When I first set eyes on her….

…she had a pair of underpants on her head, a pencil stuck in each nostril, she was wearing a tee-shirt saying ‘You don’t have to be mad to be me, but it helps’ and she was saying “Wibble”. I don’t know how I didn’t notice that she was as cracked as Humpty-Dumpty after a five storey dive onto a crazy-paved patio. She even showed me her passport, which had her occupation down as ‘Das Fruiten-Loop’.

OK, so maybe none of the above was true in the strict meaning of the word, but Ursula WAS German, and pretty damn gorgeous. I hadn’t actually taken any notice of her at first, but my mate Joe had. This was when I was working the beaches in Nice, and I’d met Joe at the hostel we were staying at – not an official Youth Hostel, but a ‘Relais pour les jeunes’ or something. So Joe had noticed Ursula and had invited her along to an impromptu party on the beach that night. This was a few of us international guys passing round bottles of very cheap red wine one way and home-made cigarettes with a certain Moroccan flavouring the other.

Anyway, we were all lying on the beach [quick background note: the beach at Nice is pebbles, like Brighton, it is also way below the promenade, and accessed via regular sets of steps set into the roughly 20’ high wall] in a circle, facing the centre. Joe had positioned himself next to Ursula and I was roughly opposite her. Now what I didn’t realise was that she was besotted with ME!! I have to admit that I was at the peak of my attractiveness at that time, age 21, lean and tanned from bumming around with a backpack for months. Ursula was lovely – almost white blonde hair cut in a bob, amazing clear brown eyes – very unusual – fair of face, spectacular body…18 years old.

The first inkling I had that she fancied me was when (with Joe’s arm draped across her back) she leaned towards me and asked me if I could speak any German. So, being the wily old fox that I was, I leaned in a bit and said huskily: “Ich leibe dich”. Well, rarely can a declaration of love have been so rapidly rewarded! She said to me “I love your voice, it reminds me of an English DJ that is on the radio in Germany, you sound just like him” then she leaned even closer and proceeded to give me a snog that rated 6.1 on the Richter scale.

Bear in mind, we are now in the middle of a circle of people, chatting, smoking and drinking around us and yet we were also alone in that special place that couples go when they are concentrating on each other to the exclusion of all else. Somehow, she’d manoeuvred round and had reached down inside my jeans. My months on the road had lost me three or four inches around the waist, and I was also going commando – less washing – so it wasn’t hard for her to locate ‘little Che’ who was actually not so very little at that moment. It was all I could do to un-glue her from my mouth, re-do-up my button fly and drag her to a more secluded spot.

We went a couple of hundred feet along the beach until I could contain her no more, then we sank down in the area of shade under the over-hang from the promenade. She pushed me down on my back, ripped my kecks down and hers and was on me in a flash. It was great and even better, at the end, there was a spontaneous round of applause. A small group had gathered on the promenade above us and showed their appreciation in the time honoured way.

What followed was a night of passion to file away in the memory for those times in years to come when you need to cheer yourself up. I hope and pray that each and every one of you have (or have had) a night like that. As I said, I was staying in a hostel, as a favoured long-timer who was also working, I was sleeping on the floor of one of the big dormitories in my sleeping bag. Ursula as part of a school group was upstairs in a small room with her classmates. We went ‘back to mine’ and as soon as the lights went out we went for the reprise…we only stopped when the sun was coming up and it was getting light again. At times like that you count…it was seven times – including the one on the beach, in a full dormitory with about twenty people in it, I don’t think poor old Joe got much sleep either that night.

Now if only she’d been leaving the next day, things might have been different – one night of passion and then gone. But no, next day, there was a big fuss; her teacher had been alerted to the fact that she had not been in her room all night, she was effectively put out of circulation and then she started crying. Each time I saw her, she was surrounded by disapproving looking German girls and boys and teachers, she would burst into tears and start really quite embarrassing stuff like calling to me and pleading.

I honestly can’t remember how long this went on, but we were kept apart and yet so near for what seemed like ages. On their final night, we managed to get five minutes to talk, and she wrote me a message in my little address book, which I still have, and would really like to have translated. It reads – the best I can make out (capital B used for the double s thing):

“Ich glaube daB Du Dein Leben total genicBt. Ich finde das super. Fur mich ist das auch der beste Weg mein Lebern zu genieBen. Ich liebe verruchte Menshchen, so we Dich Das ist wondervoll Ich glaube das vericht. Okay, Ursula”

Well, maybe not so bonkers, but I’ve not had time to tell you what happened when I visited her at home a couple of months later! Maybe next time, or if we get a question ‘have you ever really been in the shit?’
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Thu 23 Nov 2006, 10:52, Reply)