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For a while, when I was twenty-one, I was involved in a long distance relationship with a Dutch girl. I had been to Holland a few times in the past, and knew it to be a liberal place, but I had never stayed in a Dutch home until the first time I flew over to spend a week with my girlfriend, Hanna, who was just eighteen and lived with her parents.
Hanna met me at the airport and we took a train to her home, near Rotterdam. Her father met us at the station to drive us a few miles to their house. I was a little alarmed by her father, because he wore shorts that he was clearly unaware were only marginally longer than a pair that might be described as indecent, and his bushy brown moustache and glasses lent him an uncanny similarity to the character Ned Flanders in The Simpsons. He seemed slightly nervous and very straight-laced, but attempted to make conversation with me in the car. He spoke English with a clipped politeness, but his efforts at what passed for interesting questions made me suspect that this might be a very trying week indeed. We passed a man walking his dog and he said, in his strongly enunciated manner, “There is a dog. Are there also many dogs in England?” I told him there were and wondered how best to carry on the conversation. Just as I was debating whether or not to tell him there were cats too, we arrived at the family home and I was spared making that particular decision.
Although not large, the house was big enough to allow Hanna and her two younger brothers their own rooms. There was no spare room, though, and I expected the brothers would be forced to share a room to allow me a bed for the week. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to discover that Hanna’s parents had agreed to her request that I be allowed to sleep in her room. They apparently hadn’t been best pleased about it, but the compromise was that instead of us sharing her single bed, a small camp bed was placed against the other wall. I was quite pleased, because although it was for show purposes only, it made me feel a little less guilty about sleeping with their daughter whilst they were along the hall. We could all play at happy families and pretend that nothing untoward was going on.
On my first morning, I came downstairs with Hanna and we sat down to breakfast with all the family. I accepted Hanna’s mother’s offer to sprinkle little chocolate things called Hagenschlaag on to a rusk-type biscuit just as her father asked if I had slept well.
“I did, thanks,” I said and bit into the surprisingly pleasant breakfast combination. I nearly spat it out again, though, when Hanna’s fifteen-year-old brother asked in a loud and cheerful voice, “Did you have a good sex?”
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