This story begins in wartime Holland, with the Rotterdam Blitz on 14th May, 1940. In 1949, there lived a nine-year-old boy, whose name was Gabriel de Vries. Gabriel and his mother were very poor, because Gabriel’s father had died in the Blitz, when Gabriel was a baby. The Red Cross were very kind to baby Gabriel and his mother. They had helped them move to the countryside, where it was safer. They found them a little thatched-roofed cottage to rent, on a lovely green hillside, overlooking farmland. Gabriel’s mother became a washerwoman, who washed clothes in the canal, so that she could earn enough money to support them both. One day, when Gabriel was walking to school, he made a split decision to rescue a newborn heifer calf that had fallen into the semi-frozen dyke. This decision was to shape his life from boyhood into manhood, but he didn't know it then.