until two
o’clock in the morning. Although we were so tired we had to prop our eyes open, we were determined to be able to say that we were drinking beer there at two o’clock in the morning.
Fancy the others going to bed. Aren’t the English people terrible? They’ve got no daring in them.
    All right the beer was horrible stuff like – well, it’s like water compared with English beer. I agree they’ve got wines that we haven’t got and it’s cheaper but
their beer’s no good at all. And Albert’s a beer drinker. During the course of our holiday he got so fed up with not having a decent beer that he asked for a Guinness. He only did it
once. They charged him eight and six for a glass of Guinness. They said they had to import it. No wonder nobody ever gets drunk over there because although the places are open all day you could
drink that beer till you floated in it and it wouldn’t do anything for you.
    Still we made out we were living it up. We wrote back most glowing accounts of sitting outside this place drinking beer at two o’clock in the morning. We were frozen to death. It was cold
and the beer was weak but we didn’t write about that.
    That was our first night there.
    The idea of course of staying at this place at the very tip of Holland was to make coach trips into Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium. And that was another stupid thing in the brochure. You had
to write and say just where you’d like to sit in the coach. I chose two numbers in the middle. Well, when the coach arrived at the hotel it was already half filled with people from another
tour and they weren’t going to shift for us. We just had to sit where we could. And didn’t some of the others moan. Albert and I didn’t because we didn’t really care that
much. It was only a small thing.
    This first day we went into Germany and the brochure said, ‘Germany with its lovely castles and a trip down the Rhine – a visit to the Drachenfels and Cologne with its wonderful
cathedral.’ And we had a packed lunch. Oh, those packed lunches! Salami sausage, strong salami-sausage sandwiches and an orange – and we got the same every day. I couldn’t eat the
salami and I couldn’t even eat the bread because it was so tainted with garlic.
    So off we set on our coach ride and the first stop was what they called the Drachenfels. It’s seven hills in a row supposed to look like a dragon. Well honestly you’d have to be as
blind as a bat to ever think it looked anything like a dragon. It didn’t compare with our South Downs. Just seven little lumps. The top one was very high admittedly but I couldn’t see a
dragon anywhere. When we got there there was a little railway that ran up to the top of this highest lump and the courier said we were all going to go up in it.
    So I said, ‘I’m not.’
    Now on these tours they can’t bear you to deviate. It worries the couriers. You’ve got to be the same as everybody else. By the look on his face I could see that I worried our
courier.
    ‘Oh, I couldn’t go up there – absolutely impossible – it’s too high,’ I said.
    ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t leave the ground.’
    ‘I hope not,’ I said, ‘for other people’s sakes.’
    He said, ‘The views up there are marvellous.’
    I said, ‘They wouldn’t be any good to me, I couldn’t look at them.’
    I simply refused to go. He didn’t like it but he had to put up with it in the end.
    So Albert and I wandered through the town on our own. And I think that was the best part of the holiday. We found a lovely little German beer garden where there was a man playing one of these
xylophone things with hammers and we hadn’t been there above ten minutes when he started playing English tunes. And there was dancing. It was