One day a man in a tan mac and a comb-over appeared at my family’s door. I have no idea how he found me but he had an exciting proposition

I grew up in a modest, family hotel on the Dutch coast. The scenes of my boyhood were of German seaside tourists, drunken men and women at the bar, wedding receptions, and bingo nights in the function room. We slaved all year round – my father at the kitchen stove, my mother serving, cleaning the hotel rooms, and caring for three children. Books passed me by so it was an anomaly that, at the age of 12, I found myself attending a grammar school in Haarlem that churned out politicians, artists and writers.

I was embarrassed about my non-intellectual origins. Each morning, when my classmates’ fathers drove their expensive cars to solicitors’ offices, banks or ministries, my father would don his cook’s uniform. One day, when I was 14, I went to our village library. After I’d filled out the membership card, a woman said: “And now you can choose three books!” I snatched three off the shelf. The thinnest was First Love, by Ivan Turgenev. From the start, the words struck me like a hammer-blow. I was drawn in by the language and the 19th-century Russian world that the writer evoked. I’d become a reader.