And the wall comes a tumbling down.

Next week we go to Berlin for the first time, this is very exciting for me.

I have been fascinated by Berlin for a long time now.
In the Sixties, presumably as an American propaganda excercise, there was a vast exhibition about the wall which travelled to Cork and filled the City Hall there.
I was enthralled and horrified by the photos of people scrambling to safety out of windows and of young men left to die in no-mans land.

I read two books about Berlin later, one The Gift Horse by Hildegard Kneff told of her scramble from the Russian soldiers through the cellars after the war, gave a personal view of the terrors Berliners underwent and the other, Berlin, the Downfall by Anthony Beevor gave an overall view of the same war in that town.

At the moment I am deep (thanks Donal for the loan) into Fredrick Taylors’ The Berlin Wall, another fascinating insight into Berlin and , as I read it I remember that of course the collapse of the wall was not without it’s effect on my own life in Ireland.

It was at the end of October in 1989 that I finally was putting the last touches on what was then my lifelong ambition.
I was opening a restaurant.
To achieve the finances for this I needed to sell my house, a bungalow half way between Dunmore East and Tramore.

The estate agents had not been encouraging so we had decided to sell it on our own and thereby avoid paying their fees.
We had done well, a charming middle European couple had come to look at the house and loved it, accepted our price and said they would be back the next week to finalise the sale. First, they explained they had to go back to the States to organise their finances, they had lived there since getting out of East Germany about twenty years before.

No bother, we thought.

Then just a week later, just before they were due back to finalise , down came the wall in Berlin.

Our couple obviously decided to invest in their homeland instead of Ireland and we never saw them again.

We did succeed in selling the house a few weeks later but not at such a good price.
I suppose it would be churlish to wish the wall had held for just another week…….