Windmills and tulips

It had all started about a year before . The school had sent home a letter asking us to make sure that the kids didn’t walk to or from school on their own because at least one man had been seen trying to lure a child into his car and there had been reports of others. Then the man at the corner shop was arrested for ‘interfering’ with little boys.
For crying out loud this was Surbiton all net curtains and BMW’s in the driveways it was a 'nice' area and now the kids couldn’t even walk to school alone.
Peter was running his own plumbing and heating company working really long hours to make sure we didn’t go belly up the way a lot of small companies were going at that time. He often left home at 7 am and didnt get back until 8 or 9pm often working weekends as well because you had to keep the customer sweet. This all resulted in the children and I not seeing much of him.
When I had been pregnant with Abby I’d even had to go on holiday without him, taking the boys to Littlehampton in the caravan with my mum to help out. I had started to identify more with one-parent families than with couples and I’m sure that some of the other mums at the school thought that my husband was a figment of my imagination. He was never able to attend parent evenings or school sports days, jumble sales or even the christmas play.

It all came to a head one Sunday. We had taken the boys swimming and afterwards as a treat we went to Mc’Donald’s. as we stood in line he asked the boys what they wanted to eat. James had no problems giving his dad his order but Ryan shy anyway and having taken to heart my warnings about talking to strangers refused to speak to his father. His little hand clenched my trouser leg and he whispered to me “ can I have a burger and some cola mummy”?
Enough is enough we decided.

So the hunt for a new place to live started. We did look in the UK but where you could find work there was nowhere to live and visa versa.
Our thoughts turned to emigration. Peter thought Australia or New Zealand would be nice I thought that was just a bit far away and besides didn’t they have strict rules about who could and who couldn’t get in?
What about Europe we thought? We liked France, we had been there on holiday once or twice but we couldn’t speak French. That would be a big hurdle because the French were a bit funny about letting people in who didn’t even speak the language.
Then Peter suggested Germany, he had worked there before we were married and thought it might be ok. So he went off to take a look at the possibilities. It didn’t work out and I picked him up 3 weeks later from Heathrow. He was almost blind with welding eyes. This is something caused when a welder catches a flash ie; looks directly at the welding arc of his own or in Peters case someone elses torch, the light from the welding torch is so bright it causes a sort of instant sunburn on your eyeballs. I had to grab him as he stumbled past me at arrivals and keep cold flannels on his swollen red eyes for the next 24 hours. The place he had been working at employed foreigners but then flouted all the safety regulations making it an accident waiting to happen. He had been lucky to escape with just a bad case of welding eyes one poor man got hit in the side of the head with a hook, he hadn’t been wearing a safety helmet at the time and left never to return.

Then we thought about the Netherlands we had been over on holiday several times and really liked it. The Dutch always seemed a friendly relaxed sort of people and a big plus point was that most of them spoke English.
Peter set off on his motor bike at the end of April. He toured around for a few days asking about work and looking at various towns. We really didn’t want to swap one big city for another so Amsterdam and Rotterdam were out of the question. Someone advised him to try going north over the dike to Friesland.
Just to explain the geography a bit;
The Netherlands is split into various counties or provinces one of the most northern is Friesland.
Dutch people from the rest of the country always joke about needing a passport to go there. The province is now connected to North Holland by a dike over 30 km long with an inland-sea on one side and the North Sea on the other. But until 1925 the only way to get to Friesland was either by boat or by driving hundreds of kilometers around the edge of what is now the inland-sea. The Ijsselmeer. The county is quite rural with many tiny villages and small towns one of which is Harlingen.

Very popular with German tourists, Harlingen is a small coastal town just 8km from the end of the dike. Tourists go there and take the ferry to one of the small islands off the coast there or stay in one of the local campsites and just enjoy the Friesian countryside.
There was also a fairly healthy ship building industry and it was at one of these shipyards that Peter ended up. . Now Peter is really a heating engineer but he can weld. So he walked into a local shipyard that needed welders and just like the boys from the black stuff said, “ Gis a job”.

To his surprise they did, firstly though an agency and later they gave him a contract. It wasn’t the best job in the world but the hours were 7.30 ‘til 4 p.m. That meant there would be no-one phoning in the middle of the night to say that their boiler was making funny noises or to order a new gas cooker. That was something we had regularly had to put up with in London. We advertised a 24hr call out service which lead to some people thinking that they could call at 2am and discuss bathroom planning.
Peter found that he was one of a group of English guys working at the yard and all of them stayed at a hotel in the middle of town. There wasnt much to do in the evenings except play darts or drink at the bar.
One of the women who worked at the hotel had a huge black Bouvier dog and Peter lost for anything else to do of an evening offered to walk her dog for her. He would phone me every evening to let me know how things were and to catch up with events at home.
After walking all round the town he decided that while he was out he would phone me, after all the dog seemed quite placid . We were chatting away and he had told me about this very nice dog when all of a sudden I heard a grunt a crash and a 4-letter word then silence! I was quite panicky thinking that some thug had dragged him out of the phone box to beat him up or mug him
” Peter”? I called “Peter are you ok”? After a few seconds he returned and breathlessly gasped “sorry about that the fucking dog saw a cat and took off down the road after it. Ive been hanging on for dear life"

A few days later he noticed a slight leak in the trap under the wash basin in his room so on his way out to work he stopped at reception and told the girl there “ there is a leak under my sink”. He watched in amazement as the colour drained from her face “a what”? She asked “A leak “ under my sink “ said Peter slowly. What happened next was like a scene from a sit-com the girl ran off yelling in Dutch to someone in the office.
Peter picked up the words leak and Police and wondered if he had committed some terrible crime by reporting leaky plumbing. The manager then came forward and asked Peter to repeat what he had told the girl at reception. Peter repeated himself slowly “there is a leak under the washbasin in my room,” he said hardly daring to think what the managers reaction might be. To his suprise the manager started to smile. The explanation was just a matter of faulty translation.
Peter had said, leak the girl heard the Dutch word lijk ( corpse ) which explained her panicked reaction.
It was one of the first but by no means the last time that the language barrier would cause us problems and laughter.
After a couple of weeks at the hotel and with the help of some Dutch friends Peter put our names on the housing list and after 6 weeks got a letter inviting him to view a house. It was a nice 3-bedroom house in a fairly new part of the town with a useable loft space, which was handy when we had visitors coming to stay. It also had a garden for the kids although they never played in it. They much preferred to be outside. The house was in one of 4 streets, which formed a square with a playing green equipped with swings slides and a roundabout in the center. On one side of the square was the school and on the other the doctors surgery with the supermarket 2 streets away.

Back in England it was half term, so with the two boys aged 6 and 8 and baby Abby 18 mths one buggy and a huge backpack I traveled in the rush hour by tube across London to Liverpool St then by train to Harwich and finally with the boat to Hook of Holland. This journey is now much improved with the introduction of the high-speed boat the HSS but back then it was an 8-hour journey. The boat was packed with drunken American students who were “ Doing Europe” and as a result we arrived at the port feeling dreadful. Peter was there to meet us in a tiny car he had hired and we strated off on the final leg of the journey.
Friesland is a good 3 hours drive from the port or at least it was in the tiny hired Daihatsu and really warm with all the kids crammed in the back. We had been travelling for over 17 hours and the Americans had kept us awake the whole time by either singing or puking. So by the time we arrived I was hot and worn out the kids looked exhausted but as we got out of the car outside the house the boys saw the playing field in front of the house with the swings and climbing frame just 5 yards from the front door and thought they’d landed in heaven, “ can we mum can we? I said yes and they played outside nearly all week. They made friends with the other kids who lived around the square,went fishing, had tea at friends houses and thoroughly loved it.
All too soon it was time to go home. We re-packed the backpack and headed off back to the port. The boys moaned about going but it all broke loose when we got to the port.
I stood at the Stenaline desk with my ticket the boys howled that they didn’t want to go they didn’t want to leave daddy or their friends or the new house or the swings or the fishing rods they’d been given. Then Abby started crying .She didn’t know why she was crying but if the boys were so upset it must be serious. As I handed over the ticket and the tears started rolling down my cheeks the girl at the desk stamped the ticket and in her best English asked “ are you sure you want to go”?
´ I don’t want to go but I have to ‘ I replied tearfully. We waved Peter goodbye and made our way onto the boat. By the time we got to the top of the boarding ramp we were all crying buckets and people were staring.

Then to cap it all there was some idiot in one of those furry costumes welcoming all the child passengers and having pictures taken and before I could do anything he had an arm round each of the boys “ smile” he commanded in a syrupy fake friendly tone. They wailed even more as the camera flashed.
Needless to say I didn’t buy the resulting photo.
We got back and Ryan started packing, he was ready to leave right there and then.
A few days later I officially notified the school that the boys would be leaving at the end of term. Unofficially they had known by 9am on monday morning because Ryan, unable to curb his enthusiasm had told everyone he was moving. The way he described it I’m sure most of the kids thought he was off to live at Euro Disney. His Birthday fell in June and we gave a big birthday /going away party both boys invited everyone they wanted to. Katie nanny (my mum) helped out organizing games and party bags for about 30 6-9 year olds.

The boys were disappointed that they had to wait a while until I’d arranged things. Like turning off the gas and electric.
Honestly you would think that no one had ever left the country before the way the utility companies behaved “where do you want the account moved to “? they would ask when I phoned to arrange the shut off date. “No where” I would say, “we are leaving the country” ‘Yes but what forwarding address can I give’? they would ask and I would give our new Dutch address, to which they would reply “I’m sorry madam I can only accept a UK address”, Good god! Give me strength!

My best friend cursed me. She had just bought a flat 10 minutes from where my house was and now I was moving
Who was she going to go to aerobics with on Thursdays now? It was a ritual; I’d been going since before Abby was born and carried on until I was nearly 8 mths pregnant. After stretching and toning our bodies we would go home via the chippie still dressed in gym clothes. As my belly expanded the Chinese lady at the chip shop became horrified, her advice was to “ put feet up let and husband do work” But we didn’t care. It was our girls night out, aerobics and chips!

I also made an attempt to at least learn a bit of Dutch. I went out to buy one of those teach yourself courses.
I trawled bookshop after bookshop and found that they had everything under the sun, Chinese, Japanese, Zulu, Russian, Croat, Icelandic, and some I’d never even heard of but ask for Dutch and the shop assistants shrugged their shoulders, shook their heads and more or less laughed at me. After all who wanted to learn Dutch? As one woman told me “ you’d be much better off learning German dear” Eventually I did find one a taped Teach yourself Dutch course.
I’d been to every bookshop I could think of and more and eventually walked into a small place in Kingston and asked for the umpteenth time “ Do you have a Dutch language course”? The shop assistant frowned, chewed her lip a bit and said “ Yeah the place with the windmills and tulips right”?

Not that it did me much good. The idea is that the nice lady on the tape (snooty cow) says something in English then in Dutch and you repeat it. Lesson one; How to say yes, no, thankyou. Yes/JA no/nee thank you/dank u wel. I was beginning to think I might just stun the natives with my command of the lingo. Then I tried lesson two; the snooty cow (sorry nice lady) said “wilt u alstublieft wat langzamer praten”? I must have rewound and played that bloody tape a 100 times but it was no good she rattled it off so quickly and it all sounded like one long word to me and I gave up. Ironic that she was saying "would you please speak more slowly".

At last he big day dawned. Everything we wanted to take with us was packed away in boxes and our clothes were in suitcases ready to go. The dog had had her vaccinations and was declared fit to travel.
My mum had come to help pack the last bit and bobs and to wave us off but as the day wore on I think the realization that we were really going to leave hit her. It all got a bit much and she sat on our bed and cried. In the end she gave herself a headache. It was no good our minds were made up. So a bit later than planned (she wouldn’t get off the bed) we waved goodbye.
Our nieghbours had managed only a faint interest saying “ bye bye then have a good time” as if we were off on holiday.

Peter had bought a car by this time, an old Talbot which as I had no idea how Dutch numberplates worked I couldnt tell how old it was but I guessed that antique status was not far off. Peter’s dad helped us move. The plan was that we went first with kids and our clothes and he would follow on the night boat with the rest in the van and trailer.
We had decided to leave a lot of large furniture behind so the sofas and dining room table and chairs stayed behind so did the wardrobes and dressing tables.
Peter’s dad had put the suitcases on the roof rack of our car with those stretchy elastic hook things and we were making good time down the M20 when other cars started flashing us. At first we took no notice thinking it must be the foreign numberplates doing it. Then a Volvo flashed us, cut in front and slowed putting his hazards on. “ What the hell!” said Peter as he pulled over. The man got out of the Volvo and walked over to us pointing at the roof. The stretchy things turned out to have been as old as the ark and the elastic had perished. Somewhere along the motorway they had snapped and our suitcases were loose on the roof rack. Worse still the man explained, one of the cases had come off and got lodged under someone’s car. Just at that moment an Astra pulled up behind us with a young couple in it. They jumped out and laughed as they handed back our case saying “ We thought you might like this back” and assuring us there was no damage to their car at all and they were fine. They drove off smiling and waving but I couldn’t help but wonder if they would have been so nice if they hadn’t thought we were foreign just been glad that we spoke English?