Unemployment in the early 1980s was high, especially among young people. I had asked my mother, ‘What is the point of studying for unemployment?’ She stressed that there would always be room for the best. They had lived in poverty and had learned that you must work hard to earn your place under the sun. I never experienced poverty, but my parents kept reminding me that you shouldn’t take a comfortable life for granted. It made me work hard, possibly harder than everyone else. It was a conservative Protestant school, so that says something. In primary school, I didn’t see the point of working hard.

Occasionally, I knew more than my teachers. My father later told me about a mayor he knew. He had been my history teacher before he became a politician for the Christian Democrats. He told my father that I once had corrected him during the lessons. It annoyed him, so he checked his books during the break to discover I was right. He was not the only one. A geography teacher admitted I knew more than he did about Russia.

On the final exams, my average grade was the highest (8.6 out of 10). The scores were good but not outstanding and resulted from hard work. Some pupils had stellar degrees in mathematics without working hard, but not me. My average was good but not stellar. If I didn’t prepare for a test, which happened once, my grade dropped dramatically to 3.5. And so, the mathematics teacher, Mr. Blaak, had a field day and made jokes about me spending too much time on the school newspaper. And I never solved the Rubik’s cube, despite spending much time on it. It demonstrates I was not a genius.

My weak spot was explaining literature. It is about guessing the supposed motives of book authors. My scores were consistently poor, the poorest of the class. I considered guessing other people’s motives and decoding hidden messages in texts a waste of time. The authors themselves often marvelled at what the literature experts found out about their intentions from the books they had written. Art and literature were a lot of fluff about feelings, quite often imagined. And I did poorly at it, and it probably has to do with my Asperger’s Syndrome. With the final exams nearing, I began to fret and asked my teacher, Mr. Amelink, to give me additional practice exams. A teacher could only dream of such a fanatic pupil, so he was helpful, but the grades remained as poor as before.

Before the final exam, I prayed that the grade wouldn’t be too bad. Not only to my surprise, my result was the best of everyone, only equalled by Geraldine, a girl with a striking hairdo, a bit alternative, who dressed outspokenly and flaunted her interest in art and literature. Mr. Amelink was also amazed and suggested the extra lessons had made a difference. Another girl became curious about this feat. She said, ‘You have a mysterious way of winning in the end.’ I was too embarrassed to tell about the prayer. It was selfish to pray for a higher grade. People in Africa needed God’s help much more. And it could not be that God granted that wish, or could it? While doing the test, the questions appeared more concrete than usual, making it easier to answer them.

There is a subtle difference between speculating about hidden motives and understanding the meaning of texts. I was good at the latter. It inflated my grades, as explaining texts comprised 50% of the scores in English and French. If a particular English or French word was unfamiliar to me, I could still infer its meaning from the subject of the text, the author’s opinions and the purpose of the paragraph or sentence. By connecting the dots, you often arrive at the correct answers. I hardly made errors in these questions.

At the time, there was no reason to suspect God had anything to do with it. Still, later developments added a peculiar twist to this incident, as I may have uncovered messages from God in pop music lyrics. The teacher’s name, Amelink, suggests a possible link to the isle of Ameland, and Ameland was to become part of a set of peculiar coincidences. A song named The Foundling of Ameland refers to this island. It includes a scene with the foundling walking over the water. But that was still over twenty years into the future. And I disappointed my economics teacher. Had my grade for economics been slightly higher, I would have received a 10, and an economist would have come to the school to give me the diploma. My teacher had hoped for that.