When I was only 4 years old, my father read from the comic series 'Jommeke'. I believed everything in it. So I escaped from school and ran off to the castle to discover if there were children captured in the cellars. And of course our old neighbour was a witch. The other neighbour was a lady who had lost one finger. I tried everything just to get a glimpse of that hand. Exciting was fun. I ended up inventing my own stories. My sisters thought it strange that especially in our garden grew a candy bush. My brothers followed me when I went hunting down escaped criminals with bow and arrows and catapults in the abandoned railway bed. When my brothers and sisters grew older, the magic disappeared. So I decided to write books.