This was not Emil Nolde's house....

.... but I initially assumed that it was. The Nolde House was its closest neighbour, a hundred or so yards away, and extremely ugly by comparison.

Serendipity. (A strange word, but the only correct one here.)

In the 1970s a German friend gave me a novel written by Siegfried Lenz, with the innocuous but intriguing title "Deutschstunde", this simply meaning The German Lesson.

For this German trip I had decided to read the book once more, and had by this date (i e 5th November) managed to get nearly half way through. It is the story of the adventures of a young German boy in the early 1940s.

The boy's father, 'the most northerly police officer in Germany' - i e in Schleswig-Holstein, very close to the Danish border - is charged with delivering an important document to a local painter. The painter has already been declared an undesirable by the Nazis, this document is one prohibiting him from any further painting. Furthermore, the policeman is under instruction to keep the painter under observation, to ensure that he does not disobey the order.

He asks his young son to help by spying on the painter. This is a very awkward situation for all concerned: for instance, policeman and painter grew up in the same village, and during their younger years the painter had saved the policeman from drowning.

Enough of the plot, I have yet to continue reading... Now comes the serendipity.

I knew from the start that the novel made use of what had happened in real life to the expressionist painter Emil Nolde during the Nazi years - i e denunciation and prohibition from painting. I also knew that Nolde had lived in Schleswig-Holstein; in fact, I had seen a photograph of a writing desk made by Nolde, today strangely enough in the possession of a foundation promoting the memory of a 19th century local writer, Theodor Storm.

We were driving northwards, getting close to the Danish border. A signpost to a local attraction appeared on the side of the road, and in the course of consulting our guide book for clarification a reference to the unconnected name of an "Emil Nolde Foundation" suddenly appeared.

The penny quickly dropped, and a sense of disbelief set in. The house had to be the real counterpart of the fictitious house described in the novel. Travel plans changed instantly, and we found our way there across the polders. So today's photo is one of the house which I assumed we were looking for. I snapped this house, whereupon the weather immediately deteriorated.

I did of course also photograph Nolde's house and its garden. The house exterior can most charitably be described as ugly, the garden had suffered from the 'hurricane' which had swept through England and Northern Germany a week before and was therefore closed to the public. (I had earlier observed a large wood the centre of which had been shredded almost to matchwood no more than 30 kilometres to the south of Nolde's house.)

Not surprisingly, I was NOT allowed to take photographs inside the house. There an exhibition of about 140 of Nolde's paintings was on show. A riot of colour, the products of about 50 years of painting; and, from the years during which the painting prohibition was in force, some of Nolde's little 'unpainted pictures'. Pure magic.

Even today it is difficult to believe that we stumbled on the house; a later discovery that we had missed this opportunity would have been galling.