Read Online Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare - Free Book Online

space and found himself looking for the first time through Eastern eyes. The smooth water of the harbour amplified each sound. The distant yell of the fisherman. The cormorant that plunged, croaking, towards whatever scraps were being tossed away. The bark of a dog on the opposite bank. Someone shook their raincoat, but it was a swan taking off.
    At the end of August he said goodbye to the Viebachs. He had sat out his remaining meals trying to avoid seeing in their expressions a sign that he had become dinner-party fodder.
    â€œYou are welcome here any time,” said Kirsten’s mother solemnly.
    Next day found him in Holland. In a bakery, overhearing his accent, a man mistook Peter for a German and spat in his face. A small part of him was relieved: his German must be getting better.
    He had not found the language easy to learn. His schoolroom German wasn’t the German he heard spoken in Hamburg. But his desire to communicate with Kirsten had had a liberating effect and in the following term he rose to near top of his class. Nervous of Peter’s sudden fluency, his teacher – a frilly, Gothic script of a man who had until now insisted on calling him Höthersay, thinking he was doing Peter a favour – stopped singling him out.
    His German master wasn’t alone in observing a change. He had returned to St Cross more dissatisfied and confused. More defiant. One evening after “namers” Mr Tamlyn took Peter aside. “Is everything all right at home?”
    â€œEverything’s absolutely fine.”
    â€œIt’s good to talk about these things.”
    â€œReally, sir. Everything is fine. Couldn’t be better.”
    He retreated deeper into his toyes, spending his last pocket money on a subscription to the German soccer magazine Kicker . He covered the walls with team photographs of Hamburger SV and at their centre pinned a poorly taken snap of Kirsten after a race, her suit of silver Lycra barely distinguishable against the snowbank.
    Until he was sixteen, he had assumed he would marry an English girl. Had built a picture of her in his mind, a sort of composite model of a young woman on a beach who happened to be one of Rosalind’s friends. But now? With each passing week, he sensed himself divided from his fellows, even Brodie. His German summer had taught him that there was a European culture and he was not part of it. In England, he felt small and restless. At the same time, his experience in Hamburg had led him to fear, even to dislike, a part of himself he couldn’t know.
    To vanquish this dragon he determined to ride out to meet it. As Bedevere might have done.
    He settled into his studies, making himself into a German and also qualifying himself to escape. If his decision to go to Hamburg marked the first jutting of the jaw, the second was demonstrated by his choice of university. He would become what his mother wanted, but that was incidental as it was also what his father had wanted – and now what he wanted, too.
    Eighteen months since his 16th birthday and he was ready to make the break. To go against every grain. To find himself by taking not Leadley’s obvious path through an Oxford quad and dark panelled rooms to an institution in the City, but the route which led in the opposite direction, among a people whose language he falteringly understood, past the rough streets of the Reeperbahn where he had heard shots in the night, past the grim housing projects, to the teaching hospital.
    His mother couldn’t contain her joy. “Medicine? But how wonderful, darling. Where will you go? Oxford or Cambridge?”
    â€œHamburg.”
    â€œHamburg?” she said and looked down at her book – she was reading Maurice Guest . “That’s a good university, I’m sure. If you can do it, you can do it.” What else could she say?
    The Universitätsklinik Eppendorf, or UKE, was not Peter’s first choice. He had looked into studying