by Helen Moat
We observed the sky, swollen with water now, and headed for the campsite restaurant to slowly sip coffee and take shelter in the warmth of the room. As we stared out of the window, the rainwater broke from the pregnant sky and any sense of eagerness I’d felt about sleeping out in the open evaporated with the earlier sunshine. When the rain finally stopped, we ventured outside, to find a man shivering at the entrance with his bike, a wet shirt clinging to his back.
‘You wouldn’t have a spare jumper or coat?’ he asked hopefully. It was a desperate request. I shook my head a regretful no and the man slunk away. Despite the fact that we only had one waterproof and one jumper each, I felt guilty.
Down by the water’s edge, the Danube was softened by mists. Beyond, the hills of Austria were sponged an impressionistic watery green. Just as we contemplated setting up the stove, the rains came down again and we scurried into our coffins, where all we could do was listen to the hammer of water on canvas and try to sleep. When the rainstorm finally stopped, we took refuge again in the campsite restaurant, comforting ourselves with Spätzli und Wurst, our plans for pasta cooked on the stove forgotten.
That night was the longest of our trip. I cursed our sheet bags (bought with the summer temperatures of Eastern Europe in mind) and sliver-thin self-inflating mattresses that didn’t properly self-inflate. I lay in my coffin and listened to the thunder, dreaming of the guest rooms above the restaurant. Emerging from my tent in the morning, the campervanners opposite us shouted a cheerful hello.
‘We felt so sorry for you last night in the storm.’
But you didn’t invite us into your warm, dry campervan, I thought sourly while smiling cheerfully.
*
From the Austrian border, the Danube stretches out with barely a kink until it hits the Schlögen – the Loop. The Danube here, encountering impregnable granite, is forced to double back on itself, taking a 180° turn to create a watery noose around the forest of Sauwald, before looping round once more to head east, then south. It’s a particularly haunting stretch of the Danube, narrow and thickly wooded. Man has barely left a mark here. As we approached Au on the curve of the loop, the heavy rain from the previous night had left the deep-cut valley washed in mist.
From Passau we had kept to the left bank, but at Au, where the river slices through a deep incision of land, cyclists have no option but to switch to the right bank. Our bike book offered us two options: a short ferry-hop directly across the river to the other side, or a boat ride along the second loop that stopped just short of the hamlet of Grafenau, dropping its passengers off on the same side of the river. Jamie had decided on the second option, but when we arrived at the departure point, we found it unmanned. We returned to the first ferry.
On the other side, the track undulated through woodland, with no sign of human habitation until we came to a guesthouse with a little kiosk attached to it. We slammed on the brakes and ordered Gulasch mit Brot – the goulash dish somewhere between soup and stew and served with crusty bread. It was delicious and filling and good value at six euros and would serve as our main meal that day. Radeln macht hungrig, as the Germans say – cycling makes you hungry.
Twenty-three miles later, we were pushing up the steep uphill into Ottensheim. We had chosen the village for its campsite, but now the sky was a threatening black again. We could see the campsite below us by the water’s edge. We hesitated then took a turn into the town. Our camping days seemed to be over before they had properly begun.
*
Tourist Information sent us to Frau Hemmelmayr, a widow who lived in a wood-clad house down a quiet side street on the outer edges of town. She took a look at our soggy tents sitting on our bike-racks and suggested we spread them out in the garage among the garden tools and household equipment.
‘Come in, come in,’ she said, leading us up steep steps to the house entrance. We climbed yet more steps to the first floor. Frau Hemmelmayr pushed open the door to a room filled with heavy oak-carved furniture and gold-gilded framed pictures, depicting religious figures and romantic Austrian landscapes in thick oils. We’d been delivered into the nineteenth century.
In the morning, our host pulled freshly made rolls from the oven and sat down with us on the corner bench of the breakfast table to chat. We talked about her business, her failing eyesight and her garden with its cherry tree, visible from the kitchen window. I told her how the wood pigeons had discovered my own cherry tree and came every year now without fail to strip off every last cherry, not leaving us a single one. I asked Frau Hemmelmayr for advice.
‘Shoot the buggers,’ she said, screwing up her shrewd eyes and throwing her head back with a roar of laughter. And with her giggles still ringing in our ears, Jamie and I retrieved the tents from the garage, packed the panniers and freewheeled back down to the Danube.
As with Asher, my father would have enjoyed Frau Hemmelmayr’s mischievous character, her no-nonsense manner and glint of eye. And like me, my father had had to contend with wildlife raiding his food – only his thieves were foxes, not wood pigeons; and his victims were chickens, not cherries. Near our house was a farmstead with a little pocket of land that no one seemed to want, so my father rented it. Behind the house, he installed hens to provide us with eggs, but despite his best efforts to keep the chickens safe, a fox returned night after night to pick them off – leaving a trail of bloodied feathers across the garden until every last hen had been taken.
My father kept a pair of heifers, too, in the fields that straddled the farm track. It was a chance for him to have a go at being the hobby farmer he’d always dreamed of. But this project was equally doomed as the cattle escaped the fields on a regular basis. He called my brothers to help him round them up and herd them back to their own field. Giving chase again and again, the cattle didn’t put on much beef and made little or no money at market.
Then there was the goat my father brought home. We called her Betsy and my sister and I paraded her on a long rope around the streets of our town (to the astonishment of my cookery teacher). But when it turned out that Betsy was Benjamin, my brother sold it on, unimpressed we had a useless goat and no chance of goat’s milk for our kitchen.
Finally, a local builder purchased the farmhouse and land for a steal. The fields were left fallow for a while and it became a playground for local children. My friends and I scrubbed out one of the henhouses as best we could and set up our gang HQ in the wooden shack, spying on the enemy – a pretty, if haughty, girl from down the road who had probably snubbed one of the boys in the gang. The builder put up fencing to keep us out, but to no avail. We ran wild on the farm, gorging on bitter gooseberries and blackcurrants in the garden and climbing a tree to break into the boarded-up house through the skylight. Once he came around to check the premises when we were in the coal bunker. He stood outside, his feet visible just inches from us, as we crouched in the tiny space, holding our breath and hoping that none of us would sneeze in the dusty bunker.
Despite the builder, I was grateful to my parents for giving me the opportunity to be a wild child in nature. And I felt saddened for my father and his failed farming venture.
*
On the river path opposite Linz, we negotiated skaters, skateboarders, cyclists and walkers. The edge of the city was heavily industrialised with the kind of riverside wharfs, factories, chimney stacks and cooling towers we’d not seen since the Lower Rhine. With relief, we left the city behind, ducking in and out of dark woods and sleepy villages until we reached a bend in the road.
‘So,’ said Jamie, who’d by now taken on the additional role of tour operator and cultural organiser as well as map reader, ‘you make the choice: we can either visit Mauthausen Concentration Camp or the open-air museum at Mitterkirchen, but we don’t have time for both.’
How do you choose between a Nazi death camp and a folk museum celebrating Celtic life? It seemed too crass a decision. The previous winter, Tom and I had visited Krakow on a weekend break. Part of the package was a trip to Auschw
itz. I had had my reservations about the tour. Wasn’t there something ghoulish, even perverse, about visiting a concentration camp? But we had gone, and I had tried to take in the sheer scale of the inhumanity: the mounds of hair, the heaps of shoes, the mountain of suitcases. I tried to latch onto something that would personalise the objects and humanise the individuals behind the vast numbers – a name on a suitcase, or a glimpse of life in the photographs of the stony-faced and shaven women lining the walls in the corridor of one hut. And I found that humanity in a picture of Helena Bargiel: her smile and direct, fearless gaze transcended the death camp.
I left Auschwitz, despite all my reservations, with a sense of gratitude that I’d had the opportunity to pay my respects to all those who had died – that I could bow my head and say ‘sorry’, whatever that meant. It was hopelessly inadequate and yet it felt important and necessary. But most of all, I’d left the camp with a picture of a defiant Helena in my head.
Some of the Auschwitz inmates had made the journey from Poland to Mauthausen. Not Helena, who’d entered Auschwitz in January of 1943 and was dead by October. But for those who had made it to Mauthausen, there was no comfort in knowing there wasn’t the ruthless and efficient organisation of killing found at the Auschwitz gas chambers. At the Austrian camp, there was no quick release – no trains that delivered passengers directly to the gas chambers. This was death by torture, slow starvation and work-exhaustion. It was long and drawn-out, cynical and callous.
The Nazis were endlessly inventive, cruelly creative. At Mauthausen, the quarry that had supplied the stone outside Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau was reached by a long stairway of hewn steps known as the Stairway to Death. The prisoners were forced to race up the 186 steps carrying granite boulders, one behind the other. When a prisoner fell, often backwards, on top of another, it created a domino effect all the way down the stairs, crushing the prisoners below. For those who survived, they often had to face the next challenge at the ‘Parachute Wall’. On the edge of the quarry face, inmates were given a choice: take a bullet in the head, or push a fellow prisoner to their death below. It was a macabre game show of moral choices and survival.
As we stood on the elbow of the road, I peered up the little lane towards Mauthausen, hidden in the folds of meadow and woodland, just out of sight. The road ahead looked so innocent, the scene absurdly bucolic. I turned around to Jamie and quietly said, ‘Let’s cycle on to the museum at Mitterkirchen.’ I’d seen the rows of functional huts at Mauthausen on the internet, just like Auschwitz, but I didn’t know if there was a Helena.
I turned my back on Mauthausen, a feeling of guilt weighing me down. But as I freewheeled down the hill to the town, I was carrying the picture of Helena Bargiel in my head, her eyes staring fearlessly into the camera, a smile curling on the edges of her lips. I would carry her confidence and optimism with me across Europe, her courage and defiance, not the scenes of brutal cat-and-mouse games at Mauthausen.
We cycled into Grein campsite late afternoon and unpacked our coffin tents. The sun slipped out for a few moments from behind the clouds, and suddenly I was grateful for my life.
7. Mary Poppins and the Lock Keeper
Iris and Brian cycled into the campsite as Jamie was setting up the camping stove. Iris, small and sturdy, was bent over her child-sized bike with an expression that was both bullish and cheerful. Brian was a few pedal rotations behind his wife – a cycling Prince Philip.
The campsite was filling up with touring cyclists: a Frenchman cycling to India; a Berlin couple, whose eyes lit up when they recalled the fall of the Wall; and now the retired English couple. Brian and Iris unpacked their bags and erected the tent in a series of quick confident steps, in an artful pas de deux. I watched Iris unpack the panniers like Mary Poppins emptying her carpet bag. The couple had the best camping equipment: a large two-section tent; top-of-the-range mattresses; four-seasons sleeping bags and silk liners; pots and pans; kettles, cups and plates; even a tiny foldable camping chair with a back. And much more besides, as Jamie and I would find out later. It was hard not to succumb to equipment-envy.
While the campsite had looked idyllic as we’d ridden into Grein, with its green park of shady trees edging the Danube, the reality was quite different. Caught in the curve of a busy road, the sound of traffic echoing around the Danube valley kept me awake that night. The plummeting temperatures didn’t help – even though I was wearing as many layers of clothes possible. I tried not to think about Brian and Iris in their luxury sleeping bags.
I woke to the early morning song of thrush and blackbird and waited for the day to take on full light, glad when the sun finally heated my coffin tent and brought some warmth back into my tomb-cold body. While Jamie still slept, I made some tea. Not having any breakfast ingredients, we packed up and headed up through cobbled streets to the market square, finding a little café-bakery that sold steaming coffees and warm croissants. Outside, I closed my eyes and cradled my coffee cup, the soothing sound of running water from the fountain in the square almost lulling me to sleep again after my restless night in the cold.
As we left the café, bellies full, that sleepy sense of warmth and well-being was rudely shattered by Jamie’s panicked voice: ‘Mum, I can’t find my mobile – I must have left it charging in the hook-up at the tree.’ We raced back to the campsite to find Brian scrolling through the phone, trying to find some way of contacting us. I could have given him a hug. Instead, we cycled with Brian and Iris over the next three days.
Having retrieved the mobile, we headed down to the ferry on the Grein quayside, now crowded with cyclists – including Brian and Iris. Disembarking on the other side, we found ourselves falling into step – or rather into pedal stroke – with the gregarious couple. Iris, in particular, chatted and joked with everyone she passed. We made an odd-looking pair: Iris, short and wiry, bent low over her small bike that had been especially made to fit her compact frame; me, not much bigger in height, but feeling like a giant, towering above her with my high saddle and handlebars.
Iris frowned in disapproval at my bike. ‘Did you have the bike before the trip?’
It was obvious she was baffled by my choice of heavy town bike, clearly unsuitable for a long-distance cycle. Her indirect question, it turned out, was unusually discreet for Iris. Not put off by Jamie’s shyness, she chattered away to him as we cycled through woodland along the banks of the river in the ever-narrowing valley. With him, she was more direct: ‘Jamie, you need to pump up your tyres.’ Despite Tom’s best exhortations, Jamie and I neglected our bicycles, never bothering to check our tyres (after all, they were filled with slime) or oiling the brakes or chain.
‘Jamie, you need to raise your saddle. You will have a much stronger downward push and it will make cycling easier.’
While Iris persuaded Jamie to pump up his tyres and oil his chain at the next campsite, she simply couldn’t persuade him to raise his saddle. I shrugged and held out my hands. Jamie could match Iris’s motherly bossiness with a good dose of his own stubbornness, and although Iris returned to the subject again and again, Jamie refused to raise his saddle.
As for me, I let Jamie make his own decisions, recognising his mule-like obstinacy in myself. No amount of cajoling would make him change his mind: he would have to come to the decision by himself. I was pleased how our relationship was developing on the cycle. Jamie was not only in charge of the route-finding, as he had been from the beginning, but was continuing to make decisions about budgets and sight-seeing side-trips. In truth, I was happy that Jamie was taking over more and more of the decision-making. Our relationship was shifting on the cycle – less mother and son and more cycling partners. I tried to give him space to be the adult he was and step back from my role as mother – otherwise it was going to be a long three and a half months for him.
As we cycled towards Melk, Brian, as the older man, took over the map-reading. Jamie was not impressed, fuming when Brian had taken us off on an unnecessary detour.
&nb
sp; ‘But you didn’t explain to Brian why you thought he was going wrong,’ I said to Jamie.
Communication was not his strong point. It was one of the few times I criticised him on the journey. More often, Jamie would chastise me – he was both young for his age and a wise old man.
Brian also chatted freely with Jamie. While Iris was wiry and square of shape – a little work pony on her bicycle, Brian was string-long and somewhere between weedy and sinewy. He had a strange method of cycling, making several quick rotations of the pedals before freewheeling into a long glide, as if on ice-skates. Before retirement, Brian and Iris had lived in a little Water Board house on an island in the middle of the Thames, where he operated the locks. His adventures on the water matched any tale in Wind in the Willows: he’d rescued escapee barges, uncovered a pair of dead bodies from the river and pulled a non-swimmer from the water. He’d acted as a flood and storm-warner for boaters and farmers alike.
On the other side of Melk, we baulked at the price of the local campsite, not helped by the boorish attitude of the owner, and cycled on to find a Pension. I was a bad influence on Iris and Brian, who’d religiously camped along the Rhine and Danube before our meeting. We climbed the valley above the Danube to Aggstein and a hotel that stood on the hillside opposite the ruins of a crumbling castle, once darkly known as Dunkelsteinerwald, or ‘dark stone forest’. It was a fitting name for this Grimm story setting, where its medieval owners, known as the robber barons, had held their rivals to ransom, tying their victims to the rocky ledge below the castle, while threatening to throw them to the gorge below if they didn’t pay up. As I sat on the balcony overlooking the castle ruins on the skyline with a glass of wine, I was glad to be living in the twenty-first century rather than medieval Wachau. When Iris and Brian arrived on the balcony, I bought them an evening meal in thanks for rescuing Jamie’s mobile. Twenty-first-century problems I could handle.