I have never been so grateful to see a man in wellies holding a torch as I was on the Tuesday evening we arrived at our little place in Berlin-Muggelheim. The sat-nav had given up about three miles back, somewhere near a field that looked identical to the previous four fields, and my partner Dave was doing that thing where he goes very quiet and grips the steering wheel like it owes him money. We had been driving from Schonefeld Airport for what felt like three days but was probably forty minutes, and I had just confidently directed us down a track that turned out to be somebody's driveway. A very long somebody's driveway. With a very large dog at the end of it.

The man in wellies was called Dieter, as we would learn, and he appeared from a garden shed as if summoned by our collective despair. He spoke no English, Dave speaks no German beyond "zwei bier bitte," and I have a GCSE that mainly covered asking for directions to the swimming pool. Somehow, through a combination of pointing, exaggerated nodding, and me accidentally saying the word for "sausage" when I meant "straight ahead," Dieter understood we were looking for the holiday home down by the Muggelsee. He walked us back to the proper road, still in his wellies, still holding that torch like a ceremonial staff. Dave offered him a Werther's Original from the glove compartment. Dieter accepted it with the gravity of a knight receiving a sword.

The house itself was one of those proper wooden numbers that looks like it was built by somebody who really, really trusts their own carpentry skills. Our neighbour, a woman called Ute who introduced herself approximately eleven seconds after we opened the car doors, explained that her uncle had built it in the eighties and that the slightly alarming lean to the porch was "character." Ute was seventyish, smoked thin cigarettes that smelled of something herbal and possibly illegal, and had opinions about everything. She informed us that the previous guests had been Dutch cyclists who had complained about the mosquitoes. "Mosquitoes are citizens too," she said, with a shrug that suggested we could take it or leave it.

We took it. We had no choice.

The next morning I attempted to buy bread at the little shop by the marina, which turned out to be less a shop and more a shed with aspirations. The woman running it, whose name I never caught but who Ute later referred to as "the bread witch," spoke exclusively in riddles. I asked for a loaf. She asked if I was the English who couldn't find the house. Word travels fast in Muggelheim, apparently at the speed of a man in wellies with a torch. I admitted we were. She gave me a loaf that was still warm and charged me what I suspect was the local rate rather than the tourist rate, though I will never know for certain because she refused to show me the till.

By the third day we had accumulated what I can only describe as a cast. There was Dieter, who waved at us every morning from his vegetable patch. There was Ute, who brought us a jar of pickled something-or-other and stood in our kitchen until we tasted it in front of her. There was a teenage boy called Florian who fished off the little jetty and explained, at length and without any prompting, that he was saving for a moped and that his mother thought he would kill himself on it. "She is not wrong," he said, with the cheerful fatalism of the young.

Dave, who normally spends holidays finding ways to avoid conversation with strangers, found himself enlisted by Dieter to help move a compost heap. I found myself being taught the proper way to make potato salad by Ute, who rejected my mayonnaise-based approach with a noise I can only spell as "pfah." The bread witch started saving us the better loaves. Florian showed us where the decent swimming spot was, the one without the weeds that grab your legs.

What struck me, and what I keep thinking about now we are back in Birmingham, is how quickly these people went from strangers to something else. Not friends, exactly. Something more specific and more interesting. They were witnesses to our small disaster of arrival, and that shared moment of us being absolutely, hopelessly lost seemed to grant us a kind of membership. We were the English who took the wrong track. We were the ones who needed Dieter's torch. In a place like Muggelheim, that counted for something.

I still do not know what was in that pickled jar. I ate it anyway. Some things you do not question when a woman in a shop-shed is watching your face for reactions.

We left after a week, early in the morning, and found Florian had left a note on our windscreen. It said "gute fahrt," which Dave misread aloud in a way that caused me to choke on my coffee. The bread witch was not yet open. Ute was already up, smoking on her porch, and raised her cigarette in salute. Dieter's wellies were visible in his vegetable patch, though the man himself was bent double among the beans.

I waved until we turned the corner onto the proper road, the one we should have found in the first place. Dave did not need the sat-nav anymore. He knew the way.