Meet the Neighbours
It was late by the time we pulled up at the house we got the kids in and off to bed as quickly as possible.
After bringing in the cases and having a well deserved cup of tea we headed off to bed ourselves.
It was a short night however as the boys were up at the crack of dawn. They wanted to go out and see their friends and if you’ve ever tried explaining to excited 6 and 8 year olds why their friends and their mums are not going to be pleased to see you at 6 am you will know its no easy task
I managed to delay them for a while with unpacking, they had to choose a wardrobe and have breakfast
A lot of Dutch kids eat hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) on their bread but it was new and exciting for my two. Even so by 8.30am I couldn’t delay them any longer and off they went to find the friends they’d made during half term. “Stay in sight of the house” I warned them “don’t go out of the street” I was worried that if they strayed off they might never find their way back. After all they didn’t speak Dutch. It turned out that I was worried about nothing.
As we unpacked we were introduced to a stream of kids that the boys bought home, local kids who were very curious about the new boys and their parents who spoke no Dutch. Some how language is no barrier to children they chatter away and seem to just know what they are saying to each other.
We had arrived at the beginning of the summer holidays so the boys had 6 weeks of playing with friends to learn Dutch and they seemed to find it quite easy, even if we didn’t.

Thank goodness for nice nieghbours, next door to us lived Amelia and her two boys Lemmy and Jeffery.
Lemmy and Jeffery were about the same age as my two and the four of them got on like long lost brothers.
Amelia spoke some English although I think she was quite shy, but she stopped to say hello one morning and after exchanging remarks about the weather and admiring Abby she took my arm “ our boys fight “ she said and I must have looked quite alarmed so she quickly rephrased herself “ our boys might fight” she said, “ they will say bad things and cry and fight but you and me we don’t fight “? She continued “ because the next day children are friends again, they forget the fight but adults don’t forget”
If only more people were like her. It was true our kids did fight sometimes mine against hers sometimes Lemmy and Ryan against James and Jeffery but Amelia and I stuck to our promise and never got mixed up in it.

Then one morning she turned up at the back door and had a handful of forms with her “ is for getting money for having children” she said. I was confused, was there some sort of Dutch breeding program going on?
As we sat and drank coffee she explained a bit more and I realised she meant child allowance.
I had had Peter find out some things I thought were important before we had moved but child allowance hadn’t been on my list.
Armed with passports and birth certificates we managed to fill in the forms. “Now” she said as she stuffed the forms in the envelope “ you will get money for children”.

Amelia had promised that when the school term restarted she would take the boys and me over and introduce us to the headmaster.
A week before the start of term the boys were out playing James had borrowed Lemmy’s bike and had somehow crashed into the side of a parked car. There wasn’t much of a dent but the was a fairly nasty scratch on the door. We knew nothing until Amelia rang the doorbell with the car owner. He had seen it happen and the boys had told him where they lived. He was very nice and said he would get a couple of estimates for the damage and we could give them to our insurance company.
After he left I asked Amelia what he meant and she explained that nearly everybody in the Netherlands has a sort of third party insurance so that if the kids or the dog cause an accident the insurance pays for the damage. Of course we had never heard of this. The man returned 3 days later with two garage estimates and told us he had put his car in to be repaired at the cheapest of the two, but that we didn’t have to pay until the work had been done and the bill sent. Within days we had arranged insurance to make sure we never got caught out again but in all the years we have had it we have never made a single claim.

The school term started and true to her word Amelia took us across to meet the headmaster but she needn’t have bothered, we already knew each other. He was the man with the damaged car!

Another friend the boys made was Marcel. Marcel was a bit older than my two but he spoke English and seemed to like the idea of taking them under his wing and showing them all there was to see and do in Harlingen. He also got great joy in getting me to repeat words that he knew I wouldn’t have a chance of pronouncing.
Like the time the boys went fishing “not just to the little canal but to the big one with Marcel” they explained.
“What big canal” I asked Marcel “De Van Harinxmakanaal” he replied smiling “ shall I say it slowly “? He asked. I had a go, so what if the kids got a kick out of hearing me make a total fool of myself. I had to learn somehow and this was as good a way as any. Marcel took the boys all over the town they learned a lot of Dutch from him and enjoyed their new found freedom.
Then one day Marcel came over as usual and said, “ my mum would like to meet you to drink tea together”
That sounded ok I mean what harm could there be in drinking tea with his mum he was a nice polite boy so his mum couldn’t be that bad. How wrong can you be?
Their house was on the other side of the square to ours on the corner so I hadn’t really noticed it but as we walked toward it I realized that I could just about see the front door through all the overhanging bushes and trees in the front garden.
The front door was open and the first thing to greet me was the sound of someone singing. It turned out to be his mum; the living room was a mixture of recording studio verses hippy commune with weird paintings and candles dotted around the place. Bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling above the kitchen worktops and tea wasn’t PG Tips but some strange brew of her own making. Pumpkin and tangerine or something.
Marcel’s mum was a left over hippy, flowing skirts and strange hats were her style and although that didn’t bother me when she started telling me about her family I started to worry about her sanity and my safety.
She insisted that she was the secret love child of royalty! She would hold pictures of the man she claimed was her father next to her face and say “ don’t you see how much alike we are”? I thought it best to just nod politely and leave it at that.

Amelia lived on one side of us and on the other side lived Gerard and his wife (I never did catch her name). They moved in after Peter but before I arrived with the kids.
They were polite enough always saying good morning and exchanging small talk.
Then one weekend Peter and I were in bed, our bedroom wall backed onto their bathroom and, council houses being the same the world over we could often hear noises through the walls.
On this particular day we laid in bed not quite believing what we were hearing, our neighbours were having full on raunchy, kinky sex in the bathroom. The water was splashing around and the screams of delight and giggles and groans were truly X rated they were at it for about an hour and a half before the noise died down.

I didn’t think they looked the type, she was nice enough but I always thought she wouldn’t do anything that might mess up her hair!
It wasn’t until Monday that we got an explanation.
Peter arrived home and I opened the door to greet him when Gerard appeared and asked if we had been disturbed by any noise from his house over the weekend?
Well Peter and I exchanged glances. What do you say? We heard you and your wife going at it like rabbits on speed? So we innocently said no nothing had disturbed us.
“Oh” said Gerard “Only we were away and had burglars. They didn’t take anything but made a hell of a mess in the bathroom”!
Gerard and his wife decided it would be a better idea if when they went away that I had the key so that I could look after the house, turn on a light at night and collect the post. Just to insure that there wasn’t a repeat performance of the horny housebreaker and seeing as how we had sat listened and giggled at their antics it seemed the least I could do.
Gerard gave me the fright of my life one evening. I heard the back kitchen door click and saw the figure of a man peer round the cupboard. Now coming from London I know that anyone creeping into your house day or night is up to no good and that the best thing to do is scream, set the dog on him and call 999.
Not so in Friesland, its normal to have your back door on the latch and people call “folk” as they enter so you wont be suprised by them. Of course at the time I didn’t know that so Gerard very nearly got clobbered with a chair.
He had he explained not called out because the kids would be asleep but he just wanted to borrow a beer, if that was ok? Totally embarrassed by almost killing my neighbour I handed over a beer. “ Just one” I asked.
”Yes one was fine,” he said and he sloped off back to his own side of the fence. It was the first of many times that he appeared and asked to ' borrow' a beer. I never did get to the bottom of it, maybe his wife forbade him to drink or maybe he was a recovering alcoholic who sometimes slipped off the wagon but the fact was he only ever came round when his wife was out for the evening.
Sadly they later divorced although he last time I saw him he was dating a Russian lady and they both looked very happy.

They say that the Dutch do everything on bikes and its true really. Ive seen people move house on a bike .Its normal for people to cycle round with a baby on the front in a seat and a school child on the back. Men would cycle with thier girlfriends on the back , most women did the shopping on the bike and even people who would exersise the dog by cycling along with the dog next to the bike I tried that to my cost. Sheba our battersea rescue dog had come with us and I decided to try this new way of letting her out, slowly at first then a bit quicker up and down the street, we were doing really well. Then we went along the canal path and were fine until Sheba saw a rabbit, being too foolish to let go of the lead I was dragged over the handlebars and almost landed head first in the canal. It was my first and last attempt at that method of dog walking.
Amelia was pregnant but would cycle off with the two boys every morning drop them at the school gates and then go off to town and do her shopping or whatever. She was getting really large and I kept saying to Peter that she would have to give up soon surely?
One afternoon I was watering the plants on the windowsill as she cycled off towards town she waved as she went and came back a couple of hours later with piles of baby stuff.
Later that evening I heard comings and goings next door and there was a strange car outside.
The following morning we heard from the boys that its was the midwifes car. Amelia had had a little girl during the night.
A couple of days later when I saw her I mentioned the fact that I’d seen her on the bike that afternoon “yes she said ”I had some contractions but I needed some more things so I just popped into town”!

Before I had arrived Peter had made friends with Erik who was local taxi driver.
Erik is not his real name but easier to say, his real name is very Dutch and totally unpronouceable for most English people.
After a night on the town and feeling just a wee bit too wobbly to risk walking home along the canal Peter had had the good sense to call a cab. It turned out that the taxi driver spoke good English he explained very proudly that he had spent some time in a great place called Basildon in the county of Essex and had perfected his English there.
Maybe it was Peters London accent but Erik seemed to take a liking to him and they became friends.
Erik pulled up to the house and was shocked at the state of it. Having only just moved in Peter had arranged a bed and a couple of chairs but not much else because we hadn’t yet decided how much and what we would be bringing over from England. This is terrible said Erik“ you have no sofa, no TV, nothing , don’t worry I can fix it” he said and drove off.
The following afternoon Peter arrived home from work to find a sofa and two armchairs piled up outside the front door a little later Erik arrived with a TV set in his arms. “ Much better “ he said as the two of them arranged the new furniture and then settled down with a beer in front of the TV.

Sometimes Erik wasn’t quite as helpful as he liked to think. Shortly after I arrived I asked him about a television license. “No we don’t have that here “ he assured me “you just pay for your cable TV and that’s it”.
Some months later after I’d been at school a while I was standing in the queue at the post office and my eye fell on a brochure with a picture of a shocked figure watching a TV. I tried to translate the headline while I stood waiting my turn “ Kijkt u zwart”? Which literally translated read “look you black?” that couldn’t be right I thought, could it be advertising about colour TV I wondered, but surely everyone had colour by now? I picked up one of the folders on my way out and when I got home I translated it with the help of my dictionary.
It turned out to be a government information folder about the risks of a huge fine if you were caught without a TV license. The word black refers to the Dutch way of saying something is not quite legal like working without paying tax “ is to “work on the black”

Erik could be very kind though and that winter when the ice formed on the canals and all the Dutch children got their skates and sledges out he turned up at the house. He had skates in one hand a sled in the other “ come’ he said to the boys “time for you to learn to skate”.