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When I was writing yesterday’s blog, I forgot about about another incident that told us that the wall between east and west was about to crumble.

In September 1988, my elder daughter – just turned 17 – asked if she could skip school with seven or eight of her friends (all final year highschool students) to catch a train from Vienna to Budapest to go listen to the Bruce Springsteen Amnesty International Rock Tour to promote human rights. Budapest was the only Communist destination that agreed to be on the world tour route.

How cool is that? To play hooky by crossing the border between East and West. To go to a concert on human rights in a Communist country. To hear Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Youssou N’Dour – and the relatively unknown Tracy Chapman, all in one 8 hour concert.

Of course I said no.

Just kidding, just kidding. I said yes.

The school (Vienna International School) took a very dim view of the whole thing afterwards, and wrote – as I recall – a very snippy letter about it to the parents concerned, telling us – in effect – that our kids would fail their finals if we let them behave in such reprehensible manner, and what kind of lousy parents were we, blah-di-blah.

My daughter received the only detention class of her life and was heartily unimpressed with the school. (She went on to Oxford, so somehow I don’t think skipping a day’s class affected her career.)

Last night I asked her on Skype what she remembers about the day. Mostly, it seems, gadding about Budapest with her boyfriend and other friends before the concert! Oh, and Tracy Chapman.

One would have thought hearing The Boss sing Born in the USA in front of the Prime Minister and other Communist officials would have left some impact…

Ah, youth. Wasted on the young.
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I was living in Vienna. Vienna, Austria, that is. And the Berlin wall came down. We spent that night quietly at home, not listening to radio or TV, so knew nothing about the momentous happenings in Berlin late that day.

Of course, we were living in the midst of change, we knew that. Quite apart from what was in the news, there were the odd things that happened to us, personally. We were Hungary in October 1988, for instance, and there was a good-natured student demonstration taking place; I remember watching it from the Citadel in Buda – a steep hill that rises sheer from the banks of the Danube. The young folk held hands and wended their way across a bridge and along the riverside, and then back over the river by another bridge.

They were demonstrating against the building of a barrage on the Danube in Austria – but the reason was not the huge significance. It was that a demonstration was allowed at all. I remember a tourist ferry gave them three blasts on its horn, and there was a rousing cheer in response.

In Poland, earlier in 1989, Solidarity had already – impossibly and remarkably – won Communist-staged elections. I remember we picked up a Polish hitchhiker and he was full of hope for the future as he made his way (virtually penniless) to the West to take a look. He was full of confidence that the US would be pouring money and aid into his country. My husband and I were more dubious.

Anyway, back to the fall of the Wall. I woke up the next morning and turned on the radio to hear the news. The station I listened to always started with the news in German, then in English. As I listened to the German version, I couldn’t believe my years. I shook my husband awake. ‘I think they just said the Berlin Wall was down,’ I shouted.

He thought I had misinterpreted the German. “No, no,’ I said, and dashed downstairs. In those days (if I remember correctly) there was no morning TV in Vienna, but I switched it on anyway, knowing that this day there would be. And sure enough, they were broadcasting scenes from Berlin of the night before.

There is an image that has stayed with me ever since:

An elderly lady, surrounded by crowds of celebrating, happy people – and they are in West Berlin. She is dressed in an ugly dark coat, but she is being interviewed by the TV reporter. She is an East German, she says, and she lives near the checkpoint. A friend had telephoned to tell her the wall was down. ‘So I rushed out to see for myself, and here I am! I waited 30 years for this, and I couldn’t wait any longer! See?’ she asks, and opens up her coat. She is dressed in a nightgown, and on her feet are bedroom slippers. She had not spared the time to dress.

After 20 years, I may have misremembered the details, but the image stays with me.

I know how I felt then. I had grown up with the cold war, with the fear it engendered, and now it seemed – it was over.

And there, like that elderly woman, I stood dressed in my nightgown, and watched the wall come down as the tears of joy welled in my eyes.
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