Where do I start? At the beginning, I hear you say. So what is there to be ashamed of? But — who knows? I was christened Belinde van den Bok. My father Willem was a public notary, a person of some standing. He and my mother Blanche met when she was a secretary in his office.
Although she spoke fluent Dutch, she actually came from just over the French border, in Lille. Throughout his life he seemed to believe that the Flemish were backward peasants, whereas the French-speaking Walloons in the south of Belgium were advanced and sophisticated.
From the moment he married, the idea of being Walloon rather than Flemish seemed to obsess him. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether he married my mother specifically so that he could pursue his francophone ambitions.
So when I was seven, we moved to Tournai in Wallonia, almost within hailing distance in French, naturally of the French border. My father, who had developed a tolerably successful French-language legal practice in his new home town, absolutely forbade the speaking of Flemish at home, even though it was the language I had grown up with.
But I never lost it, and one of the many small delights of knowing my lovely hostesses at the Cabaret chez Robe Jaune has been the opportunity of talking to my dear friend Gerda in Dutch when occasion permits. She had no children and was very fond of me. It was she who introduced me to the city, and it was from her that I gained my visceral love of the place.
