By Pieter Thomassen

From the leatherette back seat in Roy Heijnens’s, the red-headed owner of driving school ROY, dual control Daffodil, Axel watches fearful sweat drops trickle down his mother’s neck.
      ‘Keep latched onto his tail!’ Roy bellows on their way to the A76. ‘And keep looking into the mirrors!’ after his pupil manages to entangle her coloured beads with the gearstick while driving in the bus lane. When Roy, to encourage her, pushes a cold coca cola tin into her neck, it makes even her son shiver.
      After 213 lessons and from the jaws of hell, she can finally tuck her driver’s license behind a picture of Axel in her purse.
      Reverend Uncle Peer’s face turns purple after she parks his beige motorcar, the one he lend her on the spur of a jovial mood, against the block of flats and reverses it without the front bumper. The next spring, still getting used to her enormous bifocals, she crashes into two parked cars, only to, on the longest day of the year, Axel’s birthday, completely wreck her canary yellow DAF 44 by crashing into Tjeu Rompen’s motorbike opposite the Co-op supermarket. He, mercifully, only suffers from a broken shinbone.
      Following this, there remains just one means of transport: a Fongers bicycle with a tartan ladies’ saddle, meticulously maintained by her husband. When she has a puncture at full speed on the ramp towards the square in front of their flat, Axel in the back seat – his legs spread wide and hanging on tightly to the saddle springs – it takes only a few seconds for curious people to appear on several balconies, eager to view the cause of the deafening sound of metal scraping on stone.

Axel 26 – Axel 25 – Axel 24 – Axel 23 – Axel 22 – Axel 21 – Axel 20 – Axel 19 – Axel 18 – Axel 17 – Axel 16 – Axel 15 – Axel 14 – Axel 13 – Axel 12 – Axel 11 – Axel 10 – Axel 9 – Axel 8 – Axel 7 – Axel 6 – Axel 5 – Axel 4 – Axel 3 – Axel 2 – Axel 1