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Of course he told me how the British had saved Antwerp, during the War. They didn't save it much, but they had given them warning, and so forth. They were able to make all kinds of arrangements. And at the close of the War, they had brought Winston Churchill over and had given him a present of a magnificent diamond--did you know that--I forget whether it was set in a ring or set in a watch-fob, but anyhow, it was the most beautiful diamond that they had produced and they were very proud of it, and they gave that to Winston with all kinds of ceremonials. A very ceremonious people.
The old Hotel de Ville in Antwerp, as you know, is very handsome. Very beautiful. It's the town hall, you know. He was much interested. I saw a lot of him that day.
Then we went East to Ghent, and I remember we saw the weaving industry, the cloth industry, the cotton textile industry there. A little outside the town, a small steel factory, and a magnificent orchid-growing plant. I said to the man, “How did you keep your orchids during the Occupation?” -- because it takes ten years, as perhaps you know, as he told me, for an orchid plant to develop from a seed to the point where it's large enough to bear orchids. Ten years!
“Oh,” he said, “we hid them.”
“How could you hide them?”
“Well, we couldn't hide everything, but we hid the
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