As you stand there, right on top of the rise, you are sometimes filled with a sudden feeling of freedom, a tingling of happiness and adventure. The sea breeze is clean and bright and everything appears well laid-out and clear-cut: roads, fences and ditches form regular patterns and connections, one leading naturally to the next.

That unforgettable moment when enlightenment seizes you only to vanish again just as inexplicably, the moment for which you search as for a dream that has been swept away ,and yet is still present, locked away deep inside yourself.

It is coming up to the end of September but the weather is still warm and sultry. The walk from Laaxum to the Red Cliff has made us so hot that our faces are damp and sticky. We have been chasing each other along the way, shrieking with laughter, gasping for breath, up dyke, down dyke, and now we are clambering up the path feeling guilty: we are sure to be too late.

Jan is sitting waiting for us at the topmost point of the Cliff, looking unconcerned. I sense the annoyance behind his imperturbable air. ‘I thought you were never going to turn up,’ he says, looking past us over the landscape and yawning. ‘Do you lot still want to do something?’ He says ‘you lot’ but looks straight at me with a mixture of mockery and contempt. ‘I’ve been sitting here for half an hour. There was work I could have been doing in the stables.’

Shamefaced, we say nothing, even Meint keeping his mouth shut.

Jan takes a few steps away from us and looks down the slope. I cringe: now he’s going to go away, a precious afternoon with Jan has been lost. ‘Let’s see if the water’s still nice. First one in,’ he calls out even while he is racing down.

Boisterously we career after him, Pieke sliding on her bottom, shrieking with laughter.

Jan stands waiting for us below. He has kicked off his clogs and now struggles quickly out of his trousers. Jantsje stops in her tracks and turns round to Pieke, who is trailing far behind. Our voices ring out clearly in the warm air. I sit down in the tall grass and look at Jan. He has a yellow spot on his underpants. The sea makes cool, alluring noises along the stones.

An hour later I watch them walking down the sloping path again. Their blonde hair sticks out in spikes and I can clearly see wet patches on their backs and bottoms. Pieke is hobbling wearily between Meint and Jantsje, wailing for the support of an arm no one gives her. In any case, they’re off home and I am finally alone with Jan.

‘Why don’t you all go back,’ I had suggested. ‘Jan wants to talk something over with me. About Amsterdam. We want to go back there one of these days.’ I had made it sound important on purpose, almost whispering the last few words, like a secret message. Then I had raced back down the Cliff, taking reckless giant’s leaps, uncontrolled, half falling over, the grass lashing my knees.

Jan sits motionless on a slab of stone, his face towards the Bea. He swivels a length of rope through the air, but it is as if his arm doesn’t belong to him and is leading a circling life of Its own. For a while we sit silently, side by side, Jan a few paces away from me. I am afraid to interrupt his swivelling game and wait patiently. The sun burns my shoulders and makes me feel drowsy and languid. I listen to the buzzing of insects flying from flower to flower. The water laps idly between the stones.

‘Take off your shirt, it’ll dry more quickly,’ says Jan.

He has put his own in the grass behind him. His bare swivelling arm is thin and wiry. Leaning back he tries to dig up some grass with his toes, then kicks the grass away in a .mall arc. Slowly he stands up and gives me a searching look. ‘Did you see Jantsje in her underwear?’

I pretend not to hear and fiddle with my toenails.

‘When she was wet you could see everything. Or were you too scared to look?’ He walks a bit further off and pees into the sea in a wide arc, legs far apart. ‘Did you see how far I got? That’s muscles, boy.’ He flexes his arm, shows me a small round bump and pinches it with obvious satisfaction.

All five of us had been swimming and Jan and I are now trying to get our soaked things dry before we go back home.

When I had run up the slope with the other three, I had put on my shirt, hoping that my vest would dry underneath all the same. I find it suddenly odd to expose myself half-dressed to his pitiless gaze. A little earlier, when he had been shooting through the water on nimble, supple, frog’s legs, Jan, spluttering and tossing his hair, had made fun of my skinny body. Jantsje and Meint had been splashing about clumsily at the water’s edge and I had stayed close to Pieke, who was clinging tightly to a big rock, letting herself down into the water little by little. She had shrieked each time she touched something unexpectedly with the soles of her feet, and needed our constant attention.

I had looked at Jan’s glistening arms and legs as he came up out of the water and waded dripping wet towards us. Every part of his slender body displayed burgeoning strength, and his bearing was self-assured. With surprise and envy I watched him acting like a much older boy, swaggering about as he demonstrated the backstroke. He waded closer still and blew snot out of a nostril with a practised air. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘spindleshanks.’ He grabbed hold of me and tried to push me under the water, one knee placed firmly on my chest. I had come up half-choking and fled to the shore.

‘See that over there?’ Jan waves his rope in the direction of the sea where two thick round shapes in the distance are sticking above the surface of the water. ‘That’s the wheels of a plane. British. Shot down by the Jerries. The pilots are still inside, I’m not kidding.’

I turn my head away. We’d been swimming in that water only a quarter of an hour ago, and Meint had said, pointing to the two mysterious curves in the water, ‘Who dares swim out to that?’

No one had dared, of course. Not even Jan.

In my imagination I can see the two Englishmen sitting upside down in the water, still wearing their caps and mica goggles. They rock and sway about slackly with the current, like seaweed. One still clings to the joystick, his mouth hanging open while fish swim in and out. Their eyes in their goggles stare at the shore and watch our legs splashing exuberantly through the water…

Jan saunters back and turns his shirt over in the grass. ‘Must get a bit more of a tan.’ He drops down full length, his brown knees sticking out above the tall green grass, his eyes screwed up tight against the sun.

‘Lovely Sunday tomorrow,’ he chants. ‘Lovely day off tomorrow.’ He turns over onto his stomach and stays there, arms and legs stretched out wide. I feel envious; he never seems to think of Amsterdam any more and looks completely at home here. I want to talk to him about our street, about our friends, but I am scared to. He is sure to say something sarcastic and laugh at me.

Once, when I had gone over to Scharl to find out what was wrong with Jan who hadn’t been to school for a whole week, the woman I met in the stables called out, ‘Jan, a visitor for you from Holland!’ Jan had come out dressed in dirty blue overalls and wearing muddy rubber boots. His hands were covered with cuts and scratches and he had a silly little cap on the back of his head that gave him a brash, old-for-his-years air. ‘Hullo. What are you doing here?’ He had given me a slightly incredulous look, as if he thought I was not quite right in the head.

‘Nothing. I was in the neighbourhood. So I thought to myself, why not see where Jan lives?’ I said it apologetically, as if I had done something that wouldn’t quite stand up to examination.

We were standing in the large, sunny farmyard, Jan plucking weeds out from between the stones with quick expertise, as if the yard belonged to him. Suddenly, I felt a townie all over again. What on earth was I doing here, what business did I have to be in this place? Jan had turned into a different person, taciturn and grown-up. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking around the place like a real farmer.

In Laaxum I had kept thinking about Jan, the mysterious, inaccessible Jan, the boy from my street. We would have so much to tell each other when we met, about our parents, the friends from our street, about how rotten it was for us here

‘D’you want to see around the stables?’

We had walked through the big doors and Jan busied himself raking some dry grass together with a pitchfork. Somewhere in a corner there was a goat, pulling impatiently at her rope, bleating like a crying child. Jan had squatted down to feel her udders.

‘Inflamed,’ he said, ‘that kid of hers bites the teat too hard.’

He scratched the animal lovingly between the horns and I felt a stab of jealousy.

For a while I stood there in the middle of the barn, totally redundant, looking on as Jan raked the fork to and fro, clouds of straw flying up in the air. ‘Well, so long then,’ I had said and Jan had raised a hand without looking up. ‘See you.’

‘Traitor,’ I had thought to myself as I walked outside, biting my lip hard. ‘Dirty, filthy traitor.’ I could have cried out with mortification.

Jan had stopped moving. I jump to my feet and race up the slope. The silence gives me a sense of great excitement: this is our afternoon. Jan is asleep and I am keeping watch, guarding him from danger.

At the top of the hill I look down at the sea which is covered with small white waves. Jan’s almost invisible body makes the shape of a cross in the grass. I let out a whoop, a shout like the ones we gave in the street in Amsterdam to call to one another in the evenings when we played cops and robbers or prisoners’ base. I see Jan raising his head.