The Berlin Wall: My part in its downfall

The German authorities didn't officially start dismantling the wall until June 13, 1990 and reunification didn't happen until October 3.

Prior to both those dates, an enterprising Darlington travel firm began offering a £99 day trip to East Berlin, and I was allowed to go on the inaugural flight: March 8, 1990.

I filed an article (below) live from East Berlin of my experiences. Well, at least I tried to file an article from East Berlin.

Journalists in the current age of the mobile phone will not understand this, but the first thing those of us of a certain age do when we arrive somewhere is check-out the payphones: their location and their dialling tone. Once we've sorted the phone problem, we can relax and begin collating the story.

Having, as I describe, made it through Checkpoint Charlie and choked on the Trabant smoke, I began locating payphones. They were grey, plentiful, unvandalised, queue-free and working, so I set about collecting my notes.

Having written the article, I then went to the phone to phone it over. No queue, no bother. Except, as I remember, then I discovered that the phones only took 20 pfennig pieces. I went to several shops - I remember going into one gorgeous bakery - and being practically laughed at. There were no 20 pfenning pieces in circulation and no one in East Germany used the public payphones.

With deadline rapidly approaching, I had to jettison my plans for a lingering farewell to this curious Communist city and barrel through the green-coated guards and make my way back to the west to find a telephone that I could use.

This was desperately disappointing because I so wanted to be by-lined "From Chris Lloyd in East Berlin".

I remember rushing back through Checkpoint Charlie, sniggering at the cheap kitchen units in which I imagined the Stasi kept all sorts of secret documents and files, and then being struck by the change in the architecture. It was as dramatic as a change in the weather: you know the moment when out of Newcastle or Teesside you land at a Spanish airport and are hit by a wave of heat.

In East Berlin, everything was coloured grey and fawn. Everything was imposing, almost hostile. Everything was monumental - even the plate glass windows of the shops (which had no lurid names over them) was crushingly huge. And I remember rushing back through the checkpoint and being welcomed back to the glitzy west by the warm and reassuring neon glow - red and gold - of McDonald's arches.

My other memory of that trip is of the air full of the chip, chip, chip sound of what are now called "mauerspechtes", or "wall woodpeckers": people chipping away the grafitti'd concrete and flogging it off to gullible tourists like me.

I still have the lumps of Berlin Wall. Indeed, I think I did a roaring and profitable trade when I got back to the office in the souvenirs.

A couple of smaller fragments on my bookcase I managed to snap off, I think, with my own bare hands, but the larger lumps I bought from the mauerspechtes, each coming with a genuine photocopied certificate of authenticity.

Anyway, the article...(the introduction refers to huge seas which had swamped the Welsh coast making thousands homeless, killing several and being so severe that the poor blighters had just qualified for a Royal visit)...

======================================= When happiness is half a breezeblock

The Northern Echo, March 8, 1990

by Chris Lloyd in East Berlin

Berlin Wall, Wednesday

THE police in Towyn in Wales had to send morbid daytrippers home last weekend because they were standing on the beach getting in the way of mopping-up operations. Here in Berlin the daytrippers are aiding and abetting destruction. For a Deutschmark or two you can buy a garish bit of concrete that has been spray-painted fluorescent blue, green or yellow -probably within the last few hours.

The entrepreneurs are making an effort to give it a touch of realism, though, since on the walk from the Brandenburg Gate to Checkpoint Charlie ladders are leaning against the wall and old screwdrivers and chisels are driven into it. This is the Berlin Wall they are chip, chip, chipping away at and making a handsome profit. Perhaps the English ought to do the decent thing and let the Scots see some freedom and then sell off bits of Hadrian's Wall.

Chip, chip, chipping makes an unseemly racket. It echoes across the broad space that divides East and West. The daytrippers love it. They stand around waiting for a bit to fall and then dive upon it fluttering Deutschmarks at the hammerer. This is the genuine article.

This is half a breezeblock of history. Men on a boat on the east side of the river are pulling up poles that were once a fence - the third line of defence in No Man's Land. An American with a ridiculously large video camera plus a sonic boom microphone shouts across a speculative offer to them.

The men on the barge decline. How would he ever have flown a 12 foot pole across the ocean anyway?

But the supreme irony of all this chip, chip, chipping is the sellers of tiny nuggets of history who have spread their wares out on blankets for the highest bidder on the chainlink fence beside the Reichstag. Crosses adorn that chainlink fence bearing the names of those that were shot trying to scale the wall. The last one died in October, his cross looking down this March on the chip-chip-chippers selling off the wall by the fragment.

Beside the Reichstag is the symbol of it all, the Brandenburg Gate. If a monument in Europe is truly historic it is shrouded in scaffolding. The Brandenburg Gate is truly historic.

For the best view of the Gate you have to clamber onto the top of a seven foot high wall. Not being a mountaineer I struggled till a man pulled me up. He shouts: "This is it, this is it," and blows an extravagant kiss, presumably towards the Gate - he doesn't particularly look like a scaffolder so it can't be the complex network of iron beams he admires. He is from West Berlin and is quite probably drunk. Even though he is four months late in seeing the birth of freedom, he is still determined to tell his grandchildren he was there at the time. He insists he takes my photograph and I take his last can of Hansa lager which, in its jubilation, explodes all over my notepad. It's a 20 minute walk to Checkpoint Charlie and he urges me to jump down and run through the gate declaring the world is free.

I decline as there are numerous green-coated border guards who probably would not be very appreciative.

The sensible option is to walk, but even that is not safe. Dodging the chip, chip, chippers requires full concentration and the path at the foot of the wall has been turned into a muddy morass reminiscent of the pockmarked Somme after a season of tourists have traipsed over it.

Inside Checkpoint Charlie, where even the brusque border men laughed at my hideous passport photo, it feels like home. There are MFI kitchen wall units all over the place, although the grinning guard is seated behind at least five panels of glass surrounded by curtains. The light shining on his face makes it look as if he is lying in state as the mourners file through.

East Berlin on the other side of Charlie looks like Dover Harbour bus station and smells like the start of summer. Waves and waves of blue petrol smoke swing through the air as the legendary Trabants splutter like lawnmowers at the traffic lights.

When you prepare for the first cut of summer with the lawnmower, it always starts to rain, and drops began to fall the minute I arrived. It is austere over here. Large stone buildings loom in greys and fawns. There are some glitzy shops but no 20foot neon signs paying homage to SONY TV AUDIO VIDEO like those adorning every rooftop in the West.

Of course, there are no banks. Not knowing the German for bank may be a drawback in this search so I track down a Flugtour building, which must have something to do with international travel judging by the pictures of aeroplanes emblazoned with "Happy Landing' on the windows.

Flugtour give directions to a bank, but this is not the end of the problem since none of the Caisses are bold enough to say in English that they deal in foreign exchange.

A Romanian intercepts me. Says he wants to see a long-lost brother in the west of the city, but he's got this far without a passport so they will not give him any change. Thinking it is a bit of a blow for the poor guy to see his hopes dashed after such a long journey, I do a dodgy deal with him. He goes off contented and I realise I have far too many Oestmarks than I can cope with. So I just have to spend them on bits of wall for friends and colleagues.

You can't eat these brightly coloured goodies, but they are the politically aware daytripper's answer to Blackpool rock.