Going Dutch

by Rick Johansen

We’re going to the Netherlands soon, the land of my mother. Me, my partner and my two sons are headed off to the land of Kaas, Dropjes and Madurodam.

As a child, I went to Rotterdam every single year, for the entire school holidays. We took the train to London Paddington, the taxi from London Paddington to Liverpool St and the train to Harwich/Parkestone Quay. Finally, we took the boat train, the overnight connection, to the Netherlands.

Close my eyes and I am boarding that old ship and heading to our cabin. Hours of gentle, swaying sleep and soon it’s light again. Peering through the porthole, there’s the Hoek van Holland, a thick drizzle, I remember, various men stood around by vast cranes and chains. The early morning light, nearer and nearer to the shoreline, and then clunk, we’ve docked.

The electric train waiting for us was silent, unlike the grunting growling diesels of England. Lugging the cases on board, we were soon swishing and powering, clickety-click, through the flatlands. And then Centraal Station, Rotterdam. My grandmother couldn’t drive so it was the tram for us. Then we arrived in Leopoldstraat, three storey apartments on one side, higher on the other. At the back, a green area where the boys played football. I was the overseas player.

There were plants in every apartment, incredibly strong smelling plants, almost overwhelming. A salad would be waiting, formed of lettuce, sliced boiled egg and vinegar.

For six weeks, I was within the four walls every evening. During the day, I would explore the Goudesingel and Coolsingel. Mostly, I would sit by the tram tracks and watch the trams pass by for hours on end. I loved the very old trams.

Tuesdays and Saturdays, I would go the enormous market beneath the railway line, hundreds of stalls with everything you could imagine, all fresh and clean. And from time to time, a train would thunder by and I’d gaze up to catch the sparking pantographs on the overhead wires, through Station Blaak and over the river. Now, the railway line is in a tunnel under the River Maas, much less fun.

This year, we will explore the memories of my past and my sons, now grown up, will be able to see where half of their family came from, where their father spent many months of his life. Once, when I was very young, I returned to England unable to speak English so caught up was I with the Netherlands, yet never could I write in Dutch. I was, am, Dutch illiterate, but I could speak fluent Dutch.

I am proud of my heritage. I know this will not play with those who wish to detach ourselves from Europe in next week’s referendum, but I am only 25% English in terms of bloodline. I am, of course, a proud English patriot, a progressive patriot, as Billy Bragg once described it, but I cannot, will not, forget where I came from.

I know I will feel the emotion too. The people of Rotterdam loved Britain and all it stood for. They were friends, partner and allies in the Second World War and they have never forgotten those ties, as we seem to be doing. My grandfather, who died before I was born, lost everything three times in the war, ending up with no ‘hard’ memories – photographs and everything else were lost in the first German bombing attacks on the family flat – but a head full of gratitude and comradeship.

All this is probably an important reason I feel so passionately about remaining in the EU. I feel Dutch, I feel mainly English but I feel European too. My older family loathed the Germans, loved the British, even though the war was 25 years ended, yet they formed part of an economic union with them. In the back of my mind lies the fear of rejection by the country of my birth to my heritage.

We will visit the Madurodam Holland in miniature, the beach at Scheveningen, the…ahem…bars of Amsterdam and the best Indonesian restaurant in Rotterdam. We will go to the zoo at Blijdorp, we will walk to Leopoldstraat. One day, I shall sit quietly and watch the trams rumble by at the end of the Lijnbaan.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Soon, I have an extended date with yesterday, a wander alongside the ghosts of my past, seeing once again what was and what could have been. What could easily have been, when I was too young to know, was resettlement in Rotterdam. How different life could have turned out. I could say that it wasn’t meant to be, but nothing was meant to be. It is utter nonsense to say things happen for a reason, except when you have created that reason.

“This could be the last time”, sang Mick Jagger, adding “I don’t know”. I think this could be my final trip to the Netherlands because already I have a trunk of old memories and I really need some new ones.

Every single one of my Dutch family is dead now, apart maybe from cousins I don’t know and will never know. My roots are there, though, buried at the back of Leopoldstraat, just up from the cattle market – that’s now a housing estate – and by the ice cream shop which no longer exists.

Are these people, who look just like me, really the unwanted foreigners Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage proclaim us to be? It is truly scary that if my mother was to try come here in this era, following Brexit, she would be refused entry? That she always worked and never once claimed benefits wouldn’t matter. She was foreign, fuck off back to your own country, this is England.

This boy is coming home, just for a short while. I’m English in every way, except by bloodline and by name and by heritage. That’s a combination I like, by the way. I don’t know why people would want to change that.

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