tjh290633 wrote:I recall that in Poland many years ago the advice was to avoid a queue with young Poles returning from Western Europe. Invariably they had a magazine like Playboy, which was found and then had to be scrutinised from cover to cover by all the customs officers present.
Little old ladies were a better bet.
Hah! During my student days in cold-war Berlin,it was the little old black-clad ladies you had to watch out for. Nobody was more likely to cause a civic punch-up than the "Tanten" (aunties), a bit like Giles's cartoon grannies, who would elbow you out of the way at the supermarket or rugger-tackle you off the pavement at the tram-stop queue. The worst of it was that there were probably a hundred thousand of them.
The underlying demographic facts shed a little more light on the problem. Hitler's wars had killed off a very large proportion of the males who these frustrated wimmin would otherwise have been expected to marry, and the last thirty years had been spent nursing one hell of a collective sexual grudge, which had surely been augmented by the general latitude accorded to these poor women who everybody assumed were war widows. (Some were, most weren't.) And then, of course, there was also the hideous fact that 80% of them had been brutally raped by the Russians in 1945.
All in all, it wasn't hard to see how they'd got to be this aggressive. And OK, being Berliners was also part of the problem. The city still has a reputation for being in-your-face, rude. ironic, pushy and often amazingly funny in a way that only a hard-wired local could appreciate. (It takes a bit of getting used to.)
Either way, the
Tanten were a force to be reckoned with. If they didn't beat you to death with their brollies, they'd cheerfully push you under a bus if it meant they could get aboard ahead of you. Sharing a city with these feral septuagenarian gangs was enough to sharpen up your survival instincts no end.
BJ