Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You think British trains are bad? Try German ones

[Getty Images] 
issue 05 August 2023

I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered, unseeing, through an expectoration of towns: Zutphen, Eefde, Gorssell. He was 79 years old, he told me, and returning to Berlin for the first time in 61 years for a meeting with an old friend.

Our steward made it absolutely clear he couldn’t give a stuff that there was no buffet car

Back in 1962, Jean-Pierre had been a very young Belgian Jesuit employed in smuggling hard currency from West to East Berlin, which he did by stuffing the notes inside a plaster cast which covered his right leg. There was nothing wrong with his leg, of course. His contact in an illegal Christian charity in the East was a man of the same age, called Norbert – and it was this chap he was going to see for the first time in almost six decades.

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