A COLD WAR RELIC WHAT A GAL
four other people and an infant in the lift with our group. Eight adults and a baby.
A man leaning against the wall opened the first door. All good. He then pushed at the second steel door … and pushed and pushed. It was stuck. There was a certificate on the wall to say that the lift had been inspected in May this year. We wondered how diligent the inspectors were because absent from its place on the wall was the emergency phone to be used if the lift broke down. In its place was a vacant recess in the wall.
All of us looked and looked, confirming, yes, there was no phone. We were in a lift in a building in which there was no phone link to the outside world. The two attendants downstairs in another part of the complex were, as we knew, preoccupied reading novels and I MET Paul Lind Lindegaard, d a man who makes jewellery from copper removed from the roof of a bank in Copenhagen.
He worked on the roofing project with Jorn Utzon. Mr Lindegaard, like all the Danes I’ve met, thinks the world of Australia’s Princess Mary, married to Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark. They all give “our Mary” the thumbs-up. Mary’s mum-in-law Queen Margrethe II of Denmark ( pictured) is a bottler. It’s nothing for her to turn up at the supermarket in her trakkie daks. She loves her durries. My Danish friends tell me her preferred brand of cigarettes is so strong they are not sold in Denmark but brought in from Greece. What a gal! playing computer games. In all likelihood they had no idea there was anyone in the lift. We all knew that mobile phones often don’t work in lifts. It started to get hot immediately.
A woman with a phone had the number for the front desk. She called the number. Miraculously, the phone rang away down there in the bowels of the building. Disappointingly, no one answered. The father of the infant sat on the floor with his child telling it Danish nursery tales. The man at the door continued to push. Buttons were pushed as per instructions on the wall. Nothing. The unsaid thought on everyone’s mind was “what if the cables unwind and the lift goes hurtling groundwards?” The woman with the desk number rang again. This time after what seemed forever, the man answered.
“He’s working on it”, the woman with the phone announced. After 25 minutes the cables groaned and we started descending. When the doors opened on the ground floor the young man was there, a cheery grin on his face. “No problem,” he said