I suppose you did learn some German while you were there? Can you still speak any?
I was 8 when we moved to Dusseldorf and 11 when we came back to the UK. In effect we were living on a British housing estate, and in the NAAFI (the Forces' shop) the staff spoke English. Mum liked the quality of the meat and veg in the village shops in a village called Holt which was not a very long walk away, and she soon learned the names of the various meats and veg. She had been broken into that in Dusseldorf, because we lived a long walk from the NAAFI and when we got Deutschmarks instead of stupid pretend paper money which you could spend only in the NAAFI and other British-run establishments it was much easier to go up the road to the small Otto Mess store and buy food there.
The British aren't much good at learning foreign languages, and I still cringe when I remember a magazine article I read when a teenager in the 1960s. The woman for whom it was ghost-written was a Service wife ie her husband was in the Armed Forces and she had been with her husband in West Germany. What a joke it was when she walked into a shop one day and bellowed 'Does anybody here speak English?!' only to be reminded that she was now in England. What an ambassador for the UK she must have been in West Germany.
That being so, I learned hardly any German words but at secondary school in the UK I chose German as my foreign language and studied it up to O level standard, I got a grade 3 (grade 6 was a pass) in it. I still remember some of it, and I can ask for things in shops in Switzerland. And sometimes make very simple conversation in German as well.
That has reminded me about the time Mum and I went on the Jungfraujoch. Mum had asthma so I told her to move and walk slowly when we arrived at the top station actually inside the Jungfrau. Of course she didn't so by the time we arrived out of the station and out into the daylight, though not outside, she was wheezing merrily away and decided she needed the loos. Within 10 seconds I was surrounded by middle-aged German ladies. 'Ist Ihre Mutter krank?' they demanded. 'Nein, nein,' quoth I, 'Sie ist OK.' But these kindly ladies were not to be put off. 'Ist Ihre Mutter krank?' they asked again. 'Nein, nein, sie ist OK und sie hat ihre medizin,' I replied. One of them delved into her handbag. 'Ich habe medizin!' she exclaimed. Just then Mum emerged, sounding much better; so I told her that these kind ladies were enquiring after her health. 'Oh, I'm quite all right,' said she with a smile. So I repeated that in German and then told the ladies that they were very good ladies and kind, and thank you very much etc. So off they went.
I also found one year that I could phone a taxi firm to take us from our friends' house to the train station, so we could go to Zurich airport and come home, and make that arrangement entirely in German. Ruth, our friend, would have done it for us but Peter had forgotten to take his insulin jabber to work with him so she needed to take it to his workplace in Zurich. So the taxi lady said about her driver 'Er kommt sofort!' Mum asked me 'When is the taxi coming?' 'Now!' replied I and out of the house we went with our hand luggage, our hold luggage having been checked in at the train station the day before.
Considering that I sat my German O level in 1967 I think I did quite well.
Like the late Chaircat Midge, I am not always right.