September 1987

If you're trained in the arts you'll do anything to get into the job market. After a B.Mus (Hons) and performance diplomas from music colleges in Manchester and London I decided I wanted to go abroad and learn about life beyond Britain's fair four walls. As luck would have it, the job that came up was that of a ballet pianist in a smallish German town called Koblenz. It sits at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers and is pretty attractive, as rebuilt teutonic settlements go. I was to work as a ballet pianist, something I'd never done before and which turned out to be the most difficult position I've ever held.

Thosse unfamiliar with the work of a ballet pianist have not missed much, save to say it is incredibly demanding and unlike any other musical discipline. So that the dancers don't get bored with what you're playing, you have to come up with about 90 minutes' worth of new music every day for the ballet class and then try to interpret how a dancer hears and counts music whilst accompanying the choreographic session. I won't go into details, but it goes against the grain of everything you've been taught since you first put your grubby fingers on a keyboard. Anyhow, the dancers were charming, the girls extremely attractive and I was willing to learn.

German theatres in those days did everything in German: Die Bohème, Figaros Hochzeit, Schwanensee (OK, so there's no singing in a ballet, but you get the point), to name but a few. Our first production was Swan Lake, a traditional reconstruction of Petita's classic choreography and very well received by the audience. I hankered to veer over to the opera department, but these two branches of the theatre brooked no intermingling. I made friends quickly, one of whom is still regularly in touch, an American, P, from San José, California. He was young, free, straight and single and wasted no time promoting American-German relations, but more on that, later.

I'd arrived in Koblenz with no German but set about learning the lingo as quickly as possible. I'd be in rehearsal from 10am until 2pm, then I'd go home and study the language until my next rehearsal started at 6pm. My first breakthrough was losing my temper with the doorkeeper at the tax office (which had closed, unannounced, the only afternoon I was able to go). Three weeks of study and I found myself able to let off such a convincing tirade in the language of Goethe that he opened up the office for me and tracked down a stray tax officer to process my details. Two months later I was reading crummy crime novels and by February I was fluent. In those days over there, it was sink or swim; Germans spoke then, as now, excellent English, but were keener to see you make the effort with their language than to practise their knowledge of yours. Things have changed a lot, but, as a foreigner, good spoken German opens a lot more doors there than if you just rely on them to do the running.

I was lonely and dreadfully homesick at first. My little one-room flat overlooked the railway tracks and Tuesday night was freight night...from midnight to six a.m. it was just one single procession of every example of German manufacturing and military might: cars, lorries, freight wagons and even consignments of tanks (with the unmistakable insignia on the side) rolled past my window and kept me awake. Still, I had my own bathroom; I was 25 and, for the first time ever, didn't have to worry about what anyone else would get up to in that little room. A simple, but profound, joy.

I eventually moved downstairs to a larger studio, then out to a one-bed flat overlooking the Jesuitenplatz, a beautiful square in the centre of town and one minute's walk from work. My friend P had been busy breaking hearts and I was getting restive. Then one day, while I was sitting in the canteen having coffee, an attractive thity-something lady came in and asked me if she could sit at my table. She was there to meet the acting director with a view to setting up an audition. We chatted amiably and went our seperate ways.

A couple of days later, on Carnival night, P and I went into our local bar. Lo and behold, there she was, sitting at the bar, telling the landlord how she wanted to become an actress. We got talking again and started ordering drinks. Yes, she'd like to see my new flat (I'd just moved in), so I got a bottle of local white to take away and off we went. We sat talking in the sitting room for a couple of hours before the caressing began. God, how I'd missed that contact. The carnival screams and shouts outside in the street competed with ours and I finally felt I'd arrived in Germany; not quite a conquest to match that of 1945, but a pretty major one on a personal level. The next morning we had breakfast and, making vague promises to get in touch, promptly never saw each other again.

P, in the meantime, was entertaining at home, a 19-year old extra he'd met at the theatre with a body built for sin. We'd both finally started really enjoying our time on the Rhine with our respective Rhinemaidens.