And thirdly there was her Missingsch. Some people think Platt German is ugly and don’t like it, but I’ve always loved it; my father spoke it as correctly as if it had been High German – Platt, ‘the more nearly perfect of the two sisters’, as Klaus Groth called it. Platt German is a mixture of everything: rough and tender, funny and sincere, clear, sober and, above all, it can be beautifully drunk. The Princess turned it into High German as it suited her – in fact there are hundreds of different sorts of Missingsch, from Friesland to Hamburg and across to Pomerania; every village speaks it differently. Philologically, it’s difficult to grasp, but you can grasp it with your heart. That’s what the Princess spoke – but not all the time! That would have been intolerable. Only sometimes, for a change, when she happened to feel like it, did she speak Missingsch: she used it for things that really mattered to her, and then she spoke it with a strong Berlin colouring. But she still spoke Platt sometimes, or that halfway Platt, Missingsch.

I’ll never forget the time when we were first getting to know each other. I was having tea with her, and cutting the discreetly ridiculous figure of a man courting – we do make right idiots of ourselves. I was making calf’s eyes at her and talking literature; she smiled. I told jokes, and lit up all the department-store windows of my heart. We talked about love. It was like a fight in Bavaria – when they fight, they begin with talking about it.

When I had explained everything to her, and my knowledge was not inconsiderable – I was very proud of the risqué things I’d dared to say, and of how I’d managed to present it all so precisely and with such burning clarity, so that really the time had now come to say: ‘Yes, well how about it?’ – then the Princess gave me a long look and said,

‘What a sophisticated young man!’

And that did it. It wasn’t till much later that I recovered again, still laughing, with nothing to show for my erotic baptism. But love had something to show for itself.

The train stopped.

The Princess sat up and opened her eyes. ‘Where are we?’

‘It looks like Stolp or Stargard – something with “St” at any rate,’ I replied.

‘And what does it look like?’ she inquired.

‘It looks . . .’ I said, and gazed out over the little brick houses and the gloomy station, ‘it looks like the sort of place where sadistic non-commissioned officers are born. Shall we have lunch here?’ The Princess immediately shut her eyes. ‘Or we can eat in the dining-car, they’ve got one on the train.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘in the dining-car, the waiters are always infected by the speed of the train, and everything’s such a rush. I’ve got a tummy that likes to take its time . . .’