“MUMMY, SHOULD I fall asleep so they feel sorry for us again?” Jasper asked.
“He won’t feel sorry for us Jasper, he is fed up with us. He thinks we are idiots, doesn’t really want us on this train and we may well be getting off in a minute, so don’t settle down and make yourself too comfortable,” said I.
And so began one of the most remarkable turnarounds seen on this, or any, adventure.
The main players in this are the Invincible Shines, Mr Beetroot-face of the Danish Railway network and his only slightly less exasperated colleague, Mrs Harumph.
We’d climbed aboard the Copenhagen to Kolding train to factor in a visit to Claus and Bente – great friends in Singapore with whom we’ve kept in touch since they moved back to Denmark.
Great behaviour on the Kolding Express…
It was a sunny day, we were up bright and early, looking forward to visiting our old friends and their lovely children. It had all the makings of a great day.
“But this ticket is not valid.”
That all-too familiar feeling worked its way into my guts.
“I’m sorry,” I asked Beetroot-face, raising my eyebrows. We really didn’t need this.
“Where is your ticket. This is a supplement, it is not a ticket,” he insisted, rendering the piece of paper I had been nursing so carefully for the past few hours instantly worthless.
The you-have-got-to-be-bloody-well-JOKING look passed across my face before I had even realised it, and we were stuck at an impasse.
I didn’t have a clue what he was going on about and he clearly thought I was an idiot with an invalid ticket (and to be fair, we have displayed a bit of form in that regard on this trip).
Kitty squawked, Ben rolled around and put his feet on the chair, and beetroot-face pulled out his phone.
Mrs S suddenly twigged and it seems we should have stamped or activated our Eurail Pass before starting to travel.
This is not a valid ticket!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Swedes hadn’t noticed (or had been too cool to mention it) and nobody on the way into Copehagen had remarked, but Mr Beetroot-face wasn’t going to let this go. Or make it easy.
“The Germans will never let you travel with this,” he spluttered, after seeing our future destination was Hamburg. As if it was a German rail worker and not HIM creating the fuss.
I kept quiet. I didn’t need the lecture, I just needed old beetroot to fix this not carry on tutting at us.
“It is very expensive to get this stamped on the train,” he said.
Here we go, I thought, a shakedown, in Denmark of all places. But no, it was clearly just another angle from which to berate me for my stupidity. Another tool to poke into my side to heap on the discomfort.
He sighed. He shook his head. He went to find a colleague.
Mrs Harumph turned up a couple of minutes later.
“You haven’t got them stamped?”
“No we haven’t got them stamped.”
She shook her head. These two should enter the synchronized head-shaking world championships.
Once she’d tired of shaking her head, she checked the tickets, checked our passports.
“Where is the baby?” she asked, looking at the picture of baby Kitty in her passport.
“Here she is. She’s grown up a bit,” Mrs S said.
“That’s good,” said Harumph, who then told us some breakfast would be on its way, included in the ticket.
No more than three minutes passed before old beetroot was back.
“Can I see your tickets, please,” he asked.
I unzipped my bag and took out my tickets. Again. And handed them to him.
“They have not been stamped,” he said. “You know it is really, really expensive to have them stamped on the train.”
Was this some kind of joke? “No, you know they have not been stamped. You’ve just seen them.”
Mrs S was thinking on her feet. “Can we get them stamped at Kolding?” she asked.
“There is no ticket office at Kolding. You will have to get off at Odense. But then you must get off the train because you must go to the ticket office.”
“But we have friends collecting us at Kolding,:” Mrs S said to his big beetrooty ‘so-what?’ face.
He shook his head again and disappeared, only reappearing to dump a wire basket of bread rolls and jams on our table. “It’s for you,” he mouthed with his mobile-phone clamped to his ear.
We debated our options while sending an email to Claus to inform him we had hit a spot of bother. His unshakeable optimism (“Don’t worry, we will fix it this end”) made us feel much better and I went to find beetroot.
I spotted him in a little cubby-hole near the loos, whispering to Harumph.
“Hi there, do you think we could get an earlier train tomorrow to the next station after Kolding on the way to Hamburg and get it stamped there before joining our train?” I asked him, outlining Mrs S’s clever plan.
“DO NOT WORRY,” old Beetroot shouted.
“WE ARE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN FOR YOUR FAMILY. BUT TODAY IS SUNDAY AND MANY OFFICE ARE CLOSED. BUT DO NOT WORRY,” he added.
WE WILL DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING FOR YOU!
I was more than a little thrown by the 180-degree change of heart and attitude, and returned to our seats to share the news.
No more than five minutes later, the beetrooty one himself was there.
“I have found a very friendly woman in Odense,” he told us, puffing up with pride. “She will come down from the ticket office in Odense and wait on the platform and she will stamp it for you. So, I need your tickets.”
This seemed too good to be true, but sure enough he had called in some favours or pulled some strings and that is precisely what happened.
“People just want to get rid of us,” Mrs S remarked drily. “Just get them off our train… just get them out of our country… get out of our lives… it is a powerful tool,” she laughed.
She might have been reading the mind of the young woman sharing our carriage. She had been twisting and turning in her seat, contorting herself to get away from the noise the excited Shinettes had been making.
Mrs S apologised to her. “Don’t worry I have got my earplugs,” she barked back. Lucky her.
“This is the best adventure,” said Jasper, proudly wearing the white and green hat he had been given at a Tivoli Gardens restaurant. “My Mum and Dad are in the ditch” the writing on it read in Danish.
The sour woman sqeezing her head into her seat with bits of foam rammed into her lug-holes could not dampen our spririts, though, and the Invincibles had done it again.
We piled off the train at the little town of Kolding and Claus, Bente, Freja (now 14) and Mads (a whopping 20) were on hand to pick us up and load us into their cars for the short drive back to their house. If Tivoli was heaven in Copenhagen, the Dyrings house was heaven in Kolding – with a sun-bathed garden, rabbits, chickens, a dog and CHILDREN.
Bente and Mrs S catching up in Kolding…
The great thing about good friends is that it doesn’t seem to matter how much time goes by between visits and so it was with Claus and Bente.
Mette, 10-years-old when we first met her in Singapore and now 18, had stayed at home and greeted the weary travellers when they arrived home.
The family had been in Spain with 40 or so friends and family to celebrate Claus’s impending 50th birthday (“I’m still nearer zero than 100,” he proudly pointed out at supper. “For a few more days anyway.”) and he had brought back the entire hind leg of a giant pig along with some Spanish beer and we feasted at lunchtime in the garden, catching up on all our news while the children chattered down one end of the table.
It was still astounding how lovely their ‘children’ are, now 20, 18 and 14 and how much time they have always had for our little ones. From looking after Jasper and Ben aged 4 and 2 on the beach in Sentosa during one of our legendary Sunday night BBQs or entertaining our 8,7 and 2 year old with painted nails, swinging in the hammock, playing with them in the playground or transfixing them with Top Gear and super-complex space ship building games on the computer, they were as kind, patient and interested as they were when we first met them…and most importantly afforded us some ‘grown up time’ which has been so missing on this trip!
Metta and Freja have Mads in a spin as Jasper and Ben look on…
Claus had been slow-cooking his famous pulled-pork recipe and he transported it from the oven to the barbecue for the final few hours as we dined on his monster pig-leg, prawns, black bread, white bread and various other marvels Bente had rustled up in the kitchen.
We walked off lunch with a tour of their village and a visit to the playground where the children ran amok and then it was time for Claus’s pulled pork and Bente’s homemade buns followed by homemade ice cream. To say they were a triumph would be a major understatement and everybody dipped in for seconds and thirds as we talked deep into the night, exchanging Trans-Siberian stories – Bente has done the journey twice – and ending with the foreigners trying to bend their mouths round the most unpronounceable Danish words and phrases our hosts could think of.
Claus’s famous pulled pork…
The Shinettes nodded off one by one and were transported into their beds until only the olds were left.
And then there were none.
WOODLANDS TO WATERLOO 