On the 7 January 1934 in the Dutch town of Hilversum, a child was born and named Jopie Houbein. From her earliest days she felt that neither her face nor her name really fitted her. On the outside she was white, but all her feelings of kinship went out to people of alien races – a Chinese trader, travelling gypsies, school-friends from the East Indies, even a child disguised as St Nicholas’s black helper. One of her early fantasy playmates was the beautiful Indian actor Sabu, the Elephant Boy.

When she was four years old, she saw a newspaper picture of the child-god, the Dalai Lama who was then the same age. To meet him became the first of three wishes running like a leitmotif through her life. The other two were to sit under a palm tree in a tropical country, and to be found by a partner with whom she could live life the way she needed to live it.