Dutch war hero rescued by ‘remarkable’ Wiltshire locals
A DUTCH author and veteran of the Bosnian war has been saved from homelessness by the kindness of the residents of his Wiltshire market town.
Arnold Jansen op de Haar, 59 and his sister Bernadette, 63, ran into trouble when their publishing house, Holland Park Press, began to struggle during the pandemic.
The Dutch-born pair had moved to the UK years earlier to live out their dream of selling and writing books, settling into British life in Malmesbury in Wiltshire.
They were renting a small cottage when the pandemic began.
When their landlord informed them he was selling up, they realised they would have to find somewhere substantially cheaper to live as almost all their income had disappeared.
They reached out to the local community on social media and were “overwhelmed” with the response.
Mr op de Haar said: “We feared we might end up out on the street. We [published] my new novel, Schurft, in Dutch in the Netherlands, but it didn’t resolve the precarious financial position of our publishing house.”
The pair had thousands of books they needed to store but they had no money with which to do so.
Help came in the form of an unlikely cast of characters the couple had never met before – Tilly, a 15-year-old rugby player, an 81-year-old grandmother named Catherine, who mobilised her sons and grandsons to help, and Andy, a Channel swimmer in his 50s, who offered to help move and store the pair’s books and furniture.
One woman, Lisa, offered them two rooms in her family home and only asked that they help share the bills.
Now, Mr op de Haar and his sister, who are still living with their new host, are looking for somewhere more permanent as they rebuild their lives.
‘I sometimes detect an antibritish sentiment in the Netherlands. I’ve yet to see an anti-european attitude here’
“We came so close to being homeless, but we have been rescued by a remarkable community,” Mr op de Haar said.
“I sometimes detect an anti-british sentiment in the Netherlands.
“I’ve yet to experience an anti-european attitude here. Here, they all just want to get on with it.”
Mr op de Haar served in the Dutch army and was the commanding officer of the 200-strong unit that helped secure Tuzla air base for incoming UN aid in 1994.