Muisjes (Little Mice) 2

My mother and I take a trip to Holland to stay with my grandparents.

My Oma grew up in Lowestoft on the bracing, salt-stung east coast of England. She was born in 1891. When she was a young lady, seeking adventure and a position as a governess to one of the titled families in Holland, she packed her bags and left those familiar shores alongside her friend Gwen, stepping boldly into a brand-new life. Leaving behind her twelve brothers and sisters and her parents must have taken an immense amount of courage, but she faced it all with the stubborn tenacity of youth.

Before long, she met my Opa, who was then the local butcher’s boy delivering meat to the grand estate. He later took over his own father’s fish-smoking business and turned it into a roaring success. Oma and Opa married in Holland and settled down to raise four children, my mother and her three brothers. Foreigners weren’t always warmly embraced in those days, and truth be told, Oma never quite mastered proper Dutch. She spoke a charming sort of "pigeon Dutch," butchering the grammar delightfully, but she always made herself understood just fine.

Their very first home was at the lower end of the High Street in Noordwijk, before they finally moved to the grander house when my mother was about ten years old.

The Crossing
When I was little, travelling to Holland with my mother was an annual pilgrimage. My father accompanied us and stayed for a two-week holiday, but then he returned to work in England and mother and I stayed on with my grandparents until the end of the school holidays.

The journey was always exciting. We took a train from London down to Parkstone Quay in Harwich, where an army of porters awaited us. For a small fee, these men would scoop up our heavy leather suitcases and march them straight through customs. They wore wonderful, distinctive porters’ uniforms with peaked caps pushed casually back on their sweating brows as they hauled our luggage from the platform to the ship's side.

Usually, there were three regular vessels on the route: two Dutch boats, the Koningin Beatrix and the Koningin Juliana, and an English one called The Duke of York. Those were the days when boats looked like proper ships, complete with towering funnels that let out mournful toots capable of frightening me half to death. You could walk a complete circle around the deck, tracing the perimeter right back to where you started. At the very stern, I loved leaning against the cold metal railing, staring down at the churning white foam spinning in the wake like the giant kitchen food mixers we have today.

If we could afford first-class tickets, which wasn’t very often, we got to eat in a proper restaurant, and if fortune smiled upon us, our cabin was high enough to feature a round porthole through which we could watch the dark sea rush past. I didn’t like being put in the lower cabins; they were suffocatingly small and the relentless, throbbing roar of the engines vibrated right through my bones. I used to feel a terrible, tight panic in my chest, though at the time, I didn't yet know the word claustrophobic.

Everything inside those cabins was brilliantly engineered to save space, from the bunk beds stacked tightly like shelves to the fold-down washbasins. I always climbed into my bunk with a thrill of anticipation, but the moment the ship unhitched from the dock it began to roll, and the engines started their heavy throb, I invariably wished I was anywhere else on earth. We almost always took the midnight boat from Parkstone Quay, arriving in the crisp dawn at Hoek Van Holland around six o'clock.

On one particularly cursed journey, a vicious storm hit the North Sea. Both Mother and I fell violently ill, the only time I can ever remember being seasick, and it was as thoroughly miserable as everyone warns you it is. Mother always insisted that the best cure for queasiness was dragging yourself up onto the windy deck. Standing at the rail, letting your knees go loose and swaying up and down with the wild rhythm of the waves while the freezing salt spray hit your face, was wonderfully, bracingly exhilarating.

That night I was wearing a pretty little knitted sweater embroidered with pastel flowers, and during a particularly violent heave, I ruined it entirely. Even after Mother scrubbed it down in the tiny cabin sink, the sour smell lingered like a ghost. For as long as that cardigan fit me, looking at it brought back the phantom taste of sea salt and misery, and I cheered the day it was finally thrown into the dustbin. Mother got sick too, though she managed to reach the basin and save her clothes with admirable, grown-up precision.

The Tram to Noordwijk
Once we finally docked at Hoek Van Holland, cleared customs, and boarded the connecting train to Leiden, the real magic began. From Leiden, the final leg of the journey to Noordwijk was a bouncy, half-hour tram ride that rattled straight through the heart of the Dutch bulb-growing countryside.

To my eleven-year-old eyes, it was an absolute storybook world. I pressed my face against the glass, admiring the classic Dutch windmills, the network of sleepy canals, and the plump black-and-white cows that I secretly assumed were all named Hendrika. The tram itself felt wonderfully strange, rattling along at a terrifyingly fast speed. The other passengers were always immaculately dressed; the ladies wore stunning hats weighed down with feathers or dramatic brims, while the gentlemen sported smart waistcoats with heavy gold watch chains draped across their fronts.

During one particular ride, I sat opposite a tall, swarthy man whose stare lingered on my mother just a fraction of a second too long for comfort.

Did he know her? I wondered, narrowing my eyes. He couldn't, could he? Perhaps from times gone by?

I pretended to look back out the window at the passing fields, but I could track his profile clearly in the glass reflection. When he realized I was watching him, he leaned forward and whispered something low to my mother. She flushed instantly, pressing her back hard against the plush upholstery as if she could physically sink away from him. It was the very same man who later materialized on the beach, tracking us down at our sand-hole while we ate our treacle cookies.
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