Dutch girl?
You may ask, what is the story of a Dutch 7-year-old doing on a BBC website? The answer is simple: marriage.
To connect the dots:
I was born in the Dutch East Indies in Bandoeng, now known as Bandung in Indonesia. To me, the Japanese invasion meant the death of my father, 3 years' imprisonment, the end of youth. We were first interned in Bandoeng and then moved to Kampong Makassar, near Batavia (Djakarta). And moved back to Bandoeng after our liberation. There we were quartered in a schoolbuilding. The Indonesians wanted independence. Unfortunately we were caught in the middle of a battle, at night we could see the bullets like gigantic fireflies. I don't think we were consulted actually, but suddenly there we were on a huge ship bound for Holland. "Repatriation" they called it, only when we got there, it did not feel like a "fatherland" at all. To begin with, it was FLAT and the houses were all the same.
I must have talked about life in the camps, because one day a classmate said, "Do shut up about those beastly camps. We had a war here, too, you know." This is very much what happened to most of us. We stopped talking and tried to adapt.
When I was 14 I came to England for the first time. My uncle had been chief engineer on a tanker plying between America and England. A very cruel sea indeed! He had married an English girl who invited us to visit her in Dorset. She had a beautiful little cottage, picture-book: roses and all. I had taken to roaming the countryside again and one day, picking flowers, had strayed further than I should. So I found a bus to take me back. The conductor looked at the flowers and said something I did not understand. I wanted to tell him that I was Dutch, but didn't know the right word. Surely it needed a feminine ending? Waiter/waitress? -ess! Eureka. So I proudly told him, "I am very sorry. I don't understand you. I am a dutchess." That stopped the conversation! Back home I told auntie what had happened and asked her what he had said, repeating his words verbatim. She was most amused. The poor man had only said, "Flowers don't like flirts."
Years later, I worked in England as an au-pair, met my later husband and finally came to live in London. When the marriage turned out to be a mild disaster, I went back to Holland, finished my studies and taught for 22 years. And this is how I sojourn here...
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