Große Freiheit

ME
Why are we burning these bank statements?

MY FATHER
If we don’t, the police will come round and arrest us.

We - my Dad and I - are standing in our garden gazing through both smoke and the dying light of a late January Sunday afternoon at a small bonfire which he has lit perilously close to our garden shed and is now fuelling by adding handfuls of bank statements. This is an annual event, and despite the bitter cold - the feeble flames from the bonfire only give an artist’s impression of warmth - looked forward to by me, the previous month’s Christmas festivities now a distant memory. But until today I have never questioned the reason for this document burning ceremony.

I accept my father’s explanation of the need for the bonfire as I had accepted it on at least one previous occasion. Regular readers will recall that when I was of nursery school age he spent an entire weekend decorating my bedroom, the wallpaper repeated images of Noddy, Big Ears and PC Plod, the Toyland characters created by Enid Blyton, the stuff of actual nightmares. But, possibly in response to my impatience, asking him why he was taking so long, my Dad said that unless he got the pattern of the wallpaper lined up accurately, the police would come round and arrest him.

His fear of arrest was of course entirely without merit, a put on to entertain his young son, perhaps more so to alleviate his own boredom. And to my knowledge, he had crossed paths with the forces of law and order only once before, a minor run in with the military police on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn the day he was de-mobbed from the RAF in 1954.

To celebrate my demob, David, Sannigar, Charlesworth, Pilot Officer Cochrane and I went off to Hamburg on the Saturday returning Sunday. We pottered around sight-seeing, including the zoo, and then ended up at this street which if I remember correctly was called Große Freiheit. At the entrance was a large notice which indicated it was out of bounds to military personnel. However, we strolled in to have a look and found a sort of shopping street with large windows behind which sat prostitutes. We had no sooner started our window shopping when we were accosted by a couple of military policeman who must have been lurking about somewhere. Anyway, it was all very polite because after seeing our identity card we were addressed as gentlemen and “invited” to go with them to a nearby military police station. We were told an officer had been summoned to deal with us and in due course a rather grumpy officer who, having his Saturday disturbed, dealt with the matter and off we went.

All good clean fun. However, on a Sunday afternoon at the tail end of January in the early 1970s, unless there was snow, burning bank statements as entertainment was as good as it got, but one year I must have pushed my father for an explanation beyond the unlikely threat of police intervention.

The reason for the annual bonfire of the bank statements, I was told, was security. True, this was before the availability of affordable home paper shredders, but there wasn’t much information on those statements. Almost all deposits were made manually, all payments made by cheque, so just a meaningless list reference numbers and corresponding monetary amounts. And what sort of housebreaker was going to get past our Fort Knox style security system only to steal a few bank statements? In any case, this was still in the days when you arranged a mortgage by having a glass of sherry with your bank manager in his (sometimes, but very rarely, her) office. That was as good a deterrent to retail banking fraud as any.

It didn’t seem right to be setting fire to bank statements, even if they were your own. After all, they were official documents. Official documents which the Bank of Scotland provided - free of charge - smart blue linen covered ring binders in which to file them. And it wasn’t as if we were stuck for space in house to store the files, I’m pretty sure we could have squeezed in several lifetimes of bank statements.

But, as it says in the Große Freiheit leaflet which my Dad kept from that final weekend in Hamburg and pasted into his photo album, “there are unusual amusements for every taste - it all produces a charming mosaic of thrills and attractions.” Prost to that.