quality to make Ikea’s bargain basement products look like Chippendale. We did, therefore, the only thing any man with a young wife and an albeit limited expense account for furniture would do: we went shoppingin the West. And before long had found ourselves a nice, relatively modestly priced brown leather sofa. There was a problem, however: nobody would deliver to East Berlin, at least not without prohibitive charges that included protracted dealings with customs officials – which I suspected involved substantial backhanders all round – and visa formalities for the delivery men.
So we opted for the only logical alternative, as it turned out totally illogical in our circumstances, but we didn’t know that at the time: we hired a self-drive van. This was a bit of a challenge in itself for a relatively novice driver, but we loaded up the sofa and set off for Checkpoint Charlie. Everyone, from the West Berlin office staff to the man at the sofa shop, said we were mad: they would never let us through. It simply hadn’t occurred to us. I had, after all, a customs exemption certificate for East Germany; I hadn’t considered that it might not be valid for the import of larger household goods. And sometimes, as all journalists will tell you, it’s just best not to ask that extra question. When we turned up at Checkpoint Charlie they opened the barrier as usual but waved us to one side into a loading bay while a relatively junior border guard dashed into the prefab huts that made up the border post to fetch his superiors. The senior officer who emerged frowned at first when he saw my customs declaration form, then turned to ask something of another who turned out to be the burly, curly-haired one – Yogi Bear – who had congratulated me on passing my driving test. He smiled again. I liked it when he did that. Then he went to fetch one of his colleagues who was even more unusual: she both smiled and was female. She had a nickname too. We called her ‘Lovely Rita’, not because she was called Rita – we never knew her name – or was particularly stunning , though with long dark hair and an easy smile she was pleasant enough looking, but because of the Beatles song: ‘Lovely Rita, meter maid,’ which included the line, ‘and the bag across her shoulder made her look a little like a military man.’
She wasn’t actually military but customs, but she was definitely a woman and when she looked inside the van she had only one comment on our unusual and possibly illicit cargo: ‘Hmm, nice sofa! Real leather!’ And that was it. She stamped the forms and off we drove. Several hours later I drove back to West Berlin to return theempty hire van – to the amazement of my Western colleagues and the man from the furniture store who had been expecting his goods returned. On the way out, the Checkpoint Charlie guards all turned out to watch, and ‘Rita’ came over to ask if we’d got the sofa into the flat all right. Not one of them looked in the back. For all the tortuous schemes that would-be escapers from East Germany devised, from hollowed-out petrol tanks to secret compartments under the floors of freight lorries, on that occasion I could have had a dozen escapers in the back and nobody would have noticed.
Ever afterwards, if it happened to be ‘Rita’ on duty when we crossed through Checkpoint Charlie she would make a point of asking, ‘How’s the sofa doing?’ I never had the courage to admit that a week after we bought it I had fallen asleep on it with a felt-tip pen in my rear pocket and put a series of indelible scrawl marks all over it. Come to think of it, I didn’t tell Reuters either. It was hard enough telling the wife.
If we shopped when necessary in West Berlin, I was determined that it would only be when necessary, and we would not live our social lives over there. Jackie probably wondered about the wisdom of this as we wandered up Schönhauser Allee past shops that were a million miles from the
So we opted for the only logical alternative, as it turned out totally illogical in our circumstances, but we didn’t know that at the time: we hired a self-drive van. This was a bit of a challenge in itself for a relatively novice driver, but we loaded up the sofa and set off for Checkpoint Charlie. Everyone, from the West Berlin office staff to the man at the sofa shop, said we were mad: they would never let us through. It simply hadn’t occurred to us. I had, after all, a customs exemption certificate for East Germany; I hadn’t considered that it might not be valid for the import of larger household goods. And sometimes, as all journalists will tell you, it’s just best not to ask that extra question. When we turned up at Checkpoint Charlie they opened the barrier as usual but waved us to one side into a loading bay while a relatively junior border guard dashed into the prefab huts that made up the border post to fetch his superiors. The senior officer who emerged frowned at first when he saw my customs declaration form, then turned to ask something of another who turned out to be the burly, curly-haired one – Yogi Bear – who had congratulated me on passing my driving test. He smiled again. I liked it when he did that. Then he went to fetch one of his colleagues who was even more unusual: she both smiled and was female. She had a nickname too. We called her ‘Lovely Rita’, not because she was called Rita – we never knew her name – or was particularly stunning , though with long dark hair and an easy smile she was pleasant enough looking, but because of the Beatles song: ‘Lovely Rita, meter maid,’ which included the line, ‘and the bag across her shoulder made her look a little like a military man.’
She wasn’t actually military but customs, but she was definitely a woman and when she looked inside the van she had only one comment on our unusual and possibly illicit cargo: ‘Hmm, nice sofa! Real leather!’ And that was it. She stamped the forms and off we drove. Several hours later I drove back to West Berlin to return theempty hire van – to the amazement of my Western colleagues and the man from the furniture store who had been expecting his goods returned. On the way out, the Checkpoint Charlie guards all turned out to watch, and ‘Rita’ came over to ask if we’d got the sofa into the flat all right. Not one of them looked in the back. For all the tortuous schemes that would-be escapers from East Germany devised, from hollowed-out petrol tanks to secret compartments under the floors of freight lorries, on that occasion I could have had a dozen escapers in the back and nobody would have noticed.
Ever afterwards, if it happened to be ‘Rita’ on duty when we crossed through Checkpoint Charlie she would make a point of asking, ‘How’s the sofa doing?’ I never had the courage to admit that a week after we bought it I had fallen asleep on it with a felt-tip pen in my rear pocket and put a series of indelible scrawl marks all over it. Come to think of it, I didn’t tell Reuters either. It was hard enough telling the wife.
If we shopped when necessary in West Berlin, I was determined that it would only be when necessary, and we would not live our social lives over there. Jackie probably wondered about the wisdom of this as we wandered up Schönhauser Allee past shops that were a million miles from the
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