If you have been the sinking pupil of the class for two years you may at least have learned to swim. And exactly that was my puberty’s investment. In summertime in the swimming pool of Delfzijl, top North in the Netherlands, first one in at seven in the morning and at least two daily kilometres. When this closed for the winter I would hitchhike on Saturday afternoons from Appingedam to Groningen where I ransacked the bookstores for the latest titles, which I devoured standing and in weekly instalments. The second part of the afternoon I spent in my winter paradise, the indoor swimming pool in Helpman, where I felt my water craving observed by an ever-present, exquisitely proportioned pool nymph by the name of Els. With the Beatles between my ears I saw four tall blokes with rabbit tails dangling from their swimming trunks leave the high diving tower in a steadily expanding repertoire of ‘death crashes’. The pool itself had been designed in yellow-brown hues, articulated in black. On the first floor was a rectangular gallery that went around the pool and making it rather higher than it was deep. I was mesmerized by the restless contortions of tile patterns on the bottom and I received sound-around-echo by the exhilarating reverberations of water pleasures.
In suit I made my way in a chlorious cloud, not seldom creaking on frozen snow, to Adje’s coffee shop on the filled-in ‘Boterdiep’. This was the Artistics’ hide-out, from school kids with lunch boxes and opulently decorated diaries to drop-outs, who in twilight thought attempted to excavate Truth from Life. What everyone sought was the luxury of absence of rules & regulations, an imaginary authority vacuum, a mound with a sub-social allure.
In this ambience and inspired by the ingrained charisma of Adje himself specialists prospered. One was mellow, savvied music, furtively grew ‘weed’, or was into all-day chess-games.

Thus Gerard touched foot on an irregular basis, dropping by from far and alien travel. He magicianed the Autostrada on my retina, where a thumb sufficed for hundreds of miles in a red Porsche with a succulent blond behind the wheel. He also visited the Swedish town of Børås, where the intensive textile industry had shifted the male-female ratio to 1:10. And I sensed the appeal.
So, when I doubly repeated class in the fourth form of high school my father considered me to be a total loss, who merely deserved to be a lifer, orbiting in chains around a desk to contemplate his misery. Hemmed in by the walls of Holy Duty I saw only one escape: the highroad that ran behind our house. But since you can hitchhike penniless for hundreds of miles, but hardly walk around the block I needed a job, which I found with a cleaning company, where I was to scrape pressure sewerage tubes that had been sprayed with a bad coating. A few hundred of these had been deposited in a meadow near Groningen and the labour force counted about twenty, mainly students. Within the pipes one could nearly stand upright and the acoustics for a simple song were overwhelming. Sometimes we sang in harmony and were heard near and far as heavenly choirs.

To be continued: 'On the road'.