LIVES
From Tent to Castle
Harley L. Sachs
She
was a shop assistant with a German passport, working for a cooperative grocery
in Stockholm and spoke no English.
I was an American spy at the tail end of the GI Bill teaching English as a
foreign language, two three months terms a year. In three years I had learned
Swedish. When my number came up to be served I recognized the clerk’s accent.
In the then formal Swedish way of addressing strangers in the third person, I
asked, “Is the young lady Danish?”
She blushed. I was surprised. This
was Sweden ,
after all, the land of unabashed free love. That this pretty shop assistant could
blush was intriguing. I had to know more about her.
It was my job to size people up,
judge their character, know them, if possible, inside and out. I immediately
saw this girl, who turned out to be from North Germany
but an ethnic Dane from South Schleswig , as someone
special. She was, to my mind, like a bud of a rose. I saw potential. It would
be exciting to see how she would blossom. I was determined to find out.
I set about to doggedly pursue her
in my broke grad student fashion. The GI bill had run out. I was paid for my
language classes only twice a year. I was not someone who wooed with a bunch of
flowers, a bottle of wine and a dinner invitation. Instead, every day I stopped
at the Konsum store, took a number, waited until she would be the next clerk to
serve. I then bought a nickel chocolate bar. Every day.
I learned her name was Ulla.
The store crew figured it out, of
course, and teased her. Ulla refused all invitations to a movie. It looked
pretty hopeless, but I was determined.
While a company clerk in the US
Army in Heidelberg I had learned
from our cooks the secret of making pie crust. Swedish pastry selections did
not include American apple pie. I
decided to bake a couple of pies and, since Ulla refused my invitations to a
movie, to invite the whole Konsum crew upstairs for some real American apple
pie, a pie party.
I baked the pies and waited. The
agreed time came and went. I cut a pie and had my piece, alone. Half an hour late Ulla showed up with one of
the co-workers.
After that delayed success she
decided I wasn’t such a dangerous person after all. We did go to the movies
with her always insisting on paying her own way, a plus for a guy who lived on
two pay checks a year. That was the beginning.
We did a shakedown trip,
hitchhiking to Norway
and sleeping rough in a small tent, cooking over a Loma gasoline stove and
getting to know each other. This was no American girl who could not live
without a hot shower every day, stay in hotels and eat in nice restaurants.
This was a girl who had lived through World War II in North Germany
on a diet of boiled milk and potatoes in a house with no running water or plumbing.
Ulla had pumped water and boiled laundry in a cauldron over a brown coal fire.
She could rough it without complaint.
We were married the next year. My
American and Swedish friends thought us an odd couple: a Jewish American with a
graduate degree whose Polish family had been murdered and a German girl with a
Lutheran background who spoke no English and whose brother had died at Stalingrad .
We had a lot of points against us and we knew it.
On our honeymoon we left Stockholm
on rebuilt one speed bicycles, calendar and itinerary open. Ulla had no money
and I had my stash of the three thousand dollars I had put away during my three
years as a contract agent. It wasn’t as crazy as it looked, for if we did go
broke and get stranded I knew (but Ulla didn’t) the government would pay our
fares to the United States .
That failing, I had hopes of an assignment in Denmark .
We still had the language problem.
We had fallen in love in Swedish and for Ulla’s father’s sake, married in
German at the Stockholm synagogue
after her conversion. Snubbed my my English relatives who saw Ulla as a
despicable German even though she saw herself as Danish, she swore not to leave
England until she learned the language.
After fifty-two days of rain in the
tent in England
and Scotland ,
we advertised for a winter layover and, because I’m an author, were offered the
gatehouse of Borthwick Castle
This is no Pygmalian story, for I
am not her Professor Higgins or Svengali. I am her loving, devoted observer,
still enchanted by that remarkable girl who once blushed in the Konsum grocery.
store. We have been married fifty-six years.
Our story, “From Tent to Castle:
Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is available through Amazon.com.
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