escape to life. He was given the best education possible for a child of the affluent upper middle class, but this was under the war years when Belgium was under the rule of the Nazis and Brussels was dark with oppression:
His adolescence was passed in a land where there was no joy, where laughter was careful, and Brussels itself seemed to be an ancient ruin, a dead city, its citizens like passengers in a great station waiting the arrival of a train.
It was while Brel was working for his father that two important things happened. The first was his growing awareness of the new importance for him of music and literature, both of which had always attracted him deeply, He found he wanted not merely to enjoy them but to im
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