The Coming of Age. February Part 2

13th February. Look after grandchildren. Nanny is going to a wedding.

20th February. Harriet and Russell turn up with a bottle of champagne. Gosh this is going to be a super holiday I think. I have never had so much champagne in my life as since Martin left.

Harriet and Russell are beaming as Russell tells me she is pregnant and won’t be ski-ing at all. After my initial surprise at this sudden pregnancy, I begin to worry. Russell was a good skier so he would be going ‘off-piste’ and my companion in the beginners class would be son Alex, a 28 year old policeman at the peak of fitness (he alleges), not relaxed Harriet who has inherited all my lack of co-ordination. I put these worries aside as Russell and I tackle the champagne and toast the new baby-to-be many times. Harriet doesn’t drink anything.

21st February. We had a lot of excitement getting Russell’s skis into his Fiat and even more getting them out again at the airport where Alex joined us. Uneventful flight except that Harriet spent sometime with head in paper bag. Then we drove through the mountains through passes carpeted with yellowing grass. There was some snow at the top of the mountains but hardly any lower down..

Alex and I went off to hire our skis and boots and things. We are both tall and thin. This is relevant for in Austria the skis you hire are related to your height, not your ability. The taller you are, the longer your skis. I put on my boots which pushed my legs at a funny angle and grabbed the skis and staggered towards the place where everyone met to be allotted a class. I could hardly walk. The boots were heavy and skis so long they had a life of their own and kept swinging round. I hit an Austrian man in one of those hats with a feather, luckily he was very solid, and narrowly missed beheading a two-year old in full ski-kit. I kept dropping the ski sticks as well and although I could bend to reach them, straightening up was almost impossible.

There are so many people. This is the only resort for many kilometres with any snow at all and there are so many ski classes that any place will do for a class and any one who could actually ski has been asked to be a ski instructor.

Alex and I were put in Boris’s beginners group. Boris was a Bulgarian with a limited command of English but he smiled a lot, to start with. So did we. We had to take a ski-lift, another ordeal because you had to scramble on to a horizontal bar, while the whole apparatus continued moving, with your long skis waving uncontrollably like metronomes and your ski sticks slipping out of your hand, and then jump off again without being decapitated or decapitating anyone else. Experts wore their skis and stepped on and skied elegantly off. I get my skis tangled up in the overhead bar. I am terrified and we haven’t even started.

We arrived at a sheet of ice half way up the mountain. Boris stands before us and leaps up in the air, swivelling his knees one way and his hips the other.

‘You do it like so’, he said.

Neither Alex nor I have even fixed our skis on to the ski boots. We don’t know how. We stand in a line with the rest of the class. Someone helps us. Not Boris who is leaping around in front, saying ‘You stop so’.

As soon as my skis are fixed I instantly fall flat on my face, followed by Alex. Alex tried to help me and he fell over again too. It was then that I was glad I was a middle aged, well, elderly woman. (Where is the line between middle aged and elderly? Have I reached it?) Loss of face doesn’t matter any more. It does to Alex though.

Then, just like being in an infants school and having to read out loud, we have to take it in turns to copy Boris leaping and hip swivelling. You are supposed to go a little way and then stop, as you had been shown. Most people fell down. There were one or two who seemed suspiciously adept for a class of absolute beginners. Alex glares at them and I smile ingratiatingly, hoping some of their magical ability would spread to me. It doesn’t.

After a morning in which I spent more time on the ground than upright I mutter to Alex, ‘We’re supposed to be enjoying this. We’re supposed to be on holiday.’

Every time it is my turn, I know I can’t do it. I ask Boris how I should be bending, how I should lean and where should the weight go. He cannot even understand my questions. I slurp stiffly down the gentle slope to where the mountain falls steeply away a few feet ahead and in a panic as I gather speed, throw myself backwards from the edge. My knees go inwards, and skis cross outwards and there I am again, on my back, like a giant beetle unable to move. An instructor from an adjacent group comes and tries to help me to my feet but to no avail.. He calls for reinforcements and four chaps from another group come over and together they haul me to my feet, smiling with very white teeth in tanned faces. That was the best bit of the day.

22nd February. Alex has gone to the classes again. It’s man thing. He can’t be seen to give in. I go up to the top of the mountain via two ski-lifts. Without skis, it is so easy. At the top hundreds of people are lying in deckchairs, enjoying the glorious view, soaking up the sun and drinking and eating. Most seem to feel no need to humiliate and torture themselves by actually trying to ski.

At 3.30 Alex is already at the outdoor bar where we had arranged to meet and have hot chocolate and gluhwein after his class. He has already had several gluhweins by the look of him but does manage to remember who I am and introduce me to his new bosom friends, an Irishman and his wife. He has had a different instructor, an Englishman called Paul, and has , he said, ‘Cracked it.’

February 23rd. I join Paul’s class and, on a flat piece of snow, a bit like a large saucer, I gingerly go down the gently sloping rim and across to the other side. I do not fall down. I am really getting somewhere.

Harriet and Russell go to bed early, whether exhausted by the idea of imminent parenthood or by the fact that alcohol was now off-limits for the expectant mother, and thus for husband, (Harriet is surprisingly forceful) I do not know. Alex and I go to a nightclub together. I have never been to a night club before. Alex doesn’t seem to mind taking his mother or dancing with her but this may be because there is no one who could possibly recognise him.

February 24th. Paul wanted to take his successes, which included Alex and the Irishman’s wife, but not the Irishman, to tackle a proper run. We are sent to another class and lo and behold it is Boris’s. Both our faces fall as we recognise each other. It is Thursday and the class contains all those who haven’t graduated beyond beginners, including Frank, the Irishman and two other Irishmen, brothers from Galway. We are the failures of the week – and we are all old. I am the oldest, the youngest of us is Paddy, one of the Irish brothers, who is 42.

With difficulty Boris finds somewhere to hold the class and again we end up on a vertiginous icy slope with one flat area the size of tea tray and a large declivity on the left. Frank and Paddy seem only to be able to go left; like shopping trolleys thus ending up in the declivity frequently, sometimes at the same time, shouting it is exclusively their hole and they want it to themselves. It is quite the jolliest class, and all the would-be but hopeless skiers spend the day laughing though Boris’s smile soon disappears, never to return. He, poor fellow, can’t possibly understand the Irish jokes. I crash down yet again, both knees making ominous cracking noises.

After more juggling with ice packs I am fit enough to go out in the evening to a traditional Austrian concert with yodelling, lederhosen and lots of bottom kicking. Our new Irish friends are there already their sorrows well drowned. Members of the audience are invited to join the dancers on stage and Alex, after a successful day doing a proper ‘run’ and celebrating it well, is the first to do so. He doesn’t try yodelling but he certainly goes in for bottom kicking to the surprise of the lederhosen clad Austrian in front of him. Then I am on my feet and being nudged towards the stage by Paddy. I am on the stage doing a polka. Worse follows. In front of at least a hundred people I suddenly feel this hand cupped around my left buttock and Paddy says ‘Now why don’t you come back to my hotel with me after?’ I thought of Harriet, looking on, newly pregnant and stone-cold sober and Alex. It would be all round the family in no time. I think of saying ‘I am old enough to be your mother’ but it wasn’t too successful last time.

‘I don’t think my children would like it’. I say feebly.

We get back to the table and Paddy sits on the other side and gets into deep conversation with Frank’s wife, the successful skier. Two minutes later he has passed out, face down on a pile of damp beer mats.

25th February. Alex does a red run with Paul, his face thoroughly saved. Harriet and I go for a gentle walk and then, towards dusk, for a swim in the heated open air swimming pool. Bliss.

26th February: Home again to my quiet empty house. I shall change one of my affirmations. I am not quite sure that I am up to an exciting life. Still I have been propositioned by a man 18 years my junior, even if he was drunk at the time. I have tried to ski. I may never do it again but now it doesn’t seem to matter.