SWITZERLAND ’74

We were watching a documentary the other day which happened to mention a small observatory perched high up on an Alp in Switzerland known as the Jungfrau and I mentioned, in that way I sometimes have - although not all that often because I’m hardly “well travelled” – that I had, indeed, “been there…!”

Well, I’d been to the mountain anyway. The observatory was something unknown to me when I was ten, but then, I suppose that there’s the distinct possibility that it hadn’t even been built back then for all I knew, although it turns out that it was completed nearly thirty years before I was born, so I was probably just being a bit ignorant.

But hey! I wasn’t even ten years old back then, and I was staying in a foreign country where I didn’t know two out of the three languages on offer, and was there without my parents for the first time in my life. Star-gazing wasn’t yet all that high up on my own list of priorities, okay?

Anyway, at 13,642 feet the Jungfrau (which translates as “Young Woman” and which leads inevitably to the oldest joke in the region “Have you been up the Jungfrau lately?” about which I was blissfully unaware at that age...) is the tallest of the three peaks overlooking Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald valleys in Switzerland. Its sister mountains are the Eiger and the Mönch and all three stand together about 20 miles south of Interlaken, the place where we went for that school trip when I was nearly ten years old.

Anyway, this conversation caused me to dig out the tiny lime green photo album containing the thirty or so photographs that I took on that trip using my dad’s pocket instamatic which I borrowed for the duration. You may remember those cameras. Slimline and pocket sized, containing a cartridge cassette that ended up giving you tiny negatives which, if you were very lucky, converted into slightly less than completely blurry pictures of whatever you hopefully pointed it at.

My photos are almost uniformly unspectacular. The yellow-painted hotel we stayed in with an orange-ski-jacketed elbow sneaking into the edge of the frame; the Monaghan brothers and their friend Paul Something-or-other standing in front of the hotel; some indistinct mountains which look like the statutory “the view from the window” shot; those Monaghan boys again in front of a chalet and some logs near the hotel car park; and half a dozen more blurred shots of school pals whose names I can’t remember and me in a purple shirt and blue silk-effect tie.

There’s a picture of another elderly person, Brigitte Engel, the daughter of a family my mother and father befriended whilst on holiday a couple of years earlier who came to visit. She seemed so terribly old and wise and was probably about, oh, fifteen when I look at the photo. My mother, bless her, was forever finding ways of “putting herself in the picture” as it were, usually by involving people whom I barely knew, but who she did. Sometimes it got really embarrassing...

There are also some pictures of Lake Lucerne and a railway bridge I remember being barely able to cross because of vertigo, a photograph of some boats on the river near Interlaken, and a blurry old picture of Catherine Smith attempting to take a picture of the Swiss flag.

Why do I suddenly remember her name…? Very odd…

I think we crossed paths years later when, by the strange laws that govern such things, we were both on the same foundation course, but I don’t remember now whether she was particularly friendly, and after that finished, well, we never met again, and I don’t suppose we ever will.

There are pictures of a goat and a horse in a field (with, once again, an additional orange-clad arm at the edge of the frame), which probably seemed very unusual to a townie like I was, and there are the “snowball fight” shots taken during a trip up a mountain, where I genuinely recall being amazed at the amount of snow.

It’s also surprising what I didn’t take pictures of. The most vivid memories seem to be of the kind of cable cars that you simply couldn’t persuade me into these days if you tried. Perhaps I was too terrified and was gripping so tightly to the handrails that it would have been impossible to hold the camera. I also remember a broken fluorescent tube; discovering that I rather liked playing pinball; reading “Doctor Who and the Giant Robot”; endlessly (it seemed) listening to a song by “Mud” on the juke box, possibly “Dyna-Mite” but I’m not sure now; free gifts from “Swissair” on the plane; travelling to London to catch that plane; buying the “Look-In” Special edition that would help at least three of us to do music projects the next year at secondary school…

So many memories, so very long ago…

A photograph of the two schoolteachers who accompanied us is, perhaps, the most interesting, despite yet another unexpected intruder sneaking into the edge of the frame. Miss Normansell and Mrs Machin were the teachers, neither of whom I’ve really thought about in decades. I do, however, remember the diary of the trip that they wrote and printed off for each of us (I bet there’s more than a small chance that I still have it somewhere), and the trick they played on April fool’s day saying that we had to go home early. Looking back, they both seemed so terribly old and wise but yet both look far, far younger than I could ever have thought they were.

Funnily enough, it turned out that my grandparents had been keen visitors to Switzerland years before, and had really enjoyed Lauterbrunnen, and the painting of a mountain that hung in their various homes for years was of the Jungfrau, although I have no recollection of anyone seeming to show enough interest in my visit to actually bother to mention it to me at the time, or indeed for years afterwards.