This story is based on fragments of scribbles accumulated by the British-Jamaican-bred, Monica Armstrong.
It’s captured amid the heat of the economic recession in England the reason she and her family moved to the Netherlands in the hope of a better life. The years were demanding and testing and their marriage turned out not to be as happy as the couple would have hoped for she and her husband struggled to maintain an equilibrium to no avail.
Being a mother to young children and also a partner who worked to help provide for the family, life proved challenging beyond words. Although she was often sad and wounded from within, her camouflage smiles always found a way to make her problems vanish into thin air.
With no one to share her story, pain, and anguish within those early years, she created a diary, narrating to the Queen of the Netherlands, fictively, to give herself balance and meaning while staying in a land she had difficulty calling home. Her adventures explore the memories and the soul-searching depths of her life. During the period she lived through the entire 33 years of Queen Beatrix's reign, she began to feel a sense of belonging.
But does she really belong?