The Leipzig Affair

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

It was my counsellor, Sally, who got me thinking about Leipzig again. We did an exercise one day. She got me to write things down. It was hard at first, but after a while I got into the swing of it.

“Start with your name,” she said. “Just write it down. My name is Robert. I know it sounds silly, but it’ll get you going.”

She always insisted on calling me Robert. My name is Bob, I wrote.

After my name I was to write down some basic facts about myself. “By facts we mean things that are indisputably true,” Sally said.

I gave it a go. I am Scottish. I have green eyes. I used to work in financial services. Now I am a consultant (=unemployed). I have thinning, gingerish hair. I am not tall.

I could have written: I am an alcoholic. But I never say those words. And Sally wouldn’t have liked it. They don’t believe in alcoholism at the South Islington Alcohol Advisory Centre. They believe that some people need help to manage their alcohol consumption, and that there are various ways of doing this. That was one of the things Sally and I talked about during our sessions: how to manage my alcohol consumption. According to Sal, that could mean total abstinence or it could mean a return to normal drinking. A return to normal drinking. What a joke! Sally has no idea what it’s like. She doesn’t know how reduced my life is. She doesn’t understand that when you drink everything gets chipped away until there’s almost nothing left. She doesn’t realise that I’m only a tiny fragment of a person.

Next Sally asked me to write about what happened. She meant What Happened to Me in Leipzig. She said that was how I saw it: in italics with capitals, like the title of a book or film. I didn’t want to write about that. Or talk about it. I’d only told her that I’d spent time behind the Iron Curtain to counter any idea she might have that I was some kind of Tory City boy because I worked at Liebermann Brothers for fourteen years and went out with a girl who worked as a PA for a hedge fund manager in Mayfair. I wanted her to understand that I was as much of a fish out of water at Liebermann Brothers as she would have been. That I was a Labour voter just like her. A woolly liberal with a bleeding heart. But she latched on to it – with a hint of desperation, I thought – and so I played along.

The trouble with counsellors is they’re just people. They have their problems, their issues. Take Sal. I’d been seeing her for nearly six months by then and I reckon I’d got to know her pretty well. I knew that when she crossed her legs and leant forward clutching her clipboard to her chest, she was about to make an important point. We’d reached a crossroads and she wanted to make sure we went the right way. And I knew that when she turned up in trousers and flats she was having her period. Normally, she wore smart above-the-knee skirts with glossy tights and high heels that showed off her slender ankles and shapely calves. But once a month, regular as clockwork – trousers and flats. And a couple of times when we had morning appointments, her eyes were red-tinged and she was distracted and found it hard to get the session going, and I knew she’d had a fight with her boyfriend. Maybe even had a few too many the night before. And why not? There’s no law against alcohol counsellors having a drink.

The thing was Sally was new to the job. She was still on day-release training. She wasn’t getting anywhere with me, and she thought it was her fault. It wasn’t. It was me. I’m a cagey bastard. But she thought it was. She was worried. I could see it in her eyes. She was starting to think maybe she wasn’t going to be any good at this counselling lark. The writing was her brilliant idea to draw me out. She thought she was on to something with my Leipzig story and maybe she was. But that’s not why I agreed to write about it. Or why I carried on talking to her about it when the exercise was over. I carried on because Sally was interested in a way that she wasn’t interested in Liebermann Brothers and Annabel, my ex.

“That must have been fascinating,” she said when I first told her I’d studied in Leipzig back in 1985.

“Well, yeah,” I said, feeling for the first time that she wasn’t listening to me because she was paid to but because she wanted to, that she was just a girl and I was just a guy. Maybe I was a little bit in love with her.

The big problem with writing about what happened to me in Leipzig was: where to start?

“Start at the beginning,” Sally said in her brisk, that’s-enough-now voice.

But where was the beginning?

I was born in a caravan at Uig on the Isle of Lewis that my Uncle Norman had lent to us. My mum went into labour unexpectedly, and my big sister Shona, who was only four at the time, had to go and get the farmer to drive us to Stornoway because my dad was out fishing. By the time the farmer got there, it was too late and he had to deliver me himself. It made the Stornoway Gazette: ‘Ardroil Man in Caravan Birth Drama’.

No. That wasn’t it. Neither was the beginning in Calderhill, the Lanarkshire village in the shadow of the Ravenscraig steel works where I grew up. The story began in St Andrews where I began my DPhil on Heinrich Heine. If I hadn’t gone there – and hadn’t hated it so much I was willing to do anything to get out – I wouldn’t have met John Bull-Halifax and he wouldn’t have organised a study place for me in Leipzig.

I went to St Andrews because Eugene Bramsden, the head of the German Department, was the leading Heine scholar in the UK – or so I told myself. Unfortunately, Bramsden was also a right-wing prick. He regretted the presence of students from state schools at ‘Scotland’s premier university’, and rumour had it he’d once dismantled a wheelchair ramp with his bare hands to prevent a disabled student from entering the modern languages building.

Bramsden and I never got on. He was a relic of a bygone age: a time when the likes of me would’ve been down the mines and students wore cream-coloured cricket jumpers and drank Pimms. The grubby reality of university life in the 1980s, when, even at as august an institution as St Andrews, one could be confronted by a postgraduate student who’d clawed his way out of a Lanarkshire comprehensive and somehow wangled a first-class degree (even if it was only from Glasgow) was not really to Bramsden’s taste.

Our first meeting of the term set the tone for our future dealings. Bramsden was in convivial mood. He had on one of his spotty bow ties, and there was a decanter of port on his desk from which, it was clear, he had already liberally imbibed. In the manner of a bachelor uncle conferring a substantial inheritance on a much-loved nephew, he informed me that I might call him ‘Prof Bram’. I told him I’d stick to Professor Bramsden if he didn’t mind.

“Ah-ha!” he sniffed. “I see.”

He slid the decanter across his desk for another salvo. “Fancy a tipple?” He smiled, revealing a mouthful of crumbling teeth.

“No, thank you, Professor Bramsden.”

His eyes hardened and he sat back in his chair. I could see the cogs turning beneath the wisps of grey hair that dotted his cranium. A mistake had been made. I wasn’t at all the kind of chap one could do business with. After that, his nose twitched whenever I entered his office as if he expected me to stink of manure or chip fat or both. He winced at my accent, rubbished my ideas, and when I tried to explain my thinking, he stared out of the window, a pained smile etched on his thin lips.

It was a sorry state of affairs. A good working relationship with your supervisor is essential for a DPhil. I should have transferred back to Glasgow. But I didn’t. I persevered because, whatever I’d told my friends and the Arts & Humanities Research Council – and myself – I hadn’t really chosen St Andrews because of Bramsden. I’d chosen it because Chris, my best pal in the whole world, was already there doing his PhD. I’d known Chris since I was five. At twelve we were separated when he was sent to a fee-paying school in Glasgow. Since then we’d never been in the same place at the same time. This was a chance to put that right.

It was a stupid reason to choose a university. Childish. Ridiculous. The stage was set for me to do something daft. And what could be more daft than completing my DPhil at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig?