A young boy stands at the window of a big house overlooking a stretch of the river Rhine as it flows through Holland. The window is in the dining room. The six-year-old Dutch boy's chest only reaches up to the windowsill, but he has a good view of the Rhine floodplain and the green meadows that run down to the water.
The year is 1947. The boy's name is Michiel ter Horst. He is happy to be known to English speakers as Michael. As he tells me the story of that day, nearly eight decades later, his voice cracks. The memories of his family home, he says, "are both happy and sad".
Here's why, in Michael's words:
"I was daydreaming as I looked out of the window. You know, the way you do when you are six. Just taking in the day, taking in the world. I could see a big sky over the Rhine. I was looking in the direction of the old church that stands in a meadow near our house.
"Then it happened. There was a terrible bang, then a huge 'V' shaped plume of smoke and dirt burst into the sky. Just like in the movies.
"I knew in an instant that my older brother, Peik, had been killed. I don't know how I knew. I just did. I collapsed on the floor by the window and cried."
Peik, 13, had stepped on a World War 2 landmine. As the six-year-old Michael instinctively knew, he was instantly killed. Peik was, as usual, playing with his best friend from a neighbouring house, Henk Winterink. Henk died a few hours later.
The house that Michael was looking out from, the ter Horst family home, became famous in the 1970s when its real-life role as a field hospital for British troops was portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster 'A Bridge Too Far'.
It was a star-studded version of the true story of a 1944 British and American offensive that swept through Belgium and Holland against the retreating Nazi army. The Anglo–US plan was to take a series of bridges on the Rhine so the Allies could then advance into the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, and, as in so many military dreams, "end the war by Christmas".
The furthest of the bridges in this campaign, heading towards the Ruhr, was at Arnhem. But because the German army kept a strong presence in this particular area, the Allies failed to hold the bridge in the timeframe they hoped or, indeed, end the war by Christmas. They were forced into a defensive pocket in the Arnhem suburb of Oosterbeek, where young Michael's house, The Old Vicarage, became a field hospital for British military casualties.
Arnhem Bridge was the bridge too far.
The cast of the film, directed by Richard Attenborough, included Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Caine, all playing senior British officers. Lawrence Olivier had the role of the young English doctor, Randall Martin, who worked in the field hospital. Also prominent was the Norwegian actress, Liv Ulmann, who played Michael's real-life Dutch mother, Kate ter Horst.
Michael and his sister Sophie, a few years his senior, who also agreed to speak to me for this article, said Liv Ulmann and Kate ter Horst met many times. The two women understood each other well.
Kate talked to the soldiers and comforted them in her requisitioned and battered house. She also cared for her own children – who spent all of their time during the worst of the fighting sheltering in the cellar with a nanny.
The number of casualties rose quickly. Sophie ter Horst remembers that on the first day they were asked to take in British war-wounded, there were five. Two days later, there were 300.
Despite giving what help she could to the soldiers, Kate felt embarrassed to have earned the title among them as 'The Angel of Arnhem'.
Sophie recalled that her mother didn't like the film 'A Bridge Too Far' at all:
"It was dramatised, and my mother didn't like the way she was portrayed as very special or very brave. Everyone in Oosterbeek was living in their cellars in difficult circumstances. Everyone was suffering from the German snipers and their deadly explosive devices.
"After four years of occupation by the Nazis, any Dutch family would have opened their doors to treat our wounded liberators. We were not special."
Michael recalls some of the meetings Kate ter Horst had with Director Richard Attenborough: "[He] was too much of a British gentleman to understand the Nazis. My mother told him quite frankly: 'You have the German officers in the film talking in a normal, quiet manner. But they never spoke like that – they only knew how to scream at the top of their voices'."
Michael also recalls how Attenborough had suggested to Kate ter Horst that her grandchildren, the offspring of Michael's generation, might participate in the film, playing out the wartime roles of a young Michael, his brother and his two sisters.
"But my mother said no, because it would be too traumatic for her grandchildren to be surrounded by wounded soldiers – even if they were acting. She protected her grandchildren in the same way she had protected her own children during the war and had cared for the wounded British in our house."
The death of Peik ter Horst and his friend Henk Winterink in 1947 opened a new chapter in the story of the ter Horst family. This period brought them together with other landmine victims and, eventually, with the international landmine clearance charity The HALO Trust.
Michael ter Horst says he knows of around a dozen people in and around Oosterbeek, including children, who were killed by landmines in the years immediately after World War 2.
"Most of those victims were young boys. In those days it was mostly the boys who would go off on adventures in the fields and the woods, so they're the ones who would step on hidden landmines."
It's a similar picture these days – but girls are dying too. A large proportion of those killed by landmines today, in countries such as Afghanistan and Syria, are children. They are either attracted by cluster munitions that look like toys they can play with or, because of extreme poverty, they 'harvest' landmines and bombs for their valuable scrap metal.
When Michael and his sisters became adults, the oldest sibling, Wendela, started to encourage the establishment of a Dutch landmine clearance organisation in honour of the memory of Peik. As teenagers, Michael recalls, Wendela and Peik had been inseparable soulmates – she the oldest sibling, he the oldest boy.
Later in life Wendela learnt about the work of HALO, which today has become the largest civilian landmine clearance charity in the world. It is financed largely by governments and institutions but also by generous individuals, some leaving legacies in their wills.
Wendela ter Horst (1933 to 2017) made a series of generous donations to HALO, starting in the 1990s and culminating in a bequest on her death.
These donations totalled over £2m and allowed HALO to survey and clear landmines from several countries across the world.
Wendela's legacy meant the charity was able to help mine victims in the most practical way possible – to help them get on with making a living for their families without the fear of the land beneath their feet blowing up.
Violent deaths – in Holland, Syria, Afghanistan or elsewhere – send trauma through families and down generations. When I spoke to the now 86-year-old Sophie ter Horst, she recalled:
"Peik was killed on 2 November 1947 – All Souls Day. It was during the autumn school holidays. I was staying with a friend in Eindhoven, some two hours journey from Oosterbeek."
Peik's death meant that someone from the family had to leave the house to collect the eight-year-old Sophie and bring her home.
This heavy task – leaving the house while everyone there was in mourning – fell to Peik's sister, his soulmate, Wendela.
"I know Wendela felt very bad about having to go on that errand", Sophie told me, "and when I got older, I understood why.
"Shortly before Wendela died in 2017, on her last visit to Oosterbeek, we talked about that day in 1947. I said I understood why it had been so hard for her to leave Peik, her closest friend, even though he was dead, to pick up her little sister."
Peik and Henk, childhood friends, were buried side by side in a cemetery in Oosterbeek. When Wendela died in 2017 she was cremated. The urn containing her ashes was placed inside Peik's grave.
More than 80 years after the battle of Arnhem that led to a landmine being left in a green Dutch meadow, Sophie still goes to the cemetery regularly to tend the memorials.
Image: Old Church of Oosterbeek (a Battle of Arnhem monument), mirrored in the flooded Rhine River foreland, by Henk Monster. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.
