Winter has surely come to our little town. The Café Hirsch has taken in the tables by the old fountain, and carried off the ornamental trees in their heavy blue pots; trees that had provided a tracery of shade in those long hot Summer days. Days when Jonny sipped his green tea with milk, and the old men played cards for matchsticks, swished flies away - and drank their Trollinger mit Lemberger.
Winter is the time when the Alt Stadt - the Old Town - belongs to the folk who live here.
Gone are the myriad tourists. Those hords of strangely-garbed cyclists, with their Spandex shorts and alien helmets. (Do they think the helmets render them invisible, I wonder, as they swish past my table, Spandexed genitalia resplendent.)
Now Besigheim belongs to the Besigheimers. In just a very few weeks it will be time to cut away the dead wood in the vineyards. This will be raked into piles and burned. To me, it feels very wasteful! In southern France it would be the time the vine-growers gather the dead vines and have huge barbecues, roasting racks of the giant sardines that are caught by the fishermen of Port Vendres and Argeles.
In France, it is a time of Bacchanal.
Here in Besigheim, it is a time for hard work -- and introspection.
Every year there are more fallow vineyards, as the young people leave to work in the big cities, like Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart - and every year more and more vineyards are sold to property developers, to make houses for the people who flood here, from Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart, looking for a place in the country.
When I first visited here, over forty years ago, there was a winemaker in almost every house. Now there are just a few who make their own wine, the rest sell their grapes to the big combine in Hessigheim - Felsengarten Kellerei. I find Felsengarten wine very drinkable, but somewhat lacking in character. Linda and I prefer the wine from Lauffen, or, sometimes, we’ll drive up to Stockheim, where we have found a winemaker whose wine we really like.
We worry about the changing character of the surrounding towns, but, here in Besigheim’s Alt Stadt, things stay pretty much the same.
When the weather is not too cold we’ll sit outside the Café Hirsch and chat with Jonny.
Jonny was just sixteen years old when the Allies captured him at Dunkirk.
He sits and sips his green tea and reminisces about the workshop under the railway arches in London’s East End, where he was allowed to work on day-release from the prison camp. Or the time he was transferred to a prison camp in the States.
As he talks, he sips his tea and smiles. They were good times, he says. People were very kind to him. They called him ‘Nazi Boy’ and gave him cigarettes.
He loves America. It was there that he was given the name ‘Jonny’, and abandoned the name he had been given at his Christening..
The sitting room of the little house he shares with Trudl, his wife of almost fifty years is crammed, floor to ceiling, with books. Books on America, books on London, the war.
He is stuck, forever, in those years.
When Spring finally comes we must get our house painted. Also I notice that a small section of the plaster, which fills in the gaps between the wood that frames our old house, has broken away. I’ll have to get that fixed, too.
For now, our main task is to block as many draughts as possible!
Living in a house that is just two years younger than America presents one with many problems.
Heating being paramount.
All the windows, bar two, are modern and double-glazed- yet the house leaks like a sieve. We can have the big tiled oven in the ess-zimmer pumping out the heat, yet we’re bundled up like Inuits, just four feet away. Next year I plan to get a central heating and cooling system installed – with a humidifer in my music room, to keep the instruments happy. Right now I’m trying to get someone to come out to modify the bathroom on the middle floor so that I can, finally, take a shower.
It’s a very simple modification, just raising the floor about four inches and raking it down to a drain hole by the far wall, then installing a slatted seat, bolted to the wall, with sufficient space beside it to get my wheelchair alongside. The shower head to remain where it is now.
A simple job, yet I cannot find a local firm who will do it. MOST frustrating!
It’s too cold to work in the barn, so I’ve set up a work area in my office.
Merlin, the flat-coat retriever, has made a nest under my desk and plonks his warm body on my cold feet. It’s a fine symbiotic relationship.
Roll on Summer!
