Leisure Time
Gerhard Kress
Structured leisure time in my childhood included several activities. The church choir. The choice was altar boy or choir. I don’t remember being asked. My brother was in the choir and so would I be. Weekly rehearsals held by the organist were hard work but without stress or temper outbursts. More often, rehearsals were held by the priest. He could get angry about wrong notes or sudden coughing. He could shout and in my younger years I was scared of him. But each session ended in storytelling. One of the books was by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, about a minute boy flying with geese.
In this context, the other structured, weekly activity was the Sunday church service. The boy choir was standing to the side of the raised altar, the adult choir, including my uncle, a Tenor, was hidden from view behind the altar. We were dressed in long, heavy, black robes reaching the floor. Over that, a white-washed, white, angelic looking shirt. I quickly realised that fidgeting and foraging nostrils for bogeys, was visible to the entire congregation and, obviously, frowned upon. The smell of incense could be very strong and not particularly nice at times. Our songs were mostly Gregorian Latin, sung from a very large handwritten and painted book. I not so much learned by instruction, but copied the boys standing next to me. It became quickly apparent that the ‘cool’ thing to do on the altar, was to bury your hands inside the long black sleeves. Perhaps the angelic image of us little monsters made some grannies swoon. And to restore the balance, we’d commit ‘Schellekloppe’, that is ringing the doorbells of flats and running away to hide behind a corner to observe the puzzled or angry man, too old to run after us.
I remember one evening, we were recording for the radio or a vinyl. One of my friends was visibly and desperately trying to suppress a burp. He succeeded. But it backfired rather spectacularly. In a quiet section of the music he produced one almighty fart. The stink spoke volumes about his diet. And we had to re-record.
Other structured activities included weekly violin lessons, subsidised by the city of Frankfurt, weekly visits to the library, the scouts and on Saturdays, family visits to the public bath house as we didn’t have a bathroom.
Unstructured leisure activities in childhood were of the utmost importance. I could spend hours building entire stories around playing with my LEGO bricks. Building, re-building, imagining life in a zoo, a circus, a castle. Outdoor playing was also important. My best friend’s garden at the posh end of the street, the flats that had bathrooms, was wild, in a manicured sort of way. We invented and played out stories. Quite often including sword fights with swords made from rolled-up newspaper. I thought of my friend’s family as something better than my own, not least because his mother treated and portrayed her son as something better than me. And of course they had a TV, a bathroom and as his father was a travelling salesman, they had a small car. But most of all, he was allowed chocolate in his school lunch box. Not something my mother allowed or had money for.
Street games included ‘Klicker’. Small and round glass marbles had to be pushed into a small hole. The winner could walk away with many of your treasured marbles. Once one of my marbles rolled under a garden fence. My older brother was tall enough to guide my probing hand, by looking over the fence. “Left a bit,” he said with a barely concealed smirk. “Left a bit more.” And there it was. No, not my treasured marble, but something squishy. He had guided my hand into dog poo as he and his friends ran off, laughing.