Hallelujah! (An Easter to remember)

Hallelujah!  (An Easter to remember)

Half-past two!  As the train from Frankfurt pulled into Fulda station I wondered if I would make it to the church in time for the Good Friday service.  In accordance with tradition, that would begin at three o’clock, the hour at which the crucified Jesus, with a loud cry, gave up his spirit.

There were two problems: the first was that, never having been in Fulda before, I would have to find the church!  The second was that I would have to leave my heavy suitcase at the station, if possible, to enable me to run as fast as I could…

Hurrying along the platform, I spied the Left Luggage lockers – phew!  After hastily depositing my case, I studied the rough map Christel had drawn for me, then took to my heels.  Fortunately, I managed to arrive at the church a few minutes before the service began.

How moving it was to hear once again the familiar story of the Crucifixion, but this time in German, followed by Bach’s solemn Easter choral music.  As I studied the choir, I wondered which of the sopranos was Christel…

     That Easter was the first one after Bob’s death the previous June.  Because our son Michael was going on a school trip to Greece, I was free to spend a few days in West Germany, in the hope of refreshing my German vocabulary.  Having spent time in both Freiburg in the south and Hannover in the north, I chose Fulda, approximately halfway between those two.  Now I needed to find someone to converse with, so I hit upon a plan!  First, I contacted the Fulda tourist office to book my hotel accommodation and to ask for the name and address of a Protestant pastor.  Then I wrote to him, explaining my situation and asking if he could put me in touch with a lady in his congregation who would be willing to chat with me once or twice over ‘Kaffee und Kuchen’ (coffee and cake’!)

        Shortly afterwards I received a lovely letter from Christel, a lawyer’s wife with two teenage daughters.  She told me that she enjoyed meeting people from other countries and invited me to her home for supper on Good Friday.  She added that she would be in the soprano section of the church choir at the three o’clock service.

With Bach’s beautiful music still ringing in my ears, I returned to the station for my suitcase, then found my hotel, where I rested for a couple of hours.  Later, street map in hand, I set off in search of Christel’s home.  With me I had some presents, including a pack of playing cards produced by Colin Baxter, the photographer, showing 52 different Scottish scenes.

  In addition, I had a cassette of highlights from Handel’s Messiah, plus copies of the sheet music for the Hallelujah Chorus, so that we could sing both soprano and alto parts together.

Arriving at the appointed time, I found Christel’s husband, Hans-Christof, waiting to lead me up to the family’s flat on the second floor. As we made our way up the winding stone staircase, I was amazed to see dozens of photographs of Scotland  attached to the wall. (“Oh dear!  So much for the playing cards!”  I thought to myself.)  Christel had not mentioned that every summer they travelled through Scotland to the tranquil island of Harris

– far away from the armed soldiers on the watch towers near Fulda, on the border with East Germany (which we were to visit the following day).

  An even greater surprise awaited me in the living room.  On the wall was a small section of a map of Edinburgh city centre, showing the George IV Bridge, Greyfriars Church and the row of buildings where my daughter Sally lived!  I was able to point to the exact location of her flat, opposite the students’ Bedlam Theatre where she had met her fiancé, David…

Twenty minutes later – this time to Hans-Christof’s surprise – Christel and I were singing the Hallelujah Chorus in harmony together!

But it was two days later, on Easter Sunday, that the most memorable coincidence was revealed.  After a family lunch at her elderly mother’s home in the little village where she and Hans-Christof grew up, Christel and I went for a walk in a nearby beech wood.  As we passed a depression in the ground, Christel told me that it had been made by wild boar digging for beech nuts. When, farther on, we came to a much bigger depression, I remarked that they must have been very hungry!        
  “Oh no,” said Christel, “that’s where one of your bombs landed during the war, when I was a baby.”

We then found out that there were only six months between us, and that, whenever there was an air raid, each of us had been carried by her mother down through a trapdoor in the kitchen floor into a cellar below.

(My mother wrote on the back of this photo, taken outside the house in Glasgow where I was born,

 '23.7.40, Kathleen , after an Air Raid')

Now, on this Easter Day, here we were, daughters of former enemies, bonding as friends …

Ehre sei Gott!  Glory be to God! 

Hallelujah!