“I was born in the Lange Leidsedwarsstraat in 1934 and I have lived in this neighbourhood my entire life. Everyone around here knows me. When I was a girl I cleaned rooms in the Amstel Hotel and the American Hotel.
At night, groups of drunken boys often stand underneath my window shouting. It doesn’t help when I ask them to leave, they simply shout: ‘go and live somewhere else yourself!’ One time I went outside with my carpet-beater, but my neighbours warned me: don’t do that, they might hit you back. The police gave me a whistle to chase away any noise-makers. But overall, living here is lovely. Something is always going on. The other day some school boys were standing beside my ‘I live here’ poster and I said: ‘won’t you look at that, of all people they paste me to this wall’. We all had a good laugh about that.”
