Cold Feet in Germany

Without any doubt the coldest my feet have ever been was when I was a passenger in a Volkswagen Beetle. We were driving from what was then West Berlin though the autobahn corridor of East Germany in the winter of 1972, heading more or less due south to the Bavarian Forest, a nature park on the German border with Austria and Czechoslovakia, as it was then.

The road was pretty empty, not many made that journey compared to today’s traffic volumes. They’d have been foolish to do so in an old Beetle with a heating system which was about as effective as trying to warm your entire home using the kitchen toaster! But we were exactly that kind of foolish – and young.

VW Beetles had a simple rear-mounted air-cooled engine, reasonably reliable and known for their distinctive sound. No radiator to freeze in winter. But the car heater was a inefficient fan which was supposed to suck air, warmed by the hot engine, forward along a couple of pipes into the footwells up front. Even on a new, more efficient 1970s model, the system was pathetic.  On our older model, no heat reached the interior of the car at all. We buzzed along at a little less than 60mph – the East German state made good money from fining motorists who went over 100kph (62mph). Hidden on every down gradient were the unflinching VoPo – the volkspolizei – eager to stop anyone with Western currency who transgressed the speed rule.

To be honest the speed limit wasn’t really much of a burden for us. The old engine wouldn’t have been able to propel the car much faster anyway. But it did mean that the 600km journey, through the corridor from West Berlin to West Germany, took even longer.

You may also have noticed that once one’s feet are properly cold, nothing seems to warm them up. And one can think of little else. At some stage we stopped at one of the meagre motorway service stations for Wurst, Brötchen und Gulaschsuppe. Perhaps warming some parts of the body, but going nowhere near as far as the feet.

Harald and I, brothers-in-law, had had the brilliant idea of treating our young daughters to their first taste of skiing in the hills of the Bayerische Wald, where we had rented a small wooden house from the local forrester. The skiing would not be Alpine style downhill excitement – or high fashion – but gentle slopes with short village drag lifts we thought might be suitable for very young girls making their first forays into snow-sport. In the planning stage it had all sounded such fun, but doubt set in to my mind when we set off on a miserably cold, grey day early in the New Year… Me and my daughter had flown in to Berlin a few days before and I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by the generous heating system in the Berlin apartment.  So although I had got warm ski-socks in my suitcase, this was packed under a weather-resistant tarpaulin tied tightly with rope on the roof rack… (Boot space, under the front bonnet of those old Beetles, is awkwardly shaped and very limited.)

On we trundled, the girls in the back wrapped in blankets and playing the kind of games youngsters are good at inventing to make the kilometres pass more pleasantly. Harald behind the wheel concentrating on making sure he kept the car from getting over the speed limit… Me, the passenger in the front seat, now regretting the whole idea of this winter holiday. If it was this cold, now, what’d it be like later?

And then just as we were getting close to the border with West Germany again the car’s engine started to splutter. Soon travelling anywhere near the speed limit was an impossibility. We managed to pull off at an un-attended rest area, the light fading in the late afternoon.

Picture the scene. Two grown men looking into a murky engine compartment, miles from help and with little idea of what might be up with the bloody thing! We couldn’t see much, or test anything. I had the reputation for tinkering with cars, which came from the fact that I used to arrive everywhere with grubby fingers having had to ‘adjust’ something under the bonnet of the unroadworthy banger I was driving at the time. So it appeared to be  down to me and I asked Harald if he had a rag…

True-to-form an oily piece of something which might once have been a pair of underpants emerged from the door pocket. I wiped the plug leads, giving the impression that I knew what the trouble was and what I was doing. Actually, I suspect that the biggest change was to the colour of my hands, now a familiar chocolate brown from dirty engine oil.

We got back in the car and for no apparent reason it started and began to run a little more eagerly. A few kilometres further and the engine seemed completely smooth again. Of course I took full credit for the change in performance, but actually I was pretty sure it was nothing to do with my amateur intervention. The credit I was given made me feel a warm glow, but my feet stayed painfully cold until long after we arrived at our remote holiday hut in the snow.

Very late that evening I managed to warm them on the traditional tiled kachelofen - a wood-burning stove in the centre of the house which can warm a whole building given long enough. It was that and a fair amount of schnapps…

My feet have never been that cold again. Not during the days in the snow with ill-fitting boots, as the girls revelled in their winter sports . And not on the journey home when they were covered in two pairs of ski socks pulled over one pair of thinner socks tucked inside my pre-warmed shoes…