Our family originated before the last war from the Dutch-German border area where the dialect Low Dietsch is spoken. My parents used it in the home and so I grew up bilingual in English and Low Dietsch. It was 1960 and I left High School at age sixteen, a young man who had done well at sport but little else. The best opportunity open to me in the City was as a filing clerk at a small Dutch bank located in the financial district of London, a stone's throw from the Bank of England.

The bank was sandwiched between a large financial institution on one side and a post office on the other. It had four floors and no lift. The Labour Exchange arranged the interview as a filing clerk for my knowledge of Dutch. It was held in the filing room in the basement, deep in the bowels of the bank and so close to the London Underground system that trains could be heard passing through the adjacent tube tunnels every three minutes.

The interviewer was a lady of Dutch descent. I waited an hour seated in my future bunker before she put in an appearance. We shook hands and then she addressed a few pleasantries to me in Dutch to which I replied in kind to prove that I could speak it as well as I claimed. Mevrouw Rosamund looked less than her fifty-six years and I had the impression of nobility in her upbringing, but of course I did not like to ask.

Five feet six inches in height, she was a slim woman of regal posture and well-cut features. She always wore her honey-gold hair piled up in permanent waves, the style being reminiscent of the inter-war period. Her eyes were pale blue, puckered at the corners by crows' feet and wrinkles from so much smiling. Her lips formed a delicate line which always seemed ready to break into a smile. She liked colourful silky dresses with the hem just below the knee and sandals with wedges. Her adornments consisted of a a necklace, long dangly earrings, a small gold watch.

She sat facing me at the filing table, looked keenly at my face and surprised me by opening with. "Well, you're a nice looking boy, tell me all about yourself." I found it easy to converse with her and without inhibition. She listened with bright, interested eyes and even asked if I were courting.

The job was mine.

The salary was a pittance which obliged me to continue living at home, a pauper dependent on the goodwill of Mum and Dad. So the months passed. Vrouw Rosamund came down once each day with the filing and to enquire on how I was getting on. After four months I was promted to senior filing clerk, the same job but double the pittance.

The day of the bank's Christmas party came. Vrouw Rosamund wandered downstairs that afternoon to tell me that I had been barred from attending the party because nobody under the age of eighteen was allowed to drink alcohol on the bank's premises. She offered me a Christmas kiss as a consolation. When I agreed she produced a sprig of mistletoe. I thought this was just going to be the kind of token kiss I got from my Mum at Christmas, but instead it changed the course of my life.

Rosamund pulled me into her with her hands behind the small of my back. I felt her warm breath on my face as she smiled her pleasure. Next she offered me her mouth. The softness of her lips, the trace of her saliva, the passion she put into it and her scent all sharpened my senses.

I was not used to being so close to a woman in this way and a huge erection embarrassed me. Rosamund had me locked against her and could not possibly have been ignorant of it. At least a minute passed before our mouths parted.

"Wow, you certainly know how to kiss a fifty-six year old woman, don't you, naughty boy?" she said. "You've gone right to the top of my Must Have list. Tell you what, if you like I'll skip the Christmas party and we can go to my place to relax."

Bearing in mind that she was my supervisor and a director at the bank, and that refusal might harm the prospects of my future at the bank, and in any case I did not want to refuse, I agreed. At age sixteen I understood nothing of the wiles of women, particularly not the wiles of a a well-bred and intelligent woman forty years my senior, and I suspected that I was about to be seduced into the first sexual experience of my life. I decided to lie back, think of Holland, and accept it.