[2004] FAMILY HOLIDAYS   

0075 Austrian Holiday in 1952

In the days of my youth it was rare for people to go abroad.  However, my father had actually been abroad, in the late 1940s, as a form of reward from Unilever.  He and a group of other supervisors had been taken to Holland, Unilever was one of the large Anglo-Dutch companies, to see how it worked there. But they also did a considerable amount of general sightseeing. He went on about it for months afterwards.   

We, my mother and myself, didn't go abroad with him until 1952.

It is worth noting that the holiday packages in those days were very different.  After the Second World War the main holiday destination was Switzerland. The rich, who were the only ones who could afford such luxuries, didn’t go for sun, sea and sand!  I well remember the stories told by my uncle about how he and his friends, in his pre-war Ford car, climbed laboriously over all the passes in Switzerland.  I sat entranced at his feet when he regaled us with these experiences -- and even more entranced when he brought strange, foreign presents back; including my first wrist watch (with a wonder of a luminous dial, which would now be banned due to the radioactivity it emitted!). 

We used to look at the holiday brochures and dream about going on such holidays.  The ideal places were on the lakes in Switzerland - Lugano, Lucerne – or possibly Interlaken and the Alps.  One I remember particularly well was the resort - Montreux - on Lake Geneva which, because it was further north, featured itself as the centre for house parties.  I suppose it was the equivalent of Caribbean cruise now.  But it was half a century later before I actually went there, on a spare half day, when I was visiting Geneva on business.  It was a lovely place, with lovely fin-de-siecle hotels, very unlike the modern package resort.

You can understand then why our first holiday abroad was to Austria, since this was a rather cheaper variation of Switzerland.  The destination was Igls, just outside of Innsbruck, and the operator was Swans; then the largest company at a time when foreign travel was still a specialised business. 

The first thing was getting there. Of course, in those days, nobody went by plane; that was for millionaires only.  So we travelled through the night from Ostend in Belgium – where our Channel Ferry docked - to Basle in Switzerland.  We were in a very comfortable carriage, a first-class one. It had pull-out seats, so in theory you could sleep on them.  But I well remember being woken up in the middle of the night as the steam train desperately tried to get up an incline, going backwards and forwards, until it reached the top. I have never managed to sleep well trains, not even on sleepers.

After almost two days we got to Igls. It was a beautiful and untouched village on the side of the Alps.  It was a small village but it had a number of hotels which featured in the brochures.  At that time the Alps were seen, by British people, as the location for summer holiday resorts.  Skiing holidays for the masses simply didn't exist in those days.  Having said that it was set out as the skiing centre, for the Austrians themselves, where even the tennis courts were flooded in the winter to provide outdoor ice skating.

We stayed, as was generally case in those days, in a small hotel  - the Stettnerhof - and in fact in the annex of the hotel.  I shared a room with my parents, and I remember it having double doors into the hall, to keep out cold.  It was also the first time we slept under duvets, and I well remember the maids hanging them out of the windows in the morning to air them. The maid called me liebchen, which my parents found funny - but, at the age of 12, I didn't! It was all very strange.  Equally strange was our continental breakfast, with coffee and croissants.

There were some lovely walks around the village and we spent quite a bit of the time following these.  Not too far away was a swimming pool, not the swish swimming pools of these days but essentially a muddy lake with changing rooms by its side. Even so it was great fun to swim in, even if it had clouds of horse-flies the size of pigeons! 

The other traditional thing we did in the village was to go up to the top of the local mountain. The cable car terminal was just down the road from the hotel. From there it went to the top of the Patscherskoffel mountain.  I guess once you've been on one cable car you've been on all of them, but at the time – our first time - it proved to be a wonderful experience. 

The only nightlife I can remember was the Austrian dancing with men slapping their leather pants. I desperately want my parents to buy me some leather pants; and was very disappointed when they wouldn't.

We went on a short trip to nearby Innsbruck.  There was nothing worth mentioning there. The river looked cold and dismal, and the only 'sight' was the 'goldener dach', golden roof, house which really wasn't worth a second look!

We made three other longer trips. The first of these was all the way over the Brenner Pass, into Italy, visiting Cortina in the Dolomites.  It was a spectacular trip and the scenery in the Dolomites was beautiful.  The rocky mountains stretched out into the distance.  In those days they were bare, now they've all been planted with the ubiquitous conifers; which is the reason you can no longer see them in their true majesty.

Cortina itself was then a fairly typical small Italian Alpine town; though now it is a major ski resort, which has hosted the Winter Olympics.  At that time it was pretty, and relatively unspoiled; and – like everything else we visited – deliciously foreign. 

Indeed, I guess that it, and the other towns we visited, were most notable for giving me a feeling for life in other countries.  I suppose they were already very picturesque, and tourist oriented, but even so everything was rather strange -- and the experience set me out on the road to appreciating what foreign really means.

The other main expedition, the most important one for me, was to Salzburg.  I don't think I really the appreciated the place, since - in those days - I knew nothing about Mozart.  Even so it was a spectacular town to visit, especially when we went up on the lift to the ramparts - to look out over the town. Having said all that, my main memory is of buying an enormous packet of foreign stamps, which just about doubled the size of my stamp collection. 

The other notable matter was our mad driver. He drove at full tilt everywhere, in particular going at high speed between two offset gates - through which the bus could scarcely pass, with only inches to spare; seemingly by sliding the bus sideways.  All the girls on board screamed.  He also managed to knock a cyclist off her bike, but still didn't stop. We were very lucky to survive, because he also raced a train to beat it to an unguarded railway crossing.  Fortunately he just about made it!  Such are the things that you remember!

We also made a trip to Berchtesgaden, to see Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, albeit only from the bottom of the mountain. It was just seven years after the war and his exploits were still very much alive in our imagination.

We came home complete with the traditional cuckoo clock and our memories. It was another four years before we went abroad again.

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