Julian and I

It was a lizard’s tongue-flick after

England One Germany Four in the World Cup

when armies of churlish chair-hurling Anglo-Saxons

who apparently aren’t Germanic in any way

mid-stanza stopped caterwauling about two world wars

and nineteen sixty-six AD or BC (no-one remembers),

and as a thousand thousand flags of Saint George

snuggled up to banana skins

again,

my rotund computer-programming Swabian chumlet

who’d been named after the son of a walrus

trotted barefoot through the puddled

concrete plastic neon rosehip-sprinkled

streets of Lewisham. I asked,

“Julian, where are your shoes?”

He replied, chortling like a coalminer

at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral,

“In Germany we don’t need Jews!”

and I reacted in the British way, thinking

“Nothing to do with me, God, that was

his sin, not mine.”

 

As we trekked beer-guided supermarketwards he added,

“I’m so glad I’m in England

where I can tell jokes like that,

back home I wouldn’t get away with it!”

Well done, mate,

hitlerious.

To circumcise a long story,

we ambled into a lake of

skinheads in England football shirts

and tattoos that said “Mum” and “Millwall”

and Julian turned into a gameshow host,

quizzing them, “Can you guess which country I’m from?”

 

The lemming in my brain chewed his claws

as the guesses flew past, “Norwegian”

and “Swedish” and “South African”, before,

in a flailing attempt to stop World War Three

erupting outside a Croatian hairdresser’s shop,

I cut in, “He’s Dutch! He’s Dutch!”

and before I could add that he was born

in a windmill, eats tulips and is always

stoned, there rose an Alp of indignation,

“I’m not Dutch! Don’t insult me!”

and so the lemming scampered

round and round in his wheel

to “Zimbabwean”, then “Danish”, then “German”,

then                                               complete

                     silence.

 

“Where’s your shoes, you cunt?”

 

“Well, actually,” enlightened Julian,

the hole in the ground spreading into a canyon,

“I lost my shoes in a bet

that England would beat Germany in the football.”

 

                                 more

                                                      silence,

and I stood there imagining steel-tipped boots in earholes

and fists with “Aunty Doris” printed on them

crashing into grinning teeth

but instead there were laughs

and smiles

and Heil Hitlers

and the skinheads mooched cheerily

on their way, singing something that sounded like

“Port Salut, Salut,

whatever is Brie, is Brie,

so choose your cheese caerphilly,

Port Salut, Salut”

but probably wasn’t.

 

Three years later

in the Stuttgart Schlossgarten

Julian and I found ourselves benched beside

a disarranged aged tramp

agent-oranged by vodka and shouting

Heil Hitler!

Heil Hitler!

Heil Hitler!

Heil Hitler!

Heil Hit

before the handkerchief-headed

rolled-up-trouser-legged

fish-and-chip-scoffing

saucy-postcard-scribbling

cricket-bat-brandishing

tea-with-extended-pinkie-finger-sipping

genocidal-civilian-massacring-maniac-quoting

war-lover

that prowls around deep deep deep down

inside even the most European of island-monkeys

burst gushing red white blue in every direction out of me

with a two-fingered

“We shall fight them on the beaches!

We shall fight them in the streets!

We shall never surrender!

I have nothing to offer but blood

sweat

and tears,

ENGLAND!

 

ENGLAND!”

 

To which our damp-trousered neighbour replied,

“Heil Hitler!”, and then,

“Heil Hitler!”, and then,

unexpectedly,

“Barack Obama!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Alfie Shoyger