A German Incident

A very brief story possibly inspired by Bates's August 1927 trip to Germany.

The trip — partially depicted in two stories (A German Idyll and The Bath), as well as in Bates's autobiography, The Blossoming World (pp. 54-57, p. 117), and in an independent account by one of his fellow travellers — was done by train, bus, boat, and on foot, whereas this 1935 piece has the travellers speeding by car through southern Germany. Bates's autobiography refers to several other trips to Germany, one of which might equally have inspired this piece.

The narrator glimpses a peasant girl with hair 'that gleamed like silk in the straight noon sun... she was about seventeen. The fair silk-soft pig-tails lay strong and long over her shoulders and down her breast; and her fresh blue-eyed, sun-browned, very German face was lovely.'

Both the tone of the story and the description of the girl resemble A German Idyll, in which the narrator falls for a girl described as 'twenty-one or two... fair-skinned and slender' with 'hair as pale as whitened wheat-straw and her eyes were vividly blue and candid and shining.'

In Programme, the journal of the Oxford English Club (May 17, 1935, no. 5, pp. 1-2)