Never Discuss Engelbert Humperdinck Engelbert Humperdinck is not easy to say at the best of times, but every year, as the Eurovision Song Contest hits our screens, I am reminded of how the pronunciation of his name was made so much more difficult because of the Dreieichenhain Kerb.
E
very May, the whole town of Dreieichenhain where we lived in Germany, stopped for a huge festival which lasted for five days. In the weeks before it began, sixteen-year-old boys would be taken by the older men from the church in the middle of town into the woods. Here they would be taught drinking songs and collected small saplings which they cut down, added a red ribbon and sold to people in the town to strap to their gate posts. As the event grew closer a huge beer tent would appear, filling most of the car park in the centre of town. A couple of days before, the tent would be joined by fairground rides and food trucks selling everything from sweet treats to the obligatory sausage. The start of the Kerb was marked by a procession of boys all wearing white shirts, sashes over their shoulders, straw hats covered in flowers and a beer glass tied around their neck, hanging from red ribbons. As they arrived at the lake by the castle a whole host of horrors awaited them. Firstly, they would be expected to climb a telegraph pole to sit on a chair strapped to the top. If they survived this, which inevitably they all seemed to do, they would be dunked in the lake in a kind of ritual baptism. Looking on were large groups of men of various ages, each group wearing matching T-shirts sporting the year they had been one of the boys to have survived the initiation ceremonies. Benches were adorned by three or four grey-haired men in T-shirts sporting, “Kerb 1949”, looking on silently taking it all in as they had done for the last sixty years. A group of thirty or so middle aged men, with stomachs that had seen the benefit of a pint or two over the years since their Kerb in 1984, stood reliving their youth, pretending for a night or two that they did not have the responsibilities of a kid climbing the obligatory pole. Their offspring were either dressed in the white shirts and flowery hats or wearing a T-shirt with Kerb two thousand and something or were acting as slave labour in the beer tent, where only the young were sober and responsible enough to take charge. Their wives stood by matching them pint for pint, but looking a little more glamorous in their brightly coloured dirndls. It seemed like wherever you ended up in life if you had grown up in Dreieichenhein, you returned each May, like swallows in the spring, or a repetitive, drunken Preston Guild. That afternoon the town erupted into a riotous drinking festival filled with lederhosen, dirndls, Oompah bands and beer. It was so much fun the first year we were there. 180
LANCASHIRE & NORTH WEST MAGAZINE
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