At a very young age, after learning to write at primary school, I found it fascinating to put words in the right order and turn them into a sentence. In the family I grew up in, there was always something I couldn't quite put into words, so I would write it on the tear-off calendar hanging in the smallest room in the house. That wasn't always appreciated. Nor were the words I chose to put into my sentences. A lot of what I wrote back then ended up being torn to pieces. I can still remember one of them: Love is blind, which is why I wear glasses. And that was mostly because... well, you can fill in the blanks.
 
At primary school, every week we could choose an activity. Clay modelling, crochet, weaving or drama. I always chose drama. There I could be someone else and channel my creativity into acting.
We were often asked to write an essay to see whether we'd learnt anything from our Dutch lessons. That's when I would let my imagination run free. One of my essays, for instance, was about visiting Frisia in Harlingen at the weekend. Because every child in Harlingen knew that at weekends you could go there and fish rejected marshmallows out of the skips. I wrote an entire essay about it: how to get there, what you had to do and what might happen if the police turned up. My teacher wasn't impressed with the content. I had used the word then so many times that, according to him, Then would have been a better title than Free Marshmallows.
In my final year at primary school, I wrote a play for drama which we performed in class at Christmas.
 
At secondary school, I wrote the poems to go with the Sinterklaas presents we made with the whole family for 5 December. The first line was always the hardest, but once it was down on paper, the words came faster than I could write them. Around that time I also wrote song lyrics, which we sang ourselves and recorded on cassette tape. Without really noticing it, writing just kept finding its way back into my life.
 
My ambition was to become a helicopter pilot. Unfortunately, my eyesight got worse. The school I attended was an old monastery, with high walls around the courtyard topped with barbed wire and shards of glass. Once, I wrote on a board that they'd put all that there because they were afraid the pupils might try to escape.
 
That wasn't particularly appreciated either. After three years of muddling along — I spent more time playing pranks than paying attention in class — I left and went to another school.
 
Right, so then you get a job, meet a woman, get married, have children, and during that period I also had a clubhouse behind our house. We called it the Animal House. All sorts of characters would drop by and tell their tall tales in the Animal House, and I started writing them down.
Until suddenly there was an entire book full of those stories, and a good friend casually said to me, “That story about the barge — keep going.”
 
No, I never actually intended to become a writer…