I was still quite shy of four when my Father’s job took us from Colombia to Holland in the spring of 1976. Up to then I’d been a child of the tropics and perhaps my earliest memory of the Netherlands is one of walking the streets of Rotterdam with my Mother and Father, feeling the bite of the bitter, cold wind through my little brown and beige anorak. We were then still a family of three; my Mother being pregnant with Sacha, who would arrive in our lives about six months later. I’m told we spent a couple of weeks in a hotel, whilst my parents looked for a house to rent, although my memories of the place are sketchy. I do remember having charmed the cleaning ladies, who I have long since learned were Indonesian, and who would take me for rides the full length of the landing on the back of their “fuck-ume cleaner” as they went about their work. I must have been shocked by what I thought I’d understood as my Mother, no natural born linguist (bless Her!), as lost as I was with the language, took pains to explain to me that they weren’t trying to be rude about my ride.

My parents found a house for us in Delft, overlooking a canal, on Hertog Govertkade, occupying the first and second floor of a house in a duplex configuration. If you knocked on our front door, with the canal to your back, and went in you would have to climb a steep set of stairs strait ahead of you that would veer left about three quarters of the way up leading up to a landing that was level with the main floor of the house. I’ll take you in there later. By way of an anecdote; Dutch stairs are well known for how steep they are and my Mother once took a tumble down those very stairs, smacking her face on some sharp edge and giving herself a shiner. My grandparents arrived the next day – en route to some destination in Latin America, no doubt, having chosen to fly KLM via Schiphol to enjoy a brief lay-over with us I assume – and I believe my Grandfather might have taken my Father aside at some point to ask him if – not so tongue in cheek – everything was ok between he and my Mother. This episode must have happened later than these initial months in Delft that I want to refer to as, her being pregnant at the time, my Mother tumbling down steep stairs might have had much graver consequences than a black eye. And that I know I would have remembered.

Our street was a warm, quiet neighborhood of a place. I remember we knew – to a greater or lesser degree of intimacy – many of the families who lived there. Most of us kids were friends and used to play together. Finding ourselves in this placid, benign, Dutch environment it must have taken my parents a while to unwind from the tension and paranoia of living in Colombia in the mid-seventies where violence, robbery and child abduction were a constant concern. In fact standard practice during daylight hours on my street was for a string to be attached from the inner front-door latch that in turn was poked out through the slot of the letter-box allowing kids and adults access to their houses without need of a key. It took months for my Mother to understand that this was actually ok in this present environment and not an open invitation to assault. She was fine with my going out to play in the street but I must have had to ring the bell, to get back in, for a good many months before she consented to my having my piece of string like the rest of my friends.

Below our flat, with their front door at ground level, lived Jos and Loes; young students, in comparison to my parents who were only slightly older in their late twenties, and perhaps the closest to us of all our neighbours in every sense of the term. A lovely couple – whom my parents lost touch with for a couple of decades but who we are now back in touch with – with no kids of their own at that time. I seem to remember that Jos was a student at the Delft University of Technology which was just down the road from us and that they might have done a bit of babysitting for my parents every now and then but in essence they were friends and the closest thing Sacha and I grew to have as family on that street. Loes is a gifted photographer and my parents still have a few albums of beautiful photos of us four (Emma would not appear in our lives until six years later) taken by her over the two and a half years we lived in Holland. It must have been sometime over the winter of 1977/1978 that it snowed and there is a whole series of endearing photos of Sacha, not much over two years old, wearing a little Peruvian poncho that my Grandmother had brought for her, her hair and face speckled with little snowflakes.

Immediately to the right of our front door lived my friend Meita and her Marxist Hippy parents. Meita was the slightest of little girls with a short blond bob, little Lennon glasses and her mother always had her dressed like Raggedy Anne in delicate, floral dresses – always slightly grubby – with semi-sandals on her feet. The mother was always decked out in faded black and purple skirts and blouses; Stevie Nicks style. I seem to remember the father looking crumpled and brown; a bit like a tramp. Their house was a pretty bohemian affair if I recall. However her mother taught me a thing or two about personal hygiene which I have no need to go into here; suffice to say I still follow her advice today. My parents asked them over for drinks one night and they both got very drunk. The evening had started off awkwardly but as more wine was consumed the conversation started to flow a bit. As the evening progressed, his militant Marxism started to overflow and dominate the conversation. I’m told he crowned the evening – very drunk – by telling my parents how confused this evening had made him feel; he had after all very much taken to my parents but when “the revolution” finally came they – his hosts and their kind – would unfortunately have to be shot! My Father’s thoughts; “yet here you are, quite happy to get rat-arsed on my bourgeois wine!”

To the left of Jos and Loes lived Dr Voss and his family, on the floors above his practice. A serious man with a serious family I recall; they skied in the Swiss Alps every winter which seemed to me like taking a trip to the Moon. Left of them lived my close friend Miriam and her family in a large cluttered house full of what seemed to me like bits of broken record players and disassembled speakers. I remember they used the fireplace to burn refuse. Miriam’s mother was a tall, stern yet kind woman with a shock of shortish graying hair and whose glasses reinforced the respect she imposed. She wore clogs in winter and sandals in summer which revealed her battered toe nails. I remember her telling me off one day for urinating against the wall of their house. By that stage I spoke Dutch and I was old enough to know better; with feelings of shame and gazing at the paving stones with my face screwed up in penitence I had to hear her guttural rants whilst she splashed the wall with hot water from her steaming kettle. Miriam was one of my two close friends on the street; the other being Patrick who lived at the end, just short of the tobacconist’s, but who moved to Zeeland after about a year. If Miriam’s mother was stern and imposed respect, her father was warm and invited all kinds of interaction from us munchkins. Tall, lean, disheveled and balding from the front of his head towards the dome, he was the mad scientist incarnate. He worked for Phillips and he told my parents at the time that he was leading a team that was designing a format that would in time replace vinyl and magnetic tapes. As it happens, it turns out he was referring to compact discs! Miriam had an older sister by about 4 years who I had a tremendous crush on and who’s name I cannot recall. In my eyes she was this long, tall, blond beauty with blue eyes. I remember that at some point at school they started her on English and that she had learnt to speak it pretty well within about a year. A few years later, when we had left Holland and had been living in Paris for about a year we went back to visit my aunt – my Mother’s sister – now married to a Dutchman and living in Holland. We went back to our street and of course I knocked on Miriam’s door. In my time away my Dutch had been eroded progressively as I learnt French. I found myself unable to string an intelligible sentence together and neither could I really understand her when she spoke to me. Miriam’s sister happened to be there and she ended up having to interpret for us through her excellent English. I don’t think I remembered just then how besotted I’d once been with tall, blond, big sis. I just remember these groping gazes between Miriam and I; all those things we wanted to tell each other in Dutch but no longer could.

Soon after arriving in Delft my parents enrolled me in the local kindergarten which was five minutes’ walk from our house. Speaking nothing but Spanish and English, I was thrown in at the deep end both linguistically as well as culturally. For months I was mute, resorting to pointing and the odd scuffle to make myself understood. I was a little, dark, quiet mushroom surrounded by tall chattering pale asparaguses’. I’ve long since forgotten her name – I so wish I hadn’t – but our teacher took a shine to me and went out of her way in her attempts to get me integrated with the rest of the class. Our days were taken up with constructive play and imaginative games of one sort or another. One occasion stands out in my memory; I cannot have been there long – perhaps not longer than a few weeks – as I remember it was still cold and my Mother had sent me to school with warm underclothes. At some point we were told to put our games away, were walked down the hall to a large room for some PE and told to strip down to our underwear in preparation for all the running and jumping around we would be doing. We all did as we were told; the local kids stripped down to their skivvies and vests and there I stood in a long-sleeved thermal vest and brown woolen tights which must have come from the girls department at C&A. The whole room erupted; all giggles and sniggers and pointing fingers. Our teacher silenced the room with a sweeping gesture, had everyone sit down and went on to explain to the class how far away I had come from, how different the climate was over there and how it would take me some time to adjust to the cold, the wind and the rain that they had always known. Bless her! I spoke little in class for the next few months but the linguistic transition happened quite suddenly: I’m told that one day I came home from school nattering away quite happily in Dutch to my class-mates.

By September 1976 my Mother’s pregnancy was coming to term and my Grandmother flew over from the UK to help out with running the house, getting me to school and such. I remember that summer as having been incredibly hot; so much so that many local kids had taken to swimming in the murky waters of the canal in front of our street. My Mother had had her pregnancy monitored by a local obstetrician since our arrival in April and had obviously presented him with her clinical history. I had been born by caesarian section four and something years earlier and all indications were that Sacha would have to greet the world in the same fashion. I’m told that the obstetrician wasn’t having any of that; women in Holland have natural births and so would my Mother. “This wasn’t America”, the arrogant prick told my parents. Woman in Holland also average over a meter eighty in height with hips to match and there was my Mother, with certain pertinent clinical issues, who stood a mere meter fifty-five. What followed almost killed my Mother and my sister; a pregnancy taken to ten months out of sheer bloody mindedness on the part of the doctor, with my Mother being rushed off to A&E at the last possible moment for fear that she might die. When she was wheeled into theatre she remembers the operating table surrounded by countless masked faces; the procedure was so comparatively rare in Holland that medical students and other members of staff had been summoned to witness the operation. My Mother and her child were saved, thank God, and Sacha came into our lives; very long and very hairy.

Once you walked up the steep stairs to our house you found yourself on a landing. To your left were two doors, separated by a couple of meters of wall, both of which led into the living-dining room. Walking through any one of these you would be faced with four large windows which overlooked our street and the canal beyond. To the right was the open-plan kitchen tucked snuggly behind a brunch bar. Back on the landing, if you had just come up the stairs from the front door, you were faced with the door to the bathroom and immediately in front of it a spiral stairway which led up to the bedrooms on the second floor, with their angled ceilings, and access to the roof terrace. Walking up those stairs you would find yourself on a landing, facing the direction of the canal. To your left was the guest room, which in almost all my parent’s homes for years was known as the Music Room as this was where the Hi Fi lived. In front of you the door to the room Sacha and I shared. To your right; the door into my parent’s room. It was, all in all, a lovely, cozy and well lit flat.

Sacha cannot have been more than a few months old when this occurred. I recall it was late at night and we were all settling down, getting ready to go to bed. Sacha was asleep in her cot in our bedroom. I was lying with my Mother on my parent’s bed; I had probably been whining about not wanting to sleep in my bed. Their bed faced the door that led onto the landing and to the left of it was a hand basin, I think, and I recall seeing my Father from behind – quite naked – brushing his teeth although I’m not certain about this. But I am certain that he was there, in that part of the room and facing away from us; I can still picture his skinny behind. I am also certain of what I saw next. I was looking towards the darkened landing through the door when the figure of a grown man stepped out from my bedroom and onto the landing. He stopped in front of the door and turned towards me. He was about as tall as my Father, his form was well defined but lacked apparent mass and depth, the whole being comprised of something resembling the static we used to see on old TV sets except in neon tones of blue and red. The features of his face were undefined but I felt him look at me. He then raised his right arm in an open-handed gesture, turned and disappeared towards what would have been the stairs. “Of course there is no-one there”, I was assured when I asked my parents who that man was. “Come on Oli, it’s time for bed”.