I boarded the ferry at Harwich around midnight and the rest of the night the ferryboat rocked and rolled across the black North Sea towards Holland. I shared a tiny cabin with three other girls, with a curtain around the bunk beds for privacy and the loo was somewhere far away along the gangway. I don’t think I slept a wink all night or went for a pee!
The ferryboat arrived in Hoek van Holland at 6 o’clock on a dark, freezing cold Christmas Eve morning in 1968.
The boat train left Hoek van Holland station at around 7:30 and as the strange Dutch train wormed it’s way across the flat black landscape towards Amsterdam, it looked just like toy town outside to me, with twinkling lights in the little towns, orderly rows of dolls houses, toy barges on the silver canals that criss-crossed the wintry fields and hey!...look!! … A WINDMILL!!
The boat train arrived in Amsterdam at around 9 o’clock - I wonder if I wore a watch then and had remembered to put it forward an hour? – and I stepped out onto the bustling platform at Amsterdam Central Station for the very first time… I was eighteen years old.
In 1972 ben ik komen wonen in Nederland…. maar dat is een ander verhaal.