Letter from Netherlands 1987-1988

My flat on the 14th floor building in Tilburg
 

Whilst my friends in England were all settling down to a happy family life with kids, a mortgage and a car, I have yet to pass my driving test. All that had to wait as I decided to move home again, this time to Netherlands. I could not refuse an offer of an exciting job as an assistant designer in a small town called Tilburg. A job for life I thought but (there is always a big BUT in my life) I only lasted one miserable year.

 

Netherlands is a flat land, easy to ride a bike if I wanted to , the roads are straight, easy to find my way around, the people are beautiful, tall, blonde, friendly and they all speak English, I should have been happy as a lark, but I was not!!

The land was so flat that I found it boring; I kept coming home to the hills of England. The beautiful friendly people of Netherlands are white European race, just like the English but I quickly discovered that they are of a very different temperament; I could not get use their ways!! My first accommodation was a room at my boss’s family home. He was known as Hitler at work and for the few days I stayed at his place I had to have his permission to go out for a simple walk!! My second place of stay was with a lady who spent all her time cleaning her beautiful house and I was not at ease living under her roof either. Finally, I moved into my own flat. As I was over thirty, old enough to have 2 children and a car, I was given a massive big flat for four on the 14^th floor building and a garage on the ground floor. I had very little intension of investing any money on furnishing my flat. People of Tilburg were generous they donated  a table and two chairs, one single bed, a worn out sofa, a small fridge and hot electric plates for cooking. I did very little cooking when I was alone, eating out became an easy option for me and it was also a way of meeting other people of very small town of Tilburg.

I did not want to invest my money in having a telephone in my flat and all my calls to England were from public phone outside my building. There I was rattling alone in my flat, my friends at work kept telling me to buy a parrot for a company but I found listening to BBC radio 4, kept me away from jumping from 14^th floor window!! Every morning I walked on a narrow small tow path by a canal leading to my work place but my friends at work kept telling me to get a bike, as most had three. I had very little confidence in riding a bike amongst hundreds of bikers who were also going to work on the same tow path as mine; one big problem they saw which I failed (until I got hit) was in fact, in the dark winter days it was difficult for the bikers to see me. Even though one of my friends gave me a bike, I continued to walk, avoiding bikers at all cost.

 My school days German lessons helped me to start speaking and writing Dutch but all my friends, including my Dutch tutor wanted to improve their English and they spent very little time speaking Dutch to me to improve my Dutch. Things got worse for me when I met them socially outside working hours, they would all talk to each other, ignoring me completely, as far as I was concerned it all sounded ‘Double Dutch' to me !! (I got to know where the saying ‘Double Dutch’ originated from). One of my friends pointed out that the whole world would have been speaking Dutch if only the Dutch people had kept their valuable discoveries to themselves the mighty North America and Australia. 

 

 

During my time in Netherlands I spent all my weekends away from my flat, either I came home to England or I travelled around Netherlands to places like Utrecht, Eindhoven, Nijmegen, Apeldoorn, Rotterdam etc…… When visiting England I would hop on to a train from Tilburg which brought me to the port of Vlissingen in time to board the night boat, sleeping all the way to my home. The people of Netherlands, including my boss saw Amsterdam as a foreign city but when my family and friends came to visit me the first port of call was always the great city. The canals, the art and culture, the red light district, the cafes were all exciting and different from the rest of Netherlands. At times with friends I crossed borders to Belgium to Breda for lunch or to Germany travelling as far as to see the Berlin wall and to Austria to the city of Vienna to eat the Viennese’s pastries and see the rest.

 It was so easy to cross borders whilst I was living in Netherlands that I decided to spend two months travelling across Europe down to Crete before returning home to my beloved England in September 1988.