By this point, my life was split between playing cocktail piano in the Chesterfield Hotel in the evenings, staying with friends in Honor Oak and making sure Stefan and my mother could converse back up in Norfolk. At the end of the week I headed back up, ready to return the rental car to Dover and pick up Stefan's hopefully repaired TR6. And then the telephone rang.
'Could I speak to FrenchFingers, please?'
'Speaking'
'This is Barbara from Cats in Hamburg. We would like to offer you a contract'.
Talk about turmoil. OK, there was a three-month trial period, but you have to be a completely untalented, antisocial tosser to fail that in the music business. I accepted the offer, fixed a date two weeks hence to fly out (they would take care of the booking, the fare, the lot; oh, halcyon days) and set about getting poor old Stefan set up. His English was still at the 'Gut Mornink' stage; my mother's German a throwback to her friendship with a Jewish Baron, Edgar Lustig-Lendva, a vet in wartime London (but that's a post in its own right, coming up right after this one) and centred around property conveyancing: 'Ein kleines Abkommen' doesn't help much in such circumstances; references to post-Nazi property restitution not really being the order of the day when speaking to the modern German confirmed pacifist that Stefan was.
I managed to get Stefan B&B in my old London student digs in Barnes (yes, darling) and a 'date' with a dear friend from Koblenz, Lisa. My former landlady, married to a descendant of Wordsworth, was delighted to accomodate a charming, handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed teutonic language student and revelled in her contribution to promoting cultural diversity. He subsequently got a kitchen job in the pub next door, The Sun; everything worked out perfectly and I could fly off to Hamburg with a clear conscience. Which I did.
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