band playing outside the police station on the Leidseplein. Outside Reijnders Henk pointed out ‘several of the younger generation of Dutch artists and poets’. We stayed there until about 3.15, and then walked back to the Haarlemmermeerstraat. ‘Even at that hour there were people selling and eating eel in the street. By the time we got home and made a cup of tea and ate some peanuts it was past four and dawn was breaking.’
I recall us both being tired the next day. And how hot it was when we walked to the Stedelijk Museum to see, in addition to the collection, a fascinating exhibition of Harry van Tussenbroeck's weird and wonderful dolls, later all regrettably destroyed according to his wishes laid down in his Will.
The next morning I caught the Rheingold to Bonn. Henk's aunt had cut sandwiches for me and Henk gave me oranges and sweets and a print of a cat by Theo Kurpershoek that I had admired in his room. We had promised to write to each other. In Bonn I was met again at the station, this time by a young student of dentistry who had contacted my professor of German asking him if he thought it would be a good idea for him to immigrate to Australia. We became good friends although I told him that I was head over heels in love with Henk.
That August Henk and I met again first in Zwolle where with my mother, who had traveled with me to England, and I stayed with his parents for a few days. Later Henk arrived in London where my mother and I were staying with friends. Among my memories of that time are a visit to Battle in Sussex where the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, a boat trip along the Thames to Hampton Court and eating toffee apples together on Westminster Bridge. The two of us also hitchhiked to Bath and Wells, Glastonbury, Minehead and Porlock, though I've very little recollection of it apart from reading Jane Austen on the back of a slow moving lorry and Henk having wakened frightened by a sound which turned out to be a branch scratching on the window pane of the hostel we were staying in.
He then returned to Holland and I to Bonn, after seeing my mother off on a ship back to Melbourne. We spent Christmas together with Henk's parents in Zwolle and we decided that I could just as well continue to work on my M.A. thesis in Holland as in Bonn so after finding a room close to Henk's I moved to Amsterdam two days before the Zeeland disaster of the night of the 31st January/1 February 1953.
It took me nine years to persuade Henk to visit Germany and meet Günther, who never did migrate to Australia, but gradually they became good friends although it took more than forty years before they ever spoke of the war together.
What follows are excerpts from letters to my mother, the first dating from 1st February 1953. Gerben Wynia asked me if I couldn't write something about our early relations with Han and Loesje Voskuil and Gerard and Hanny van het Reve. Henk