Switzerland – Blood and Porridge

October 5, 2025October 10, 2025

The best of the Bonds (Part 1)

© Jonathan Cape

Today, I’ve learned, is James Bond Day – even though it’s a bit hard to celebrate the occasion when (1) the franchise now belongs to Jeff Bezos, who, with his vast fortune, private space programme and bald head, would make a good Bond villain, and (2) we currently have no idea who the next James Bond will be.

However, to celebrate the occasion, here is the first half of a lengthy treatise I’ve written about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: both the 1963 novel by Ian Fleming, which I think is possibly the best of the books, and the 1969 movie, which I think is definitely the best of the films. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll abbreviate the title to OHMSS. Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the storylines of the book and film, be warned that his entry will be chock-full of spoilers.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the tenth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. He wrote it in early 1962 at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica. Nearby, meanwhile, Jamaican locations were being used for the filming of the very first James Bond film, Dr No. Thus, James Bond was undergoing a metamorphosis – from a literary phenomenon into something bigger, a franchise incorporating large-scale moviemaking and merchandising and whose central character would soon be an icon of 1960s pop culture. Though the novels were refined examples of pulp fiction, Fleming – who was methodical about his research – at least tried to give them a veneer of believability. With each successive film, however, Bond seemed to drift further from the realm of possibility and into that of outright fantasy.

OHMSS-the-novel feels different from its literary predecessors, but not because Fleming tries to take it in the direction the films were going. He does the opposite. It makes Bond more believable as a character, not less. It’s ostensibly about the first face-to-face encounter between Bond and his archenemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld, who is head of the secretive and deadly crime syndicate SPECTRE. But OHMSS also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability.

Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo, a woman whose father, Marc-Ange Draco, runs a crime syndicate too, the Unione Corse of Corsica. At the novel’s end, with Blofeld seemingly vanquished, Bond and Tracy get married – only for Blofeld to suddenly reappear in the final pages, spray their bridal car with bullets, kill Tracy and leave Bond as a babbling wreck. As a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted at the time, this Bond was “somehow gentler, more sentimental, less dirty.”

When Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman got around to filming OHMSS six years later, five Bond books had been turned into movies and, already, the continuities of the books and films were hopelessly at odds. In the books, Blofeld had made a ‘backstage’ appearance in OHMSS’s immediate predecessor, Thunderball. In OHMSS’s successor, You Only Live Twice, Bond and he have a second and final meeting. It’s the grim tale of the traumatised Bond hunting down and getting his revenge on Blofeld, much of it taking place on a bizarre ‘island of death’ off the Japanese mainland, whose deadly fauna and volcanic discharges attract a steady stream of visitors wanting to commit suicide.

In the Bond movie-world, though, Blofeld had featured in the backgrounds of From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1966) and then played a leading role in the film immediately before OHMSS, 1967’s You Only Live Twice – yes, the title that came after it in the book series. As a result, there isn’t much grimness in You Only Live Twice-the-movie. It’s a jolly science-fictional romp involving stolen spaceships, a secret base disguised as a Japanese volcano and Donald Pleasence playing Blofeld with a white jumpsuit, severe facial scar and fluffy white cat. The film is a cartoonish thing compared with the book because, as far as the films are concerned, the murder of Bond’s wife hasn’t happened yet.

© Eon Productions / United Artists

When OHMSS began filming, the filmmakers – Broccoli and Saltzman, scriptwriter Richard Maibaum and director Peter Hunt, who’d worked as a film editor and second-unit director on the previous five movies – made the brave decision to follow Fleming’s book closely, right up to the tragic denouement. So keen was Hunt to be faithful to the book that supposedly he carried a copy of it with him around the set, its pages marked with his own annotations.

At the start of OHMSS-the-book, it seems like business as usual for Bond. As with the previous novels, he’s a sophisticated, money-is-no-object consumer of the sort of food, drink, cigars, clothes and cars that most of Fleming’s post-war, austerity-Britain readers could only dream about. Although Fleming writes early on that “James Bond was not a gourmet. In England he lived on grilled soles, oeufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad,” a page later we hear him bitching about the quality of a meal he’s just had in a French eatery, about “…the fly-walk of the Paté Maison (sent back for a new slice) and a Poularde à la crème that was the only genuine antique in the place. Bond had moodily washed down this sleazy provender with a bottle of instant Pouilly Fuissé and was finally insulted the next morning by a bill for the meal in excess of five pounds.”

However, the tone soon changes. Bond is in France at the tail end of a mission to locate Blofeld, an interminable and fruitless mission that’s pissed him off to the point where he’s ready to hand in his resignation to M. Then he crosses paths with the troubled but imperious Tracy. In a pricey hotel-cum-casino she commands him: “Take off those clothes. Make love to me. You are handsome and strong. I want to remember what it can be like. Do anything you like. And tell me what you like and what you would like from me. Be rough with me. Treat me like the lowest whore in creation. Forget everything else. No questions. Take me.”

Later, on the coast, Bond intervenes to prevent Tracy from committing suicide and the two of them fall into the clutches of some heavies who turn out to be working for Tracy’s father, Draco, godfather of the Unione Corse. Draco is delighted with Bond taking a protective interest in his daughter and urges him to marry her – offering a one-million-pound dowry as a sweetener. Bond declines the marriage offer but agrees to continue romancing Tracy, if it’ll help her mental state. He also manages to coax some information out of his would-be father-in-law regarding Blofeld’s whereabouts. The super-villain, it transpires, is hiding in Switzerland.

The same events occur in the film version, although in a different order. First, Bond saves Tracy from drowning herself, then he gets to know her intimately. Also, the action takes place not in France, but in Portugal – Peter Hunt felt that by this time cinemagoers were overly familiar with the French coast. Just before the credits kick in (and we get to hear John Barry’s instrumental OHMSS theme, regarded by many as the best Bond tune of the lot), there’s also some breaking of the fourth wall as Bond turns towards the camera and quips, “This never happened to the other fellow.” For yes, this movie features a brand new James Bond. Gone is the slurring Edinburgh brogue, hairy Caledonian brawn and insouciant Scottish scowl of Sean Connery – who by then, apparently, couldn’t even bring himself to exchange words with Cubby Broccoli – and in his place is the inexperienced Australian actor George Lazenby.

Actually, such a novice was Lazenby at the time that the only thing he was known for was appearing in a TV commercial for Fry’s Chocolate Cream. I’ve heard a story that Broccoli saw him a barber’s shop, liked the ‘cut of his jib’ and picked him on the spot. However, interviewed on the making-of documentary that accompanies my DVD copy of OHMSS, Lazenby claims that he already had an audition for Bond lined up. He went to that barber’s because he knew that Connery had used it in the past and he thought it was his best bet for getting a ‘Bondian’ haircut. The establishment was used by other people associated with the Bond movies and Broccoli happened to be there when Lazenby walked in.

© Eon Productions / United Artists

In contrast with the inexperienced Lazenby, the actress playing Tracy in the movie was already a star – Diana Rigg, who’d made a name for herself playing Emma Peel in the gloriously baroque 1960s TV show The Avengers (1961-69). Fascinatingly, for a film series that’s often accused of de-humanising the books and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in the film than in Fleming’s novel. She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, she has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches. Tales about how Lazenby and Rigg didn’t get on during the shoot are legion – most notably about Rigg munching garlic prior to the filming of scenes where Bond and Tracy kiss. Director Hunt has disputed these claims, although I’ve seen at least one interview with Rigg where her comments about Lazenby are uncomplimentary.

Both the book and film show Bond getting an unexpected lead about where to find Blofeld in Switzerland – the College of Arms in London has had dealings with his adversary, who wants them to prove he is heir to the aristocratic title of ‘Compte Balthazar de Bleuchamp’. This allows Bond to adopt the guise of Sir Hilary Bray, a College of Arms genealogist, and travel to Blofeld’s hideout, a mysterious medical clinic perched on top of the Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps, where he promises to do some research in support of Blofeld’s claim to the title.

In the novel Fleming devotes a lot of time to the College of Arms, whose work clearly interests him. It also allows him to explore the theme of snobbery. As Sable Basilisk, a genealogy expert interviewed by Bond, comments: “I’ve seen hundreds of smart people from the City, industry, politics – famous people I’ve been quite frightened to meet when they walked into the room. But when it comes to snobbery, to buying respectability so to speak, whether it’s the title they’re going to choose or just a coat of arms to hang over their fireplaces in Surbiton, they dwindle and dwindle in front of you… until they’re no more than homunculi.” It’s satisfying that Blofeld’s snobbery is the weakness that allows Bond to ensnare him. Mind you, some would say this is rich coming from Fleming. His Bond novels, with their suave, sophisticated, well-travelled and well-heeled hero, have often been accused of snobbery themselves.

It’s also during this stage of the book we learn about Bond’s family. For example, he’s informed by the College of Arms that his family motto – and coincidentally a title for a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie 30 year later – is ‘The world is not enough’, of which he says, “It is an excellent motto which I shall certainly adopt.” And we learn that his father was a Scotsman who “came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe” (a detail honoured by the 2012 Daniel Craig Bond movie Skyfall), while his mother was Swiss.

Not that Fleming is complimentary about his parents’ nationalities. Another genealogist, Griffin Or, says of the Scots in olden times: “In those days, I am forced to admit that our cousins across the border were little more than savages… Very pleasant savages, of course, very brave and all that… More useful with the sword than with the pen.” Of his mum’s homeland, meanwhile, Bond snorts, ”(m)oney is the religion of Switzerland.” M replies to this: “I don’t need a lecture on the qualities of the Swiss, thank you, 007. At least they keep their trains clean and cope with the beatnik problem…” (If M reckoned there was a problem with the beatniks, God knows how he felt in the late 1960s when the hippies appeared.)

Fleming gave Bond a partly Scottish parentage because, it’s said, he was impressed with the job Connery did of portraying his super-spy when filming of Dr No took place in Jamaica in 1962. Dr No-the-film’s influence is detectable elsewhere. In Blofeld’s Alpine base, which in the book is a ski resort as well as a clinic – in the film it’s only the latter – a character points out to Bond a certain lady among the fashionable skiers: “And that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star.” Andress, of course, was Connery’s co-star in Dr No and has a place in cinematic history as the first major Bond girl.

To be continued…

© Eon Productions / United Artists

April 30, 2024June 30, 2024

Nostalgic wallows 2: youth hotels

From pixabay.com / © Hans

I’ve been meaning to write about youth hostels since last July. That was when the journalist John Harris penned an article for the Guardian that was both a tribute to and a lamentation about them. Harris reported: “The Youth Hostel Association of England and Wales (YHA) has announced the sell-off of 20 of its 150 hostels, and identified a further 30 for possible uploading over the next three years – which, in total, would mean the loss of a third of its properties. Its spokespeople blame ‘pandemic shutdowns, the cost-of-living crisis and steep inflation.’” He also observed: “Insiders… talk about how Brexit has hugely reduced the number of school trips to the UK from Europe, thereby hitting a crucial part of the YHA’s revenue.”

For a long time, I was a member of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA), or Hostelling Scotland as it is now, and I assume the situation north of the border is bleak too. The youth hostel in Melrose, the one closest to my home address in the Scottish Borders, ceased trading some years ago. Indeed, as far as I know, the Borders region has only one SYHA hostel these days, in Kirk Yetholm. It’s insane when you consider how the Borders is choc-a-bloc with beautiful countryside and offers great opportunities for walking, hiking and cycling. It should have half-a-dozen such hostels offering holiday accommodation for outdoor enthusiasts who are on a budget.

The first youth hotel association I was a member of, though, was the Northern Irish one. I joined it during the summer of 1982, when I was 16 and temporarily employed on an uncle’s farm in County Tyrone. I was making plans to go to the French-speaking part of Switzerland that October and work as a grape-picker, and then travel around Europe, and as I didn’t have much money to finance this it made sense to get a youth-hostel membership card that’d allow me to use any cheap European hostel I came across. The autumn arrived, I headed abroad and I ended up staying in a slew of hostels. These included ones in Lausanne, Fribourg, Grindelwald, Lucerne and Zurich in Switzerland, in Vaduz in Liechtenstein, in Munich, Ulm, Freiburg and Bonn in Germany, in Brussels in Belgium and in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

To my young, innocent mind, it seemed marvellous that every city and decent-sized town in Switzerland, Liechtenstein – well, Vaduz was the only town in Liechtenstein – Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands should have an establishment where you could get basic but adequate accommodation for a price that was as cheap as the proverbial chips.

From those 1982 wanderings, the Grindelwald youth hostel remains most vivid in my memory. I arrived in the Alpine town one evening when everything was shrouded in fog as well as in darkness and I had no idea what my surroundings looked like. The next morning, I woke in a hostel dormitory, put on some clothes and emerged onto a balcony. The hostel was sited high on one side of a valley and across from it, confronting me, was the vast craggy awesomeness of the Eiger. Wow!

From pixabay.com / © Goodlynx

There were downsides, of course. At the time, many of those hostels were strictly run – especially the Swiss ones. They had ten o’clock curfews and the wardens showed their guests as much humanity as Victorian schoolmasters showed their pupils in Charles Dickens’ novels. In one hostel, I noticed some graffiti scrawled on the inside of a toilet door. “The warden,” it said bluntly, “is a fascist.”

I also met a wide range of humanity in those places. In the common rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and dormitories, I had conversations with philosophers, poets, communists, anarchists, rabid Irish nationalists, belligerent English football hooligans, drunkards, thieves – a sweater was swiped from my rucksack in Brussels – and more. I met an old Australian guy who talked about the months he’d spent roaming the Sahara Desert and hanging out with the Tuareg. I met an American woman who couldn’t understand a single word I uttered – I ’d say something in my hybrid Northern Irish / Scottish accent and, panic-stricken, she’d look to her travelling companion for a translation. In Rotterdam, on my way from the station to the youth hostel, a guy pulled a knife on me and tried to rob me, and then at the hostel I was consoled by a devout Dutch Christian. After telling him about my misadventure, he exclaimed, “Thank God for saving your life!”

The following summer, I worked in Switzerland again, this time on a farm, and I did a little more hostelling – in the Swiss cities of Zug and Berne and in the French coastal town of Boulogne, from which I caught a ferry back to the UK. And soon afterwards, I spent a couple of weeks tramping around England’s Lake District and stayed in several youth hostels there: Ambleside, Keswick, Grasmere, Windermere, Borrowdale.

It wasn’t until 1988, when I was in my early twenties, that I was reacquainted with the youth hostelling world. This was shortly after I’d graduated from college in Aberdeen. Needing employment for the summer, I was taken on as a seasonal warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel on Queen’s Road. I worked under the supervision of the hostel’s head warden, the relaxed and affable Bill Dick, and alongside fellow wardens Andrew Gordon and Paul Hunter. It was a pleasant summer on a personal level – even my memories of wrestling a lawnmower over the building’s extensive and unruly back garden seem idyllic now. That said, it was a traumatic one for Aberdeen generally because, on the night of July 6^th-7^th, the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded in the sea 120 miles north-east of the city, resulting in 167 deaths. In fact, some of the guys staying in the hostel were looking for employment in the local oil industry. Before they did anything else, they had to complete a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) course at the city’s Robert Gordon Institute of Technology (now Robert Gordon University) and they’d tell me about how they were strapped inside a mock-up of a helicopter fuselage and then dunked in a giant tank of water.

Bill Dick was a laidback boss but one thing seriously worried him. That was the thought of a fire. The premises contained cheap plastic furniture that might give off toxic fumes if it burned and, also, the external fire escapes were showing signs of wear and tear. He’d raised these issues with the SYHA but so far nothing had been done about them, presumably due to a lack of funds. Thus, Andrew, Paul and I had the procedures to follow in the event of a fire, and the locations of the fire extinguishers and fire alarms, drummed into our heads.

From wikimedia.org / © AlasdairW

One evening, just after eleven, I was completing a shift at the front desk. The hostellers all seemed to be in bed and Bill and the other staff had gone out for a drink, save for Nicky, the night-porter, who was upstairs, and Mary, the cook, who was finishing up in the kitchen. I was wrestling with the usual end-of-day headache of counting up the till – not an easy job because youth hostels in those days (and maybe still now) used elaborate systems of discounts and vouchers that meant guests were often paying less than the official prices. Then an agonisingly loud, shrill noise pierced through the building – the fire alarm.

I grabbed the phone and dialled 999. Yelling above the noise, I gave the emergency-services operator our address. By this time, guests were shambling down the stairs, into the front lobby, wearing pyjamas, dressing gowns and other nighttime attire. “Get outside,” I ordered, even pushing a couple of them towards the door, “get outside!” Mary appeared from the kitchen – Nicky, it transpired later, was detained because he’d been in the middle of using the loo when the alarm went off – and we headed into the building’s interior in search of the fire. We didn’t find it. We did, however, find a fire alarm with its protective glass broken. Some wanker, who’d probably been in the pub all evening, had smashed it and pressed the activation button inside for a laugh. Meanwhile, the windows at the front of the hostel brimmed with dazzling white light, as if the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) had just landed in the front yard. It was actually the headlights of a couple of engines arriving from Aberdeen Fire Station.

Later, after I’d filled in forms confirming the fire had been a false alarm and a number of disgruntled Aberdonian firefighters had returned to their vehicles, Mary remarked, “My hands are still shaking.” I realised mine were too. I felt pretty stupid about summoning all those firemen for nothing, but when Bill returned and heard what’d happened, he assured me I’d done the right thing.

I’m sure that later, as health-and-safety regulations became more stringent, the SYHA sorted out the hostel’s furniture and fire escapes. However, that’s academic now, as the the building was put up for sale in 2022 and I assume Aberdeen, like so many other places, is now youth-hostel-less.

During the 1990s I lived in Japan and in 1995 I got a temporary job as a researcher for the Fodor’s Guidebook company. My assignment was to update and rewrite two chapters in the previous edition of their Japanese guide, about Hokkaido and Tohoku, for a new edition. As Hokkaido and Tohoku constitute the northern third of the Japanese landmass, this involved a lot of travelling around. To cut costs, I stayed in several youth hostels – in the cities of Hakodate, Aomori, Hirosaki and Akita, and by Lake Tazawa, which is up in the mountains to the east of Akita City and is Japan’s deepest lake. The hostels were pretty basic but, crucially, they were warm – I was carrying out this job in March, when northern Japan was still in the grip of winter and buried in snowdrifts.

From pixabay.com / © hydroxyquinol

My visit to the Lake Tazawa youth hostel was a spooky experience. I’d phoned earlier in the day from Akita and booked a bed there – a friendly-sounding lady had answered and confirmed the booking – but it was dark when I arrived on the train. To get to the hostel, I had to walk along a silent, lonely road that had snow banked high along its sides. Indeed, the wind had sculpted the tops of those snowbanks into weird, twisted shapes that in the glow from the sporadic streetlights, and the attendant shadows, looked like props from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Finally, I reached the hostel, entered it… and found it totally deserted. Its lights were on, but however much I wandered around its interior, and however loudly I shouted, I couldn’t locate another soul.

Yet I had spoken to a real human being on the phone… hadn’t I? By this time, with the wind moaning outside and flinging shards of snow against the hostel’s walls and roof, I’d stopped thinking about Alien and started thinking about the traditional Japanese ghost stories famously transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn. Maybe I was a character in one of those ghost stories now. Maybe one also involving the yuki–onna…

But after staying there for a bewildering half-hour, I ventured outside again – and discovered a second building close by, one I hadn’t noticed earlier. Inside it, I found the youth hostel staff, including the woman I’d spoken to earlier. What I’d entered first of all had been an annex building of the hostel. I hadn’t been ensnared in a wintry Japanese ghost story after all.

After Japan, I lived in East Anglia – one of the loveliest parts of England – on three occasions. These were for a couple of months in Norwich in 1998, while I was doing a course to get a teaching diploma; for half-a-year working in County Suffolk in 2002; and in Norwich again from 2008 to 2009 while I was doing a Master’s Degree at the University of East Anglia.

When I first turned up in Norwich in 1998, I checked into the town’s youth hostel assuming I would then find normal accommodation in a flat or bedsit for the duration of my diploma course. However, I soon decided that, because it was off-season, I might as well just stay in the hostel, attend the course and do its homework assignments in the usually-quiet common room. Elsewhere in East Anglia, I have fond memories of staying at the youth hostel in the Suffolk village of Snape and, from there, exploring the tidal estuary of the River Alde; and using the hostel in the north Norfolk town of Wells-next-the-Sea as my base while I went walking in the local salt marshes. Sadly, all three of those hostels, Norwich, Snape and Wells-next-the-Sea, appear to be defunct in 2024.

Also, from 2002 to 2005, I worked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. My family didn’t live that far away from Newcastle, being on the other side of the English / Scottish border, and by that time I’d become an ardent cyclist. Thus, several times, I cycled north from Newcastle to visit my folks. The journey took the most of two days by bike and I’d break the journey by staying in youth hostels along the way – either in the midge-infested village of Byrness just south of the border in England, or in Kirk Yetholm just north of it in Scotland. The Byrness Hostel – yes, you guessed it – has given up the ghost since then too.

© YHA Alston

I also cycled westwards from Newcastle, visited the Lake District again and stayed in some of the youth hostels I’d been in two decades earlier. While returning to Newcastle I had another eerie hostel-related experience. Again, I planned to break the journey, this time spending a night in the hostel in Alston, which is said to be the highest market town in England. To get there, I cycled through Penrith and, afterwards, had a gruelling time getting my bicycle up the mercilessly steep A686 road to Hartside Pass. It was evening-time when I finally reached the pass and by then I felt about 200 years old. But, unexpectedly, the road descended gently for the next few miles. I coasted along it, barely pedalling, gradually getting my strength back. The ride was also discombobulating, though, because the light was fading and everything around me was shrouded in mist. Finally, I scooted into Alston. The town had a dream-like quality – almost phantasmagorical as it materialised out of the dusk and mist in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the Alston Youth Hostel and – hurrah! – it’s still on the go.

After that, I stayed in youth hostels only a few times more, in Edinburgh and London when I had a plane or train to catch early the next morning and didn’t feel like splashing out on a hotel-room. In the last decade I haven’t youth-hostelled at all. Nowadays, I’m able to afford less spartan accommodation and, as I’m old, cranky and ‘high maintenance’, I doubt if a youth-hostel bunkbed would meet my expectations for comfort. Still, though they were called ‘youth’ hostels, I was frequenting them into my forties, long after my youth had ended. I certainly got plenty of mileage out of them.

Now, as John Harris observes, they appear to be heading for extinction, in Britain at least. Yes, I know, modern phenomena like Airbnb have vastly widened people’s options when they search for and choose accommodation. But that’s only if people have money. If you’re to believe the figures, some 12 million people in Britain – 18% of the population – are living in absolute poverty, including 3.6 million children. I assume the majority of them live in the cities. I doubt if the existence of Airbnb and the like enables them to travel far from home and see much of the countryside. Now more than ever, young folk need the humble youth hostel as somewhere to provide a warm berth and a roof over their heads while they wander, and explore, and broaden their horizons – cheaply.

And yet, though they’re so needed, youth hostels are being allowed to die out. That’s another indictment of Britain in 2024, a country where the powers-that-be know the cost of everything but the value of absolutely nothing.

September 29, 2021

A dark Swiss secret

I seem to have spent a lot of time recently living in the past, which is no doubt due to the lack of anything happening in the present. And that, of course, is because of the ongoing and seemingly never-ending Covid-19 pandemic. Since August 20^th, Sri Lanka, the country I’m currently resident in, has been in its third period of lockdown. When it was announced, my partner and I had just ended a state of self-imposed lockdown, for one of our friends was diagnosed with Covid-19 at the start of August and we’d had to self-isolate. So, basically, we’ve seen little apart from the inside of our flat for the past two months.

Anyway, the following entry is a little stroll down memory lane that I originally posted on this blog in 2015. While it looks back (fairly) fondly on an adventure I had in 1983, what revived my memories of the adventure was a disturbing article about Switzerland that I’d just discovered on the BBC news website.

For two months in the late spring and early summer of 1983 I worked on a farm in the Swiss municipality of Niederweningen, which is a 35-minute train ride out of Zurich. I can safely say that in terms of sheer, hard, physical work, I’ve done no job like this before or since.

At the time, I was in the middle of taking a year out between the end of high school and the start of college. As far as I remember, nobody else in my school-year did this. Those who intended to go to college did so in the autumn of 1982, a few months after they’d left school. Everybody around me, including my parents, seemed to think I was insane for delaying my entry to college by 16 months and spending the intervening period doing loopy things like working on a farm in rural Switzerland. Nowadays of course, nearly four decades later, you’re considered insane, and lacking in initiative and employability, if you enter college and you haven’t taken a year out, or a gap-year as it’s known in modern parlance. (At least, that’s how it was before the Covid-19 pandemic and presumably how it’ll be again after the pandemic.)

In 1982 I’d discovered an agency called Vacation Work International, which for a small fee arranged paid working holidays in Switzerland. Switzerland wasn’t top of my list of places to visit but Vacation Work accepted people from the age of 17 upwards. I was 17 at the time and other foreign-job agencies I’d tried had turned me down because, due to visa regulations, they could only take on people who were 18 or older. In October 1982, Vacation Work fitted me up with a month-long job as a grape-picker in a vineyard near Lausanne in French-speaking western Switzerland. This was a tough (and wet – those Swiss wine-producers had a very rainy grape harvest to deal with in 1982) but tolerable job. So, after spending some time travelling in central Europe and working with the Community Service Volunteers in the English Midlands, I thought I’d contact Vacation Work again and give something else on their Swiss brochure a go. This time I plumped for a two-month package where I’d work as a farmhand.

One thing this job did immediately was rid me of the assumption that everyone in Switzerland wore a smart suit and earned pots of money working in a bank. The farming family whom Vacation Work attached me to were not wealthy; certainly not by the standards of any farmer I knew back in the UK (and my Dad is one).

Their house was plain but serviceable, but certain things I’d assumed would be a feature of any household in Western Europe, however rich or poor, such as a television set, were absent. One basic commodity that seemed to be lacking was a decent strip of flypaper because, although the house was reasonably clean, its dining table was always plagued by swarms of big, impudent flies.

Their farmstead possessed a tractor, a trailer and one or two other bits of machinery, but nothing like what even a modest British farm would be equipped with. When the farmer, Hugo, wanted to bale some hay, he had to arrange for the use of a baler that seemed to be shared among a number of farms in the valley. And there were no machines for spraying or weeding crops. Those chores had to be done by someone with a heavy tank of weed-killer strapped onto their back or by someone wielding a hoe, monotonously, all day long, up and down the furrows of a field. Similarly, such devices as front-end or back-end loaders were considered an unaffordable luxury. For shifting things like dung or loose hay, the shovel and the pitchfork were the order of the day. During my two months there, such basic tools were rarely out of my hands.

My abiding memory from those two months is of the daily schedule. Hugo would usually come knocking at my door at 5.30 in the morning and after a hurried breakfast both of us would be outside, ready for action, at 6.00. We’d have an hour’s break at lunchtime. We’d spend the first half that lunch-hour eating and then Hugo would give me a pitying look and suggest, “Jan…” – neither Hugo nor his family could ever get their tongues around the correct /ǝın/ pronunciation of my name – “…eine halbe Stunde.” During this free half-hour, I’d usually doze off in my room and wake up 20 or 25 minutes later with a headache and a rotten taste in my mouth that suggested I’d just been chewing a dead frog.

At some point in the early evening there’d be another meal, but the work usually continued until 8.00 or 9.00 PM. During a busy period, like when we were hay-making, we didn’t clock off until after 10.00. This was the routine six days a week. Only Sundays were free. I calculated I must be doing 70 to 80 hours of physical labour each week. I’d grown up on a farm, and indeed the previous year I’d spent a busy summer working on my uncle’s farm in Ireland. But I hadn’t done anything on the scale of this.

That said, I did quite enjoy myself. I got on well with Hugo and his family were civil to me, although because I was equipped only with the basic German I’d learnt at school and as they spoke the robust – some would say impenetrable – dialect of German known as Schweizerdeutsch, communication was often difficult. At the end of 1983, I received a nice Christmas card and letter from Hugo and his family, which had been written in English by one of their children who was learning the language as school. It wasn’t very comprehensible and I wondered if I’d sounded as strange to them when I’d spoken German.

The family were also kind enough at the end of my two-month service to present me with a going-away gift: a bottle of illicitly-homemade kirsche. This bottle of kirsche lasted for the next two years, into 1985. It was so strong that it could be supped only in minute quantities. A couple of times I sneakily gave glasses of it to college acquaintances who liked to boast about their drinking prowess and, soon after, enjoyed the spectacle of them falling unconscious.

Pleasant too was the scenery at Niederweningen. It wasn’t mountainous but, half-farmed, half forested, it was gorgeous in a sedate, pastoral way. And I formed a friendship with another Vacation Work person who’d been assigned to a neighbouring farm, Rebecca Macnaughton. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we’ve kept in touch to this very day. Actually, no matter how long and how hard I worked, it never seemed to stop me from accompanying my Vacation Work colleague down the road to the local pub for a beer after I’d finally finished for the day.

One evening, we tried exploring a different road and happened across a small restaurant that was run, somewhat unexpected, by a well-travelled and very interesting Sri Lankan guy. In fact, he was the first Sri Lankan I’d ever met and I never imagined that, later in my life, I’d spend seven years living in his home country. Anyway, he described how, previously, he’d worked in Zurich with some young Swiss heroin addicts. And suddenly another of my assumptions about Switzerland, about how it was a bastion of order, decency and law-abidingness, had been turned on its head.

One other positive thing about the experience was how physically fit I felt afterwards. Nowadays, with my body wracked by arthritic aches and pains and my waistline fighting a losing battle against a beer-belly, I look at photographs taken of me after I’d arrived home and can hardly believe how athletic I looked then. Indeed, one of the things I did after that was to spend a fortnight tramping around the Lake District and I seem to remember bounding about those Cumbrian fells like a mountain gazelle.

For my Swiss farm-work I was paid a modest wage, but I was never sure if that wage came out of Hugo’s pocket or if it was provided under some Swiss farming subsidy scheme. From what I could gather, the people provided by Vacation Work International were just one input in a system that saw lots of foreign people working cheaply on those modest-sized, modest-resourced farms. Hugo told me how one farmhand who’d worked for him previously was an African bloke. He’d also employed someone, at some point, from the Faroes Islands. Hugo and the Faroese guy had got along so well that the latter still phoned him for a chat from time to time, from his home in the North Atlantic.

Mind you, the annual presence of foreign farmhands didn’t seem to improve Hugo or his neighbours’ knowledge of the outside world. I recall one lunchtime having an argument with him and one of his neighbours about where Albania was. I was the only one who maintained that it was in Europe. Eventually, one of Hugo’s kids’ school atlases was dug out and consulted and, yes, it transpired that I was correct.

I’ve written nostalgically about my days on a Swiss farm, but I have to admit that what rekindled my memories of them and inspired me to write this blog-entry was something altogether darker. Whilst browsing through the online back-pages of the BBC News website magazine, I happened across an article about a phenomenon that the Swiss authorities had until recently kept quiet about. The article is called SWITZERLAND’S SHAME – THE CHILDREN USED AS CHEAP FARM LABOUR and is written by Kavita Puri.

This describes the old Swiss practice of taking orphaned children, or the children of unmarried parents, or children from poor backgrounds, and using them as ‘contract children’; as ultra-cheap labour, often on farms, where they were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Part of the reason for this was simple economics. Prior to World War II Switzerland wasn’t a wealthy country and a low-costing workforce for its agricultural sector had to be found somewhere. However, it was driven too by an unforgiving attitude towards poverty. As one historian explains: “It was like a kind of punishment. Being poor was not recognised as a social problem, it was individual failure.”

The phenomenon of contract children – which over the decades is believed to have involved hundreds of thousands of Swiss youngsters – began in the 1850s and continued for the next century. It didn’t peter out until the 1960s and 1970s, when “farming became mechanised” and “the need for child labour vanished.” Also, “(w)omen got the vote in 1971 and attitudes towards the poor and single mothers moved on.” Even so, Puri’s article mentions one case of agricultural child labour that occurred as late as 1979, just four years before I arrived there for my 70-to-80 hours of weekly hard labour. What a sobering thought.