Jumping and landing

CHAPTER 1: THE JOURNEY

 

During the fall of 1950 it became clear that something in our lives had to change drastically if we were to succeed in raising our family as we wanted. So far nothing I had tried had worked well enough to provide a base for the future: publishing was by now out of the question after two failures, and there was nothing else that seemed attractive or promising. Oom Ru had made it clear that his financial help had its limits and that solutions would have to be sought in other directions. I knew what he was talking about, for he had helped one of my cousins to a job with the company he was in charge of, R. Mees and Zoonen, bankers and insurance brokers. That cousin had a succesful career in the business, but it didn’t attract me at all. It was a nasty situation, and we didn’t see any possibilities that would lead out of it.

Right around that time, but before we were really worrying what we had to do next, Trudi and Lootje Westermann had announced that they were going to emigrate to Canada, where Trudi had relatives living in Duncan, a small town, we were told, in B.C., the most westerly province of that huge country. I still remember Lootje’s enthusiastic grin as he showed us a map of Vancouver Island. “Larger than Holland,” he said, “and look…….just one road that follows the east coast. The rest is pretty well wild….” It impressed us, and it seemed terrific, all this wild country. But at the time we were still hoping that things would turn around, and my training was in publishing. Publishing is tied to language….Emigration was not for us.

But when the time came when we were were stuck, with no room left to manoeuver, we were one evening talking about just that possibility, to leave, to settle somewhere else and start all over, doing something totally different, opening some new perspective. And while talking we came to a decision that seemed at the time a bit foolish. The question was: Where do we try to go? Two possibilities came to mind, because we had contacts there. The one was New Zealand, where a sister of Huub Gerretsen lived with her family, the other was Western Canada, where friends lived, Pem and Mien van Heek. We decided that we would write to both contacts and go to the place from where the reactions seemed most favourable. We had an enthusiasic letter from Pem and Mien in a little over a week, but Huub Gerretsen’s sister never answered. Canada it would be!

From that moment on things were suddenly moving fast. Oom Ru and tante Miek were immediately supportive. The first thing was now to make an official request for immigration. That was the beginning of a suddenly very busy time. It is all like a blur in my memory, but I remember the visit to the Canadian ambassy in The Hague, where I was interviewed by a kindly gentleman who wanted to know what I hoped to do for a living in Canada. I told him I would be a carpenter, for I was then as now interested in working with wood and we were sure that there would be no need in Canada for failed publishers. He had clearly not expected that answer, for he asked, politely, but doubtful :”Have you done much carpentry?” “Yes”, I told him, ” well….quite a bit. “Ah”, he said, “as a hobby? Do you have tools?” I could answer that question honestly: yes, I had tools. He filled in on the form “Carpenter” without further questions. We found out later that, at least where we were going, it didn’t take much to be a carpenter.

It would be months before we would be able to leave and I had to do something in the meantime to earn a living. Somehow I found a temporary job at the university library in Utrecht. It was dull, but fitted the circumstances and paid very little. There was a somewhat older man working there whom I had had as a teacher of Latin for a short while. He was married to a British woman who gave us our first and very necessary English conversation lessons, using a Eaton’s Mailorder Catalogue as a textbook, a very practical approach that has proved to be most helpful.

 

My immediate boss was a youngish man, a nice fellow. He and his wife had two children, and they liked to take the whole family out on their bicycles during the weekend for an outdoor picnic. One day he came in and was in a sort of a radiant mood: they had bought two motorized bicycles, “bromfietsen” in Dutch, or “buzz bikes” in translation. It was a form of transportation that was becoming awfully popular in those days. The original version consisted of a bicycle with an extra heavy frame and better brakes, that had an auxiliary little motor mounted above the front wheel with a rubber roller that pressed on the tire to transfer the power. Those little engines, maybe the size of a chainsaw motor and just about as noisy, could move the bike at speeds of between 20 and 40 km/h., much faster in other words than you could pedal an ordinary bike, that had a maximum cruising speed of about 20 km/h. You started them by pedalling and then, when you reached a certain speed, pulling a lever that pushed the roller on the tire. Because they were legally bicycles, they were allowed on all bicycle paths but not the high ways. The quiet, safe bicycle paths were immediately turned into miniature highways, where ordinary pedal bikes were considered a nuisance because they were so slow. The noise was alarming.

There was, however, a more serious problem created as soon as the engines were sold separately, to be mounted on regular bikes, that had frames that were too light, tires that were too thin, brakes that were totally insufficient. These adapted models were often used by a) young kids who couldn’t afford the real thing but liked the speed and who souped-up their engines to reach speeds of 50 km/h., and b) by the elderly who could now be mobile again without buying a car, but whose reaction times were not well-matched with the effortless speed they attained. Accident rates soared, and quite a high percentage of them was serious or fatal.

However, my young boss was eagerly awaiting the first sunny weekend. It came, but he seemed a bit down the next Monday morning. I asked what had happened? “You know,” he said, “they are everywhere and we could not find a quiet spot to have our picnic.” A problem all right. But two weeks later he was beaming: they had found the perfect solution. The Dutch highways are all parallelled by wide, blacktopped bicycle paths, separated from the main road by a grass strip, about 10 m. wide, I guess. Our young family had found that one could peacefully have one’s picnic on this strip, ignoring both the buzz bikes and the cars. I have seen them, in ’71, lots of them, a colourful nylon windscreen supported by four steel pins stuck in the soil, much like the little windscreens we used in front of our tent to protct our Primus stove. There was even a name for that form of outdoor recreation in Holland: “Boulevard-tourism” (“Berm tourisme” in Dutch). It has become one of our favourite images to illustate to Canadians why we thought Holland had lost some of its charm.

A lot had to be done when the time for our departure came close: the house had to be sold, the furniture that we wouldn’t take had to be sold and the stuff we would take had to be packed by a professional in a huge wooden crate, 6′ by 8′ by 6′ high. (the panels served in Terrace as parts of our woodshed) The packers came to take what had to be in that crate four weeks before we left. It was therefore necessary that the children were somewhere else: Justus in R’dam with the Ep and Kees Baars, Lies in Delft with Hanna and Jaap Hamaker, John in Nieuwersluis with Oena and Hubert with tante Lieske and oom Simon in Baambrugge. That gave us three weeks to say our good-byes to relatives and friends.

At the end of those weeks we collected them again and when we came in Nieuwersluis to pick up John and Hubert, who would be taken there by tante Lieske, Moekie wanted to take Hubert out of tante Lieske’s arms, but he turned his head, buried it on tante Lieske’s shoulder and cried. The tragedy didn’t last long for during a little walk Moekie let her hand hang loose and he, walking between her and tante LIeske, took it and things were fine again. Poor Hubert. He was not quite two years old, had just started to talk, and now suddenly his whole life came apart. I think it was hard on everybody, this change, but maybe hardest on him.

We had instructions from Pem van Heek about the the things we had to have to be comfortable. The more we could take, the less we would have to buy in Canada. And one thing was clear as crystal: emigrants could only take very little money out of the country by decision of the Dutch government. There was no limit set for the “settler’s effects”, but that was of course limited by the costs of packing and shipping. We bought the six wooden chairs that are still in use: four in the Den and two in our bedroom, but in order to save space we got them without the legs glued in place. It was the only way we could do it, but I have cursed them every time those legs had to be re-glued. We bought the beds that are now still being used in the Den, the ones that have the spiral steel support for the mattrass. Their construction would enable you to fold down the legs of one, so that it fits under the other one. It has been a real winner in Terrace, where we slept in the living room and where the bed served as a couch during the daytime.

And I had to buy the tools that I did not have, but the only thing I remember was the Walters axe that is still my favourite when I am splitting firewood. I remember the sense of delight to be able for once to buy tools and not feel guilty, or worried about the price. We lived on a very tight budget in Holland as well as in the first years in Canada. I have always loved buying tools….

The last week we were in “Rozenlust” with tante Miek and oom Ru. I can not think of any place that would have been more appropriate or more comfortable than that dear old house that has taken such an important place in our life. The summer was beautiful and warm. “Rozenlust” had two gardens, the one right behind the house, formal, with stately old trees and curved gravel paths between manicured green lawns, a “tea hut” and in the back the house where Chris lived, the gardener and later, when tante Miek and oom Ru got their first car, their chauffeur. The whole garden was surrounded by a brick wall, about 7 or 8 feet high, and discouraging climbing by broken glass set in cement on the top. That broken glass impressed me much when I was a child.

Just before departure with Tante Miek and Oom Ru

The other thing that impressed me was the fact that you could only get to the house by means of a bridge across a wide ditch that had bright green algae floating on the black and smelly water. If you pressed the bell button the maid had to come out of the house to open the wrought iron gate that closed off the bridge. The name “Rozenlust” in elegant cursive letters was part of the iron ornamentation. I was sharply aware that we had rich relatives. “Rozenlust” was part of that awareness. It was for me a reason to feel more important, standing on that bridge and waiting for the maid to come and let me in. It is good that neither tante Miek nor oom Ru has ever been aware of that sentiment for such feelings had no place in their frame of reference. They lived an austere, frugal existence, where, to the great amusement of my father, butter on your bread was considered an unnecessary luxury. Margarine would do just fine. The fact that they got their first car only after the war was totally in keeping with their lifestyle and convictions. But where others were concerned they were extremely generous……always more or less in secret.

Behind the wall that closed off the garden there was another garden, accessible through a new gate in the wall. The land there had come up for sale shortly after the war, I believe, and oom Ru had bought it to preserve their privacy and maybe save them from having to live in the shadow of some high office or apartment block. As soon as you came from the rather solemn atmosphere of the old garden through the gate in the wall you were hit by the incredible contrast between the two, for the new garden was alive, vibrant with colour and light. At the end there was a low, charming brick cabin with a brick terrace under the same roof and a greenhouse on the other end. For this occasion, our last weeks in Holland, they had not only installed a sand box, but they had hired a girl to “look after the kids” so that we would be free to go and visit where and when we wanted. It was a wonderful arrangement, and my memories of those days are still suffused with the bright sunshine and the colours of that garden.

One of the last visits I want to mention, not for the visit itself, which was a very warm and pleasant good-bye to tante Trui, Mem’s older sister, and her husband, oom Jan Wolff, but for the fact that it was my first solo trip in any car. Oom Charles had lent us his little Fiat (“Molehill” was their fitting nickname). I had my drivers’ license, but what I had never done before was to shift down, from high gear to third, and, if necessary, to second. And since that trip took us through several larger communities, down-shifting was not a matter of choice, but of necessity. I made it, but I looked up against doing it every time I could see it coming as if it was a major operation, and was at the end a nervous wreck. I had ground my teeth every time I had ground gears and that was awfully frequently.

During those days we had our first look, acros the river Maas, at the “Zuiderkruis”, the ship that would take us to the new land. It looked fine. It had been a “Liberty “ship, one of the many that were welded together in the U.S. to replace and enlarge the regular fleet of freighters that had suffered incredibly while under constant attack by the German U Boats in the Atlantic. The losses had been so severe that the ordinary construction method with riveted steel pates was far too slow to keep pace with the demand. I believe that the welded construction was first tried and perfected in these ships. They never had a very good reputation as far as sea-going properties were concerned (not of great concern for the purpose for which they were built), but they had on this ship, rebuilt to ease the demand for passenger ships for the specific purpose of emigration, constructed an extra deck which made it a bit top-heavy, so that it rolled nastily in heavy seas.

Zuiderkruis

And so the day arrived that we were shown our cabin, the most forward cabin of the ship, right on the main deck, with a window that allowed us a fine view of the bow, from behind. I think we were very fortunate to get our own cabin with three bunk beds, and I suspect that oom Ru, who was one of the Directors of the Holland America Line that operated the ship in contract with the government, had something to do with it. The normal arrangement for emigrants was that the men slept in one hold, the women and children in an other.

The farewell was a bit wrenching, but not too tragic: we were facing a brand new life and a brand new opportunity. Oom Ru was going with us to Hoek Van Holland, at the mouth of the river. And so we were towed out of the harbour and from there under our own power through the “NIeuwe Waterweg”. That was as far as oom Ru accompanied us, but I have no recollection of the farewell or of the way he got off and to the shore. What I do remember is the rare view we got from the deck over the green low land of te polders along the river on the one side and the large harbour basins on the other with their forests of huge cranes. And then we steamed into the Channel and we looked back at the view that has brought tears to so many eyes: the receding line of the white dunes. We did not cry. Once out of the coastal traffic we turned south for a short, one-night stop in Le Havre for some reason I don’t remember. Moekie thinks we took on a lot of Belgian emigrants there and that would make good sense. And then : the Atlantic.

It had to be that way, but the sunny summerdays were left behind and what was ahead was a lot of wind, a storm, in fact. I had responded to a call for volunteers to help with kitchen chores and was sitting down below with a dozen other people, peeling onions, when the movements of the ship caused me to feel accutely unwell, so that I just managed to race up the stairs and reach the railing before I was most horribly seasick. I reached our cabin, but I don’t remember whether the rest of the family was there before me or came later. I undressed and got in my bed somehow, and felt terrrible. Eventually we were all in bed and sick, for four days, I believe. The only memories that survived the general feeling of not caring for anything any more are that the two little boys had to be helped out of their clothes at times to do what was necessary, and that bending over was more than enough to bring both of their parents to deepest distress, and that the green-faced stewart brought a tray round: dry white sandwiches with dry smoked beef in thin slices. And every time I tried to eat a bite I smelled the damned onions on my fingers…..I believe that practically everybody was sick. There is another memory that survived: the slow, continuous movement of the horizon, first way, way down, and then way, way up……..And somewhere during those days we were treated to the sight of a huge green wave smashing over the bow…. and we had front seats to watch it. Not an encouraging spectacle. And somewhere during the night, in mid-Atlantic and rolling like a drunk, the drone of the engines stopped……It was a scary feeling, but after a while the vibrations ( quite noticeable: Liberty ships were not designed for passenger comfort) and the hum resumed. We didn’t find out why they had stopped. The last day(s?) of the crossing we were well enough to be sitting on deck in deck chairs, out of the wind and in the fresh air. That was a huge improvement. We saw the pilot come aboard during a thick fog. Our fog horn had been sounding, and there was suddenly that answering horn from somewhere in the fog just before the little pilot boat emerged from the mist shroud and we stopped to let the pilot come aboard. We were obviously getting close. The fog must have cleared, for either that day or the next we saw the rocky shore of New Foundland on the horizon, and we passed a fishing schooner, not sailing unfortunately, but nevertheless impressive. It was already getting dark when we saw the lights of Halifax and we got the children out of their beds to be with us when we had a first glimpse of our new country. Entering the bay was somewhat disappointing, for you lost any sense of direction: we didn’t seem to be heading for the lights on shore. There was the huge bulk of an island that slipped by on our right, and then the anchor was let down and we could get some sleep, awaiting the next morning when we would step ashore.

That important morning was bright and sunny. We were towed (?) to our destined spot at the warf and were astonished to see that there were none of the big cranes on the warf that were such a characteristic feature of the harbours of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The gangplank was lowered and, following instructions, we went down. We had to report to an immigration office that was located in a huge warehouse covered with corrugated, galvanized sheet metal, cheap and temporary looking. The inside was not much better, but the people we were dealing with were happy to get one set of immigrants who could, more or less, understand and speak English. The formalities went smooth and fast, and we were back out in the sunlight and watching the unloading of the crates with the “settlers’ effects” by means of the ship’s cranes…. a slow process. We heard later that one of the crates had come apart and spilled some of its contents over the warf….. The owner must have been a butcher, for we were told that there was something like a waterfall of huge knives.

We went over to the station, to check our tickets and were told that we hadn’t paid enough……, not only not enough for the roommettes we had ordered, but not even enough to travel “coach-class”. It would take another substantial amount to make up the difference. We paid. It was a most unexpected and unpleasant shock, a blunder of the Rotterdam travel agent who had looked after that detail. We protested later, and got the amount back….it paid for the first electric service in our house in Terrace.

Somebody directed us towards the train that was waiting on a side track. There was some little confusion, because there was nobody whom we could ask if this was “our” train , but eventually that too was solved: it was. I don’t remember whether we went aboard for our first look or walked over to the little store close-by to get some bread, margarine and cheese (our first encounter with the bright orange cheddar, frightening at first to people who have never seen any cheese that colour, but reassuringly good tasting). That simple purchase set the pattern for the next four days or so: whenever there was an opportunity we bought our bread and cheese in a local little grocery somewhere close to the tracks. I suppose we bought fruit as well, for there was no way, of course, to cook or eat a warm meal. There were many such opportunities, for our train was slow and had to be shunted to a side spur whenever the regular train had to pass us. It became a routine: get off, run up and down the track to get some exercise, and buy our food.

When we picked our places, two compartments on either side of the aisle, we discovered that black soot covered the seats, the floor, the little tables…..everything. There were in the toilet lots of paper towels and we cleaned up the mess as best we could while there was time. And time there was… lots of it, for we didn’t move until it started to get dark. As we were travelling, it became quite, depressingly clear where the soot came from: the locomotive pulling us was an oil-fired steam engine, one of a dying breed, that produced copious quantities of smoke…. and soot. And the double glazed windows in the coaches that were at least as old as the locomotive didn’t close very well. It was one of our main problems during that first stretch, keeping things and hands “clean”, until we reached Montreal and got into another train, that was not much, but a little better than the first.

However: we were moving, we were travelling through a new, excitingly wild country, as far as we could see in the fading light. My strongest memory is that we travelled on a curved track through a swamp and that the engineer blew the whistle. That whistle, the old, howling kind of long forgotten movies, that strange, wild, undulating wail, still represents better than any other sound to me the vast empty spaces of this country. I recognized it with a sudden shock, because it was that sound that had marked the dramatic climax of a play I saw as a young teenager in Rotterdam, a play called “The Ghost Train”. It made an impression on me that was most certainly out of all proportion to the value of the play, but it kept me awake most of the night following the performance. There was no doubt about it: we were in Canada.

I suppose that we had something to eat and I don’t remember what we did afer that, but eventually it was time to go to bed. Under the seats we discovered extensions that could be pulled out to fill the space between them so that each compartment could be used as a double bed of sorts. They were fairly hard, but not uncomfortable. What we did not have was any sort of blankets or pillows. Folded clothes would do for pillows and we used our raincoats for blankets. It was a good thing that we were travelling in the summer. Moekie slept on the one side of the aisle between two kids and I slept on the other in the same fashion. In retrospect it seems amazing, but we all slept.

The next day we saw Quebec City with its citadel on the other side of the St. Lawrence, but there were so many new impressions that none of them stands out very clearly. We reached Montreal in the afternoon and changed trains. Our luggage, (there was quite a lot: two suitcases, a back pack, and assorted handbags) were carried over by a smiling black porter On the platform of the station we each ate a “Revel”-with-a-handle, something we had never seen. Delicious! And memorable.

We had all kinds of small toys and games to keep the children busy. They proved to be invaluable. It kept us busy too, making sure they had something to do, but we had time to look outside. There was one moment that we shall not easily forget: Hubert was playing with Dinky toys on the little table. One of them fell off and, quick like a flash, he slid down himself to pick it up, but when he came up again his face and hands were streaked with black….

All I can remember of the two days it took our train to reach Winnipeg is the number of larger and smaller lakes between endless forests, decorated her and there by patches of the bright red of Indian paintbrush where it was rocky, white carpets of dogwood where they found moisture, and the almost complete lack of signs of human activity. An empty, wild country.

We came through Ottawa, but I don’t remember having seen it. Maybe that was during the night, for I believe we left Montreal late in the afternoon. The next day we came through Sudbury, and that left a very vivid memory of a lunar landscape with bare, black rock, completely devoid of vegetation of any kind…. an unmitigated horror. On the other hand there was also the glorious view of Lake Superior, shortly before we came to what was then Port Arthur, from high up the rocky shore, looking down upon enormous rafts of logs, like patterns of matchsticks on the dark water.

Two days after leaving Montreal we arrived in Winnipeg where the greatest adventure of our journey awaited us. We were innocently looking out of the window at the crowd on the platform, when suddenly our name was called outside, over a loudspeaker. I went outside in a hurry, met a fellow under a ten-gallon hat, who told me to get ourselves and all our luggage out on the platform, quickly, because we were going to be taken to another station. I had some trouble understanding what he tried to convey, but that much was clear. I hurried back, we bundled up the children, grabbed our belongings, helped, I believe, by the man with the enormous hat, were in a frantic haste taken outsidethe station, and packed into two taxis.The man-with-hat came with us. At that point we are not too clear what happened, but I believe that, in order to avoid most of the traffic signs, we were rushed via back alleys and the like to the other station. Our English was not sufficient to get a clear picture of the unfolding drama, but I am pretty sure that “they” had kept the regular transcontinental train waiting for us,for something like twenty minutes, in order to avoid having to put us up in a hotel for a night. From Winnipeg we had to go to Edmonton and Jasper, while the other train went to Vancouver by the southern route.

Our guide and the drivers of the taxis (I suppose, but that sort of detail slipped from my memory) took us up to the platform with all our

luggage and there, gleaming, gorgeous, slick and impressive stood that train, all chrome and large windows, with relaxed, smiling, somewhat bemused faces behind them. We were hoisted aboard and made our entry in that luxurious interior, sharply aware now of the questioning eyes of all those well-to-do passengers in their casual neat clothes……. a ragged bunch of none-too-clean immigrants. Being an immigrant is not good for one’s ego on certain occasions. This was one of them.

Moekie asked to have the biggest of our suitcases with her in the ladies’ restroom as soon as the train moved out of the station. She took all four children one by one and cleaned them as best she could before she changed them in the last set of clean clothes we had wih us. When she emerged with the last one, there was a heartwarming applause from the other passengers.

After the two previous trains it was an incredibly luxurious, relaxed and fast trip to Edmonton and then to Jasper. We enjoyed the stretch through the prairies, which we found to our amazement to be not nearly as flat as we had thought, and not really monotonous either, with unbelievably wide, majestic river valleys. A landscape so large that there wasn’t any human dimension to it, but that characteristic seemed to us to be common to most of the areas we had come through before we arrived at our destination. Terrace, by comparison, seemed at first sight to be located in a pleasant, friendly environment; no endless views, no inaccessably high mountains, nestled close to the river in a wide valley. That impression changed as soon as I had begun to work in “the bush”, the forests that surrounded the town on all sides. Nature-in-the-raw is not a human-friendly environment.

We learned from a lady who was sitting in front of us that the delicacies we called “bonbons” were here “candies” and we were grateful that we had insisted that the children should know the appropriate response when they were offered something: “Yes, please”, if you accepted, and “No, thank you” if you did not. It made a good impression. I had a stumbling, awkward dicussion with a bony man about the political meaning and implications of the movement north of the R.C. Church in Holland. I suspect that he may have been a member of an Orange Lodge.

Moekie remembers that after a stop at some station a tall man came on board who took a seat directly behind her. He looked non-European, non-white, but was definitely not black and had a hooked nose. She thought immediately that he might be…. an Indian! Too much of Carl May interfered with her better judgment, and she felt very uncomfortable when he tried to be nice and make polite conversation with her. She had an urge to keep the children close .

My strongest memory of anything specific was that there was a moment when we could see for the first time the snow peaks of the Rockies lining the horizon, like a jagged white border between landscape and sky. It was an exciting thing to see, our first view of the continental divide that symbolically meant to us the divide between the past and the future. The closer we came the more exciting it became. The other passengers hardly looked up and the men who were playing cards in the compartment on the other side of the aisle went on playing without as much as a glance. We wer amazed that people played cards while travelling through scenery like this.

The Rockies may lack something of the spectacular grandeur of the Alps but the peaks are steeper, sharper, less accessible, and the whole landscape is more savage, not so readily exploited for profit. It has retained its character of real wilderness. I think that is what impressed me so much: the wilderness, the apparent absence of the “human touch”, nature left as it was originally. Of course you find out all too soon that the human touch (“grasp” would be a better term) reaches far into the areas which seemed at first to be pristine, but to a newcomer this first look at “wild country” can be an exciting experience. This newcomer came from the Netherlands where every last vestige of wildness has long disappeared and where “nature” consists mostly of green, man-made polders instead of the ranch land in the Interior, and straight rows of planted trees instead of forests. I have had that hankering after untouched, unspoilt nature for a very long time, really as long as I can remember. A born romantic…..

We arrived in Jasper some time in the afternoon and had quite a long wait there for the train that would take us on the last leg of our journey: to Terrace. We went into town for a look at something that was not moving past us and that was Canadian, and we would use that long wait (I forget how long it was, maybe two hours?) to see if we could get a warm meal, our first since leaving the “Zuiderkruis”. We found a small restaurant, very simple, and ate something that we didn’t know or recognize. I thought it was probably something like little yellow beans , half mashed, but they were curiously sweetish. Creamed corn it was we learned much later. At the vegetable stand of a grocery store we found strange, small, soft cabbages that turned out later to have been head lettuce. Then back to the station to wait until the train would come.

I had hoped, if not expected, to travel the last part in a gleaming stainless steel coach like the one we had just left. The train appeared and was a disappointment: it looked more like the coaches that had carried us to Winnipeg, but it was not dirty, and you could not pull out a seat-extension to change the seat into a bed. Furthermore, it moved agonizingly slowly, stopping in every possible conglomeration of litle houses, and there were a lot of those. We appreciated, with amazement, that this train stopped for twenty minutes at a beautiful spot where we were allowed to get out and take pictures of Mount Robson.

We picked a coach that seemed to have fewer passengers than the other ones and were a bit miffed when the conductor tried, in vain, to convince us that we would be better off in an other coach. Since we could sit together in this one, we stayed. I did not get the point he was trying to make, which was probably that the coach we were in would be filled later on with loggers and native Indians, and that it would be better for us and for the children to avoid close contact with those two categories of the population. He was probably acting with the best intentions, but we didn’t have any difficulty and found it interesting to watch what was going on when the coach did fill up. There was an awful lot of passing the bottle and of playing poker on top of a suitcase. We used ours to fill up the space between the seats, so that we could lie down.

We didn’t sleep much that night anyway, for not only were we too excited but there was a young Dutch fellow who had been with us since Winnipeg, who had to get off in Prince George. He travelled by himself and was going to work on an experimental station for the Department of Agriculture. He expected that somebody from that place would be on the platform to meet him. It was midnight when we reached Prince George. The station was deserted and almost pitch dark, and certainly nobody was waiting to meet him. We talked to him, trying to lift his spirits somewhat until the train moved on. While we were waiting we saw the last lights in the town go out, one after the other, and when we moved out we saw the lonely fellow on the platform under one of the few lampposts. We heard much later, that he had passed the night sleeping there on a bench at the station, but that he was met the next morning. He didn’t stay long in that job, found something else that paid better and did quite all right.

Whatever sleeping we did must have been after we left him. The next day, early in the afternoon, we came through Smithers, where we were met on the platform by Piet Dieleman who was still recovering from a heart attack and therefore not at work. He had heard when we were landing in Halifax, had found out what train we should be on and had come to the station to meet us on our journey to Terrace. It was a great surprise and the beginning of a long, special relationship. Shortly thereafter he went back to Holland for a visit, and married Moekie’s cousin while he was there. Their meeting was hardly accidental, for his brother was married to her sister.

And on we went, from little town to littler town, with one stop just before we reached Hazelton, to allow us a look at the spectacular Bulkley canyon, at the point where the river makes a ninety degree turn around a vertical slab jutting out from the opposite rockwall. It is an amazing sight, and was well worth the stop.

In Hazelton a lot of loggers and native Indians got on board. It was our first look at Indians and they did not conform at all to any preconceived notions of what an “Indian” should look like, for these men were rather small, chunky rather than athletic, obviously prone to develop big bellies, and remarkably Asian in their features. No eagle noses, not in the least “aristocratic” looking…… sort of disappointing, really, and not at all romantic.

Fairly shortly thereafter we lived through one of the moments that has given me nightmares for years after: the railroad crosses the Skeena on a threstle that must be over a hundred feet high, built in a curve and, like all railroad bridges in Canada, without a railing. The train slowed down considerably, I looked out of the window to see what was coming and immediately herded all children into the centre aisle, so that they could not look down that dizzying pole-construction directly to the river. In retrospect I am sure that they would not have minded the look, but my own immense and of course totally irrational fears overwhelmed my reason. What made that crossing worse was that you could feel the wheels push and grind against the outer rails, while the whole train leaned slightly, but noticeably, to the left, against the curve. For me this was the worst moment of our long train ride.

From near Cedarvale we must have been able to see the “Seven Sisters”, (which I think is a spectacular mountain, even after all the mountains we have seen over the years) but I have no recollection of it.

In Pacific we got out of the train for the last time for a walk or a run along the tracks. We found some berries that looked a lot like small raspberries, but that didn’t have much taste. And shortly after that we passed through Usk where we looked out of the window while gathering all our belongings in preparation for our arrival in Terrace. To our horror we saw that we were in a valley so narrow, and between mountains so steep, that we had to move close to the window to see the sky. The sight filled us with dread but there was no time to think much about it for we had to prepare for getting off. I remember saying to Moekie something like “If Terrace is like this we’d better go on to the coast….” Little did we know about either Terrace or the coast.

And then the train stopped. We got out onto the platform and there was Pem, but accompanied by people we didn’t know. First he introduced us to Pit van Stolk who shook my hand, a firm grip, and said: “Hallo, verre neef.” (“Hello, distant cousin.”) I immediately liked Pit and thought that we would get along just fine. Then there were Bill and Madzy Brandis who were to become our closest neighbours. It was a very warm welcome. And the mountains were gone to make room for a wide, open plain under the warm August sun.

van Stolk house

We divided people and luggage over the two cars; Pem took most in his stationwagon, I went with Pit. Mien was waiting for us at the van Stolk house with Brigitta and Wendela, and of course we met Enid, Betty-Lee and Ivy, but we went almost straight on to the van Heek house, which seemed to have been built as a guesthouse or something like it, for it was right behind the larger van Stolk home. It was a frame house, whereas Pit’s was built with logs. It had a porch over the whole width of the building. You entered in the kitchen/livingroom that was about half of the total area of the house. Straight ahead was a door that led to a small hall with two bedrooms, one on either side, and a staircase to the attic where we would sleep. At the end of the hall was a door to the outside. Pem told us that he had just cut that opening with a chainsaw in the wall, because he thought that to have just one exit when there would be that many people living under the same roof was not good enough. The casualness of the way he told us about it was for us an eye-opener: just imagine that you would simply take a saw and cut an opening in an existing house……We were very impressed. Things were very different, no doubt about it. Of course he was absolutely right: not having that door would make the house a potential death trap if there would be a fire. There was no inside toilet, only an outhouse, and that, too, was different from what we had been used to.

Pem told us that he had looked all over town for a house to rent or to buy: he had found nothing but an old logbarn that had been used for chickens, seemed to be in poor condition and wasn’t worth further investigation. But he had talked to Bill Brandis, who had offered that we could buy the last one-and-a-half acre of his land. Most of that was a steep sidehill, but there seemed to be enough flat land at the bottom to build a modest house. We were to look at it the next day. The price was right: $ 250.- I believe. And so, on the day of our arrival, we were suddenly submerged in plans that would have seemed less than a month ago unimaginable: building a house from scratch, with our own hands….! Pem offered his help with the building as well as with the financing. It was a very large family around the supper table: ten people. We slept well, as far as I can remember.

The next day Pem invited me to come with him when he went off to work. He was a logscaler for the largest employer in town by far, the Columbia Cellulose Cy., always referred to as “the Cellanese”. They were working on the right-of-way for their main road, the road that would eventually link Terrace and Aiyansh on the Nass River. None of that made much of an impression at the time, but what did was the look at those huge logs that were littering the forest floor, and the stumps that were left, large enough that you could easily have stood on one of them with three people. Of course I had never in my life seen trees like that, so big, so straight….hard to imagine! Pem went about his work, walking over those fallen giants with a casual ease that I found both admirable and amazing, and left me to take pictures and look around. Suddenly there was a silly sound as if somebody had blown on the kind of horn that we used in Holland when we were on a masted boat and had to warn the fellow at the bridge ahead that we were coming, so that he could raise it, a thin, nasal sound. Pem shouted immediately to me that I had to come back to him, fast, and seemed somewhat anxious. When I reached him he told me that they were going to blow up some of those big stumps. I did what was maybe sort of natural for a man who wants to take pictures to send back to his homeland, but it caused Pem to panic: I jumped up and moved towards the scene of the explosion. Pem yelled at me, now really worried, “Come back! Come back!” and the tone of his voice made me do that, without questioning. As soon as we were safely huddled behind a rock outcropping, the blast went off, followed by another one and yet another one and I could hear all kinds of “stuff” hit the ground. That sound shook me a little bit and I suddenly saw in a blinding flash how terribly stupid I had behaved. I apologized to Pem, who felt a bit guilty about not having warned me that this could happen.

That evening, after supper, we went to the Brandis farm and Bill showed us the land he was willing to sell.

Brandis house, 1951

It was surely a funny piece: by far the largest part was a steep gravel sidehill, I would think more than 100 feet high, I imagine part of the original bank of the Skeena River. On the other side of the river there was another bank just like it. When you climbed it, following a zigzag footpath, you came on a wide plain. It looked as if the river in prehistoric times, after the last ice age, had scoured a bed for itself out of that gravelly plain. On that plain, on the other side of the river, the military had built an airport that was and is still in use; an ideal location, for it was flat, there were no large obstacles anywhere, and there was no heavy forest cover that had to be cleared. Eby Road, the road that led to the property, was a dead-end of course, but it did not meet the Bench (the name the locals gave to that gravel bank) at a ninety degree angle. The result was that one corner of our lot was almost at the top of the bank, but the diagonally opposed one was at the bottom, in fact a bit on level ground. That was the corner where we could build, a narrow triangle of gravel that had once been scraped out of the bank to make a road. The piece was perfectly useless to farmer Bill, who would never have been able to use it for anything other than a miniature ski hill. On he other hand he did not want much for it and it suited us fine.

Had I known then what I know now, namely that those gravelbanks can and sometimes do slip and bury the house that stands at its bottom, I would never have built on that spot, for it was dangerous. However, the bank never moved at all above our house, and we were very careful to leave it undisturbed. There was a strict rule in the family: “Nobody EVER climbs on the bank above the house”. There were several advantages to the spot: it was very close to a natural spring on the other side of the road that produced enough clear, lovely water to make it the source of drinking water for the whole town at that time, and it was wonderfully protected against the north wind. During the coldest winters, when everybody took shelter against the fierce northerly winds, our kids could be seen playing at the bottom of the Bench, perfectly happy. And, as I wrote above, the price was right and probably it was the only piece of land we could have bought under the circumstances. We made the deal without hesitation.

The most important thing was to find a job that I could do. Enid had a cousin working as an engineer in the construction branch of the C.N. whose name was Pat McElroy. He was in charge of a crew that had to survey a route for a railroad to Kitimat, where Alcan was building their aluminum smelter. When Pit phoned him on a Sunday when he was home to ask if there would be a possibility for me to find work in that crew he hit just the right time, for they had just lost a young fellow who was allergic to the poison of Devil’s Club and had had to leave. I could take his place if I wanted it. I did. I had no idea what would be expected of me, but I thought that it could not be too difficult if a fellow without any specific training had done it successfully.

The plan was that Pit would drive me to their cabin on Lakelse Lake where I could spend the night and meet Pat the next (Monday) morning. The crew was working just across the lake. I slept well that night but I was nervous the next morning, not having any idea of what to expect. Looking out of the cabin window I saw a man approaching along the sandy beach who fitted the description Pit had given me, so I put my pack on my back and went out to meet him. It was Pat and the way he greeted me was friendly and encouraging. He seemed to be a nice man. Together we walked back to the spot where he had left his crew with the boat that would get us to the camp. The trip across the lake was beautiful and quiet. I didn’t have to talk at all. On the other side we took the boat up the river for a little ways before pulling it up the shore. The camp was just above the spot where we had landed. I was told to leave my pack in the camp and to come along. We walked for maybe a mile or so to the spot where they had stopped the previous day and I was told what to do: together with an other fellow we had to measure, as carefully and as horizontally as possible, the distance between two stakes, keeping the steel measuring tape taut and as level as we could. It was a simple task, and the technique involved was quickly learned. I got along fine with my partner, and had the impression that he was happy with the change of working partner. We worked all day with a break for lunch and went back to camp around 5 o’clock, I think. I had enjoyed the day’s work, which was nice, but what was most encouraging was the fact that Pat seemed to be happy with what we had done.

Back in camp I was shown a tent where I would sleep, I believe by myself. I wondered what I was going to get for a mattress or a bed, but when I asked Pat about that he laughed and told me that I had to make something myself, and that the tips and the young boughs of a certain balsam fir worked well. I had my doubts but set to work and constructed something like a mattrass of tender boughs and twigs and found that it was less difficult than I had thought and more satisfactory. I was not quite finished when there was a call for supper. I thought I would just finish what I was doing, but when I appeared at the table in the kitchen tent everybody was eating and the cook gave me a blast about being on time that I shall not forget. I didn’t get the meaning of his words, but his annoyance and even anger were as clear as the water of the river. Pat explained to him that I was just new in the country, that this was my first work experience and that I didn’t know the rules of the bushcamps, and to me that in a camp the cook is the boss, the undisputed boss. Things got off to a bad start, but soon cooled down. The meal was ample and excellent.

After supper we gathered around a campfire and talked, what for me meant that I said as little as possible and listened a lot. They had great fun teaching me “English”, that is: the English as it is used by loggers and others who work in the bush and mills. It is a simple language, using certain words a lot more often than others, and those words are not to be used in polite company. I think they tried to convince me that their English was what everybody used in Canada and hoped that I would be foolish enough to believe them. They quit as soon as they found out that I was not going to be fooled. I liked the job. My romantic heart loved being in that untouched forest under the canopy of those, to me, unbelievably tall, big, straight trunks, even though there were no bird sounds. But more important than the environment was the feeling, for the very first time in my experience, that I was doing something that was needed and that I did it well; that I was part of a total effort where what I did really mattered and where others relied on the results of my work. I felt part of a team. That they apparently had had some trouble with the fellow I replaced made me feel even better.

After a week we went back to Terrace for the weekend. Pat told me that it would be the last time they could do that, because the next Monday they would have to move the camp farther south and the distance would be too great to make a trip back home for the weekend worth while. That was bad news for me. Pem and I had started working on the foundation for our house, and that work had to have priority over almost anything else if we wanted to move into our house before the winter. There was no question about that need, for their little house was totally inadequate for two families at any time, really, but most certainly during the winter months. We had to move out as soon as at all possible. And because we both had to work during the week, the weekends were our most productive time. And so, after only a week of work on that job and with that crew, I had to say good bye after we had had a few glasses of beer in the Terrace Hotel together. Pat understood the situation immediately, and agreed that this was for me the only thing to do. I was sorry. I had enjoyed my work, my first job in the new country. The fellows who drove me to the Van Stolk home after our visit to the pub made me promise that I would kiss my wife while they were watching us. We kissed, they cheered. Bush workers tend to get very frustrated after a period of isolation…..

Pem found me another job immediately as a compass-man for Dave Hansen, a young Forestry Engineer in charge of the lay-out and construction of logging roads branching off the West Kalum Road, the main road through the area covered by the Management Licence.

The idea of an “Management License” was new to British Columbia. It was explained to me in glowing terms by Ed. Kenney who had been Minister of Forestry in the Liberal Government that had been responsible for the plan. He had an insurance business in Terrace and since I had a house that needed to be insured I went to him. He was fond of talking, especially about his own achievements while in office and particularly to “new Canadians” who had best be turned into Liberals. He failed in my case. But I was very interested in the Management License theory.

The idea made perfect sense: The largest forest companies would be given the sole cutting rights over enormous areas of forest owned by the Crown in exchange for their commitment to care for these lands and the trees. Of course they would take this commitment seriously, for their own future profits would depend on the new crops of trees after the old growth had been cut. The idea was that they would reach the end of the area assigned to them in about 75 years, and by that time the areas where they had started their harvesting would have produced a new crop of second growth trees, not as big individually, but the stands denser, all of uniform size and easy to fell.

It did not work out as planned. Corporations like the Celanese make it their business to cut trees, not to grow them. And in this case the company would have reached the end of their supply within ten years, had they not been granted another supply area north of the first one, twice as big. It was no longer the Celanese…. they had pulled out.

The job turned out to be possibly the most interesting one I had before turning into a teacher. Dave proved an enormously likable man and a most sympathetic and patient boss. He had to be, for his compass man was not nearly as fast and agile on his feet as he was himself and used to complain at times about the rain or the dense growth of bushes, or the snow, or whatever. He used to correct me every time I used the word “impossible” in relation to the road we were planning, when we hit a large rock outcropping or a ravine or whatever. We had to avoid those obstacles in order to keep down the costs of the road construction. “Just,” he used to say, “nothing is impossible; it is all a matter of money.” I thought that his was probably a typical Canadian attitude. And to my delight, he shared with me a sense of the romantic aspects of what we were doing, the sensation that we were possibly the first people to stand on that spot. Nonsense, but alluring. I remember in particular that we suddenly came to a deep, wild little ravine with a creek at the bottom…. a beautiful sight. Since we were always in terrain ahead of the rest of the crews we were most of the time working in old growth forest. Today I would look at those trees with a different perception, but then the only thing that mattered was: how much timber is growing here?

Dave carried a beautiful small double-bitted axe, the kind of axe that was used by “riggers” to top a spartree. He kept it sharp. One day he jumped off a log, swung his axe to maintain his balance, and cut his shin with the axe as it came down. I ran back to where the nearest crew was working and came back with a sufficient number to carrry him out on an improvised stretcher. I didn’t hear a whimper, but he was awfully white while lying in the little truck that carried us back to town. He was off the job for at least a couple of weeks, but I don’t remember that I was laid-off. Trust Dave: he tried to keep me employed as long as he possibly could. When we finally gave up the surveying there was a goodly bit of snow on the ground. And then he made sure that I had another job…..

I’ll write about that one and the ones following it later, but I want to return first to the house-building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2: BUILDING

 

We started to build almost immediately after we had closed the deal with Bill Brandis, I would think no later than during our second week in Terrace but maybe even already during the first weekend. It was to be a very simple and small house. We drew up a plan for something of 20 by 28 feet that had two little bedrooms at the one end, one for John and Hubert, the other one for Lies and Justus. We would sleep in the living room and use the bed during the daytime as a couch, which was made possible by the special feature of one bed, with collapsible legs, disappearing under the other.

site preparation

It is interesting to see the progress made by looking at the fotos from that period. It was a slow job, for both Pem and I were totally without any experience and we could not afford to make serious mistakes. One thing that helped was that everybody in the town seemed to be building, so that “building” was the favourite topic of conversation, and you could always and without embarrassment find out how to tackle certain phases or how to solve specific problems. Bill Brandis, a good carpenter himself, (although, like everybody, entirely self-taught by doing it) was a reliable and ready source of information.

The foundation consisted of poured concrete footings. The forms had to be made so that the finished footing, about 2 1/2 feet high, would be tapered, because there was a potential problem with frost-heaving. Of course it would have been much better if we had built the house with a crawl space, in other words on a continuous concrete foundation wall, but that method was never even considered: it would have been far too expensive. Pem was financing the project, and we hoped to build the house for something in the neighbourhood of $ 800.- , which was as much as he could raise. It could be done for that amount….if we used the least expensive materials.

On top of the footings came 6″ by 6″ cedar beams, and on top of those 2″ by 6″ hemlock floorjoists. The least expensive building material was shiplap. All lumber, construction grade, was available for $50.- per 1000 F.B.M. It was good quality lumber, but it had been cut from trees that had been growing in the forest the week before, so to speak, and shrinkage was incredible. We used it inside and outside, over tarpaper, and on the inside there were cracks between the boards after the shiplap had dried through which you could see the tarpaper. The floor boards were nailed with a 45 degree angle to the joists in order to avoid problems when we would be nailing down a subfloor. In the centre of the house we poured a special footing for a chimney.

The windows were a bargain. They were old army-hut windows, saved from the time when the army barracks were pulled down, and they had stormwindows. We paid $ 11.- per set: a window that could be opened by shoving up the bottom half, and a fixed stormwindow. Not a broken pane in any of them. Lots of little panes: 4 rows of 4 in each window, 32 per set, and we bought 8 sets I believe. They were a pain to have to repaint, and they needed painting, for they all had retained a most awful colour green from their army days. There were lots of army huts in Terrace: the elementary school and the hospital, for instance, consisted of army huts, as did the “Home for the Aged” , on top of the Bench above us, the logging camp and office of the Cellanese, and there were quite a number of families living in them, one on Eby Road close to where we lived, the Christies. They were unmistakable; architectural designers didn’t work for the army.

One of the main causes for the slow progress we made, apart from the fact that we could only work in the evenings and on weekends, was that we used shiplap, instead of plywood and gyproc, on all walls. That required an enormous amount of cutting and nailing. The weather remained sunny and warm for an amazingly long time: right through September, and that helped. We had the building under a roof covered with roll roofing before it started to really rain, in fact, before we had the windows in place. I remember that because one evening, when we were still working after dark by the light of a Coleman lantern that was hanging from a nail in the middle of the room, the lantern caught fire. Pem somehow grabbed the flaming contraption and threw in in one heave out of the window., or rather: out through the opening where the window was supposed to be placed.

That roof was the only slightly distinguishing feature of the house. Because we were living so close to the Bench, which made that side of the house sort of dark anyway, we planned a covered porch on that side to keep our boots outside but dry, and to store things that we didn’t want inside, and entered the house through a door that led from the porch into the kitchen. To get enough height to stand on the porch, the roof over it had to be designed as a lean-to, and we didn’t like that, or the wall had to be higher, and we didn’t like that either, or the whole roof had to be lower pitched than was desirable, for Terrace gets a lot of snow at times. We solved the problem more or less by placing the ridge off-centre, so that the north side, where the Bench was, had less pitch than the south side. People passing by often commented on that rather odd looking roof: “Look at that: a crooked roof!” It worked quite well. What caused some concern later was the roof construction. We used 2″ by 6″ lumber for the rafters, and that was considered by most of our friends (after our roof had been constructed) too light for the possible snow load. We didn’t have any problems, but I was never quite at ease when there was snow to be expected. A lot of people could be seen clearing off the roof on their house after a heavy snowfall, so the problem was a very common one.

the house at the end of Eby Road: before the first winter

The ceiling was, of course, made of shiplap like the rest, nailed to 2″ by 4″‘s There was no insulation anywhere. In the walls we thought that the dead airspace between two layers of tarpaper would be sufficient and there was an attic space above the ceiling, accessible through a small trapdoor. I made a special little ladder to get up on the attic, which was a bit tricky, for you could step only on the 2 by 4’s. We didn’t have to be there often, for only our suitcases were stored there initially. The light lumber that supported the ceiling was more or less justified by the support given by the walls of the bathroom and the two bedrooms for the children. It was amazingly satisfactory, but I did eventually nail short vertical connections between rafters and ceiling joists, which made the whole construction more like frames. The very first insulation we used was a 2″ layer of vermiculite spread on top of the ceiling, and that was already an enormous improvement. The walls were later insulated as well, when I had to take out walls anyway while adding our bedroom, a proper entry and Lies’s little bedroom, and improved the wiring at the same time.

Originally the house had no electricity at all; lighting was provided by coal oil lamps. Our main lightsource was the tall brass lamp with the milkglass shade that we still have. Our first electricity came in March of the next year, when we received the money from the C.N., a four-circuit service. We did have water, for we could just hook up to the water main that ran past our house from the pumphouse over the spring at the foot of the Bench on the other side of the road. The iron pipe that was used for that purpose ran for the first 20 or 30 feet in a ditch that was no deeper than 12 inches, for that was the depth at which the main was buried. They could not go any deeper, because under the layer of gravel you hit the swamp and digging there was not only useless, it was impossible. During the severest winter we have experienced in the Terrace years, when some water mains that were put down 6 feet below road level in town were frozen, we had only once trouble for a few days. That was not a frozen pipe but a bit of an obstruction in the connection between the main and our pipe, a shut-off valve that had probably caught a bit of ice. Ice needles came down with the water from a creek north of the town that was the source of our water supply after the spring had been abandoned because it it was insufficient for the growing population. The welder came out, connected his clamps to that valve and our tap, turned on the power, and the water flowed again, immediately. The problem was that one had to dig down to reach the valve on the main. In our case that was not too bad: you lit a fire and poured a lot of sawdust on it. That pile smouldered all night, and the next morning you could dig out 6 inches of soil. I had to do it twice, but to reach a pipe that is 6 feet down you have to have that smouldering pile going for two weeks…. There were that winter a lot of people burning sawdust along Eby Road. Our pipe, running through swamp water did not freeze up.

first winter

What did freeze during the second winter in our house was the short bit of pipe that came up under our sink. It was protected against freezing by sawdust in a wooden box that fitted exactly between the soil and the floor. The first winter that worked well, but in the second winter the sawdust had become wet from the condensation that formed on the iron pipe, and that wet mass froze solid. I tried to get it thawed out by using a gas torch. The sawdust surface smoked and glowed a bit, but the heat didn’t travel down, and eventually I had to call the welder. I am sure that, facing similar circumstances, I would now avoid using a gas torch in that situation. The image of me lying down on my belly in front of and partly under the sink, desperately trying to get a mass of sawdust to burn, right under my own house, in the middle of the winter and without water, makes me cringe.

Our “bathroom” was spartan: it was an empty little room, no bath, no toilet, no water. The small children could use a white porcelain bowl that used to be a common feature of most bedrooms in Holland when we were young, carefully hidden in a little cabinet beside the bed. We used the great outdoors, and because there was a bit of snow on the ground when we moved in, the end of October, and there was quite a bit more snow that winter, it was a frigid business. So the first thing I did was build a toilet-of-sorts. It consisted of a plywood seat with a hole in it, that was connected with a dug-out pit below through a funnel shaped tube I soldered together from galvanized sheetmetal. The pit had a vent that stuck out above the roof. The trouble was that one could not dig a deep enough, big enough pit in that location, between the foundations of the house and the Bench, for there was no room and if you dug deep enough, let’s say more than 3 feet, you hit the swamp and water would fill your pit. The fact that our house was built in that location and on a layer of sand and gravel that was literally resting on the soft, black soil of the original swamp determined the strict limitations of our options. It was not an “easy” spot. We never managed to find a satisfactory solution for our septic tank and for the drain field that was needed.

While we were building the crate with our furniture arrived in a box car that contained three crates, all approximately the same size. Terrace in those days had no equipment to faciltate unloading containers of that size and weight; no forklifts, no hydraulic equipment other than cats, which were useless for that purpose, not even a platform along the spur where the boxcar had been left. The box in the centre was relatively easy to move, and it had gone when we came with the truck of the “Terrace Transfer” to get ours. It was shoved against the endwall, and it fitted nicely, not leaving enough room on either side to allow a person to get at it from the side. I don’t remember in detail how we went about moving it, but I think that we lifted the bottom edge that was facing us by levering it up, bit by little bit, which was difficult enough because it was shoved against the wall, until we could get a piece of pipe under it as a roller. Then somebody had to get the thin end of a big crowbar between the box and the wall while kneeling on top and somehow pry it away from the wall. As soon as there was a bit of a crack we could use heavier bars and more manpower. Eventually there was an opening big enough to allow a person to get behind it and place a hydraulic jack between the wall and the crate. It was slow work, but we did get it away from the wall and eventually in front of the door. The truck was backed up against the boxcar and with the use of rollers and levers and manpower we managed to move it sideways out of the door and onto the truck deck. As soon as the driver tried to move his vehicle, going slightly uphill from the track, the truck’s frontwheels lifted off the ground. We could only get it uphill to the road by having two people stand on the front bumper to keep the wheels down.

Unloading was something else. Our piano was inside and you couldn’t just drop it off the end. Bill Brandis had the answer: he had just had a big pile of topsoil delivered; by backing the truck up against it with a little jerk, the end might slide off and come to rest on top of the pile. It worked and when the truck left the crate was sitting on top of that big pile of black soil, a bit leaning, but not damaged. What I remember vividly was that it was a grey, darkish day, and that I felt relieved, but a bit worried about leaving it there, covered by a tarp that Bill provided, open to the weather. It would be several weeks yet before we could start unloading it. When we moved in we had to heat the house by means of an enormous old cookstove in the kitchen that we had bought from Jim Smith for $ 8.-. It had three broken lids, but they had been neatly brazed by Ed Shaw, who was working in the machine shop of the oldest and largest of the two sawmills in town. He and his wife lived down the road, opposite the Brandis farm. Our fuel was a pile of slabwood, mostly cedar, and not dry at all. The stove was hooked up to the brick and flue chimney that I had built on the foundation Pem and I had made. I found it terribly difficult and frustrating work, building a chimney. It looked so easy, and it was hell. The end product had the looks of a modified corkscrew, and when, after years, we invited a bricklayer to plaster it, he looked at it in amazement, and asked, disbelief in his voice: “Who in Hell’s name built that….?”

Most novices with wood stoves will have some trouble lighting an old kitchen stove, but one of the first requirements is surely that you must have good, dry kindling and good, dry firewood. We had neither. Result: Moekie lit the monster and then everybody cleared the house for 30 minutes or so, until it started to burn. When she returned the house would be filled with thick smoke. Once it was going it was not too bad, but it was not a good way of heating a house. Of course our house had the added disadvantage of having a chronically cold floor. She told me recently that during that first winter she had never had warm feet during the day. Eventually we got a box heater as well. To stop the wind from blowing under the house we piled snow around the foundation, and that helped some. The next spring or summer I put a skirt all around, but it was probably never a comfortably warm floor.

Added to those problems was Justus’s illness. He had been to school, back in grade one, because we thought it would be best for him to repeat the year now he had to learn a new language. He didn’t find the reception very friendly. He had very light blond, almost white hair and stood out like a sore thumb. His classmates called him “ghost” and teased him. And then he became really sick so that we called the doctor. “Kidney infection” was the verdict, and he had to come to the little Terrace hospital for treatment. He was there for a week. Since we had so recently arrived we were not covered by hospital insurance and the cost of $10.- per day was more than we could bear at that time. Moekie explained as best she could to the doctor, Roger Hicks, who was a nice man, what the situation was, that she had been a nurse and that she thought she could take care of him at home. He looked a bit doubtful but consented. Justus did come home and had to be treated with great care. The litle room where he and Lies slept was so wet from that drying shiplap that shoes under the bed were covered with white mould after a few weeks. And when it started to freeze Moekie removed his bed from the wall where all the nailheads had little white frost caps. But he did get better. And he learned to speak English, because Madzy Brandis came every morning to teach him. When he had recovered and went back to school he fitted in pretty well and the teasing stopped.

more clearing

 

In the spring of ’52 Pem and I started to do some work on the ten acres he and the Samsoms shared, in preparation for the building of the prefab that was being shipped from Holland. The first thing he wanted to have was a small shed to keep all the tools dry. That was a fun project, for it was built of small logs. When that was done we could start with the excavation, by hand, of the basement. It was hard work, for the soil consisted mostly of tough blueish clay, but by fall we had it done. While we were digging the bundles with the prefabricated panels arrived, neatly wrapped, and were delivered and piled on the road allowance we had cleared, an extension of the existing road. They were covered with tarps and left until the next spring.

During that winter we gathered large and small pieces of rock for the fireplace. We found them in sufficiently large quantities on the other side of a steep-sided little valley close to the building site. In order to get them across that gully we constructed a miniature cable car: a heavy cable was anchored safely on both sides, and because the rocks were found on a spot that was higher than the place where we wanted them on the other side, we could load them from a platform on a flat tray suspended from a pulley that rode along the cable. The contraption raced across by itself. A somewhat elaborate, but fun-to-make piece of equipment, designed by Pem. It worked quite well.

When we got ready to start work on the foundation the winter rain and snow had made a horrible mess of our excavation; part of it had sloughed in and the rest was looking more like porridge than as a firm base on which to pour concrete. We did manage to pour the footings after things had dried, but on the spot where the clay had been most mushy the footing cracked and sank a little after we had built the walls for the foundation, not much, but just enough to cause considerable trouble when we erected the wall-panels on that side because the top plate was no longer totally level. All panels were pre-finished: insulated and painted. They were approximately 4 by 8 feet and 2 inches thick. We did get the house up, and, as far as I know, it proved to be quite comfortable. The fireplace was magnificent.

van Heek prefab under construction

The Samsoms, too, were building; in fact when we first met Ied she was standing on a stepladder, nailing shiplap to the side of their tiny, two-room house and she was obviously pregnant. It didn’t take very long before Niek decided that they needed more room, and a more convenient space. Their house was enlarged long before ours.

Samsom house

We all started out by using powder boxes for kitchen cupboards. They were strong, well-made, of a practical size, and easily painted, and they didn’t cost anything: you just picked them up wherever they were left. And since all four of us, Pem, Niek (also a scaler), Dave Hansen and I were every day working on the right-of-way for the main road or close to it, we had no trouble finding them.

Dave had shown me his arrangement in the kitchen-livingroom of their house, and I was impressed: they made excellent cupboards, although they had no doors. Dave and Kay’s house was also small, two-room, but built on logs, “skids” as they were called. In logging camps heavy machinery, like donkeys (the winches to pull the logs to the “landing”, where they were loaded on logging trucks) were often mounted on skids, so that they could be dragged to where they were needed. Dave didn’t have a piece of property when he built that house, and, knowing that he would have to move it, made it moveable. And when he bought a piece of land and did move his house on to it, it was easy to find: we just followed the double track of white slivers left on the gravel and the blacktop right across town.

Dave and Kay Hansen’s cabin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3: TERRACE

 

When we arrived in Terrace, in 1951, it had a population of maybe 2000 people, but that is a guess. It was a small town, where most people still knew each other, although oldtimers like Pit van Stolk complained already at that time that the town had grown so fast that the fun of attending the New Year’s ball in the Community Centre (which was the old army drill hall, a huge, empty, hollow space) had for him largely dissipated: there were too many peope he didn’t know any more, newcomers. When we left six years later the population had risen to over 3000 people and what it is now I don’t know, but much larger. We always believed that it would grow, primarily because of its location on the spot where the Skeena breaks through a low mountain range and becomes a wide, usually placid stream without rapids or other impediments to navigation. A little further to the west the Kalum River flows into the Skeena and the two valleys, one running east-west, the other north-south make Terrace a natural centre for the region.

Its favourable geographic location is important, but you must first get there, and getting there was never easy. The original connection with the outside world was the Skeena. Travellers arrived by boat in Pr. Rupert, transferred to a river steamer and arrived eventually in Terrace, where the steamer was refuelled. That was Terrace’s first commercial activity: wood for the voracious appetite of a wood-fired sternwheeler. After having taken on the fresh supply of fuel it went on, through the narrows of the Kitselas canyon that made it necessary to pull it with winches past the treacherous rocks in the middle of the river, and then all the way to Hazelton, its terminal.

Later came the link provided by the railroad, and it was a big improvement. But the trains were slow, stopping at every little settlement, and better suited for hauling freight than passengers. Then came the second world war and Terrace got a new role as a place where the army trained its reservists. That made it probably necessary to make two major improvements, the airport was constructed and the roads, both east and west, were improved and became officially Highway # 16. That meant that they were now maintained and passable most of the year, except in “break-up time” in early spring. It did not mean that they were good highways. They were still gravel roads, frequently terribly potholed, with rather great variations in width, very muddy when it rained, very dusty in dry spells.

During the time we lived there the road to Kitimat was started and the road from Prince George to Prince Rupert was improved. The drive from Terrace to Pr. Rupert used to be a slow trip. I did it once with Bill Brandis… there and back in eight hours. The road was winding here and there around the bare, rocky shoulders of the mountains. That meant that there was an acute danger of avalanches after a heavy snowfall, but also that you had to be careful at all times, because the road was narrow and vision was very limited in these spots. A drive to Pr. Rupert was a bit of an undertaking, although it is a distance of only 90 miles. The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful: steep and rugged mountains rising straight out of the green water of the river, which is west of Terrace as wide as an inlet.

It is questionable whether the towncentre was established at the ideal location, so close to the spot where the river breaks through the mountains. Because it sits on the meteorological divide between the Coast and the Interior, winters as well as summers in Terrace are unpredictable. We have lived through summers like the one when we built our house, almost two months of steady sunshine, and summers when there was hardly any sun at all. We had winters that were relatively mild and wet and winters when the temperatures went down to twenty below zero F. When that happens the high pressure in the interior causes an outflow of cold air to the coast, and that wind, when it comes whistling through the narrow gap formed by the Skeena, makes life in Terrace really miserable. I have stood behind the display window of the Kalum Hardware, where I worked at the time, and watched a heavy electricity pole right in front of me, carrying the wires that ran east-west as well as those that ran north-south, sway in the wind while it was close to twenty below zero. That was the same morning when a gust of wind lifted the closed lid of Pem’s car, breaking the hinges, and sliding it the whole length of the roof, across the hood, until it landed in the snow in front of the car. We had borrowed the car for the duration of the Van Heek’s stay in Holland. It was a bitterly cold morning, but it was the wind that made it so awful. On the other hand, at the Frank’s farm, at the western end of town, where the Kalum River joins the Skeena, there was usually hardly any wind at all.

The town’s location was, according to a story I heard, but have never had confirmed, due to a clever move by George Little, who had offered the C.N. land for the building of a station for free when they were preparing for the construction of the railway. Where the station was the town would come….. George Little, who was still living in one of the largest houses on Lakelse Avenue, the main street, when we came to Terrace, had a good eye for business opportunities. In the early days, so the story goes, he didn’t pay his workers’ wages in cash, but in vouchers that could be redeemed at his general store, so that he gained twice from their work: first by selling the products the mill produced, and then again by forcing them to pay most of their wages back through the store. That was apparently common practice in little mill towns in the late nineeenth and into the early twentieth century.

The town centre was at the crossing of the highway, Lakelse Avenue, and Kalum Road, that went straight north from Lakelse Avenue before curving to climb up the Bench, and south down a gentle hill in the direction of the river. All the main stores were along those two roads. The two grocery stores, Jim Smith’s and the Co-Op, were on Kalum south of Lakelse, Johnstone and Michael, the hardware, on the corner of the two, the Kalum Hardware also on Kalum, north of Lakelse. The Liquor store was one block north from Lakelse on a street running parallel with it. The only movie theatre in town was on Lakelse, as was, at least in later years, the post office. The Terrace Hotel, which had the beer parlour, was on Kalum south, roughly across from the Co-Op.

The Elementary School was located at the east end of town south of Lakelse, relatively close to the point where you entered the town after crossing the Skeena bridge. The Cellanese logging camp was a little further west on the northside of the same street and the little hospital about a block to the west from there, on a street that ran parallel to Lakelse a block north. At the point where the highway left town Eby Road ran straight north and our house was at the end of Eby Road, where it hits the Bench.

The total distance the kids had to walk to get to school was two miles: one mile along Eby Road, and one mile through town. That last mile was always a little worrisome because there was quite a lot of traffic on Lakelse. It was, after all, not only the main street, but also the highway. It had beautiful big birches on one side, roughly from Johnstone and Michael going west for two blocks. Those birches really made that otherwise featureless thoroughfare into something almost acceptable. George Little’s house was along that stretch. I believe he was the one that had them planted. To my total amazement I discovered, coming in from Shames where I was working at that time, that there were loggers who had not only no idea what sort of trees they were, but who had never really noticed that row as something different, special.

The distances we had to cover were not great and riding a bicycle has not been a hardship at most times. Looking after the bicycles was a bit of a chore, for the gravel roads were hard on the chains, and they had to be cleaned and oiled fairly frequently. Of course all our bikes (except mine I am sorry to say) were single speed models. Not fast, not fancy, but nearly indestructable. I had a de luxe three speed Raleigh, at that time the very summit of bike technology, but I don’t remember how I got it. The kids, each one in her or his turn, had to learn to ride a bicycle. I believe that Justus had learned in Holland, shortly before we left, but the other ones had to be taught. That involved a lot of hard work on our part. Moekie in particular did a lot of running. I remember that I developed a method whereby I grabbed the child by a belt fastened around his or her chest, and then climbed on my own bike. Somehow it worked. It surely reduced the effort. I don’t remember that there was any one who had trouble learning.

Eby Road from the Bench

 

During the winter months it was not much fun, it is true. Eby Road ran north – south, and during the winter there could be an icy wind blowing that took your breath away. It could be so bad that the children, coming home from school, walked the whole length of Eby Road, 1 mile., backwards in order to avoid having to face that blast. On your bicycle you have to face the weather, and I took precautions when I prepared to go to work in the morning by putting on extra clothes: first my regular woollen winter jacket over a heavy woollen sweater, a scarf around my neck, then a wind-tight rainjacket over top. On my head a balaclava, the bottom turned up to cover my mouth, then a skihat with a long peak and earprotecting flaps, finally a pair of woollen mittens, and over that a pair of very large canvas mittens, lined with rabbit fur. The bicycle had sleeves over the handles to keep your hands dry and out of the wind. Equipped like that I could ride my bicycle if, on the way back, I pulled down the peak of my hat so far that I could just see the road ahead of my front wheel in order to keep the wind off my face.

We rode our bikes until the spring of ’54, when we bought our first vehicle, a G.M.C. panel truck, from the garage where Billy Onstein worked. It rattled a bit, but served us well until we got good old reliable Betsy. The winter before we got the truck we had been fortunate to have the use of Pem’s nice Austin while they were in Holland. It spoiled us, I’m afraid.

To prevent cars and trucks from getting so cold that they could not be started in the morning was everybody’s concern during the winter. Most vehicles had built-in block heaters, but our truck did not. I bought a heat lamp, mounted it on a flat plywood base, plugged it in with the help of a long extension cord, and shoved it under the oilpan. With an old piece of blanket over the hood that did the job. I still have the original heatlamp and have used it to keep the pump in the workshop from freezing.

I did get my drivers’ licence in Holland, but when Pem offered us the use of his car, after years of not driving at all, I thought it would be wise to re-learn before getting a Canadian one, and I took lessons from Teun van Burken, in his Dodge pick-up. When he felt I was ready I applied at the R.C.M.P. office in the centre of town, on the crossing of the only two paved roads, Lakelse Avenue and Kalum Road. The constable got in beside me and told me to drive north on Kalum, turn right at the first side road, turn right at the first crossing, right again on Lakelse and once more right back to the station, in other words: just around the block, and “that was all there was to it”, to quote Teun. There were only two ways to fail: gross incompetence, and not stopping before turning back onto Lakelse. I passed and got my license, a temporary one, only good for driving within 100 M. of Terrace, until the testing crew would come up to give me a real test.

That took a while, and both Moekie and I felt that she should learn to drive as well, so I gave her ten lessons in the evening, after supper. She, too, passed and got her temporary license. But when the testing crew came they were so busy that they reduced their load by testing only the males. That left Moekie with her temporary license at the time we drove to Victoria, and forced me to do the driving after 100 M. on the road to Pr. George. She had done a lot of driving in Terrace and passed her test without any trouble as soon as she could do it in Victoria.

I must mention the time that there was anything like a difficulty. I was phoned while working in the hardware that my wife was stuck across a ditch on the Bench Road, and would I go up and help her get out. I borrowed Ray Juby’s fine stationwagon and found her as described, across the shallow ditch on the right hand side of the road, and stuck because she had shorn off some bushes, and one stout little trunk was wedged behind the front axle. With a hatchet I could cut it to get the truck back on the road. There was no damage. What had happened was that, driving up a road that came out on the Bench Road, there had suddenly, at the moment when she was making her right hand turn, appeared a car at a ridiculous speed that scared the daylights out of her. She must have hit the gas- instead of the brake pedal while turning. The only reaction of the kids had been: “Oh, Moekie…..” The driver worked at the “Home for the Aged” (from where he had phoned) and had been late for work.

In Terrace the churches played an important role in those days. The question people used to ask when we met them for the first time was usually: “And to what church do you belong?” We decided that we would belong to the United Church, which seemed the closest to the church we had belonged to in Holland. The other three main congregations were Anglican, Christian Reformed and Roman Catholic, but Moekie mentioned that there were over twenty different services held in Terrace every Sunday morning. The United and the Anglican churches were attended by largely the same kind of people, and, in fact, if one of the two had a very good or a very poor minister, the other one suffered or gained temporarily, because more people would attend the church where they heard the best sermons. The Christian Reformed church attracted all the Dutch immigrants of Calvinist persuasion, who in Terrace as in other communities formed a tightly knit community.

As soon as word got out that Moekie could play the piano she was asked to play for the church services, and that entailed playing for weddings and funerals as well. It was a job she did as long as there was a piano, but as soon as they acquired an electronic organ she quit. We sang in the church choir, with enormous programs at Christmas and Easter. We were fortunate in having a capable and enthusiastic choir director in Vi Seaman, the pre-school teacher, and I have good memories of the practices at her house….until, during the practice for our last Easter service we had to sing a religious text to a melody that was very familiar to us: it was the song that was “sung” by all supporters of all soccer clubs in Holland, wherever they travelled, a simple melody that was shouted, roared, blared by the fans until they had no voice left. The crudest and lowest form of folk song imaginable. Our memories were so strong and so awful, so gross and so anti-musical that we had some serious misgivings before we gave in. Since it was part of a whole program of Easter hymns there was not much you could do but quit altogether, and that we didn’t want to do to Vi.

There was one other occasion where I felt very uncomfortable. It happened during a regular weekly practice for the coming Sunday. Vi’s husband had died and I had offered to take care of that service. We had to come up with something appropriate that we could perform after only one practice. The night before I had had a brainwave: we would, in honour of the deceased, sing a round, “Dona Nobis Pacem”, beautiful, fitting, easy. A noble piece of music. I suggested it, but, to my bewildered amazement, encountered immediate, total resistance from two members, one of them, (the most vociferous) George McAdam. “That is Latin….! That is a popish piece of music……! Never!!” I had overlooked a basic fact, namely that part of the United Church’s members, particularly those from Scottish background, came from the Presbyterian Church, where anti-Catholic tradition was strong. Had I only put other words to that music, the night before…

It was through our affiliation to the United Church that I got familiar with a new tool, that made painting of large surfaces so much easier: the paint roller. I was a steward of the church, and it is the stewards’ responsibility to maintain the building. So, when it needed painting, I was there to lend a hand. The paintroller was new then, and controversial. Many people who took pride in their ability with a brush didn’t want to hear of this new-fangled gadget that was a threat to their claim to recognition. I must admit that I tended to side with them…. until I had this opportunity to try one. It didn’t take long to convince me: we all had so much to do, and so little time to do it in, that any help was welcome. Who would even dream of painting inside walls with a brush now?

Terrace was a more or less typical small, “northern” town, a logging community, but it had a few redeeming institutions: there was an active community orchestra, conducted by Frank Gavin, who was a “cat skinner”, and whose heavy hands seemed to be suited only for that kind of work. But he carved astonishingly delicate flying geese as decorations for his lamps, and his enthusiasm for music was great and genuine. Pem and Pit both played in that orchestra; Pem violin and Pit cello. Of course I joined. I was the only flute, and I had the strong impression that my contribution was somewhat futile, because I was sitting in front of the large brass section and usually could barely hear myself. Moekie played piano, made possible when Bertha Gavin, Frank’s wife, offered that she would come and babysit at home. One of the enduring memories of Pit’s playing was that he used to tune his instrument rather quickly, and then declared that it was “good enough”. It has remained one of the family stories.

The other cultural activity was the “Little Theatre” that performed once a year. They had some real talent and an enormous asset in their director, Loreen McCall, a strong, driving personality. Mien was heavily involved in it, worked very hard and was soon one of the main pillars of the group. Their performances were polished and, I thought, amazingly good. It was a popular institution in the town where the only other form of visual entertainment was a rickety movie theatre. Moekie was somewhat involved in one of their productions, “Arsenic and Old Lace” where she had to play a few bars of theme music. It was a small, but essential part and she had to attend some practice. Little Theatre practices were always at night, mostly during the winter. We had our van at that time, and she had her license, but only just. The van was at times a bit difficult to start in cold weather and after one of the practices it refused. “No problem,” the other members told her, “we’ll give you a push. Just put the van in second gear, push down the clutch, and let it come up when you have a little speed. It should start then.” To their amazement it did not, and they pushed her all the way home. She had been so intent to keep the van on the road that the last part of the instructions had been forgotten….

When we arrived Terrace did not have a library. But our kids always had books for there was the “Open Shelf”, operated by the Provincial Library in Victoria, a wonderful service. They sent us their catalogues on request, each child filled in what he or she wanted, and the books were mailed out free. We could keep them for six weeks and mail them back, again free, with the new order. It was a festive day when the parcel with books arrived. By the time we left all of our kids were ardent readers. And when we were living in Langford we drove once a week to the Open Shelf and they could pick and choose literally from the shelves. When we moved to Victoria that stopped of course, for the purpose of the “Open Shelf” was to provide a service to places that didn’t have a library.

Mien was eager to try to get a library in Terrace and put together a committee for that purpose. I was interested and became a member of the committee. I don’t think I have ever had to do anything, but my name is mentioned as one of the “founding members” of the Terrace Public Library. I must admit that I am a bit proud to have my name associated with an institute I deeply believe in. For the first couple of years it operated as a branch of the library in Pr. George and we received every half year or so a big chest full of books that had to be returned at the end of the stipulated term, but I believe that is all history, and the Library in Terrace is now part of the cultural fabric of the town.

Hunting was big in Terrace. Pit had hunted a lot but I don’t think he ever went out any more. He had beautiful hunting stories, though. Every hunter hoped to get a moose in the fall, for that would keep a family in meat for the whole winter. His hunting partner was Sam Kirkaldy, the postmaster. The story Pit told about Sam was that he had been out in the bush, looking for signs that would indicate that there was moose in that area, when suddenly he came upon a splendid, large animal that slowly approached the spot where Sam was standing, through the bushes. He didn’t hesitate, fired and saw the animal go down, but then unexpectedly heard a whole string of furious oaths come from the spot….Small wonder, for he had killed a harnessed horse that was being used to pull logs. The owner was fuming with anger. The incident cost Sam dearly, for he had to pay for the horse, and the laughing back in town was never-ending.

The sale of freezers tended to jump during the hunting season, with the result that both hardwares sold the ones they had in stock, and you could almost count on it: as soon as the one we had had for a year was sold there would be either a customer or a phonecall because somebody else had been lucky. It didn’t matter that you promised to phone in an order that same moment, and that it would be delivered within a week: if you have butchered a moose, you need a freezer, right then and there.

Shooting a moose is made difficult by the very fact that they are enormous beasts. It was no good to shoot a moose somewhere deep in the bush, for you could never hope to carry it out. You had to shoot it close to a road where you could get to it with a truck. Dave Hansen and a friend were out looking for moose a whole long afternoon, without even sighting one. When they finally returned to the spot where they had parked their truck and sat down under a tree for a little rest, facing the clearing, there was a sudden movement in the bushes behind them and looking over their shoulder they saw a fine moose right there, within maybe twenty feet. They shot it, hardly daring to believe their good fortune, and shared it between them.

As soon as the road to Kitimat was “in” there were people buying land along it. It was probably not very expensive land, for there were of course no services at all. One man who had built his house there was apparently a practical joker. He made, from cardboard, a lifesize moose and attached, somehow, a pair of real moose antlers to it. He planted it in some bushes close to the road, and it looked remarkably realistic. He got a charge out of seing people drive by, stop, back up for another look, get out of their vehicle with their rifle at the ready, take careful aim and shoot what they thought was their kill of a lifetime, so close to the road. When the moose did not move they went up to have a look…. swear loudly, hurry back to their vehicle and race off. The story has it that he had to replace that moose several times, each one shot to shreds. I can not swear that it is a true story, for I have not seen that moose.

As far as I know there were no people skiing in Terrace. Dave Hansen got around on snow shoes on occasion and you saw the odd pair of snow shoes hanging in people’s entries, but no skis. I am sure that must have changed, for there was a ski hill cleared and a lift installed on the slopes of Thornhill Mountain during the years after we had left.

There was a curling rink in the town, but we never went there to skate. The Brandis farm had a low lying area, the most productive land on the farm by far, that would flood most winters, and if it was cold enough it would make a good, albeit rather limited, skating rink in the Dutch tradition. We did skate on that ice, and it was fun, but I can only remember doing it once, and I don’t know why. Probably because I had to work during the week and the times when there would be ice during the weekend may have been few. And maybe it was often just too cold…

Summer activities were easier: there were places where you could hike, or go for a swim, or have a picnic. We hiked up Thorhill Mountain, the first time only Justus and I with Bill Wellings, the manager of the Bank of Montreal, and his family. They introduced us to Bakers Dot chocolate as a good trail treat. It was a fine hike; the trail was good, rather steep in places, but well maintained, and the views were incredible. The higher you came, the thinner the trees of course, and in the end you actually rose above the tree line. That may seem rather strange, for Thornhill is only a bit over 4000 feet high, but it is of course the result of Terrace’s location: it is so much farther north than where we are living here. The winters are longer, there is more snow earlier on the mountains around Terrace, and it stays longer. Thornhill mountain, with its deep snow and strong winds (you could see a vane of flying snow coming off the top in the winter) is a harsh environment for trees. In Terrace during the summer it was much longer light and Moekie and I remember working together on the roof, nailing asphalt shingles, well after ten o’clock at night. The noise didn’t seem to bother the children at all.

Northern lights are an almost common spectacle, sometimes like random searchlights flashing across the night sky, but on one occasion turning the whole sky an amazing, an unbelievable red. That is, I believe, a pretty rare phenomenon. Ed Shaw, who had been a prospector in Northern Ontario, said the next day that he had seen it only once before.

Our second hike up Thornhill Mountain was a few years later, with the whole family. Arriving at the top and looking at the sparse growth and the ponds in that rocky waste was always a thrill. There was the fire lookout cabin on top, securely anchored by steel cables to the rock, where during the summer the guy lived who had to spot starting fires. It must have been a boring job, for you were so utterly alone up there, although you had radio telephone to maintain communication with the Cellanese office downtown. There was nothing to do, but you had to remain watchful all the time. Lots of time to read, I suppose. Teun had that job usually and did not mind the loneliness, or so he said. The lookout was changed to a different site at a lower elevation in the years when we were still in Terrace, because Thornhill was too often hidden in clouds. I wonder what happened to the old cabin on the top.

And there was Lakelse Lake. It seemed to me that all the old timers living in Terrace had a cabin on Lakelse. The road that connected Terrace with its favourite summer recreation spot was an old logging road, built on the cheap and avoiding all major tree stumps. We were told that there were, I believe, over 130 curves in a road 17 miles long. I never did count them, but there was hardly a straight stretch anywhere. The only one I can remember was at Jackpine Flat, I guess about one mile long, and for the rest the road twisted and turned like a snake in a frenzy. It was a narrow road as well, and terribly dusty. It was advisable not to try to go fast. They warned you in Terrace to be careful and stay out of the way of Dud Little, who took pride in the fact that he didn’t slow down for anybody. All the cabins were on the east side of the lake, for that was the side where the road led you. There was no access road to the other side in those years, and the few hardy souls that built cabins there had to cross the lake. One of the families who did that was the McCall clan. I remember that we rented a cabin for a month during the summer. At the end of that month we found the whole family McCall one morning on our beach: they had had a skunk for a visitor, and their dog had chased it under the cabin, where it had protested and let go. It is an unlikely vile smell. We quite understood that the McCalls could not stay inside. I believe they had spent the whole night on the beach in front of Ed Whalen’s cabins. They had thrown whole cans full of tomato juice at the spot where the skunk had hit, because they had heard that it would neutralize the stink…. they knew better now than to waste good tomato juice. Even scrubbing has only limited effect…. if you can stand to get so close that you can scrub. Skunks are not intimidated by any animal; they know their power.

I have very happy memories about that stay, although we had a case of badly sunburnt feet: John and Hubert standing on a raft they had assembled, their feet wet all the time, and in the hot sun. They sailed their two model boats and I took a picture of those. We sailed in Susie Adam’s boat after Moekie had made two sails from bedsheets provided by Susie. We had to get our sewing machine from Terrace for the production. The next summer the boat had sailmaker-made sails. It was a joy to sail.

We went with Ed and Ann Shaw to an old house on the south side of the lake that had had a hot water system by piping the water in from a hot spring that was located near by.

You reached the hot spring by walking along a “corduroy” road, a road made of parallel logs. The corduroy construction was necessitated by the swampy soil at the south end of the lake. After a while you saw mist slowly rising from an open spot between the trees. Coming closer you could see that it was not mist, but rising steam. And then the wide, round opening in the forest came into view, with in the middle the still, dark water of an almost perfectly circular pond, some thirty or forty meters in diameter, bubbles breaking and steam rising in its centre. The shore consisted of a very slippery, grey clay that gradually showed darker as the water got deeper. It seemed to slope very slowly at first, but faster as the distance from where we stood increased, until it plunged, like an inverted exponential curve, toward the black centre where the bubbles continuously rose and broke. It was very quiet, very peaceful, but that slippery curve and the black centre were nevertheless menacing, an unspoken but clearly stated threat. The scene left a strong, clear impression of something going back endlessly in time, notwithstanding the little basins that people had dug on the edge, to sit in the water after it had cooled off a little. They were the only signs of human activity I can remember, although there must have been something indicating where the houseowner got his share; wooden troughs or pipes, or whatever.

We have seen the same spot later, after the road to Kitimat had been completed (it ran quite close to the hotspring) and the water rights had been obtained by a Terrace logger/entrepreneur who had built a motel, reduced the circumference of the original pool drastically, built a swimming pool and so on, and so on. We could only feel terribly sorry that nobody had had the foresight to secure it as a park.

We had picnics, on our own property, on Pem and Mien’s property, but also, once in a while, on the top of Terrace Mountain, which wasn’t a real “mountain”, at something like 2000 feet, but a big lump of rock looming behind Terrace. From the top you had a lovely view of the town and the valley. The hike up was not too strenuous, but just enough to make it sort of interesting.

And one of the favourite spots was Kleanza Creek, Gold Creek , which emptied into the Skeena some ten or fifteen miles upstream, on the other side of the river. It was a salmon rearing creek and it was there that we saw for the first time the humpbacks struggle upstream to spawn. A beautiful spot, protected, even in those days, by its park status. The last stretch of the creekbed is wide, and the water rushes down to the Skeena in a joyful, fast current. On the flat shore, under the trees, stood a number of camp tables and a logcabin, where an old fellow lived, who looked after the park. Against the wall of his cabin leaned a number of wooden stilts he had made for kids to play with. At the far end of the flat part the creek came thundering through a narrow canyon in a series of falls. You could climb up a litle steep trail to the rim of the canyon , from where you could see the creek at its original own self, a wild little stream in a wild vast country. In the creekbed were left the rusty parts of what I have always thought of as an attempt to use the creek for generating purposes, gears, wheels, assorted metal rods and such. Because they rather emphasized the untamed nature of the creek, (the attempt had clearly failed) they seemed to us to be more part of the environment than intrusive and misplaced. And in those days we still had a very romantic view of prospectors, miners and, especially, gold diggers, a view that didn’t take into account the obvious motivation for their activities: raw greed. To us they belonged to the adventurers who had “opened up the country”. Adventurers they were, but “opening up the country” is a loaded term that has a nasty racial connotation: it considers the recent invasion by the white man, a mere 150 years ago, as the start of history in a land where aboriginal peope had lived since the ice retreated.

It’s less than 50 years since we arrived. It seems hard to believe that in that short span of time the harsh consequences of human greed and an explosive growth in human population have become so disturbing that we wonder what is left for our grandchildren. At the time I am trying to recall forests were “endless”, mineral resources “waiting to be discovered”, real, untouched wilderness was everywhere as soon as you went a couple of miles outside the village, and grizzlies were more threatening than threatened. Of course all the signs must have been there, but we didn’t recognize them. It was that frame of mind, that sort of innocence, that made it possible to start and complete projects like the Kenney Dam, the Bennett Dam, and all the other dams, mines and projects that have had far greater and far more devastating environmental impact than was predicted at the time of their construction. It’s as tempting as it is useless to speculate what might have been the results if the plan to build a mono-rail right through the Rocky Mountain Trench, as proposed during the W.A.C. Bennett years, had been realized.

The Skeena River system was, of course, important for the salmon fishery and sport fishing was very popular in Terrace. Pit van Stolk had been a keen fisherman and took me to the hardware of Michael and Johnstone especially to show me, with the enthusiasm that was so typical for him, fishing rods made of glass…… I couldn’t believe what I saw; I had never even heard of such a thing. But while I was working in the Kalum Hardware and met all those who actually did catch fish I was inspired to buy a rod like that myself, together with all the paraphernalia deemed necessary. I could hardly wait to try my luck. During our first trip to Lakelse Lake after this purchase I had to try it out. So, when we crossed a little bridge over a nice creek, I parked the van and announced, with appropriate casualness, to my admiring family that I was going to do a bit of fishing, because this did seem like a good spot. Mine was a casting rod, and, working in the place where we sold this stuff, I knew how to use it and when and where. I picked a spot where there didn’t seem to be any obstructing branches, selected a nice, colourful lure, attached it carefully, and started casting. So focused was I on what I was doing that I paid little attention to the movements of the children. I hadn’t made more than half a dozen casts, when suddenly there was a loud scream behind me. Turning around I saw Lies bending over and clutching her leg…..I had caught my own daughter and the vicious barbed hook was deeply imbedded in the calf of her leg.

There is no way you can extract a fishhook without doing a lot of excruciatingly painful damage. We cut the line and drove as quickly as possible back to Terrace and to the hospital, where the nurse took one careful look at the situation, and explained to me that there was only one way to go about it: cut the eye off the hook, and push it all the way through. “Don’t attempt to pull it back,” she warned,”that would make it far worse.” She was not volunteering to do the job for me. I suspect that this was meant to be a lesson to the dad of the unfortunate victim. We learn by suffering. Lies was incredibly brave during the operation, performed after we had come back home. The hook was brand new and apparently clean, for the resulting wound healed quickly and without infecting.

The incident reduced my enthusiasm for fishing by quite a bit. I remember going once, with Justus, to the Zymoetz River, where it joins the Skeena, a short distance upstream from Terrace. It was supposed to be a terrific place for catching steelhead trout, but I caught nothing. It was a grey, blustery day, the river was fast and grey and cold, and we didn’t have a lot of fun. We didn’t stay long. When I got my lure tangled up behind a rock I cut the line and we left. I may have tried again in later years, but I never developed a taste for fishing. It was more rewarding to pay one of our customers, a kid about fourteen years old, fifty cents for a ten pound salmon. He always caught fish, far more than his mother could use, and he could pay for the lures he had to replace by selling the surplus. He got his lures at the Kalum Hardware.

Terrace was a logging town. Excessive drinking was common. We talked about it around the dinnertable sometimes; it was impossible to avoid talking about it, for it had a profound effect on the town and the people living there. Apparently our talking had been so effectice, that John, when he heard that his father had bought one bottle of spirits for Christmas (I believe it was a bottle of Bols Cherry liqueur) was furious, openly hostile and obviously terribly upset: his dad was going to go to pieces any time now, for he was starting to DRINK.

The Liquor Store once sold during one day, maybe the day before Christmas, for over $10.000.-, all in cash, of course. For a population as small as the one in Terrace, that is a lot of liquor.

At the extreme west end of town, where Eby Road joined with Lakelse, the road made two unexplained right-angled turns, first south and then almost immediately west again. In a highway that is not a good feature. We used to refer to that corner as “Kirby’s corner”. It was there that I almost caused a terrible accident during the very first days after our arrival in Terrace. Pem had invited me to drive the families to the spot where we were going to build our house. I came with moderate speed up to the corner, but didn’t realize that it was really ninety degrees, not just a somewhat tight corner and didn’t brake nearly enough. I almost lost control, the van careened around the corner leaning sharply to the right, maybe on two wheels, and Pem, screaming at me :”Just.. !! Just.. !! Brake…!!!” got the shock of his life. We all did. I felt terrible, but grateful that nothing had happened. It was the end of my driving for years, until I got my second set of driving lessons from Teun.

On the highway, just before that corner, was the building materials store of Albert and McCaffery that burned pretty well to the ground some five years after opening. I had not believed it possible, but during that fire I have seen whole sheets of thin aluminum, used as insulation on the inside under the gyproc, burn while flying around in the draught like sheets of flame before coming down.

At that corner, too, was the dirt track that took you to Sande’s mill, where I worked for a year. But that is another chapter.

Sande’s mill: the deck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 4: FAMILY LIFE

 

A problem when trying to write down one’s memories is that they are by definition personal, the writer’s memories. They can include bits and pieces of memories of those around him, as they are told to the writer, but they cannot give more than a one-sided picture of the time. In this case that means that little was written about the family members, whereas they form in reality the core of all that went on. It was the future of our children that was the strongest reason for leaving Holland. Time, then, to turn to them and try to patch together a picture that places them in the centre.

It is amazing how children adjust to almost any circumstances and make do with the little they have. Our children had very few toys. We could not bring much with us and they didn’t have much in Holland to begin with. But they were not unhappy children. Who knows? maybe the lack of bought toys stimulated their imagination and their inventiveness and was a blessing in disguise.

There were the Dinky toys, and they formed the most highly valued part of their treasures, shared by all, endlessly played with both inside and out (although I believe that there were certain ones especially for playing outside). They were a main source of amusement during the endless train ride across the country, they were played with in Terrace, later in Victoria, and there are even some that survived and are played with by children who visit us on Denman. The collection grew with every birthday and Christmas, they became more sophisticated, but the older ones were never abandoned.

We brought with us a few wooden toys: a doll buggy and a truck, both of which have survived and are still serving their purpose today when we have young visitors. The wheels of the truck were very badly worn afer we had been in Terrace for about a year, which was not surprising after the hours it had been used in the sand at the foot of the Bench. Fortunately I met a fellow at work who owned a wood lathe and offered to make new ones. And when those were worn out I had a lathe myself so that they could once again be replaced. It seems to me that the wheels of the doll buggy are still the original ones. The doll that sleeps in it at this moment is still the original Nancy that was one of the first toys bought in Canada, from the Eaton’s Catalogue

I believe.. She has become pathetically pale over the years. In Terrace one more wooden toy was added: a tugboat that, somehow, never got painted, but it survived and is, still unpainted, part of our collection of toys.

I remembered from my own childhood the fun we had with Meccano and when we discovered that it was still available we started to collect our own set, adding to it with every opportunity. I still have a very soft spot in my heart for the different elements that together make up a set: the strips, the plates, the platforms, the bright colours, the little bolts and nuts, the wheels and axles, the wide variety of bright brass gears….. all together a wonderful toy. It was not a toy that was totally suitable to the environment of our house. We lived for years on shiplap boards for flooring, and the nuts and bolts tended to disappear in the cracks . Without those, no Meccano construction. Moekie found the answer: we got a magnet. And I am surprised when still, time and again, I find those little bolts in places where I had not expected them at all.

The other toy that proved immensely successful was a log cabin building set. It was a “Sinterklaas” present, offered by the holy man himself when Susie Adam introduced him at our house one year. The parts of that set have been used in so many different applications, from log cabins to harbours for little wooden boats or to whatever was needed at any time that it is hard to imagine any play situation inside where they were not used. I have a suspicion that that set is at least partly responsible for John’s preference for log construction.

Our kids grew up with tools and lumber, for they lived in unfinished houses and the finishing was done by ourselves, so that they were close to, and more or less part of, the process. It was really not surprising that they wanted to make things of the scraps of wood they found. When I was making something there would often be one of the kids sitting on top of the workbench, watching what I was doing. Therefore I should not have been surprised when I noticed that they, as soon as they were allowed to use chisels, knew how to hold and use them, but I was. I was also very proud.

One of the most successful toys made of wood scraps, was a little bulldozer, made by nailing one thinner piece to the end of a thicker one of the same length. Soon all kids had their own for playing in the sand at the foot of the Bench, building roads on which the Dinky toys could travel. They were followed, if I’m not mistaken, by boats, but I don’t remember whether those were used in the creek or only on the floor of the livingroom.

A workshop has most of the time been an essential and often useful part of our lives. In Terrace I built one of reject lumber, with two cedar logs as a foundation. It was a very simple structure but it served us well. I had forgotten this, but Lies remembers that in that workshop a round lid of a tin can was nailed to the inside of the door. It served as a target for little arrows that had nails stuck in the end and that made a wonderfully satisfying “clunk” if they hit the target.

the workshop

Interesting detail: smells tend to linger in our memories. All the kids remember the gluepot that contained some kind of animal glue, made, I believe, from hooves, horns and the like, that was heated in a small cast iron pot, suspended in another cast iron pot that contained water, “au bain Marie” you could call it. It was the most common glue used in those days and when heated it spread a most peculiar smell, a smell I didn’t mind, but strongly disliked by the kids. I heated it on the what we used to call an “airtight” heater, (which was anything but airtight) that I used to heat the workshop. It was made of sheetmetal, with a domed lid through which it was fuelled, and a round opening at the bottom for a draught that could be reduced or closed by a little circular piece of sheetmetal. The whole contraption was flimsy, but it produced a lot of instant heat and it was very popular with trappers and the like, because it was light and cheap. You had to put a layer of rocks or sand in the bottom before lighting it for the first time.

It worked quite satisfactorily until a spark escaped and set the whole workshop on fire, which burned totally in a short fierce blaze. Lies told me that she has a vivid memory, not unlike some kind of a nightmare, really, of waiting with the whole family at the foot of the Bench for the first sign of the firetruck, way down the road. It took apparently some time. The only thing somebody had thought of taking from the house to save was a little yellow blanket over Hubert’s cot.

Nobody was in the house, which was, miraculously, untouched, and since we had insurance we did not suffer a financial loss. I lost most of my tools, and some of those were irreplaceable, but I did not use them very often and have not missed them much. The man appointed by the insurance company to estimate the total loss was a local contractor I knew quite well. He measured the floor area of the original building as indicated by the ashes and told me that a building of that size would cost so much to replace. I don’t remember the figure he used, but I do remember that it was an awful lot more than what I had paid for the materials. Then he wanted to know if I remembered more or less what tools I had had, and asked if I could produce a list for him? That was no problem. When the cheque came it was more than enough to buy new tools, and there was some left over to do something about our house. I did not replace the workshop, I suppose because we already knew that we would be leaving.

With the workshop I slipped back into the topic closest to my heart, myself. So: back to the family. As soon as we had moved into our house Moekie took all of our children for an exploratory walk, first along the old road, that time and growth had reduced to merely a trail, then up the Bench, and back along the road to the place where the zig-zag trail led back to the pumphouse. All this was accomplished on wooden shoes. The gravel of the road proved to be disastrously effective in destroying wooden shoes that were already quite worn, but when the kids were back most of them had holes in the soles. It was a quick lesson: wooden shoes were not practical. The thing to have was rubber boots.

That first winter we had a lot of snow. Because the Bench sheltered us against the biting north wind the children could play outside in the snow when everywhere else it would have been too cold. It was deep enough to allow them to dig tunnels into it. If, for some reason, we went to town as a family (I imagine that going to church would have been such a reason) we had to walk, of course, but Hubert was too small to walk that distance, so he was bundled up and put on a sled.

“That first winter….” In retrospect I wonder how we got through it, but at the time it didn’t seem like a big deal or a struggle. I certainly don’t have any really bad memories. It was all so new, so different. There were certain things that caused problems, our difficulties with the language among them. When Moekie went shopping on Saturdays at the Smith store, she was glad that she didn’t have to talk to anybody, or ask questions, because she could take from the shelf whatever she needed. But not at the meat counter; there she pointed to what she wanted. That worked, except when she wanted ground beef. She knew enough to be able to ask for “One and a half pound, please,” but was disturbed when the butcher on the other side didn’t understand what she wanted and made her repeat her request. She did: “One and a half pound, please,” but he looked at her, still puzzled, not comprehending, until suddenly he grinned and said: “Ah, pound-a-half!” in such awful chewed-up American that it seems unlikely that Moekie could ever have said it the same way.

Justus started school a month after our arrival in Terrace It was not easy for him: shorts were not worn in Terrace because of the bugs, and so he had to have jeans. He was very fair, his hair almost white so that he stood out in a group and he didn’t speak or understand English. He was called “Ghost”b y his classmates. After a month he picked up a “flu-bug, and ended up in hospital with kidney infection. µoekie had to make doctor’s appointments and had to use the phone. Those phonecalls required careful preparation. For some reason, using the phone is almost more frightening than anything else to people who are struggling with the language. I remember the feeling of momentary panic when taking the thing off the hook before answering it. She did it; there was no choice, but it must have been a terrifying experience. We have gotten over our fear.

What made life for Moekie a lot more complicated was that we had no electricity to begin with, but even if we had had it there were certain things we wouldn’t have been able to use, because both the little Hoover washing machine and the vacuumcleaner were wired for 220 V. which is the normal power for domestic use in Holland. In order to use them the armatures of their motors had to be re-wound, and that was done in Vancouver. Our first electrical service was installed after we had received a cheque from the railways to repay what we had been charged extra (and erroneously, as it turned out) in Halifax when we arrived. It was a minimal service: 4 circuits, but it made a world of difference. We could suddenly use our double electric hotplate for which we had bought the special, square-looking pans that are still in full use.

Eventually the hotplates were changed for a “rangette” that provided us with an oven, that is to say: if you didn’t want to use the top, for you had to choose: one element on full, or two on half, or the oven. And Moekie could do her laundry in a working Hoover. How she managed before I don’t know, but she did. I don’t even understand how she could do the laundry for our whole family in the Hoover, which was really tiny compared with what we have now and use to do the laundry for two people…. It gets even more amazing when I recall that three of our children were wearing diapers, Hubert all day, John and Lies at night. Lies used them until she went to school. (Annalies apparently had the same problem, happily explained by her mother as a sign of superior intelligence) I suppose that the years we spent on the “Janneke Jans” were good practice for what was waiting for my wife in Terrace. I am sure it was good preparation for me.

Life was, even after electricity, not easy for her. There were the boxheater and the kitchenstove that had to be lit and kept burning. We were not well prepared and didn’t have dry firewood in abundance. We did not have dry firewood, period. But even the wet cedar slapwood that we used was at one point gone, and there was nothing else. So the lady grabbed an axe, walked off into the snowy world and felled a litle tree, an alder or a birch, cut it in pieces and hoped that it would burn. It did…. reluctantly. I got the story when I came home and was proud. There was no insulation in the walls, or in the floor, or in the ceiling, and we needed a lot of wood, I’m sure. Moekie dried the diapers on the attic, which could be reached by means of a little ladder through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the livingroom, and often found them frozen stiff. The first insulation was a 2 inch thick layer of vermiculite, spread by hand between the ceiling joists. You had to be very careful on the attic to step only on the joists or on the loose boards across them, for the nailed shiplap that formed the ceiling might not support the weight of an adult. The vermiculite may have been laughably inadequate, but it sure made a big difference. The rest of the insulation had to wait until we started to make drastic changes in the house, but by the time we left all the walls were insulated as well, with 2 inch blackish, nasty fibreglass that stuck in your hands, packed between two layers of paper like in an envelope, which was stapled to the studs. The storm windows that were part of the sets when we bought them proved to be a blessing, although they were very far from airtight.

The floor was not insulated either of course and the only thing that stopped the wind from blowing there and make our feet into icicles was the bank of snow I had piled all along the edge of the house. It was more or less effective, but it didn’t stop the temperature from dropping to below freezing. Our waterpipe came up under the kitchen and ran through a wooden box that was fitting exactly the space between the soil and the floor. It was filled with sawdust, for insulation. It was such a logical idea and for a while it worked fine, but unfortunately the air had been moist and that moist air had condensated against the iron pipe until the sawdust was quite saturated with moisture and became a first rate conductor for the frost. The result was naturally that our water supply was one day cut off, because the column in the pipe running through the box was frozen. We had very little money, and to order the welder to come and thaw it out was something of an expense that might be avoided. Pem had a blow torch, one of those old brass tanks with a pressure pump, filled with kerosene or gas and equipped with a burner that produced an impressive flame. It used to be the standard equipment of all plumbers and roof repair crews (in the construction of roofs, especially large roofs, lead was often used to seal valleys, to form gutters, and so on). I would bet that it is a piece of equipment that has more contributed to church fires than anything else. Anyway, that night I crawled under the sink, opened the floor above the box, found the frozen lump of sawdust and started merrily to heat the pipe, hoping that the heat would eventually travel down along the pipe and thaw it. Heat doesn’t travel well downwards and what I produced was a smoking smouldering top layer of sawdust but nothing else, no matter how enthusiastically I tried to set our house on fire. I don’t remember exactly how we fixed the problem, but I seem to recall that I ended up breaking down the whole box and removing the frozen sawdust bit by bit. The pipe was of course insulated again in some way, but I have only the haziest recollections and don’t remember how it was accomplished. Effectively apparently, for that section of the pipe didn’t freeze any more.

January 1953: woodshed, house, workshop

We were not totally without water during this episode, for we had the spring that supplied the town with its water right across the road, and it was not too much of an effort to fill a bucket with the purest water I have ever seen or tasted.

 

That spring was the source of the creek that flowed past our property, followed the Bench and crossed Pit van Stolk’s property way downstream. Pit had visions of having a trout stream on his property so that he could fish them for supper right there. To that purpose he constructed some kind of a dam across the creekbed, which was very shallow, to create a pond in which he hoped to raise the trout. Whether there was ever any sign of trout in the creek I don’t know, but I am convinced that his dam was one of the causes of poor de-watering of our land, among a host of other ones. The creek was not only shallow, but choked with debris for its entire length: trees, branches, weeds, you name it. After we had left it was cleaned out and made a lot deeper, and the result was that our swamp dried out.

It crossed Eby Road of course, and the little wooden bridge there was a favourite place for the boys to float their “boats”: They threw sticks in the water on the on side and then quickly crossed the bridge to see whose would be first to reappear. Justus was as interested in the game as his two younger brothers and on one occasion was in such a hurry that his foot caught the beam on the other side and made him fly, head-first, into the creek. While he crawled out, sopping wet from top to toe, the other two were watching him from the bridge, laughing their heads off. Their joy with his misfortune made him so mad that he chased them furiously home, without catching them because his wet clothes slowed him down. His mother’s reaction is not recorded.

Just on the other side of the road was the property of the Petryshyn family, father, mother and two daughters. The children played often together, and I have a feeling that the two Petryshyn girls taught our kids, and especially the three younger ones, a lot of English. According to Lies the real attraction of the Petryshyn girls was that they had access to almost unlimited amounts of fruit, blackberries and apples . The chickens, she said, had made little tunnels under the blackberry bushes, and the children were small enough to crawl under there to find the biggest, sweetest and juiciest berries. Notwithstanding the fact that they lived so close there never developed a real friendhip between the Petryshyn girls and our kids, and over the years the distance seemed to get bigger, rather than less. The parents were nice people with whom we had only the most casual contact. He worked for Charlie Adam as a projectionist in the movie theatre. They invited us over one evening for “coffee and dessert”. It must have been soon after we arrived, for we didn’t have the slightest notion of what that meant. The dessert consisted of pie with baked Alaska and Mrs. Petryshyn was delighted to find out that we had never even heard of it. To say that we were surprised when we found out what was coming is an understatement: it was almost like another meal and very different from anything we had ever enjoyed after supper. I think I felt sorry not having been forewarned so that I might have eaten less at suppertime: the pie was delicious but I couldn’t do it real justice.

On the Petryshyn property lived a bachelor in a trailer, a young fellow whose last name I don’t remember, but he was known to anybody as “Larry”. Larry was keenly interested in things mechanical, and particularly if they had anything to do with electricity. He drove a magnificent black Dodge panel truck on which he had mounted an electric winch to pull him out of tight spots. It was an object of great interest to all of us, for we had never seen anything like it. We had not even heard about that kind of equipment, for which there was in Holland probably less use than in Terrace. But Larry’s stature increased beyond that when we discovered one day that he had brought home the fuselage of a real airplane….I don’t remember what he did with it, if anything at all, but it seemed full of romantic promise at the time.

Winters in Terrrace could be cold and the frost would then go down deeply, particularly if the frost came in the wake of a wet fall. There was one winter when the water main down-town, 6 feet below the surface, had frozen. During the spring there was always a period when the roads became very muddy: the sun melted the ice in the top layer, but the water could not drain away because the deeper layers were still frozen. “Spring break-up” was a serious situation, for during that period, which usually lasted a couple of weeks, all heavy trafic was stopped in order to avoid exessive damage to the roads. Everybody was used to muddy roads, but during the break-up the gravelroads turned soft and suddenly there would be spots where the mud was very deep, I suppose as a result of extra exposure to the sun and poor drainage, and then, if the mudhole was as wide as the road, the road became impassible. One spring such a mudhole had developed on Eby Road. For some reason (probbly the break-up !) Moekie and the children had taken a taxi to get home from town, a nice, low-slung, racy looking new Studebaker that much impressed the boys. When the driver arrived at the mudhole, he surveyed the situation and announced, wisely, that he wouldn’t try to get across. They had to walk the rest of the way, and because the mudhole was fairly close to Kirby’s corner, that was a fair distance to walk, especially for little Hubert.

Hubert had his problems with mud during the spring. The sand at the bottom of the Bench, where they often played, was also subject to spring break-up apparently, for it turned into fairly deep mud. Hubert didn’t realize what he was getting into, waded in a ways and, once in, couldn’t get out. When he tried to extract one foot his boot stayed behind in the mud. He was caught until his father could rescue him. I suppose I had to carry him inside and get his boots afterwards.

In many ways the place where we lived in Terrace was ideal for children, and particularly for the very small ones. The only vehicles that ever came that far belonged either to our friends or to Curly, the municipal employee who was responsible for the pump that provided the village with water. We had rarely any worries about where they would be and they had an amount of freedom that is unknown to kids living in places where traffic is a constant concern. And what a place to play, with the sand on the one side of our house and the forest on the other.

The time of the year when they could be in that forest was somewhat limited, it must be said, for from late spring until the first frost would hit us the place was alive with mosquitoes and no-see-ums, those tiny little flying pests that are small enough to crawl through mosquito screens. We were lucky at that for we had no trouble with blackflies which like drier country with lots of shrubbery. I remember the blackflies that made life miserable for the Doormannen: they took literally a bite out of your skin and the bite itched violently for days if you touched it. But the mosquitoes that our swamp produced were quite bad enough to keep the kids and us out of the forest during the warm weather. I used to pour kerosene on the pools in the swamp to kill the mosquito larvae, but I don’t think it was ever very successful.

August 1953

During the spring we used to have picnics under a cedar tree in front of our house. We were proud that we could have a picnic on our own property. That part of the property was later cleared to make room for a garden. It was not an easy job, that clearing. The first time we had a cat in, it was an oldie, a second-hand one that somebody who worked for the Cellanese had bought to see if he could make some extra money. He didn’t quite realize what he was getting into and ventured out to somewhere in the middle of what was to become our garden, but then he he had to change directions, and because the soil was so soft it was difficult for him to turn. He promptly ran the right hand track off the rollers and there he sat, unable to turn, unable to get the track back on the rollers, unable to do anything. I don’t remember how he got out of his predicament, but I imagine he either had to winch himself out or call another cat to do that for him. He did not charge us.

The next cat driver was more careful, assessed the conditions and decided to stay on firm land and use his winch. We all remember the moment when he started to pull out a fairly big stump: it moved slowly, stately over the black muck, not unlike a thing floating upright on water, leaving a wide, black, shining strip behind it. With the stump came a patch of soil in which Lies had planted some bright nasturtiums. The catskinner jumped off his machine, picked the little flowers and returned, offering his colourful bouquet to Moekie, with an appropriate flourish, before getting the stump on the gravel and pushing it in the bush.

I think we got yet another cat in, this time Ralph Easton’s, by far the biggest cat the boys had ever seen, a monster with sixteen inch wide tracks, to finish the job, using the same technique. All the stumps were shoved into the bush where we couldn’t see them, at least not from the house.

The small stumps and the srubbery we removed ourselves with the help of a handwinch we had gotten from Ed Shaw. The boys were eager to help by turning the crank. It was very hard work, but it did the job: once the stumps were pulled partway out it was possible to cut the exposed roots, and after that it was easy to pull out the rest.

At one point I imagined that I could do what everybody else did: blast the larger stumps out with dynamite. The dynamite, the blasting caps and the needed wire I bought where everybody else got it: in a little store along the highway east of Terrace at a location that carried the grand name of “Copper City”; not only not a city, but no other houses than that one little store. The technique of blasting is treacherously easy, the result spectacular: a terrific bang, an impressive amount of dust, dirt, bits of rock and wood, and, presuming that the blaster knew his business, after everything has settled a split stump with torn-off roots. In my case everything went as planned: the bang was great, but the dust and what have you were replaced by a lot of black, wet garbage and when that settled the stump was sitting there with a big open space underneath, undamaged, with all the roots intact, albeit exposed. Blasting did not work in our swamp. Hence the cats.

Because there was so much we had to get rid of as a result of our clearing efforts, branches, bushes and other assorted pieces and chunks of wood, it seemed that there was no end to the fires we had to start to get rid of it all. The kids loved it and to me it seemed like something that finally could (and did) satisfy a yearning that has been part of my awareness since my earliest childhood memories. In Holland outdoor fires were almost unheard of and where we lived, in the driest part of town, with at that time a large number of open grass fields and small bushes of scrub oak that separated clumps of houses, the threat of a devastating fire was real and clear to practically everybody. One of the charms of our summercamps was that in our organization the cooking was done on outdoor fires and that at the end of each day we gathered around a central campfire.

Burning the branches that we gathered and cut in our swamp was not without risk. The swamp soil was of course very wet, but under a hot fire that had been burning for hours the accumulated ashes were glowing for a long time after the fire was out, and those ashes were quite capable of drying out the wet peat and starting a smouldering fire that could creep for days, even weeks, undetected, underground to suddenly flare up at a considerable distance from where I had burned the rubbish. I have seen such a peat fire on the Brandis farm and understood Bill’s worries. You can’t tell where it is or where it is heading, and the telltale wisp of smoke is as scary as it is welcome: you know where it is at that time and can then fight it.

We did have a garden, and the pictures to show it, the neat beds separated by narrow paths, which consisted of boards lying on the soil. I am grateful for those pictures, which fix an image that was, I’m afraid, related to a short-lived victory. It proved impossible to keep that system going, for the board walks disappeared in the muck and the effluent from our septic system turned the water in the only drainage ditch an alarming nasty green. I am sure that we did not solve the problem of the septic effluent, but left it (I am just a trifle ashamed to admit it) to the people who were living in the house after we had left for Victoria. For a long time after we had left Terrace I have had guilty feelings while thinking about the plumbing in our house at the time when we left, in particular the septic tank and the disposal field. It was some relief when, during our brief visit to Terrace with Elsie Smith, oom Charles went up to the house and talked to the new owner, the fellow we had sold the house to. I didn’t have the nerve to do that, mainly because of that plumbing problem. He returned with the message that the owner was quite happy with it and thought he had had a “bargain”. It stopped my worries.

The kids remember the garden with pleasure because they had each their own little plot. John was proud of in his rhubarb plant that thrived and the stalks of which he chewed raw, and his enormous sunflower. And they remember the cress I had sown, representing each child’s initial. While struggling with the awful soil in our garden in Victoria, which contsisted of the most vicious yellow clay imaginable, I have had recurring wishful thoughts about that garden in Terrace with its deep, black peat.

It was just as well that our kids found so much to keep them happily busy at home, for there wasn’t very much in the way of organized sports in Terrace, and if there had been we would not have been able to get them there and back, because we only had our bicycles. But there were Scouts and Girl Guides and as soon as John reached the age where he could become a member, we tried to get him involved. Bessie Vosburgh was the Cubmaster at that time. When we approached her she told us that she wanted to get out, was looking for somebody to take over the pack…. and why wouldn’t we do that? She would continue to help us in the beginning. I don’t remember how long it took us to make up our minds, but we did do it and became Akeela and Bagheera. It was a matter of either let the whole idea slide into oblivion or take it on. It seemed a shame to disappoint the boys already involved and now John as well.

One of the strange discoveries, very early in our involvement was that when we read to those little boys Kipling’s Mowgli Stories they were not interested and became quickly bored, no matter how interesting we thought the stories were. And so we switchd to reading the story at home and then telling it to them in our own way. The result was amazing: they were instantly spell-bound. The problem had obviously been that Kipling’s language went straight over their heads.

It was fun to lead the cubs, at least for a while. We tried to bring some sense of excitement into our activities. One of the high points was the meeting on the Samsom farm, where we played a game of “conquer the flag” and roasted wieners and marshmellows over real little campfires. Lies was there to take part and has told me that she was jealous because in Brownies they didn’t do that sort of thing; they learned to crochet and to knit…. And one of the low points was the parade on Armistice Day. The Cubs and Scouts then wore shorts, summer and winter, regardless of the weather, because that is what Baden Powell had decided was proper wear for real boys, never mind the climatic conditions. But what was possibly not too bad in Europe was lunacy in Canada, where the bugs could eat you alive in the summer and where you could suffer from frostbite during the winter. The Parade that year was held in clear weather with serious frost and those little boys got far too cold. If I only could have known what the weather would be….. We should have said “Go home and stay warm. You can ask your mom for a cup of hot cocoa instead of drinking it in a hurry after the parade is over.” We didn’t. Baden Powell didn’t know Canada and we should have known better.

Not an awful lot of “leisure time” in our life during that period, for there was so much that had to be done, so much to build up, so much to get used to, so much that couldn’t wait. It meant that there was not much opportunity to do things with the whole family. But we did manage to take time for some things. The first and simplest was to have an outdoor picnic on our own property, at the foot of a big cedarstump or tree, I don’t remember. During the first spring and summer that was quite exciting for kids who had never lived in surroundings in Holland that would permit that sort of thing after we had moved away from the “Janneke Jans” (and they were very small when we made the move to De Bilt). But it didn’t take long before there was something a little more ambitious needed. Of course there were the frequent trips up the Bench for visits to Ied and Niek Samsom and to Mien and Pem van Heek, but that wasn’t adventurous either. “Swimming” at Little’s Island in a slough of the river was more like it; that was a real outing. There is only one less pleasant memory associated with it: Lieske’s friend Gail had stepped in a piece of glass and had to be taken to the hospital to be stitched up.

A little more advanced was a trip up Terrace Mountain, the rocky bump that bordered the town to the north-east. “Mountain” was far too grand a description, for it was really not much more than a steep hill. We looked out at it from our livingroom window and that by itself was enough to set us wondering what would be up there; there were no houses as far as we knew. But the view from the top would be quite impressive, and so we climbed it with the whole family. It was not a strenuous climb, just enough to give us a sense of satisfaction when we reached the top and enjoyed the view. We had lunch there and the picture shows that we had Hades, our big black dog, with us. That detail indicates that it must have taken place after we had bought our first vehicle, the good old G.M.C. panel truck. The summit, if my memory is correct, was wooded with enough open spaces to allow us to look out over Terrace, the river, the valley leading south towards Kitimat, and the mountains that formed the valley through which the Skeena flowed west. Yes, it was worth it.

More challenging by far was the expedition up Thornhill Mountain. That now was a real hike, up and up the zigzag path that was, although easy and well maintained, fairly steep and long. It had been built to construct, maintain and supply the fire look-out on the top of the mountain, where a lonely watchman spent the whole summer all by himself. The cabin itself was closed and kept locked if there was nobody there and it is likely that it had already been abandoned at the time when we got there with the family, for its location was too high to serve the purpose for which it had been built: too often it was in the clouds, making it impossible for the watchman to spot a fire. But it was an interesting destination, a litle building that evoked all manner of heroic and fanciful thoughts about the brave souls that spent their days and nights in fearsome isolation, experiencing howling winds, thunderstorms, unmitigated exposure to a merciless sun, all to save the people in the valley below from the effects of a devastating forest fire that would threaten their jobs. The reality was probably somewhat tamer, but the fact that the little building was anchored to the rock by steel cables was suggestive of the bitter forces it had to withstand.

What made the hike especially interesting was that the path led through pretty dense forest at lower altitudes, then reached the sparse stunted growth of trees that survived near the timberline, and finally took you to the bare rock near the top, all in one easy hike, while the views were stupendous. For immigrants fresh from Holland it was quite an experience, like Canada-in-the-raw, the real thing. Not all of us enjoyed the hike up. Lies complained bitterly, about the steep trail, the bugs, the heat, the length of the climb, all the way up, but danced and skipped on the way down as if we had just started out.

As soon as we had our first vehicle, the good old G.M.C. truck, we could go farther from home and once used that possibility to go on a picnic during the early spring, the first spring after we acquired the truck. We drove a ways down the highway to Pr. Rupert until we found a inviting looking side-road that allowed us to pull off the highway and have our picnic in a spot that can’t have been very far from the highway, but there was so little traffic during those years that it made no difference, really. What I remember well is that there were still patches of snow around the spot where we were eating our lunch.

One favourite spot was certainly Kleanza Creek, or Gold Creek as we called it usually. The first time we went there it was with Pem and Mien and we were impressed and delighted. I imagine they wanted us to see the spawning salmon, humpbacks I believe they were, right before our eyes. It is a marvellous spectacle under any circumstance, but an incredible thing to witness for people who have newly arrived from Europe. And I can’t imagine a better place to see it, for the creek is as clear as it is shallow, has a gravelly bottom and the shores are flat and grassy. Where the creek breaks through the rock, at the end of the flat area where the picnic site is, there are rapids and a little waterfall and you could see the salmon jumping. A trail leads from there up the rock to the edge of the canyon that was carved by the creek. Looking down into that ragged crack and the wild, white creek at the bottom I had the feeling of being in a very wild country, almost untouched, although the rusting parts of some machinery in the water were emphatic evidence to the contrary. The old fellow who looked after the picnic site lived in a log cabin under the trees, and kept, leaning against the wall of his cabin, several pairs of stilts in different sizes for kids to use.

One day we drove to a spot on the way to the airport where a creek came down the steep slope in several small waterfalls on its way to meet the Skeena. We climbed the slope to the foot of the first fall, where some big rocks made it possible to cross the creek, which was neither wide nor deep. In trying it I slipped on the wet rock, fell into the creek and found myself right under the fall, pinned down by the water, unable to get up, let alone to get out. Moekie reached out from the shore, grabbed my hand and tried to pull me up, but had to let go because I was too heavy and the waterpressure too great. It was a rather frightening experience for there was the chance that I would have been washed down by the current and might have been badly bashed against the rocks. Moekie suggested that I might try to slip down to the next pool, which was less deep, to get away from the fall. I did that and from there I could get out with her help.

On the day we became Canadians we drove, together with the Achesons, to the south end of Kalum Lake and and celebrated with a picnic. It was most certainly a very Canadian spot to celebrate the event. Also with them we went one winter to Lakelse lake that was frozen solid, a remarkable event because the water in the lake was warmed by the outflow of the hotspring at the other end. We were watching a fellow in a truck who was turning and slipping in wide circles on the ice but neither of us got out there to try it. Instead we roasted weiners over a campfire on the shore.

Most trips to Lakelse Lake were of course summer trips, with Pem and Mien, with Susie Adam, with Ann and Ed Shaw. Lakelse was for most people in Terrace typically THE summer place, excellent for swimming and fishing and boating. Later, when Susie’s boat had sails, we added sailing to its charms. It had lovely sandy beaches. The number of people who had a cabin-on-the-lake must have been enormous, and all on the east side off the lake, because the other side was difficult to reach: there was no road there in those years. The Mc Calls had to cross the lake by boat to reach their cabin; however, once they were there, they were alone (with the skunk, alas), whereas the crowds and the noise from outboards tended to be a bit much on the other shore. Nevertheless, I have almost no other than happy memories of the Lake, and particularly of the summer when we rented a cabin from Whalen, on the south end, for a month. Wonderful. The cabin of the Adams was close-by and we used to watch Max, their mongrel shepherd, try to catch fish close to the shore by snapping at minnows. The photo we have of John’s and Hubert’s boats sailing there puts me right back in one of the happiest summers in Terrace.

I have often thought how Lakelse Lake would be now, halfway between Terrace and Kitimat. I fear that a comparison with Hornby (only so far as summercrowds are concerned) is not far-fetched. And both used to be so wonderfully natural, simple, almost primitive. I imagine that most of those small one-room summercabins have been changed into architect-designed villas. I am not tempted to go and have a look; one look at the hotspring in ’67 was enough warning of things-to-come.

There is one not-so-happy memory related to Lakelse, but it is Moekie’s and Lies’s, not mine. In the summer of ’56 the Terrace Rotary Club decided to organize swimming lessons in the lake, during the summer holidays, as their community effort for the year. They got the volunteer teachers, of whom Moekie was one, and solved the transportation problems. Lies was one of those who were going to take the lessons. Everything was well prepared, but what can one do about the weather? The date was set and the weather was lousy, cold and rainy. It was not a pleasant experience for either the instructors or the kids. Lies remembers that she got thoroughly, bone-chilling cold and was almost getting sick during the twisting ride back to town. Moekie still p[ictures her daughter standing in the water in the chilly air, shivering, her hands clasped together, the image of an unhappy child. The Rotarians were delighted with the initiative they had taken and were wise enough to stay home during the lessons. They had organized it; surely they didn’t have to be there? During the festive evening where they were going to thank all the volunteers who had participated, there was a “thank-you” supper with chile-con-carne for the volunteers, who each got a silver teaspoon with the Rotary symbol. We still have it, but Moekie doesn’t need it to remember the occasion. Lies learned to duck her head in the water.

So much for the outdoors activities; what did they do inside? All our children were more or less involved in all building activities and eager to help wherever they could, and they helped with the general things that had to be done around the house. I don’t remember that we ever found it necessary to assign special tasks to them individually, not at that age level. That came later, in Victoria, when help was so much needed, and with it came the usual squabbles and fights.

Reading was to them as natural as eating, it seemed, and, brother, did they go through a lot of books. The provincial “Open Shelf” service was an absolute godsend in our life, and something we had never known in Holland. We could hardly believe it when we learned that the books were not only sent out free of charge, but that you could return them free of charge as well, and that there was no charge for borrowing them either. There was never a shortage of books. It is hard to imagine what those early years in Terace would have been without that service, especiallyduring the fall and winter.

Even while we were living in Langford the relationship with the Open Shelf continued. The service was, of course, intended to serve communities that had no other access to libraries, and Langford must have been a borderline case, but since it was in an “unorganized area” we could continue to draw from that rich resource. Whether that was “normal” or “exceptional” we’ll never know. We went there ourselves and wandered freely through the stacks to select what we wanted; it was great.

Another favourite was drawing, but our supply of paper was limited, and the pieces handed out were rather small. Later, while we were attending Victoria College, we learned from Mr. Johns that children should be given large brushes to work on large sheets of paper; that to force them to work on a small scale is contrary to their needs in developing the necessary motor skills, that it might stunt their emotional growth and that it was therefore dangerous to their development into harmonious, balanced adults. Well, if any of our offspring shows stunted emotional growth, the years in Terrace and the ignorance of their parents is clearly to blame. As soon as it was possible, in Victoria, we changed to rolls of newsprint, the last bit of which has just served in 1995 to mask the windows of the shed when it was re-stained.

When Lies went to school she was so totally involved in this new experience that she re-enacted at home everything that had happened during the schoolday, giving her mother a clear view of her little daughter’s activities and experiences in Mrs. MacIntosh’s class.

We remember that teacher with gratitude, especially after John’s rather dismal start under her successor.

Then there was the festive Sunday tea that was a special family highlight. It was the beginning of a tradition of certain little ceremonial resting points in our otherwise sometimes rather hectic existence. It has changed over the years, but the tendency is still clearly recognizable, and it is still a meaningful characteristic, a treasured element: coffee-time, sherry-time….. celebrations of “family”.

When we were prep[aring for our departure from Holland, Moekie asked Mien van Heek if she would need anything special to cope with housekeeping duties in the new environment. “No”, was the answer, “the only difference is that the women here bake their own bread and cut their manfolk’s hair.” Neither of these proved to be exactly correct, but she did both. I can’t remember that we ever ate any store-bought bread in Terrace. There was a bakery in Terrace, but women with a family did a lot of baking: cookies, cakes, pies and certainly bread. We started eating the bread from a little bakery when we came to Victoria. There just wasn’t time for Moekie to bake her own for as long as she and I were both totally involved, first in attending college and then in our work, but as soon as she quit teaching, there it was again, our lovely home-made bread, until very recently, when Denman got its own bakery.

Cutting hair became a routine, and still is as far as my hair is concerned. I dare not estimate how much we saved, but I am thinking that the amount, plus the interest on it, would be staggering.

There was the eternal sewing of new clothes and the repairing of the existing ones. There was simply no money to buy much, and most of that was spent on the stuff I needed. Unfortunately that was quite a bit, for my clothes wore fast and had to be changed when I changed jobs and needed different things. And jeanses we bought, as well as coats. But shirts and dresses were all home-made from material that we ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue. It was a good thing that we brought so much clothing with us from Holland and therefore didn’t need too much the first years. But the sewing machine, the old hand-cranked Singer Moekie had bought when she was living in Amsterdam, was much in use. It was an investment, but certainly a major improvement, when we got our first electric service, and ordered from the catalogue the little motor that made it so much faster for her to sew. That old Singer is still in good shape and used when something has to be sewn of very heavy material.

Neither Moekie nor I (or, for that matter, Lies herself I imagine) can ever forget that she had to have a new dress, a “party dress”, when she and her grade one class had to perform during a school Christmas concert. Did we know what was meant by that term, “party dress”? To us it was important that the dress be nice, festive, but warm and usable for more than just partying. So Moekie made for her little daughter a beautiful woollen dress, colourful, but practical. And when the class was lined up on the stage there she was, in the front row, in her beautiful warm dress, with new ribbons in her pigtails and neat brown loafers, next to a girl in a silly, frilly, silky pink outfit with ruffles and ribbons and black patent leather shoes. She was so impressed by her neighbour’s dress that she forgot to sing, but could not take her eyes off her neighbour and had to touch that dress. Finally she bent down and flicked a bit of imaginary dirt off her own sturdy brown shoes, to the great amusement of everybody but her parents who were embarrassed. New Canadians…..

Animals have always been a part of the family experience. The first one was a kitten, a typical tabby, grey with dark stripes, a white front if I remember correctly, and white paws. Whether a “she” or a “he” I don’t know, but tiny, for sure. One morning when Moekie was making the beds and shoved her bed under mine (the legs collapsed and had then little rollers that made the operation easier) she felt resistance, heard a squeal, pulled the bed back and saw to her horror that our little kitten came sort of rolling from under the bed, tail at a weird angle and obviously at that point not in good shape. We feared the worst, but the little thing survived and recovered, although it always had a weird kink in that tail.

And then came Claudius, gorgeous on his long legs. I have no specific memories about him though, and I wonder now what we did with those cats when we left for Victoria. I suppose we gave them away, but to whom? Most certainly they did not come with us.

The next was Muffy, a little spaniel cross that came wandering in and liked it and stayed…. for a while, for he disappeared as he had come, suddenly and into nowhere. A friendly little vagrant without any sense of belonging or loyalty.

Not so Hades. Ed Shaw found him. He was a lean pup, very black, with a lot of Lab in his blood. The size of his paws indicated clearly that he might be big when full-grown. He was. Ed could not keep him, for he had already two or three big dogs and thought of us. So he came, with Hades, to the door and pleaded his case, Hades’ case mostly. We needed a dog, he had decided, for a family could never be complete without a dog. We had four kids and no dog…. ridiculous. We wanted a dog, he knew it. The end of it was that Hades was accepted as our dog. He was a very good dog, too, loved to play with the children as soon as they came home from school. During the day he lived in his own kennel, a fenced-off square with his own doghouse. The fence was about three feet high, made of chickenwire, and we thought that it was high and strong enough to keep him there. We had no reason to think otherwise, for Hades never got out without permission. Until, one morning, while it was still dark, there was a furious barking and a somewhat nervous male voice, trying to calm the dog down. We investigated and found Hades standing on the deck in front of the frontdoor with his rough up, his teeth bared, growling like a demon and looking at a somehat white-faced Curly who was standing at the foot of the stairs that led to the deck and the door and not risking to come a single step closer. One look at Hades convinced me that it was probably a wise decision on his part. I grabbed Hades and calmed him somewht down, while Curly explained that he had come to ask if he could use our phone: there was something wrong with the pump across the road. He thought we had one hell of a good watchdog. We hadn’t known that before that moment, but we agreed and were proud of Hades. We forgave him that he had jumped over the fence of his kennel.

Hades was a bit of a scavenger, I suppose, and developed a nasty lump in his neck, but before anything was done about it (I don’t even think there was anybody like a veterinary in Terrace at that time) the lump burst, created an awful looking mess, but cleared up rapidly afterwards. And how could we possibly blame the dog for going off to the Petryshyn house after they had butchered a moose and dumped the legs across the fence in the bushes? Those legs were far gone, and the stench around the dog when he returned was fearsome. It was clearly impossible to keep him tied up until nature had taken care of the rotten meat and we decided that the time had come to give Hades away to someone who would love him. One of the hardware’s customers expressed interest after he had heard the story of Hades’ efforts to keep strangers away, liked the dog when he saw him, and took him. I am sure the dog found a good home there. We did not like to get rid of him, but later, when we decided to leave, it was a blessing not to have to worry about Hades.

The one topic I haven’t dealt yet deserves to be kept till last, because it is really not a very interesting subject, but is nevertheless important enough in this family to be mentioned. It is Cars.

Of course we had no other transportation than our bicycles to start with. Those worked well for a long time, but Canada is a big place, and distances, even in a small community like Terrace are very much greater than what we were used to in Holland. So, when Uncle Teun was found willing and even keen to re-teach me, I was happy to grab the opportunity. Learning went smoothly and without a hitch, but I do remember the first night out on the road (there were no suitable parking lots in Terrace, and, at any rate, I had earned my Dutch driver’s licence, and was therefore not as green as other new drivers). We met another vehicle and I had a brief moment of panic: can I manage to avoid a collision? I did, and it seems amazing now that the thought hit me at all. One gets used to meeting other cars. At the end of the instruction I passed my (temporary) test and felt grand. But had no car. That winter Pem and Mien left to go for a long period to Holland. Were we interested in using their car for that time? Yes, indeed, we were. I drove them to the airport and took the car, a spiffy, new, little Austin sedan, back home. It was a great help during the weeks that followed, and it gave me a chance to drive in snow and on slippery roads. I’ll never forget that time when I was picking upone or several of our kids from the school, had to come down the icey little hill leading down from Lakelse Avenue, saw another car approaching from the right, tried to brake, and found that there was nothing I could do to stop or avoid a minor collision. There was no damage, fortunately, but the experience was as scary as it was instructive.

After the borrowed car we were spoiled, of course, and when I found an old G.M.C. panel truck at the garage where Billy Onstein worked, a panel truck he recommended, we decided to buy it. Never has an old truck been more lovingly dealt with. I had the engine, which was using some oil, re-done, but otherwise that truck has served us well. I got stuck a couple of times, being an inexperienced driver, but the truck did not let us down. We used it until we knew that we were going south and realized that the truck just wouldn’t do.

We found a fine scond hand Pontiac that had just been overhauled by its owner, a mechanic in one of the garages, and found him willing to sell it to us. “Betsy” was certainly a step up from the panel truck. She looked good, she was comfortable, sound and reliable, took all six of us and an incredible load of luggage (clothing and bedding for a year, plus a newly acquired tent and other camping gear)all the way to Victoria, via the Okanagan Valley even. After that she did the job of providing basic transportation for quite a number of years. When I was working for Charlie Adams and had parked Betsy behind the apartments where I had to paint I was more than a little bit pleased when he looked it over and seemed somewhat surprised that it was our car. As was Aunt Enid when I drove her home one day. Altogether a good vehicle. The panel truck we sold to another Dutchman with whom I had worked in the mill, Herman van der Hende. He used it for years and was happy with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 5: PEOPLE

 

In this chapter I would like to remember some of the people who were important to us during those first years in Canada or who were so remarkable that their stories should be told in these memories. I won’t say much about most of those who are still living and in some ways connected to our present life, but I would like to pay tribute to those who are either no longer alive or who have disappeared from our horizon. I must, however, begin by writing a little about Pem and Mien van Heek, who made it all possible by sponsoring our immigration. It would be difficult to imagine better or more conscientious sponsors. Without them we would in all likelihood not be here. How does one thank a person for that? We shared with them a general background and a similar motivation. They were facing a future that didn’t appeal to them, as we did, and they found in Canada opportunities, chances, that opened doors and allowed them to build a life that was rewarding and satisfying, just as we did. Their ties with Holland have always remained a bit stronger than ours, but neither they nor we could ever go back to what was lovingly called “the old country”. It has become too small, too full, too pressurized.

I must in this context mention one lesser known fact, namely that I have tried, for a brief while, to follow Pem’s example and become a forester. I applied for the course and got the first papers, which had to do with mathematics, logarithms I believe. I did not last more than two weeks at the most: the mathematical aspects of the training defeated me before I got started. It has always been that way. When I enrolled in my first course for a Masters degree in Arts, specializing in Education, (you could not get a Masters in Education then) it was a course in statistics. The textbook was charmingly titled “Statistics, an Intuitive Approach.” My only intuition was loud and clear: give up and stay out. I dropped the course before I was halfway through. It was mathematics, you know….. The people that pop up in my mind immediately when I think of the friends we had in Terrace are Pit and Enid Van Stolk. Pit had come to Terrace in 1937, upon recommendation of someone he had accidentally met during the boat trip to Montreal. From there he went to Edmonton where he looked for a farm, but he didn’t like the Prairies and came to Terrace. He met Enid who was cooking in the Terrace Hotel and they got married in ’39. I feel that I, of all people, have least right to joke about men who marry excellent cooks. During the war years Pit joined the Dutch army, was in England, Ontario and Surinam, but after the war the couple returned speedily to Terrace. I suppose that he had already built the enormous addition to their log house before they left. It has always been a mystery to me how you could use logs of the size you could see in the kitchen; how do you move the heavy brutes ? The addition was entirely in keeping with the existing house, but that doesn’t answer the question. I wonder why I never asked Pit about that. There were times during the first years in Terrace when we got sort of discouraged with the endless amount of work, the slow progress, the fact that what we wanted to achieve in our daily surroundings seemed forever to lie beyond our reach. If that mood struck there was one sure-fire solution: a visit to the Van Stolks. In their warm, wonderful living room that sloped downward in one corner, or at the table in that big kitchen, you felt instantly better, reassured, more optimistic. Something reinforcing got transmitted by the magic of those two natural, generous hosts. How we enjoyed the sheer luxury of a glass of sherry in front of their huge fireplace…… Luxury was an illusive concept for us in those days. It has always remained like that: a visit to the Van Stolks was an occasion, an event, a lifting, warming experience, whether they lived in Terrace, or in Victoria, or on Quadra or in Saanich. There was always the feeling that you were “special” in their eyes. Their range of interests was enormous, the conversation stimulating. Pit used to quote: “Du choc des opinions, la verite s’elance.” In later years, when they lived in Saanich, Enid and we used to discuss ideas about education that were more or less foreign to him but there was never the slightest indication that Pit was annoyed.

Pit was a very good teller of stories, and especially one of them, about a hunting adventure, is part of our family folklore. His friends and he were duck hunting in the swampy area south of Lakelse Lake when they saw a large, round rock not too far away. They didn’t recognize it as something they had seen before, and it seemed strange that it would be there for the soil seemed too soft to support its weight. They approached it, moving slowly and with difficulty through the mud, when suddenly the rock moved, raised itself up on its hind legs: a grizzly. He was standing, slowly moving his head from side to side and sniffing the breeze, which was fortunately blowing in the hunters’ faces. Their shotguns would have been useless. Grizzlies have poor eyesight, but excellent noses. The hunters stood motionless; the bear didn’t smell anything suspicious and after a tense and agonizing while lowered himself again to resume searching for whatever had attracted his attention. Slowly, carefully, they started their retreat, pulling their boots out of the mud: “slurp….slurp….slurp….” The bear gave up his search after a few minutes and sloshed off in the opposite direction. Too close for comfort, that encounter, but it was Pit’s telling, complete with action and sound effects, that made it unforgettable.

This sketch would not be complete if I omitted a story about Enid, a story that is just as famous in our family as the grizzly story. By marrying Pit she had automatically acquired Dutch citizenship, for Pit had not yet changed his nationality. The Dutch law does not recognize dual citizenship. Nobody paid much attention to that detail which had no consequences for their daily life. But when Pit applied for and got his Canadian citizenship, it became suddenly clear that he was now Canadian, but his wife was still Dutch. She, who was born and bred in Canada, had to apply for a change in nationality as if it was a favour she was asking for instead of her natural right. I think that may have hurt a bit, but the real crunch came when she had to appear before the judge during the citizenship ceremony. She and Pit knew the officiating judge quite well, I believe. He had a wicked sense of humour, and when her turn came he asked her, as he had asked all the other applicants, really new Canadians, to prove that she knew enough English, by reading to him a few verses from the Bible. Enid, furious, had no choice but to oblige, but it took a little time before she, too, could appreciate the joke.

We stayed with the Van Stolks in Herriot Bay during the summer holidays a couple of years after they had moved to Quadra. I must admit that I don’t remember any details of the interior, except that it was very much Pit’s and Enid’s house. What I do remember is the string of sheds and storage spaces to the left of the house when you approached it from the road, all more or less under one long roof. It was there that I discovered the long bow that is still in the workshop and used once in a while in the summer. Pit gave it to me because he never used it any more, he said, and he was happy to know that it would be appreciated in Victoria. It has been a great success with sons and grandchildren. We heard later that all those sheds had burned down to the ground, but that the house had been saved, miraculously.

From the house the lot sloped down to the water’s edge, where a previous owner had built a sort of a guest house or a large tea house or whatever its original function had been. That’s where we stayed. Between the house and that bungalow was an orchard, surrounded by a somewhat rickety fence of fish netting to keep the deer out. It didn’t work very well, for at night we could hear the “plop….plop…..” of deer jumping over the ‘fence to help themselves to the fruit.

The view from both the house and the garden was beautiful, but somewhat limited by the big rounded mass of the rock island that lies in the middle of the bay. At low tide you can reach it walking, but a soon as the tide comes in you may find yourself stranded. That’s what happened to Justus and Lies, who had to be taken off by Pit in his aluminum boat. In that boat we made a lovely sunny trip to a white shell-covered beach lining a bay somewhat farther north. I wonder now if that was on Reid Island? We had a look at the remains of an old lime-producing plant there. Pit took us for our first look at the amazing Rebecca Spit. He introduced us to friends who had some kind of a ranch (?) farther north and more in the interior of Quadra, where we sat on (riding is a very different thing) horses and listened to the tales of the owner, who hunted deer by running them down on foot. If I am not mistaken, it was during that summer that we ate our very first fresh raw oysters, the gourmet’s delight that has never quite convinced either Moekie or myself. Quadra seemed a long way off from Victoria; that was our only stay with them while they were living in Herriot Bay. It was very good news when we heard that they were coming to Victoria. How Pit managed to find those spots is a mystery to me, but they always seemed to end up living in very beautiful locations. They found a lot in Saanich that overlooked Island View Beach and James Island beyond, on the edge of a steep hillside and built a lovely, roomy Panabode, where Dan and his family lived after Enid decided to move out. Of course we saw more of them now they were so close-by, but we always wondered after each visit why we didn’t do it more often, since we enjoyed it so much? That feeling seems common. It may contain a sort of a compliment to the people you visited, but it also holds a warning: it takes a little effort to maintain friendships. Our neighbours in Terrace were the family Brandis, Bill and Madzy Land their three kids, Marianne, Gerald and Joost. Bill was farming, growing vegetables for the local market. They owned twenty acres before selling us the two and a half acres where we built our house. They seemed unlikely farmers, he and his wife. Both were raised in well-to-do families and neither had any connection with farms or farming as far as I know. Bill was trained as a manager of large estates, which usually contain both farms and forested land, so he must have had some theoretical background. Those estates are pretty rare and far between in Holland, and becoming more so with the passage of time. There must be enormous pressure on the owners to “develop” or sell to a developer in a country as densely populated as Holland is. They are really an anachronism, a remnant from feudal times when wealth was expressed in real estate and not in capital. Jobs in that field are sparse of course and when Bill considered his options emigration must have been an attractive possibility. What brought them to Terrace I don’t know, but it could be that they knew Pit, or knew of Pit. They must have come shortly after the end of the war and they must have had some money, for they were able to buy their land as well as a truck. I don’t know whether they built their house or bought it with the land, but I am inclined to believe that they must have bought it. Not that Bill was incapable of building; he was a good carpenter, fast and accurate. While Pem and I were working on our house he was our main source of information. He was a hard worker as well. He had to be, running that farm by himself. When the winter started and farmwork got less, there were the jobs that had been postponed during the farming season, as well as the looking after firewood, first felling it and bringing it in with the help of his horse, then cutting, splitting and piling it. There was never a time when he could relax.

The most productive part of his land was a low-lying area with moist, deep, black soil. It was very productive and admirably suited to the crops he grew: carrots, turnips, cabbage, cauliflower, and the like. During the winter months it flooded, and if it started to freeze it made a fine skating rink. It took a little time in spring to dry up again, but Bill didn’t mind the yearly flooding, which, so he claimed, killed the insect pests that lived in the soil. I remember well the planting of the cabbage seedlings where we used to help. Moekie remembers another not so pleasant job she did for Bill. He had sown peas, but had had no time to look after them, so that they were incredibly overgrown with weeds. In order to save at least some, he suggested that Moekie would take on the weeding, after which she would get half of the crop. It was a bitter task and the remuneration didn’t seem to be nearly adequate for the hours spent in very hard work. There was one more field where they had crops growing, very close to us, a part of the swamp that had been cleared. It grew magnificent cabbages. The difficulty was to get them off before the land flooded, and there was one fall when Bill was just too busy. Those cabbages did not come off, at least a substantial number were still on the land when it flooded and the harvesting became impossible. During the winter that was nothing to us. We were sorry for Bill, that’s all. But during the next spring…. that was another matter. The cabbages rapidly started to rot and spread the stink associated with that process everywhere. It was unbelievable…. and there was nothing we or anybody could do until the soil had dried. By that time the last leaf had rotted and smelled.

Bill and Madzy didn’t have a cow; they had goats instead. A splendid idea, for the goats require not nearly the same level of care, and their milk is actually better for a person than cow milk. Unfortunately, they also intended to do their own breeding, and kept for that purpose a billy goat. You could smell him when passing the farm if the wind was right, but there was no need for a lot of wind. It is an appalling, a fiendish smell. I had never quite understood why the devil has always been portrayed as part-goat, but the smell explained that perfectly. Rumor has it that to keep a billy goat in the same environment where you have milk goats makes the milk almost undrinkable. Don’t doubt it. When fresh and cold it is ok, not terrific, but ok. Heat it and you can forget about consumption: the billygoat jumps at you. Porridge, anything that required cooked milk….. out of the question. Nobody would or could eat it.

Bill and Madzy ended up giving the billy goat away or selling it. I imagine that their choices were limited in this matter: if you want your children to drink goat milk either you do away with the billy or you lose your children. Their children won. Bill dedicated the house where the creature had lived as a children’s playhouse, after extensive cleaning. It was not a good idea: the billy goat came, so to speak, inside their house. And ours. It didn’t last long, for nobody wanted to play there.

By now I must have established an impression that life next to the farm was pretty awful, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were excellent neighbours, and good friends. We were more than just very grateful to Madzy when she came to teach Justus English during his illness that first winter, day after day, week after week. It has made all the difference.

When the summer came to its peak, Bill cut hay on a field across Eby Road. To bring that in was always a festive, a summery occasion: the celebration of farm life at its cheerful best. If Bill was not a typical farmer, Madzy was certainly not a farmer’s wife. Her health was always a bit shaky, she was physically not strong, and over the years arthritis made her joints very stiff and painful. She wrote well and loved it. Her story about their life in Terrace, published in book form, struck us as a valiant attempt to think away all the unpleasant aspects of their life and to focus on the romantic, the happy, the beautiful moments. The result was, in our eyes, a rosy, but essentially untrue story. An unconvincing story. She was a brave soul, but to “tell-it-as-it-was” would have destroyed the element of success that had to be preserved at all cost.

Madzy’s aggravated arthritis, combined with the fact that the farm had proved to be a struggle that could not be won, made them decide to move. They sold and went to Vancouver, where Bill went to U.B.C. and got his degree in agriculture. They ended up in Ontario where he got a job as a consultant for a fertilizer company. Madzy kept up a correspondence with friends everywhere for a long time, and when that became impossible because her hands couldn’t hold a pen any more, she spoke “letters” into a taperecorder and sent the tapes. There was a time when I tried that to make contact with Holland easier, but it proved more difficult than the writing of letters. Making a tape sound “natural” and “spontaneous” is almost impossible. It was as if having a mike in my hands turned me into a (phony) performer. A bad experience that lasted only one or two tapes.

Right across the road from the Brandis farm lived Anne and Ed Shaw. They were good friends of the Brandis family and especially of Madzy’s. The gate that gave access to the path to their front door was named “The Madzy Gate”. Anne worked for a bank, I believe the Royal, but I’m not sure of that. Ed was at that time working as the operator of a big metal lathe in the shop of Little, Haugland and Kerr’s mill. I write “at that time” because Ed had done more things in life than a dozen ordinary people accomplish between them. Among these things: trapping in Northern Ontario, manufacturing candy in Prince Rupert, farming in Terrace and inventing in Gibson’s Landing. When we had bought our cook stove with three broken lids, Ed brazed them together and they worked fine.

He was a big man, an impressive man with his silvery white hair and straight bearing. But most amazing was his language….: immaculate Oxford accented English, spoken with a soft voice. He didn’t particularly like his job, but it paid well, and he was proud of his skill. It was therefore an annoyance to him that he was ordered to make and keep a good stock of a certain bolt, used to fasten the headsaw to the face plate, only to find that there was time and again a messenger coming over to the shop from the mill to get another three bolts. Always three, and they never lasted longer that a couple of weeks. Until, one day, he had to be in the mill for another reason and saw that the crew was changing the saw. He went over and saw to his amazement that the four holes in the faceplate did not exactly match the four holes holes in the saw, and that for that reason they used thinner bolts, but could only get in three instead of four. Nobody had ever mentioned the problem to him. The mill had suffered endless temporary stoppages when the three too-thin bolts once again sheared off, thereby causing a loss in production time that had cost very much more than the making of a new faceplate. He made a new faceplate and the problem was solved. Nobody said “thank you”.

The mill was only temporary in Ed’s plans. What he wanted to do was grow tomatoes….. the scientific way. He had read whatever he could get his hands on, and was convinced that it should be possible to do so in Terrace, profitably. The problem was that the long daylight hours in the area did not make up for the short duration of the growing season. That being the case, was his reasoning, one would have to extend that growing season on two ends by artificial means. To that end he would use a greenhouse of his own design. It was most unusual, but it seemed to make Ha lot of sense. He built it himself. It had a high, insulated north wall without windows, a south wall that was almost all glass, sloped to maximize the sun’s effect, and a concrete floor that was a shallow basin for water. By closely controlling both the temperature and the humidity he could use it for four purposes: first to grow young tomato plants from seed, then to produce a very early crop of tomatoes, long before anybody else, then to ripen green tomatoes that had been picked when there was a chance of night frost (and they ripened almost without fail, beautifully) and lastly, during the winter, to grow mushrooms. The secret was the water in the floor basin that was heated by thermostatically controlled heating cables. It kept the temperature and the moisture at exactly the right level for what he wanted to grow. The only failure was the mushrooms, and that was his Achilles heel for he had to have that to give him an income during the winter. He needed horse manure to grow them and the only outfit that used horses commercially refused to give him a contract for the manure. Without a guaranteed supply of horse manure the whole thing collapsed. Justus worked for Ed during the summer months, in the tomatoes.

Ed liked music and was the first one among our acquaintances who had a high fidelity record player, originally with only two records “Sound-Off!” and “Oklahoma”. We were greatly impressed. He was a real dog-lover; they had two or three large mongrel shepherds and when another pup arrived (I don’t remember where it came from) for which a family had to be found he convinced us that we needed a dog and so we got Hades, who grew very large, was very black, very protective of our house and property, and irresistibly attracted to the pile of foul smelling moose bones the Patrishyns had thrown over their fence. The dog’s smell after those escapades was something else. We ended up giving him away and it was a heartbreak.

Ed’s stories about life in Ontario’s North were aimed, I think, at stopping our complaints about the blackflies and mosquitoes that came in thick swarms out of the shrubbery in the swamp as soon as the snow had gone. He used to tell us of mosquitoes so thick, that a net over your hat was absolutely mandatory. You didn’t worry any more, he told us, about half bare arms. They were permanently covered with mosquitoes…. you just wiped them off once in a while, like a messy covering of insects and blood, your blood. And Ed could make the most incredibly wonderful candy.

He had an inventor’s mind. One of his inventions was the magnifying glass with built-in flashlight that was meant to make map-reading in a car at night a snap. It worked well, but Ed didn’t have the money for an advertizing campaign, and the venture fizzled. We used ours for years. He also had an idea for a solid insulating block, using tiny, microscopic plastic bubbles. That, too, was a great idea, but he failed to find an answer. The problem, as he explained it, was that the air had to be pumped out of the case that contained the bubbles, without making it collapse, in order to produce a block that had built-in, really superior insulating properties. What he was looking for was a light-weight insulating brick-of-sorts. Anne and Ed left Terrace and lived for years in Gibson’s Landing, where Moekie and I have visited them. Anne was at that time still working in the bank and Ed was working on the insulation problem with a grant from U.B.C.

I want to write about somebody who is still living, very much alive. II do it with hesitation, but since I have nothing but good things to say about her I shall take that risk. I am talking about Susie Adam, who came to Canada as Susie Hiensch. She had lost her husband during the war. He was working for a “resistance” or “underground” organization in Amsterdam, was caught by the Germans and killed. He left her with two little boys and no means of supporting herself and her family. Her decision to leave Holland after the war and come to Canada was based on the same reasoning that motivated all of us: the opportunity of starting all over. She left her boys with her sister and went by herself to find another life in Canada. Why she came to Terrace, I don’t know. She spoke no or very little English, but she was bright and learned fast. She was hired by Charlie Adam who needed a housekeeper….. and oh boy, did Charlie need a housekeeper ! He had been a bachelor all his life, and his housekeeping skills were not well developed. He found a lady who was determined, intelligent and hard-working, but she happened to be probably the best unattached housekeeper in Terrace as well. Charlie’s life became quickly much easier and happier, notwithstanding all the new rules he had to submit to. As soon as Susie felt that she had solid ground under her feet, economically speaking, she had the boys come over. It must have been very difficult for them, to get used to a strange environment, learn a new language, and go to school in Terrace. Ed must have been in gr. 9, and Rob in gr. 6 or 7. When Ed was facing his graduation and seemed to be heading for a failure in Math. Susie asked Moekie to coach him, and, miracle of miracles, Ed passed.

Charlie liked his new lifestyle and the lady so well that he proposed to her. I imagine that it must have been a difficult decision for Susie. I don’t think she was in love with him, madly or otherwise; Charlie was not the kind of a man who sweeps women off their feet in a swoon. Susie had been very deeply in love once; it was just as well to leave those memories undisturbed and safely tucked away. But she knew that Charlie needed her and that she could make him a much happier man than he had ever been. Charlie was a thoroughly decent human being and would be good to her and to the boys. There would not be any more worrying about a future. They needed each other and isn’t that the very best basis for a successful marriage? She was determined to make it a success. It was a success.

Different people have talked to us about the “courage” of immigrants. They don’t understand the mechanics, the motivation behind the decision to leave one’s country. Most immigrants have a strong desire and that is worth more than courage. Susie is an exception. She had the desire, certainly. But to take a clearheaded decision of that magnitude, and then to go on and make it work, make it a success for all involved, that requires a strength of character that I admire. She developed an amazing skill in her relationship with Charlie, who had, to meet her expectations, to make some changes. They didn’t come fast, they were not easy, but they did come. Their yard was no longer a mess, there was order in their lives, the house was pleasant, clean, a real home…… and Charlie was a happy man. We think of Susie as a very warm, very generous and very courageous lady. Most of all, she is a dear and faithful friend.That was Susie. What about Charlie himself? An original, for sure. Born and raised in Scotland, but an immigrant in Canada at a young age, I believe, he settled in Steward on the Pacific coast north of Prince Rupert. Why there? I have no idea, but I suppose it could have something to do with the reputation of the town as a possible “boom town”. Charlie was poor, very poor. He shared that problem with a good many other Scots. I have a theory that the (in)famous Scottish parsimony is a straight and obvious result of endemic poverty. Poor people don’t throw things away that might have some value and the habit becomes so ingrained that even an end to poverty doesn’t succeed in changing the habit.

Charlie told us that he and all the other people living in Stewart had a strong belief that yes, it was going to happen: Steward was going to boom any time now, certainly the next year. He had an automobile dealership and it seemed worth waiting just another year …. there were rumors of a mine opening up in the area, that might bring a lot of people, and then he could sell a lot of cars. And so he waited, year after year and the boom didn’t happen. In fact nothing happened, not in Steward anyway. And finally he gave up and moved to, of all places, the Queen Charlottes, not because there was a boom expected there, but because life was cheap, I imagine. The famous story in our family has always been of Charlie living in some kind of a self-built cabin on the beach and heating it by shoving whole logs in the heater, bit by bit, until the log was gone. I can’t vouch for the truth …… Charlie was a great teller of stories.

From the Queen Charlottes to Terrace. And there the miracle would happen: Charlie would earn money, real money and quite a lot of it. What gave him the idea I don’t know, but he started a movie theatre, the first in the town, and it pulled people in by dozens, if not hundreds. There was no other movie theatre in the place and precious little to do for people during the evening. We visited that movie place once or twice, and it was pretty grim: a narrow building with rickety rows of chairs and the all-pervading smell of popcorn. Maybe our judgment was unreliable because we had no basis for comparison other than movie theatres in Holland.

At this stage Susie entered his life and things started to change. The yard around his house was littered by numerous piles of old lumber. Wherever you looked it seemed that there were more piles of old lumber, mouldy, half decayed shiplap, two by fours and what have you, clearly taken away from demolished buildings and piled in his yard. You never knew when it might come in handy, was Charlie’s credo. After Susie started to take part in decision-taking you never knew how many piles quietly disappeared…… Certainly Charlie didn’t know. But the yard took on a different look.

He had some weird ideas about building, particularly about insulation. Nothing could beat sawdust in the walls, of course, but the next best thing was corrugated cardboard, or, if there was not enough of that (you didn’t need a lot, mind you) newspapers did an admirable job.

How she managed it, I don’t know, but Susie got Charlie to act as “Sinterklaas” during an honest-to-goodness celebration in Terrace of this most Dutch of all Dutch festivities, where all her Dutch friends were invited, with kids of course, especially with kids. He did a fine job and I think he got a real kick out of it.

After he retired the two went traveling, cruising all over the world and it was during one of these cruises that he suddenly died in mid-ocean. It has always seemed to me such an appropriate ending for this man who had known poverty as a most direct crushing weight on one’s life, who had been lonely for such a long time and who had found real happiness late in life, to die at an occasion that to him must have seemed like a crown on his efforts, leisurely, luxuriously cruising together with his wife. He was buried at sea, and that, too, seemed appropriate, right.

There were two grocery stores in Terrace in those years, the Co-Op and Smith’s. The manager of the Co-Op was Corby King, who lived on the Bench. We dealt with Smith’s and didn’t get to know Corby, but I’ll never forget him. He and his father dug a well, by hand, through the gravel of the Bench until they hit water at, I believe, 115 feet. They did it by making a strong cribbing in sections of, let’s say, 3 feet high which were then lowered by digging away the gravel that supported them. As soon as the top of the first one was just below the surface the second one was placed on top, and so on, one man digging, the other one winching up the filled buckets and emptying them…… over a hundred feet deep. A dreadfully monotonous epic, more boring than the Fairey Queene, but a heroic struggle.

They can’t have finished it much longer than five years before the water supply in the town was changed from the spring at the end of Eby Road, opposite our house, to a creek that was running year-round, I imagine flowing into the Kalum River. This change allowed all people living on the Bench, who had never been able to use the old system, to hook up. Niek Samsom was one of the first ones to do so….. in secret. He was found out and, I believe, fined. An embarrassing event for the whole family, for everybody knew about it, as it is bound to happen in a small town. I understood why he did it, having witnessed the years of his fighting with a neighbour about the water rights on a well just across the road from his house. Of course he was hooked up shortly after he had been forced to disconnect.

There were three brothers Smith living in Terrace: Jim, the oldest and the owner of the grocery store, Fred and Harold. It was Jim who sold us our kitchen stove: $8.00. Had we had dry wood it might have worked well; it might even have kept us warm, but to get heat out of a kitchen stove in which you have nothing to burn but wet slab wood is asking much. Jim was a big, kind-hearted man. After he had retired he and his family moved to Victoria. He told us an amusing tale: he wanted to buy a t.v. set, but being a business man he did not want to pay cash for it, knowing that in doing so the outfit where you bought it has no longer any interest in you. Buying on credit assures that they will fix it if anything goes wrong. Jim was a wealthy man, but he had never bought anything in his life for which he had not paid cash. The store owner wanted to have some credit references….and Jim didn’t have any. No credit rating…. no t.v. set on credit. I believe he had to involve his bank to establish a credit rating.

After our professional year we were practically broke. I needed work in the worst way and wanted to go back to Terrace My chances would be better there than in Victoria, where I didn’t know anybody. Jim went back to Terrace every summer for some visiting, some fishing, a feeling of being “home”. He had always been a big fish in a small pond, and felt a stranger in Victoria. He offered me to travel with him; he would pay for the motels along the way. It was a fine trip, although I am afraid that I abused his new Dodge by using the passing gear maybe more than was unavoidable. Jim never complained. We stayed on the way up in Kamloops with his brother Stan and his family. I was there that I played crokinole for the first time. Jim proved to be most entertaining company. I learned more about Canada and basic Canadian values from listening to his stories of life in a small prairie town during the dirty thirties than I had during the years we had lived in Terrace.

After Jim’s sudden death his wife, Elsie, gave us the large cast iron frying pan that had been his. He used it during his fishing expeditions to Babine Lake and wherever he went fishing. It was Elsie, of course, who played an enormous role in our lives. The whole family stayed in her house while Jim and I were away in Terrace. Our rental unit in Morrowcrest Court, where we stayed during our professional year, had been found and rented on our behalf by Elsie. Under the circumstances we could hardly have been better off than we were there. The fact that we had two bedrooms, (we had the only cabin that contained two bedrooms!) made a big difference. By using a pole in the middle under each mattress we converted each bed into two singles, but that divider didn’t stop Hubert from bothering his brother and eventually we had to get a folding camp cot for him. We slept on the pull-out sofa in the living room. What we really liked was the almost idyllic rural scene we looked at from our dining room window: a cow grazing in a meadow. When we lived in Langford we started looking for a house, because Elsie had promised that she would provide the funds to buy . We really tried and looked at several houses, but there was always something drastically wrong; usually there were not enough bedrooms. We needed four: one for us, one for Lies, one for Justus and one for John and Hubert, and there was no escaping from that arithmetic. Most houses had only three bedrooms. When we reported back to Elsie she said that we had better start looking for a lot then; her offer would still stand. We found a lot, the one on Kingham Place. She paid for that. We made a plan and had drawings made, she paid for that. We hired a carpenter and started building and she paid for the works, just as she had said, to a total of $16,000,–, and by that time we could move in. Her lawyer made up a contract and pointed out to the lady that this was a most unusual arrangement, and a very unwise one. What collateral did we have? None? Ridiculous. If we would default she might lose the whole investment. An impossible deal and he advised strongly against it. But that is what the lady wanted, for, so ran her argument, there was no doubt in her mind: we would not default. He made up the contract and we were proud that when we handed her the last cheque we had not missed a single payment.

After Jim’s death Elsie sold the house in View Royal and bought another one, a smaller one that had almost no garden. She was anything but a gardener. Whatever there was by the way of grass and borders she had blacktopped over. But she didn’t stay there very long: she wanted something smaller yet, and bought a mobile home, for which she found a spot in a trailer park in View Royal, one of the less horrible ones. She was happy there, and we visited her regularly, delivering our monthly cheques.

The highlight of our close relations with Elsie was undoubtedly the trip to Terrace in her car, pulling her trailer. Moekie and tante Lieske were sleeping in the trailer, oom Charles and I in our tent, and Elsie insisted that she “was fine” on the backseat of her car. It was a memorable, a marvellous trip. It gave us an opportunity to show our guests not only the place where we had lived for five years, Terrace and our house, but a good chunk of the province as well. They loved it, every bit of it.

I honestly don’t know what we would have done if Elsie had not entered our lives. Probably we would have found some other way of doing what we did, but she made it happen at a time when it was so very important to have space. The location was ideal: close to town, but far enough out to enable the boys to enjoy the adventures by boat on Portage Inlet. Far enough, too, from our neighbours, by sheer luck of our location: a double lot on the one side, a road allowance on the other and an only partially developed sports park in the back. There was no way we could have done anything remotely similar at that point in our lives if she had not helped. Our combined income was so small that we could never have made a workable deal with the bank. The simple fact that we had no assets, no collateral in either real estate or capital, would have necessitated a prolonged stay in inexpensive rental housing. Our Langford house was fine for those two years, but all of us disliked living there. Elsie Smith has been a very important, a critically important person in our lives.

When Jim retired his younger brother, Fred, took over the store. Eventually it changed into an Overwaitea store and most people in Terrace seemed to like that change. To me it was like just another take-over of an independent business by a big, powerful competitor. We didn’t know Fred well; I had a lot more contact with Harold, who owned the building where the Kalum Hardware was established., and who had his own office next door. I used to hop over quite often for a chat.

I want to write about Teun van Burken. Maybe I should have mentioned him much earlier, for he became a very close friend. He had come to Terrace, I think, because he knew Bill Brandis. He, too, was manager of an estate, although his background was “Jacht Opziener”, a game keeper, the person who looks after the wildlife for the purpose of enabling his employer, the owner of the estate, to come and shoot it in the fall. It was an occupation that ran in the family: his father had been in the same job and his brother was still doing it when Teun lived in Terrace. His nephew held the job for the Dutch government in a planted forest in one of the new polders.

In this case the owner lived on the estate. It was a famous place for wildflowers and botanists all over the country knew and loved it. It was known as “The Plasmolen” but I believe that was really the name of the restaurant that was located on the highway running past the estate. It was open to the public, but in those days it was considered too remote to attract many visitors, at least not “many” in the sense that we attach to the word; the restaurant was more popular. But the estate, with its forest, farmland and meadows, and the creek that ran through it, was beautiful. It was located almost on the border with Germany, south of Nijmegen. Teun lived in a small house on the property. Having free living quarters was part of his remuneration.

He was an enthusiastic photographer and had a collection of photographs, all taken by himself, of all the wildflowers found on the estate. He had spent years collecting it. It was a unique and valuable catalogue-in-pictures and he was very proud of it.

He met, fell in love with, and married a nurse who worked in the t. b. sanatorium in that area. I don’t know how long they were married when it was discovered that she herself was infected with the dreadful disease, but it must have been very soon after they got married. She died. Teun remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.

It is as if Fate had it in for this generous, kind and wonderful man. When the war broke out he was evacuated. All his possessions that he couldn’t carry, and those included of course his books and photos, he put in his basement, where they seemed safer than anywhere else. There was probably no time to take them somewhere else or find another solution. When the war was over and he returned to what had been his house, all that was left was a basement filled with water. The estate was practically destroyed. All that had been of value to him had been smashed. When he heard that Bill Brandis, whom he had met during the war, was with his family emigrating to Canada, Teun, realizing that there was no future for him in Holland, followed him to Terrace. After a period of work on the Frank’s dairy farm, where he undoubtedly learned enough English to get by he found a job with the Columbia Cellulose. Since he had no academic qualifications and a very limited grasp of the language, he never got past the lowest pay scale. Enough to live, but not enough to get ahead. It was ironic, to us in any case, that this man with his enormous experience in practical forest management should always get the jobs that did not require any knowledge or experience of any kind, the jobs anybody could do. Jobs like clearing brush, or menial jobs on survey crews, or occupying the fire look-out cabins during the summer forest fire season. I believe of these jobs he liked the last one the best: he was by himself, he had a certain responsibility, and lots of time to read. How he managed to do so has always been a mystery to us, but he saved, enough to first buy his own lot and build his little house in Terrace, later to buy the farm in Abbotsford.

He came over to our house quite regularly for an evening meal, and always brought a brick of ice cream. He wouldn’t eat it for it hurt his teeth, he explained. (He had all his teeth, which seemed in perfect condition, and I believe he never saw a dentist.) We had no refrigerator, so the ice cream had to be finished at once: a celebration ! I Teun was a loner, if ever a loner existed. But he didn’t become bitter; he never complained. He liked people and company, but he liked it also to be alone. He was, by any standard, a terribly lonely man; isolated by his speech in the places where he worked and, coming home, facing the evening by himself. Many, if not most, men living under those conditions would soon decide that there was really little point in keeping the place where they lived tidy and clean. Not so Teun. We have only once seen his house not immaculately clean and had on that occasion the feeling that he had sort of given up looking after himself. He looked a bit disheveled and uncommonly down. That was when we visited him in Abbotsford for the last time. He had sold his farm and had realized that it wouldn’t do to continue living on the place while it was obvious that his advise to the new owner had fallen on deaf ears and that the place was seriously going down-hill. He had moved next doors and seemed totally at a loss what to do next. We could convince him to come to Victoria for a real break. A It was the beginning of what we think was the best and happiest time of his life, the years he lived in Sidney. He suddenly found himself surrounded by friends who appreciated him, who counted on him. He had a garden and grew all kinds of vegetables. He had a very special relationship with his neighbouring lady, Alice Anderson, who was quite a few years older that he was and a wonderful person, with whom he played endless cribbage. He loved sharing his fruit; there were several fruit trees on the property. And he continued to come regularly to Kingham Place for a meal and a lot of talking. Every time he left he would install himself comfortably behind the wheel of his green Rambler, take out a cigar and light it. It was his only vice: he smoked cigars like a chimney. The Rambler which we inherited after his death reeked of stale cigar smoke. We lost in him a very good friend.

There are only few people left on the list of those I wanted to remember. First the “Doormannen”, Rein and Jan . Rein had met Nico Samsom, because they held the same job: they were in service of the Canadian Pacific, accompanying the trains that carried new immigrants across the country to their destinations. It was their job to make sure that the individuals reached those destinations and then, later, to check in order to see that everything was all right. Rein had bought land in Terrace, across the river, where land was cheaper. His was a twenty acre piece. He hoped to farm it but he needed help and invited his brother to come from Holland to share in the venture. Neither one had farming experience, but what was worse was that they had no start-up capital, no money to invest in machinery. In order to pay for the land and then for the machines needed to turn it into a productive farm, they both had to work. And over the years the dream of the farming became hazier an foggier, until it dissolved.

They were very nice people, and hard workers, but not farmers. They seemed to fit better in a “high society” environment than on the edge of the wilderness on an isolated stretch of partly cleared land. Across the clearing you looked at the forest and at night the coyotes would come out and start their howling. They had mean tricks, those coyotes: the females lured the male dogs of the Doorman farm, first the one, then the other, over to the forest, from where they did not return. They were no match for a pack of wild coyotes. The brothers hated them with a passion, and so, in furious desperation, plotted revenge: they used to lie prone, side by side, on a bed in front of an open window, and shoot their rifles at the sounds in the dark. They never found a dead coyote. I remember that we needed some lumber and heard from Jan that there was a pile of one inch boards, that had been left there after a little mill had gone. Justus and I went over to get some. We could use their tractor, for the trail was not for cars. But they insisted that we take a rifle, loaded, for it was possible that there would be a grizzly around…..

I had never fired a shot with a rifle, and Jan wanted to make sure that I knew how to handle it, so we had a quick practice, shooting at cans. I don’t remember whether I hit anything, but it didn’t matter: I knew how to use it. And so we went, the rifle at the ready. It was warm, even hot, the lumber was lousy, even worthless, but the thrill was terrific. No grizzly showed, thanks be given…..

The idea of the farm became vaguer as time wore on and little progress was made. They both had to work full time to make a living; there was never any serious time or money to do something constructive on the farm, and eventually they gave up. Jan got an offer to become a sales representative for Bols in Vancouver and accepted it. I remember that I was a bit jealous when I heard what his starting salary would be, but I also remember a feeling of real relief: this seemed to us to be so much more what they were good at. Rein got a good job somewhere else, but that was after we had already left.

Then there was Bill Wellings, the manager of the Bank of Montreal and his wife Eileen. A nicer bank manager could not be imagined, we thought. He was friendly, helpful, thoughtful. And he tried to help in a very practical sense. He and his wife were among the first people who invited us for tea one evening, in their apartment above the bank. We admired the apartment and were amazed to find that the living room was not painted in one colour, which had been the standard in all Dutch homes where we had ever been, but that the end wall was painted much darker (I think it was brown) than the rest of the room. It had been done with the obvious idea that it would make the room seem less deep, and it was effective, we thought. We have applied the idea ourselves on several occasions: the end wall in our living room in Victoria was yellow, for instance.

We were kindly instructed in correct English and learned that it is not right to talk about your children as “kids”, not in polite company. I have often thought about that but never found that it was an idea that was generally accepted. And we got goodies with the tea that had been specially prepared…. delicious and very different from our Dutch point of view. The epitome of good manners, a wonderful set of hosts. Not typical for our experiences in later years.

They took Justus and me on a hike up Thornhill Mountain, an exciting, even terrific thing to have done. It was the first time that we had hiked, in Canada, that far and that high. Thornhill is not a high mountain by any standard, but the top is above the tree line and the views from there are stupendous. You are looking east at snow covered peaks, a real mountain wilderness, and west lies the wide valley in which Terrace is located, and then the Skeena valley proper deep between more rugged mountains. The fact that there was a cabin on the top for the fire look-out during the summer months, anchored with steel cables to the rock to prevent it being blown away (in the winter we could often see a plume of snow blown from the top of the mountain) gave the long hike up a certain romantic satisfaction, a goal. Teun has lived in that cabin a few summers, until it was abandoned because it was too high for the purpose: the summit was too often in the clouds. On the way up I saw my first wild colombines in flower.

When Eileen had to be away one Easter (I believe because she had to visit her parents with the children), we invited Bill over for supper. He brought us beforehand an enormous ham for the occasion. We had no idea what to do with it and I don’t remember what Moekie did, but I vividly remember his disappointment with the result, a disappointment we could better understand after having seen and tasted what Canadian cooks are supposed to do with ham….There is a tradition among Canadians when it comes to Easter ham, and it is unwise to break that tradition. Little did we know about Canadian customs and/or cuisine. .D

Bill was transferred to a bank in the Fraser Valley before we left Terrace and seemed to be pleased: it was supposed to be a promotion. We stayed with the Bank of Montreal as customers, but have never made personal contact with any manager. There is a lot to be said in favour of starting in a small community if you are immigrants.

I cannot leave this topic without mentioning Mrs. Foster, who was Lies’s grade 2 teacher. She and her husband owned a little grocery store close to the Kalum Road Elementary. She was a good teacher, but belonged in a previous era, when a dunce cap for trouble makers was an acceptable form of punishment. She believed firmly in drill, and drill she did, until even Lies knew the multiplication tables. But her heart was big and she was totally sincere. There was nothing phony about either Mr. or Mrs. Foster. We have always believed that she was good for Lies at that stage of her development. She had given Lies a poor mark for arithmetic because Lies was sloppy and didn’t like the drills. Moekie went over to talk and during that conversation something clicked between the two ladies. Mrs. Foster was very surprised to run into a mother who thought that the poor mark was not only deserved, but probably a good thing. Most parents who came to see her wanted her to change a poor mark into something better….

When we considered the possibility of going into teaching, we asked Mrs. Foster for advise. The principal of the other, larger, elementary school had told me that he thought our chances of being allowed to teach at elementary schools would be so slim as to be negligible. “Unless you have the qualifications to teach at the secondary level I don’t think that you will be accepted, for I doubt that the government will allow you to teach the Queen’s English with a foreign accent……” was what he said. When Mrs. Foster heard that story she caught fire: “Stuff and rubbish!” she exploded. “You get your academic records to Victoria College with your application right away and wait. They will accept you… I think you two would make excellent teachers.” We did and the rest is history. But for Mrs. Foster’s strong backing at a critical junction things might have turned out quite different. We owe her a lot.

In rereading what I have written about the people we knew in Terrace there are two things that strike me. The first one is that I left out so many and the second that I seem to have committed the same sin of which I accused Madzy: presenting too happy a picture, with so many really wonderful people. My defense is that I avoided writing about all those who are still around and “in the neighbourhood”, so to speak, with a exceptions, and that, unlikely though it may seem, the picture is true: we were surrounded by the nicest people. When we needed money to go to college in Victoria, we had no trouble finding two people who agreed to guarantee our loan: Harold Smith and George MacAdam. When I needed work, there were always jobs, like cutting birches for Fred Kirby, and, later, painting the outside trim on his house for Ralph Easton, or painting the inside of new apartments for Charlie Adam. I’ll go one step beyond that: I cannot recall meeting anyone whom I actively disliked (except the weird foulmouth who wanted to prove himself as a highball logger). My memories of those six years in Terrace that were so crucially important to us are all the happier because we met so many people we liked. And if that sounds too rosy: so be it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 6: WORK AND JOBS

 

If I don’t count that first, short week on the C.N. survey team, my first real job was with the Cellanese, as a compass man for Dave Hansen. One could not ask for a better or a nicer or a more patient boss. I am afraid that I did a fair bit of complaining about the weather when it was raining, certainly when there was wet snow on the ground. But he remained cool, chiding me jokingly, and never showed that he was getting fed-up. He had reason to be fed-up, though, when I complained, for I suspect that it was largely his concern for me that kept him going after the good weather for our work was over. He had enough office work to keep him out of the rain.

It was his job to locate and mark the branch roads that would make it possible for trucks to reach the spars in the middle of the cutting block where the logs were piled. They were loaded on the trucks that hauled them to the landing near the railroad, at the beginning of the West Kalum Main on the highway. There they were transferred with a huge A-frame to railroad cars for shipment to Pr. Rupert.

I loved his sense of humour and his feeling for the few romantic aspects of what we were doing, like finding old posts or witness trees, or coming upon a particularly beautiful stretch of the forest. “You could easily think that you were the first white man to stand here, couldn’t you?” was his question when we were standing on the edge of a narrow canyon that had a wild little river running on the bottom. Yes, you could.

I loved the care he used for everything he did, from making sure that every curve was as perfect as it could be, to his annoyance when the cat operator had ignored his stakes and thereby loused up such a curve, and his pride when he could tie a certain spot to a given marked spot on the map.

In the morning we usually got a ride with Bud McCall, the bull bucker, in his pick-up. That was convenient, but I found it often a bit difficult to accept the natural fact that I was as green as grass. Bud would be driving, Dave sitting next to him, and I next to him, at the end of the seat. They would keep up a lively conversation, but it took me weeks, probably months, before I could more or less follow what they were talking about. I felt shut out, not on purpose, but by my lack of fluency in English. I had little trouble understanding what was being said directly to me, but to be able to follow a casual conversation between others is much more difficult, of course. On the other hand, being with Dave the whole day, I learned fast. It was probably just about ideal as far as learning a new language is concerned, for he is very articulate. It was just about ideal in every sense.

When it was really getting too snowy to continue, I suspect that it was Dave who got me another job. It must have been in January. The job was a boring one, but it paid the same hourly wage: $1.50.

In the spring before we arrived the company had tried to get logs to the plant in Pr. Rupert by way of a river drive, the method commonly used at that time in the Eastern U.S. and Canada. The logs are thinner and shorter there and they were cut during the winter, when it is easier to work in the forest than in the spring or summer. They were piled along riverbanks where they would be carried away by the streams during the spring freshet. The rivers on the east coast are faster flowing, but even there the losses were such that the method of transportation has been largely abandoned. In B.C. the method resulted in a disastrously small percentage of felled logs arriving at the mill near Pr. Rupert; the rest was stuck along the way, hung up in sloughs, on islands and along the river bank.

It was an unfortunate beginning for a corporation that had just started up on the west coast. There was a lot of money involved, so that something had to be done about it. A crew was sent out in a (or several) riverboat(s), to find the missing logs and note their location, before crews could be sent out with equipment to try to salvage as many as could be pulled free to be piled on the islands close to where they were found. The idea was that the sloughs, in the summer full of water, would freeze over during the winter months, allowing loaders and trucks to reach the islands and take off the logs.

It was winter now, and not a little bit. It was cold and there was snow on the ground. It was time to get those logs and to do that a temporary road had to be plowed out of the snow from the highway to the island, a distance of maybe a mile or a mile and a half. It was done by a cat but safety regulations made it mandatory to have another person there with the operator, in case there would be an accident. To be that “other person” was my job. I had nothing to do, just be there, walking behind the cat as it plowed its way through the deep snow.

We were taken to the spot where the cat was parked by a “crummy” . In other logging outfits a crummy is usually a tiny little bus, but we were transported by a 3-ton truck with two three feet plywood sides, two plywood ends that were pointed and supported a pole, and a canvas top. There was one small electric bulb attached to the front panel. From the pole was suspended, by means of a wire, a small coal oil heater that was attached to the floor by a second wire to prevent too much swinging. Two benches the length of the truck completed the interior. Nothing could be simpler and only an open truck colder. Years of service determined your place: the longer you had worked the closer you could be to the heater. I was sitting closest to the back. Not that the tiny heater made much difference….I left the house at half past six and walked to the place where the crummy would pick me up. By the time I got there my feet would be fairly warm. By the time we reached our destination, an hour later, they would feel like lumps of ice and the walking was welcome.

Every morning the cat had to plow out again what had been opened up the previous day because it had snowed some more. By the time we were finished the snow walls on both sides were close to six feet high. The operator made a feeble attempt to teach me how to operate a cat, but my aptitude was not terrific, and his patience wasn’t that great either. I frankly preferred to walk. I did a lot of walking. Our lunch bags were kept from freezing by putting them as close to the manifold as we dared. We usually tried to make a little bonfire at lunchtime and that always kept me busy for a while, because it was not easy to find wood that would burn. At the end of the day we made sure that we were well ahead of five o’clock back at the highway, so that there was enough time to do to the cat what had to be done before the crummy arrived to take us back to town. We were not paid for “traveling time”, just for our eight hours of “work”.

Finally the day came that the road was “in” and there was an opening, large enough for a logging truck to turn around, at the other end, where the salvaged logs lay in a big pile. While the cat operator worked on that landing I amused myself by carving huge faces out of the blocks of snow he had pushed roughly into a circle. I was rather pleased with the result: all these awful faces staring down on our human activity in the clearing. But the foreman was not amused when he arrived to check what we had done and explained to me in some detail why I had been there and why I was paid to be there. Carving faces was not in the job description, and he made that quite clear.

It was interesting to see the loader, a big shovel with claws instead of a bucket, slowly move under its own power down the road like a prehistoric beast between the two snow walls. As soon as it had arrived the real work began: the loading of the logs. I was there for the duration but I don’t remember what I had to do; hook up the logs, I suppose.

After those logs had gone I got a job setting chokers on the Shames Flats close to the spot where we had been working. The previous fall there had been logging going on there, but the logs were not removed. They were now covered by a thick coat of snow, thick enough to make it difficult to see where they were and how they were lying. First I was assigned to a young fellow who was new in the area and who wanted to establish a reputation for himself as the fastest chokerman in the district. He was quick on his feet, it is true. He was also one of the most unpleasant fellows I have had to work with, nasty, full of the most god-awful language I had heard (and I had heard quite a bit, for such is the company of loggers), jokes that were invariably obscene and crude, and possessed with a feeling of his importance that was totally misplaced, but that made working with him a daily ordeal. I went to see Bud McCall after a week, explained my problem, and the next morning we found to our mutual satisfaction that we now had different fellow workers. My new crew was great. I was not a good chokerman, willing enough, I believe, but rather too old to match willingness with agility. The cat operator, Bill Robinson, was terrific, skillful and very careful.

Setting chokers is a dirty job and not without danger, for you can never be quite sure whether the pile of logs you are working on is stable, and you frequently have to crawl half under a log to reach the chokerhead you have just thrown over. A young fellow who has always worked in logging and has done little else than walk on logs is far more sure on his feet, of his movements, than I was. And a cat that is operated by a somewhat careless individual is a lethal, enormous chunk of steel that can turn at an absolutely amazing speed. If you happen to stand in the way of that rapidly swinging blade…..I remember Bill with gratitude. On the day I told him I was going to work for Public Works the next day he wished me well, shook my hand, and then, smiling, looked me over from the high seat of his cat and said slowly “Well, after all I didn’t kill you….” Devastating.

By the time I left it was spring. I can vividly remember the exhilarating moment when three trumpeter swans came flying over low, sort of melodiously talking to each other. I had never seen wild swans. And one morning I heard with amazement a sound that I could only interpret as the sound someone might make if he was trying to start a small engine, a small boat engine or something: a rapid sequence of low, little beats, quickly tapering off to silence again, but always repeated, time and time again, never catching to the roar of an engine coming to life. When Bill returned after pulling the logs to the landing, I said: “Listen, somebody is trying to start an engine….” Bill climbed off his cat, came over to where I was standing, and together we waited until the sound was repeated. He laughed uproariously, slapped my shoulder and said: “That’s a grouse calling a mate. They stand on a log, a hollow one if handy, and beat their wings against it.”

Spring on the Shames Flats has left a good memory. If I was lucky at the end of the day, I could get a ride back in the cab of another member of our crew, who sometimes took his own truck to work, a baby-blue International. That was wonderful, because it was warm and you could see where you were going, in contrast to the crummy, where you could only see a small section of where you had been….if the door was open in the back. The landscape was spectacular. The road, winding around the mountains, was a bit scary, particularly when I noticed that our driver sometimes took the inner curve when the road turned to the left around a rocky shoulder. There was no way he could have seen what might be coming from the other side. When I mentioned it to him he said in a reassuring voice: “I know what’s coming. I don’t know how, but I just know if there is anything coming from the other side.” A few minutes later he said: “Watch,” and took the outer curve. Sure enough: we met a car coming around that curve. I found it creepy and wished he would not rely so totally on a sixth sense, that was to me of doubtful reliability.

I don’t remember why I changed jobs other than that setting chokers was not much fun, and I believe we had been through one short strike. That is a dreadful thing to happen when you rely totally on that pay check. And we did, for apart from our own expenses we had to pay Pem every month. Anyway, when I heard that there was a surveyor’s helper needed at “Public Works” in town, I applied and got the job. The surveying wasn’t much. I remember that we were one day doing some measuring at the spot where the traffic turned off the bridge across the Skeena to enter town, but there wasn’t much else. The rest was what all casual labour did for Public Works: repair bridges, clear corners and shoulders along the highway to improve visibility, cut, pile and burn shrubbery where it threatened to encroach on the traveled part of the road, place or replace culverts. I did it for almost a year, didn’t mind it and didn’t enjoy it either: it was a job, a steady one at that, the guys I was working with were all right and sometimes we had good times. Like on a major clearing job of one of the gravel shoulders just east of town during a cold spell in winter. Beautiful clear weather, freezing, and with a strong outflow wind coming down the river, making us all work hard to get some really big blazes going that were warming us up. Lunch posed a problem: it was much too cold to just sit and eat your frozen bread. But half a mile at most from where we were working was the cabin of a fellow who, I believe, worked occasionally as a “powder man” for Public works, the fellow who blows up stumps and bits of rock. They all knew him at any rate, and immediately contact was made. The result: “Everybody welcome!” Big relief. He was a nice man, thin, tall, clean and, above all, a very good, a natural story teller. His cabin was heated by an “airtight”, one of those thin sheet metal jobs that is anything but airtight, but that heats very well, if you put enough wood in them. There was lots of wood, and the thing was showing bright patches of cherry red on its cheeks while it roared. The crew was sitting in a tight circle around that little heater, ate their lunches, while our host told us the stories of the days when he had run a trapline in the upper reaches of the Zymoetz Creek. There was one story about the day and night when he had literally been kept indoors by a furious black wolf that wouldn’t leave, but I don’t remember how he had managed to fool the beast in the end.

The story I remember very well was an adventure while he was working at the timberline where he had built one of his cabins. He had left in the morning with his Winchester carbine, the favourite rifle of all trappers, because it is small but packs quite a wallop in the shorter range. On his way he had come to a steep, deep ravine that was narrow enough that a single tree had fallen right across, and trees don’t grow very tall that high up. He had found that to walk around the end of the ravine would mean another hour or so of walking, and had decided that he would cross it by sitting on the tree and moving himself in little jerks, moving his hands along the trunk. He said that he had been pretty scared while doing it, for that ravine was deep. After crossing he walked on and came eventually to a shrubby spot on the upper edge of a valley. Down the slope a grizzly was walking with her cub. It was spring and the cub was quite small. Since the wind was blowing in his face the bear had not noticed him. He watched the two for a little while, but then, in a foolish impulse, he had taken a shot at the mother. The distance was too great for the bullet to have any other effect on the bear than to infuriate it instantly…. if he hit her at all. It didn’t matter, the explosion was enough; she wheeled around and came storming up that hill like a locomotive on a rampage. He cursed his stupidity and ran…. and ran….. and didn’t stop before he was back at his cabin and bolted the door. The bear didn’t show up at all. It had probably been satisfied that the enemy had gone and that the scene was safe again.

After he had regained his breath and his composure he had made himself a cup of coffee. While he was drinking it suddenly dawned upon him that he hadn’t crossed that ravine as far as he could remember and he wondered how he could have missed it? He decided that he would go back the next morning to see if he could find the solution to that riddle. He did, and arrived at the same spot where he had crossed the ravine by sitting on that log and inching himself across. The log was still there, undisturbed. the only thing he could see was that in the middle, halfway between the two sides, a little chunk of bark was missing. In the bare spot he could see the marks made by a caulked boot…. his.

The job that was most challenging was the replacement of bridge decks, using three inch planks that had to be nailed with eight inch nails, using a six or eight pound sledgehammer. The nail had to be hit right on the head, otherwise it would be instantly flattened. I was no good at it, but there was one fellow in our crew who never missed. He was a native Indian, a short, chunky man, who was totally deaf and had never learned to speak. He was smart and could understand signs (not sign language) with unbelievable speed and accuracy. He was the expert when a bridge had to be repaired or replaced. One of the other crew members placed the nails, tapping them with an ordinary hammer, so that they would stand at a certain slight angle, then he would follow and drive it home in one or two strokes.

There was a lot of clearing and burning, and all that stuff was of course wet. The smoke of our fires got into all the clothes we were wearing and was hard to get rid off. They got also filthy, not only because we were often working in the dirt, but by contact with half-burned sticks and stumps. All we had for a washing machine was the little Hoover we had brought with us from Holland, the engine of which we had re-wired to fit the voltage used in Canada (Holland has 220 V. standard.) Of course it was important that I had work, but this job took more than just my effort: it was hard on Moekie.

In the next spring I heard that there was a job opening at Sande’s mill and I applied by talking to the foreman, Pat Beaton, who hired me. In the mill the job was not dirty, just hard on clothes, and quite an experience. All three mills in Terrace were built according to the same basic plan. Their main method of shipping lumber to other places was by train. It may well have been their only method. I cannot remember that at Sande’s we ever loaded a truck with lumber that had to go somewhere out of town. And because the train was so all-important, the mills were all located along the railway, each on its own spur. What would seem odd nowadays was the fact that they were all built on a platform, some five or six feet off the ground: heavy cedar posts, connected by timbers, then a layer of two by eights on edge as joists, and a deck of two inch planks. This made it easier to load the boxcars: instead of having to push every stick or plank up to the guy piling the lumber inside half of the load would go down. It made a huge difference, both in time and in effort.

That platform almost did me in the very first day I was on the job. I was standing with a little group on the edge of the deck while something had to be done with a heavy three by twelve beam lying there. I tried to help, grabbed the beam at one end and pulled hard to move it closer to the edge, when my hands slipped and I smacked five feet down, flat on my back. It quite knocked the wind out of me, and when I got up, a bit dazed and finding it difficult to breathe I saw to my horror that my head had landed less than a foot from a sharp knot in an old piece of lumber and close to a steel rail. I was sent home for the rest of the day. An unfortunate beginning, but the only accident I suffered during the year I have been working there.

Logging trucks were driven around the mill to the back, where they dumped their load on a platform of logs., at right angles to the saw. The sawyer could then roll them relatively easily with a peevee on to the saw carriage, that moved them past the head saw, in Sande’s mill a five or six feet circular saw with removable teeth. The only source of power was steam from a boiler that was fired by refuse from the mill. The mill was old and suffered break-downs rather regularly. We didn’t mind, as long as the break-down could be fixed quickly. If it was a matter of at least a day we were sent home of course, and that made a difference on our next pay check.

The mill’s garbage, the sawdust and the shavings from the planer, but also the things that couldn’t be used for anything, not even for slabwood, were burned in a beehive burner. They are now outlawed because they create incredible amounts of smoke, but were then in general use. Among the garbage were sometimes the slabs of wood that came off the saw as a correction if the second cut had not been perfectly at right angles to the first one. They were always shaped the same way, like a thin wedge in cross section. But sometimes they were otherwise perfect: clear of knots and much wider than the rest. I used to keep my eye on those slabs, particularly if we were cutting cedar, and if I saw one that was beautiful, I ran down to the chute that carried the waste to the burner and pulled the thing out to take it home. I had quite a collection and stored them in the space between the rafters and the ceiling joists. From those slabs, after a lot of hand planeing, I made the cabinet between the bedroom doors in our house. It looked quite nice.

The mill’s age showed in other ways as well. There were no mechanical devices for moving lumber. From the moment it came from the saw it was moved, piled and loaded by hand. The moving was done by piling it carefully on a “dolly”, two steel wheels, about 20 inches in diameter, connected by a four foot steel bar that was square between the wheels. If you piled the lumber correctly on that square axle the load was just about balanced, a little bit heavy at the front end. To move it you pushed down on the rear end of your load so that the front cleared the platform, and wheeled the whole load to where it had to be piled or loaded. The first rule you learned was that you never walked alongside a loaded dolly, no matter what. The reason: the planks of the platform were old and rotten, and if one of the wheels went through there was a real chance of a nasty injury when the whole load shifted and slid off. It could easily cause a broken leg or ankle.

Once I have witnessed the terrible mess resulting from a rear wheel of the loaded company truck going through the deck. Of course the truck had to be unloaded and the lumber temporarily piled somewhere, before they could even begin to get the wheel out of the hole and back on the deck. It tied up the mill for most of a morning. I was glad that it was the foreman himself, Pat Beaton, who was driving the truck at the time. His fury would have been spectacular had it happened to anybody else.

Pat was a remarkable man in several ways. When I met him for the first time, the day I was asking him for the job I had heard about, three things struck me: his very clear, deep blue eyes, his soft, almost melodious voice, and his articulate, precise speech, the speech of a well educated person. He was built like a prize fighter from the waist up: a powerful torso and broad shoulders. But his legs were pitifully incongruous, probably due to the fact that he was pathetically flat-footed. He walked much like a duck, swaying from side to side, his toes pointing way out. “A colossus on clay feet'” was my first thought when I saw him walk. His clothes were always in need of washing and repair. I had the feeling that he slept in the same clothes he wore during the day, only taking off his shoes. One day he delivered a load of lumber to our house and stayed for a little visit. He had for the occasion a brand-new green sleeveless sweater on. A month later that same sweater was held together by the last bit of the original knitted front, close to the v-neck, and for the rest the front was replaced by a large, inverted, open V. Because we didn’t have any easy chairs yet, he sat on the bed. Moekie had an awful time to get rid of the smell he left behind in the bedspread. He seemed to wear the same clothes summer and winter.

I once went with him to his cabin, behind the mill, at lunchtime and watched with amazement when he took a carton of eggs off the shelf and broke them all in a frying pan. When I said that I couldn’t eat many eggs, because I had my own lunch, he answered without taking his eyes off the eggs in the pan “They are for me….You eat your own lunch.” He ate them all.

He drove a model “A” Ford. In his yard, which was an incredible mess of derelict furniture, useless metal and old rusty machine parts, and a lot of chickens, he had two more of the same vehicles, in various stages of demolition. “Handy to have,” was his comment, “for when I need parts that have worn out on the car I drive.”

Moekie and I once went to visit him. It was a clear, frosty night with a bright moonshine that threw dark shadows across the road. Pat had no heater on in his cabin, and it was almost too dark in there to see. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we listened to a record he liked especially. He had a very old wind-up gramophone; cranking it up became something of a ceremony in itself. He carefully put a new needle in the head (I’ll never understand how he managed to do it in the semi dark) before lowering it gently onto the record. The sound of those machines was pretty awful, but human voices suffered less than string instruments and the voice of an Irish soprano singing folk songs was pure and hauntingly beautiful.

I think that Pat was essentially a very lonely man. I don’t think he had any friends he saw regularly. I suspect he had no friends. He knew his job and was respected by the people working in the mill. I found him pleasant on most occasions and easy to work for.

My working buddy was another Dutchman, Herman van der Hende, trained as a cabinet maker and small boat builder. We got along well and worked together as a reliable unit. Both of us were very keen on piling lumber so that the front of the pile was straight and square, something Pat appreciated, even though he commented occasionally that it seemed to take us a long time. That may have been true, for we were not likely to overwork ourselves, but the fact that what we did was done properly was to Pat most important.

Once he got really mad at us. I suppose he had had an argument with Sande and found us handy to vent his frustrations. We were loading a boxcar with two by eight cedar planks, seven feet long, that were being shipped to an eastern mining outfit. They used that, frequently beautiful, lumber as floors in mining galleries because it withstood rot and the floors were often wet. We liked loading that stuff: it was an easy size, it smelled great, and it was light. But Pat thought that we were loafing (we were not) and gave us a demonstration of how he was used to go about loading it. Herman came out of the car on the deck, and helped me to feed the planks down to Pat at a rate that made it almost a continuous avalanche of planks. Pat worked his butt off, threw planks into piles at a phenomenal rate, but not very neatly, and emerged after five minutes, red as a cooked beet, and panting like a mad rhinoceros. “See…”?” he shouted at us “That’s the way it should be done….” and stomped off, back into the mill. Herman and I looked at each other, laughed, concluded that it had been a fine show…. but that it had lasted only for a very short while and that the results, both on the lumber and on the man did not seem to recommend it. We went back to work feeling pretty good.

Pat’s fits of temper were rare. As long as you did the job and took some care to do it well, he was not hard to get along with. He often picked me as the man to help him at the re-saw, where two inch lumber was reduced to one inch boards. It was a rather tedious job, but not hard work, and I didn’t mind it, certainly not when it was very hot outside. During the winter the jobs outside were as bad as the ones inside, because the main building was built at a ninety degree angle to the railroad, which meant that the north wind sliced through your clothes at least as badly as it did outside. Being outside you could find some shelter in the lee of the high piles stacked on the deck. Herman and I tried to get into the boiler room after working half an hour outside when it was really cold. Nobody seemed to mind….

The owner of the mill, Ernie Sande, lived on the property, behind the mill, with his family. I don’t know how large or small that family was, or who the members were, for there was hardly any contact. If there was a Mrs.. Sande, I have never met her. There was a son, Ray, a nice , good looking young man in his late twenties I’d guess, but I don’t know whether or not he lived in that house. I have a faint idea that he was married and lived in town. We did see him from time to time, but what his relationship to the business was I don’t know. I remember that he and one of his friends built a fine “river boat” on the deck from the most gorgeous spruce lumber I had ever seen: twelve inch wide planks, sixteen feet long, without a knot or blemish.

There was a daughter, married, I believe, who lived with her parents. She kept the books, if I am not mistaken, and in that capacity she came to the mill once in a while to talk things over with her father. One morning she came running up to me, holding her left wrist in her other hand, together with a pair of pliers. “Just,” she said urgently, “can you pull this out?” and showed me her left thumb, with a sewing machine needle right through the nail and protruding on the other side. What can one do? I clenched my teeth, grabbed the pliers in my right hand, her hand in the left and yanked the needle out. It was not difficult. She didn’t make a sound, but thanked me and went back do what she had been doing.

Ernie himself was a small, tense, wiry man who never scolded anybody, never swore at anybody, never got impatient with anybody. I heard him swear once. I was working on the deck, and Ernie was down below, trying to couple two boxcars without anybody helping him. The rails at that point were sloping just the tiniest bit. He was using a tool that made it possible for one person to move a boxcar, albeit very slowly. It consisted of a hollow wedge that fitted the rim of a railroad car and a long handle. If you placed the wedge tightly under the wheel and moved the handle down, the top of the wedge came up, moving the car an inch or so forward. You released the handle, moved the wedge quickly forward until it made contact with the wheel again, pushed the handle down…. and so on. It took time, but it did work. Ernie, when I saw him, had managed to get the cars together. All he had to do was to hook them up. So, when he heard that they had made contact, he left the tool, ran to the front of the car…..but the slope in the rails had just caused the one car to roll back a couple of inches, and the coupling would not reach. Ernie ran back, started levering his car up again, raced forward at the critical moment, only to find that the same thing had happened. He tried again, and tried to run faster this time, but it was not quite fast enough and the cars could not be coupled. After trying three times he swore violently before trying once again….with the same result. At that point his frustration broke his patience, his self control, his reason, and he let go….. a string of blasphemies so terrifying and so imaginative, combining all the members of the Holy Family in unimaginably obscene situations….. it was not only fascinating, it became pure artistry. I had never heard anybody swear like that and listened in awe. He has not been aware that there was a witness to his fury.

I worked there for about a year, joined at one point by Jan Doorman, who owned a farm on the other side of the river together with his brother Rein. They were nice people and I will have to come back to them and their farm in the next section. Jan had a truck, which made it possible to go to our house for lunch.

You learn what you have to know in a small mill like that in a month. After that it is routine and it becomes pretty boring. It is heavy work and, as I said earlier, hard on clothes, even though we wore leather aprons at all times. And there are situations where there is actual danger involved. The following story may illustrate that point.

The mill had received an order for squared timbers, to be re-sawn and made into “value-added” lumber somewhere else. They were cut in Sande’s portable mill in the bush. Of course it is not very well possible to handle ten by ten timbers the same way one handles two inch lumber. There was an established, ingenious system to load those heavy beams, all green, of course, and up to twenty feet long, on a flat deck rail car. The truck that had delivered them to the mill was parked on the deck, close to the edge. In the space between the frame of the truck and the truck deck we inserted four by fours sticking out far enough to extend over the flatdeck car below, on the rails. Then the two steel posts were lowered against which the load had been piled. I climbed on top of the load, while Herman and Jan were on the flatdeck, and dropped, with the help of a peevee, one beam on the extended four by fours, then a second and a third one. By that time the combined load of the beams tilted the truck just enough to allow the first beam to slide off by itself, on to the flatdeck. Jan and Herman stood well over to the other side when it slid off, and each time I dropped another one I shouted. They hooked their pickaroons (an axe handle with instead of an axe head a five inch curved steel hook, like a claw, very sharp) in that beam and pulled it to where they wanted it, against the posts on the far side.

It worked very well. Until, somehow, while the truck was half empty, there was one beam too many on the extended four by fours. The extra weight made the whole truck lean suddenly, and before I could jump off the whole load started to roll, leaving me no choice but to scramble up over the rolling timbers as fast as they came down. Nothing happened to me or to the other two below, but it was a situation where a serious accident could have resulted.

In the spring of ’53 I heard that there was an opening at the Kalum Hardware. That seemed like a good job, clean, indoors, dealing with the public…. Not a lot of money, but no less than I had been earning. I applied and got the job. A big change.

The store was part of the Marshall Wells chain of hardware stores. It was, like all chain stores, privately owned. The owner was Ray Juby, an immigrant in Canada from the southern United States. Ray was a nice man, easy going, trusting, pleasant, easy to get along with. He liked to live comfortably, but had no great hopes of ever becoming rich. He didn’t have it in him to become rich, for he lacked drive, initiative, ambition….the necessary ingredients for making a lot of money. He was aware of this. He once said to me: “If I would relax I wouldn’t move at all….” He was also a thoroughly decent man, a man who would find it impossible to pull a fast one on anybody, I think. He just didn’t want to work too hard. He was happy that I would open the store in the morning, have the two oil heaters going during the cold months, the floors swept, generally: have the store going before he arrived. The main “push” in his life came from his pretty, plump, spoiled wife, Mary, who would have loved it if Mrs.. Juby would have been an influential, well-to-do-lady in the community, but who had been forced to get used to the idea that she was, in fact, the wife of an average store owner in a small community, a nice man, a good husband and a good father, but not a rich or gifted or super ambitious man. He had been somewhat of a disappointment to her, I think, and she let him know it. I don’t think Ray had an “easy” life at home, and suspect that he found in the store a rather convenient, for legitimate, excuse for getting away in the morning.

Mary was used to getting what she wanted and when she had set her mind on a special car that was going to be sold (I have no idea how she knew about it) she made it quite clear to Ray that, yes, they needed another car, but it had better be that particular car, for nothing else would do. It was a Pontiac station wagon, and it was special: one of the last ones made with real wood instead of fake. Maybe not particularly practical, but certainly special. Ray bought it…. of course, for the alternative, I imagine, was pretty horrendous to contemplate.

The fact that I was a bit older than he was and had a family to take care of was maybe a factor in my appointment: he felt, I think, that he could trust me. And in a very short while he left the ordering of the builders’ hardware, tools and paint entirely to me. I liked that little bit of responsibility. Marshall Wells offered to the employees working in their stores a very basic course in paint so that they might at least have some idea of what they were selling. He encouraged me to take it and was satisfied when I passed the “exam” with flying colours: it meant that was another area he wouldn’t have to have much to do with. I liked that section, particularly when Marshall Wells came out with their system of custom-colour.

During the time I was working in the Kalum Hardware plumbing changed from black iron to copper. New houses were from that moment built with copper plumbing; the only customers who wanted iron fittings were those who had started out with it. We had one customer who came back for more and more fittings, and judging by what he bought he had real problems. He was a Ukrainian and his mastery of English was not good. It was always a real challenge to understand what he wanted to do and what he needed. As soon as he got into the door Ray would get up from behind his desk and withdraw after a hasty whisper to me: “You deal with him…..I’m gone.” He usually found his own stuff, but once in a while he wanted to know if there was such a thing that would accomplish the far-fetched, if not the impossible. Those were the moments I dreaded. Not only did you have to understand what exactly his problem was, but then you had to figure out a way of solving it by an imaginative combination of standard fittings. I don’t believe there was a single fitting left in the store that was not represented in his collection. He and his wife lived across the tracks in what was generally known as the Keith Estate. They didn’t have a car and everything they bought they paid for in cash and carried home, including all the pipe they needed. It was a two mile walk…. They were both immensely strong. His wife left the store once with two rolls of six feet high chickenwire, one under each arm. They were also immensely strong emotionally; they had to be. In recalling the two while I am writing this the term “indomitable” sticks in my mind; it seems the only term that does them justice. They had a car before we left Terrace.

What bothered me was that the store sold “fancy bone china” teacups, made in England. My problem was not that they were horrendously ugly (although they surely were), it was the fact that they were displayed on glass shelves in the front of the store, and in order to sell them those shelves and the cups had to be kept immaculately dust-free. It took the best part of a morning to do that job, for there were quite a few, and they had to be taken down, dusted, and replaced after the shelf was cleaned. There was the acute danger of breaking one of them, and if that happened I would have to pay for it. The idea of having to pay for something I thought was awful was enough to make me hate the job.

Ray understood my dislike for that aspect of my duties, and had his doubt about my ability to fake enough enthusiasm to sell them. He hired a woman, Kay Gordon, to take over that part, bless him; she was nice to work with, she brought a feeling of “homeliness” with her that improved the working conditions, for there suddenly was the time and the equipment to make coffee in the morning. She had a family, her husband was the operator of some heavy equipment, they were friends of the Juby’s. When she had to leave for a reason I can’t remember she was replaced by Bertha Amdam, a young, bright, energetic woman of Norwegian stock. Bertha and I got along famously and I was sorry when she left, but happy for her, because she got married to a handsome, very nice young fellow. Moekie and I attended her wedding.

Once a year the store received a shipment of breakable stuff, all kinds of it: cups and saucers, jugs, vases, and so on. It was always shipped in a crate made from heavy gauge steel wire mesh, filled with copious quantities of straw. I suppose that it was an efficient way to pack and ship it, but it was a pain to unpack it, with all that straw over everything in the book worm. There was, as a result of our reluctance to face the job, always a very good reason necessary to tackle it. One year that reason was simply that the whole crate had been left sitting outside. It had rained and snowed on it; it was dripping wet….. something had to be done to it, and quickly. I don’t remember how it came about, but Moekie got the job of unpacking it. It was a miserable job, for the straw was not only wet, but freezing cold as well, and it stuck to the shipped items as it it was glued. Everything had to be checked against a shipping list, cleaned and marked.

It must have been in the summer of ’55 when Ray met a young fellow,

named Sid (I don’t remember his last name) who was a trained sheet metal worker. They made plans to go into the heating business together: Ray would supply the space and the tools, Sid the labour and know-how. The space was planned to be added to the warehouse, at the back of the store. I could use a bit of extra income and asked if I could build it. It was to be the simplest of the simple constructions. I suggested that I could do that in my spare time, during the evenings and on weekends, and that it would be a lot cheaper than to have a contractor do it. That was all right with Ray. I started immediately, and worked for about a month most of my evenings and weekends on that project. It got done within the allotted time so that the new tools could be moved in as soon as they arrived. It was probably a foolish thing to do, for the hours of my regular working day were quite enough, but no lasting damage was done.

Bertha Amdam’s wedding was close to the end of my work for the hardware. We had decided that we would go to Victoria for teacher training and I had told Ray about it. That must have been in April or early May, and we were not planning to leave until June, after the kids were out of school. Ray said that he was happy to hear that, for he had to let me go, and my announcement made it easier for him to do so. He was clearly embarrassed. His father-in-law had retired, was coming north to Terrace to be closer to his daughter and the two grandchildren and had expressed the hope to find some kind of work. Mary Juby had decided that Ray could let me go so that her dad could take my job. I did not feel very happy at that moment. It didn’t matter a lot; I could surely find some temporary jobs before we would leave and I did, mostly painting, first for Ralph Easton, an outside paint job. It was during that job that I heard, saw and identified a flicker. They are common, but in Terrace at that time they were not; I at least had never heard or spotted one.

During the last weeks in Terrace I got a job painting the inside of apartments for Charlie Adam. They were both pleasant jobs; it was summer and it was sunny. Just before I started work for Charlie we had bought the good old Betsy that took us to Victoria and served us well for quite a few years afterwards. Charlie was impressed.

Twice I needed a temporary job during the winter, when I was laid-off; the first time in January 1952, before I got the job watching the cat plow a road to the island in the Skeena , the second one the next year. In both cases it was Niek Samsom who managed to find temporary jobs for both of us.

That first winter was a cold one. Work on the railroad to Kitimat had started and it was important that the line that would link Kitimat by land to the rest of the province would be operational as soon as possible. Work on the line itself could proceed regardless of the weather, but the critical part was the bridge across the Skeena at Terrace, parallel and close to the traffic bridge. The river is narrow there and rock on both sides made it possible to give the bridge a solid foundation. Two circular building pits had been made in the river by means of interlocking steel beams. To prevent the concrete from freezing an additive was added to the mixture that would raise the temperature. The two bridges would run side by side so that it was possible to dump concrete in the building pits from the traffic bridge. To make sure that the trucks carrying the concrete would be in the exact right spot to hit the target somebody had to stand on the bridge as a “spotter”. The traffic bridge was the acknowledged coldest place in town, right in the path of the fierce outflow winds that came whistling through the gap in the mountains. One could not be choosy when it came to getting winter work. Niek got the job and never complained. But it was bitterly cold….. so cold in fact, that he had to be relieved every half hour to warm up in the shack.

He told me that there was another job available. The cement used to mix the concrete for those piers had been stored, I believe for years, in a hangar on the airfield, a short drive from the bridge. There was a person needed to help the driver of the truck to load and unload the bags. It had to be done by hand, for there was in Terrace no machinery to do it. I asked for the job and got it. It was heavy work, but under the circumstances that was not bad: it kept me warm. And so we went, up to the airfield, back the flat deck truck up to the pile of bags, load the bags, back to the bridge where we unloaded them, and then the procedure all over. I don’t remember how long it lasted, maybe a couple of days. Every day’s pay counted….. I do remember that it was the first time I saw vibrators being used to make sure that there were no air spaces in the concrete.

The other job came also during the winter. Winter was of course the difficult time because the snow stopped work in the forests. The local movie theatre was owned by Charlie Adam. The original building where he operated was old and narrow, the seats not very comfortable, the whole thing probably a fire trap. I believe it was because he had heard that there was a plan afoot by other interested parties to build a competing show, but it doesn’t matter what was the motivation: Charlie bought another piece of property on the other side of Lakelse and built a much larger, much better theatre that passed the local safety regulations. It had a projection room built of solid two by fours nailed together all around, so that a fire in that space would not immediately spread to the rest of the building. When the building was near completion his wife, Suzie, wanted to know what he planned to do to cover the plywood in the entrance hall. Charlie didn’t plan to do anything : the plywood was good enough. But shortly after that he had to go to Vancouver to order the new season’s films. Suzie saw her chance. Niek and I were unemployed; she needed instant help: this was just great. She had ordered the asphalt tiles and the cement before, so she contacted us and we went to work. It was a large surface; it was winter and cold. The tiles, totally rigid and apt to break when we had to cut them, were difficult to work with, but we managed to have the whole floor covered before Charlie returned. Suzie went with him the first morning after his return and watched his reaction with worse than just a little flutter of anxiety in her stomach…… To her amazed delight Charlie’s only comment was that it looked all right. She believes that in his heart he really liked it. He used to take visitors to his new show and never failed to point with pride to the finished floor in the entrance hall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 7: VICTORIA

 

Our intended trip by car to Victoria took some careful planning and preparation, for we had to take enough to last us for a year, but the space on and in the car, a second hand Pontiac named Betsy, was, of course, very limited. Everything we did not need had to be put in storage in various places, most of the small stuff on the attic of our house, but the piano went to somebody in Terrace who could use it, and the record player to Ied and Niek.

We bought from Eaton’s a canvas tent of the traditional kind: eight by eight feet, and seven feet high, with a centre pole, four metal rods that kept the top edge square, four poles for the corners and two more to keep the flap out that made the door so that it formed during the daytime a protective “porch” over the entrance. It served us for many years until finally, on Denman, the carpenter ants found it and built their nest in its folds. They must have liked the taste of linseed oil, for they had chewed the canvas full of holes. I burned it, ants and all. It was sturdy, heavy, durable but it offered somewhat questionable protection in rain, first because you couldn’t touch it when it rained without causing instant leaks, second because in aging the material became less water repellent. It served us well and I remember it with fondness, not so much for its qualities, but because it was part and parcel of so many memories.

We bought a camp stove, the classic two-burner Coleman. We still have it in the Den and use it during power outages. And we bought a nest of two pans plus a lid/frying pan and four plastic plates plus four cups two of each in green, two in yellow, and also our first plastic boxes. Plates and cups we still have, some of the boxes are still in use, and the smallest pan is used by Moekie to melt pro wax. Amazing: all that stuff is by now forty years old.

I built a large, sturdy plywood box that would fit on a roof rack. It carried the tent plus most of the stuff that we didn’t often need: the trunk with the clothing, the boxes with the kitchen stuff we would need after we were settled, a small suitcase with what little we had of medicines, etc. etc. The rest went into Betsy’s large trunk. I find it at this moment hard to believe that we fitted it all, six people and what we needed for a year, into that one car, but we did it, and it worked.

We started out on that long trip around the first of August. The first day we didn’t go any farther than to Smithers, where we stayed with Hannie and Piet Dieleman. Piet showed us the next day around his mill and even took us up to the back of Hudson Bay Mountain, where one of his crews was working with a portable sawmill.

The next day we got to Fraser Lake, but not without trouble. The road was being upgraded, which was, by the way, very necessary, for stretches of what was officially Highway #16 were no better than any narrow, twisting, potholed local road. The work being carried out that summer involved huge amounts of gravel being spread, and in the dry summer the dust was at times so bad that you had to have your headlights on to be seen by other cars going in the opposite direction. But there were stretches where the new gravel was very loose, and Caterpillar tractors were standing by to pull vehicles through. In one of these stretches, near Endako, we had to cross a pretty high ridge of loose gravel, and the resulting bump was too much for one of the front shocks of our very heavily loaded car. We could still drive it, but it was not pleasant and we had to be extremely careful. In that condition we came to Fraser Lake, where we spotted an older house, sitting on a nice piece of property overlooking the lake. We stopped and asked the owner, an awfully kind, elderly man, if we might pitch our tents on his land for the night. Permission was immediate, and after supper he visited us and told us interesting stories about the Finnish settlers that had tried to make a go of a farming community on the other side of the lake. You could still see the clearings. And he told us about the huge sturgeon they used to catch in the lake. Our host seemed to like the pancakes we could offer him. That evening, looking out over the very large, very peaceful lake, we heard a loon calling. It could have been the first loon we had ever heard. Altogether that first real camping night with the whole family was a very good experience that has left wonderful memories.

The next day we went on, slowly, carefully, to Vanderhoof. We found a garage where the broken shock was replaced. It was the only thing that went wrong with Betsy that whole trip. After that was done we could travel a bit faster, and we arrived in Prince George early enough to look up people we knew from Terrace, the Skinners. Fred Skinner was an electrical engineer, and I believe he was in charge of the Pr. George generating plant for B.C. Hydro. We had a devil of a time finding their house, because the house numbers on the road didn’t go up high enough before you reached a dead end at the foot of a steep hill. It took some time to figure out that the road continued on the other side of that hill. He showed us their stand-by: the engine of a jet airplane. I believe we had lunch with them, but went on soon thereafter, for we wanted to keep going and they were planning to spend a couple of days in their cabin at a nearby lake.

We went as far as a campsite just north of Quesnel, Cinema, on the Cottonwood River, a lovely flat spot in the curve of the little river with a fringe of small willows (or were they cottonwoods?) along the water’s edge. There was, however, a downside to the campsite, for as soon as we were out of the car we were surrounded by a veritable cloud of no-see-ums. I have no recollection of anybody lying awake the whole night, so somehow we must have managed.

The next morning after breakfast and the usual clean- and pack-up we went on. Just before reaching 100 Mile House we turned off to the east and reached Canim Lake campsite, in time to pitch our tents on the shiny black sand of the beach before a thunderstorm broke that we had seen while it was impressively approaching from the east. Our tent stood up quite well, and we were snug and dry.

Sunny again the following morning. Back to the highway and then south, destination the magical Okanagan Lake we had heard so much about. Fine campsites there, said our map, and large: 80 sites, 90 sites: lots of room; no hurry. So we stopped at the Painted Chasm and marveled at the kind of scenery one associates with more exotic places. At the edge I found some trees that I didn’t recognize. They had a distinctive rough furrowed bark and they reminded me of the trees Dave Hansen had described: Douglas Fir, not very beautiful examples , not very impressive trees, really, but undoubtedly Douglas Firs, the first ones we had seen. And a bit further south we stopped at the amazingly clear, blue-green little Kelly Lake. Moekie believes that it was located on the road to Pavillion across the plateau where one of the oldest and most famous ranch houses in the province still stands. Soon after that we must have reached the blacktop but I don’t remember where it was. What I do remember is the delight of comparatively noiseless driving which was totally new to us.

When we were in Kelowna we did a bit of shopping before crossing the lake over the pontoon bridge. We came to the first campsite, and it must have been 6:30 or 7 o’clock. Of course that campsite was full, all 80-some sites. A bit disappointing, but there were more to come. There were the towering rock pinnacles to admire, sculpted by wind and weather, and we looked across the lake at the other side, where we saw a fairly narrow green area of the hillside along the lake indicate how high the irrigation allows the existence of orchards, and above that a dried-up, almost desert-like landscape. Both Moekie and I found it sort of scary. I began to dislike that countryside, with its vehement blues and greens in ochre surroundings, but after we found the second huge campsite filled, I began to hate it. They could have the whole Okanagan valley; give me some greener country, some naturally green country.

Just before we came to Penticton, still without finding any place to pitch our tents, it was getting dark. The children were hungry and worried, as were their parents. We stopped and made something to eat-on-the-run before driving on. Darkness closed in around us and there was nothing to be found…..We were so new at this form of camping, so inexperienced and I felt hopelessly the new Canadian. We drove through Penticton where all the lights were on: nothing. Lots of auto courts with inviting signs, but we had to be very careful with our money. In the dark we climbed the slowly curving road out of the town. I was worried and scared. There we were, together in a car in the dark, no place to pitch our tent, and the leader of the expedition not able to come up with anything better than vague attempts at reassuring the others that “something would turn up… soon” while anxiety was increasing and the morale was getting lower by the minute.

And then the headlights lit up a seemingly flat, empty bit of land, straight ahead, at the spot where the road started a slow turn to the left. I stopped and Moekie and I looked the situation over, by the light of the head lamps. It was very close to the road, but it seemed possible to pitch our tent there: more than enough room, fine gravel and sparse grass and no nastiness like sharp rocks and the like. The decision was quick: here we stay; put up the tent, by the light of the headlamps, all in one tent was o.k. for one night, a bit tight, but possible. And, with everybody’s help, the tent was up in no time, the blankets and sleeping bags rolled out, and the family ready to go to sleep. It didn’t take long. There was traffic, heavy traffic, all night long, for the refrigerated trucks with fruit prefer to travel at night, when the roads are empty and the temperatures lower, as we found out the next morning. They roared past awfully close, but we slept anyway.

The next morning: brilliant sunshine. Everybody got dressed in a hurry. We discovered that where we had put up the tent was actually an old unused curve of the road, cut off when the highway was improved. It didn’t take long to get packed up. We decided to move on to a better, quieter spot to make breakfast. We found it not too far from there, and I don’t think breakfast eggs have ever tasted better. Not even the faint sound of what could have been a rattle snake was a damper on the festive mood.

After breakfast to Keremeos, where we bought and drank a gallon of apple cider, and then to Princeton. The slow, long and curvy climb to Manning Park and Allison Pass proved to be quite a job for Betsy, but she did it without a murmur. What struck me in Manning Park was that you saw so little of the gorgeous scenery. We stopped to look at the Similkameen River, and noticed on the way down from the pass the enormous burned-out area, marked by a huge monument to the cigarette that had been tossed away carelessly and that had started the fire. The kids were as impressed as their parents. The long descent to the Valley is hard on the brakes, but we survived that too. Along the four-lane highway through the Valley to Abbotsford was an easy part of the trip and finding Teun on Boundary Road was maybe not “easy” but we managed it without much trouble, after we got some information in Abbotsford. The reception was quite as warm as expected.

We went with him all over the property, looked at the raspberry canes, row upon row of healthy, lush growth, neatly tied to the wires, and at the hen houses where he kept the “fryers” earlier in the year, the young chickens that were raised not quite to maturity, strictly to provide the market with tender chickens to be fried whole, but that were now occupied by some East Indian families that were picking the fruit. He explained to us that his fortunes in raspberry-growing had dramatically changed for the better since he had been able to install irrigation with money he borrowed from his brother. The farm looked typically “Teun”: tidy, carefully looked after, well organized. Justus had his first chance to drive a vehicle: with Teun standing on the machine behind him he drove the farm tractor.

We pitched our tents on the grass in front of Teun’s little house, three rooms: a kitchen, a living room and a bedroom, immaculately clean, had supper with him and enjoyed a quiet evening. I think we stayed one more day, met the Apeldoorns who lived close-by on a dairy farm and I believe we went with him into Abbotsford. The next day we moved on: the last leg of our journey.

Vancouver looked really big-cityish to us. We crossed the Fraser by means of the Patullo bridge and Burrard Inlet via the Lions Gate bridge, which was still a toll bridge at that time, and got to Horseshoe Bay to board the ferry to Nanaimo, the only day-link with Vancouver Island. (There was still a night sailing from Vancouver downtown to Victoria.) It was all pretty exciting stuff, first crossing a busy, big city, then that large ferry with the several decks that could be explored, and finally the trip south to Duncan.

We went straight to the centre of the city and phoned Trudi and Lootje Westermann from there, giving them as accurate a description as we could of the location where they could find us, and then we had to wait, but not very long. We were guided to their house on Bell Mc Kinnon Road and were amazed that they had such a large piece of property, at least I was. Lots of room for our tents. Such a warm welcome….. Lootje had just discovered a wasp nest behind one of the cedar boards that covered the outside of their house. I helped him, as soon as it was dark enough, to squirt insect killer into the opening before closing it with a rag or something. Welmoed, Lootje’s sister, was staying with them and it was with her that we went the next day or the day thereafter for the first time to Victoria, that is to say, Moekie and I went, the children stayed in Duncan to play with the Westermann children.

Lootje had told us about the blacktopping of the Malahat Drive, that had been completed just earlier that summer. Before that it was just a gravel road, like most roads in the area, which added to the hazardous driving conditions for which the road across the Malahat was notorious: it is heavily used because there is no other road linking Victoria with the rest of the Island, it had too many curves, nasty corners and fairly steep grades, combined with frequently occurring fog. The summit was of course much more exposed to frost than the lower stretches and after snow it was a road we tried to avoid. As long as we lived in Victoria there has hardly been a Sunday when we didn’t hear one or more ambulances racing north, and usually they were attending to the victims of yet another accident on the Malahat. Blacktopping improved the road enormously, but also allowed higher speeds. Whether or not there was a sudden increase in accidents after that summer I don’t know.

We were quite impressed by the incredible views over Finlayson Arm and the Saanich peninsula. It was summer and it was sunny: Victoria could hardly help making a favourable impression. We were amazed and amused by the spectacle we witnessed on the lawn behind the Crystal Pool: a number of quite elderly ladies and gentlemen, dressed in immaculate white, each with a little cloth hat on her or his head, who were intently and earnestly rolling balls across the bright green, immaculately maintained and cut lawn. It was their seriousness that we found so funny… they didn’t seem to be doing this because it was fun, they made it look as if they were performing an ancient, sacred rite. Later Jean Green, who was Hubert’s teacher and who was living in a neighbouring cabin in Morrow Crest Court, commented, after she had seen this uniquely Victorian (or so we thought at the time) spectacle, that these people, living in the “colonies” and wishing that they could live that way “back home”, were developing traits that made them look more British than the British. Caricatures of what other people thought were typically British characteristics. The trip left a pleasant, albeit very superficial, first impression.

I suppose it must have been on or just after the first of September that we moved to Victoria with the whole family and installed ourselves in Morrow Crest Court. We met Elsie Smith there. It was Elsie who had found this accommodation and who had made all the necessary arrangements. We were very lucky, because cabins with more than one bedroom were very hard to find; ours was the only one of that size in the autocourt. Moekie’s and my first impressions are vivid and quite similar: the flowers and the well looked-after garden, and the view from the kitchen window over a real meadow with cows: David Aujla’s parents lived there.

There were two bedrooms, one was to be shared by Justus and Hubert, the other by Lies and John; we slept on the pull-out sofa in the living room. The combination of Justus and Hubert didn’t work out at all.

Because Hubert was moving around a lot in his sleep he was installed on a camp cot. Lies and John were separated by a pole in the middle. The parents had to get used to the not-very-comfortable sofa but slept reasonably well on it after that.

As I was writing this a sudden thought flashed through my mind, a thought that had never before become conscious. We were at this point heading in a totally new direction in our life and the circumstances under which we did it were certainly making things more complicated. Most people make their important career choices at a much earlier stage of their lives, and at a much younger age. We were well past thirty and had a family of four kids. We had very little money and were putting every bit of it into this venture, for which we had to mortgage our house. This was going to be the critical year: if we succeeded we would have jobs and eventually a brighter future, but if we did not succeed the future looked glum, even dismal. Objective observers would have had another reason for not being overly confident of our chances to come out the winners: my academic record at school was at best somewhat dubious, and my performance during the one year I spent at university was downright grim. Combine that with very crowded accommodation during that crucial winter session and one would have to come to the conclusion that there was reason for some anxiety and worry.

The thought that hit me while writing this was that there was nothing of the sort troubling our minds, that we were confident and positive, and that the thought that we might fail never entered our minds, not at this stage anyway. Twice during the months of training in Victoria College, from September ’57 to June ’58, we felt less certain of success. The first time when we got back the results of our English 200 midterm, which both of us failed miserably (with something between 20% and 25%), the second time at the very end, when Moekie sort of collapsed mentally during the last practicum in the classroom of a very poor teacher. Both times we survived. But I am running ahead of the story.

The children had to be registered in their schools; Lies, John and Hubert in View Royal Elementary, which was delightfully close-by, while I took Justus to Colquitz Jr. the first school day and left him there with a slightly troubled heart; it seemed like a very big school. All of us were facing big changes. We, the parents, went to Victoria College and found it to be a school of sorts, I imagine by its nature as a teacher-training institution as well as by its size. The instructors were really more like teachers than like professors, and the classroom routines were very school-like. The total number of students was, I believe, less than 600.

The first day we had a somewhat funny experience in the class of Mr.. Loft, the Social Studies professor. He wanted us to sit in alphabetical order so that he would be able to recognize individuals. When he came to the “H” he read from his class list :”Johanna Havelaar” and looked up to see who this was. Then: ” Justus Havelaar” and another, amazed, longer, searching look at both of us. “Are you related?” he asked, almost unbelieving. We informed him of the facts of our life while the class laughed. “You don’t have to sit together if you would rather not…” he said pleasantly. We preferred to stay where we were. It was a sure signal of things to come: we were very conspicuous; proudly conspicuous I may add. We liked Mr.. Loft.

We liked most of our instructors, that helped. We were training to be elementary school teachers and it could have been pretty awful, but it wasn’t. The only course that was definitely not any help for elementary school teachers was of course English 200, but they all had to pass it in order to get their teachers’ certificate, come hell or high water, for some very deep reason, cultural as well as intellectual. Moekie had one teacher on her staff who passed it on his eleventh try with 51%. That man had spent ten summers in summer school, ten wasted family holidays. His main interest was P.E.

I loved it, particularly because it was taught by an inspirational, enthusiastic instructor, Roger Bishop. After our dismal showing at the fall midterm I went to see him in his office, and asked if he thought that I could do it, English 200. “Of course you can do it,” was his answer, “but you have to learn to really study for it. It is hard work.” He was right: fully 50% of my time was spent on that blessed course during the rest of the college year. But I did well and didn’t mind. He assigned the first essay and announced that he had on the door of his office a list with topics from which we had to choose; no more than four people for the same topic, please. I was in no hurry, but when I finally made it to his office door all topics in which I was interested were signed up. The only one that looked somewhat interesting was on English madrigals. I worked on it, found it interesting, but got hold of the book I really needed after I had virtually finished my essay. It meant a lot of re-writing. I got a good mark for it.

In order to avoid that predicament I went to see him before he had listed the topics for the second essay and asked him to assign a topic there and then. He thought that was a good idea and said: ” Why don’t you write on John Bunyan and the “Pilgrim’s Progress….” I had no choice, but didn’t like the idea at all. However, the Pilgrim proved to be much more interesting than I had thought, and the author, as well as his church, were absolutely fascinating, so that it was all together a worthwhile exercise.

The Christmas exams came and went and I had worked hard. I thought I did all right. When he discussed the exam early in the new year he ended by mentioning that he had done something he had never done before: give full marks for an answer to one of the questions. It had to do with Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. It happened to be my answer. I am sure that he was as pleased with that result as I was, after my shaky start.

Moekie found out pretty early that she had to drop English 200 if she wanted to pass her other subjects and went to see Dr. Hickman, the Principal, who was sympathetic but tried to convince her to finish it. She might spend less time with her house- and family duties, he thought. Had she ever learned the trick of….(a gesture imitating using a can opener) She told him we bought vegetables for a whole week for $1.–at a local Chinese market garden, and he understood that our budget didn’t make allowances for canned food. In the end she was allowed to drop English 200 and take it later in a summer session. That decision saved us: during the first years of teaching we needed her income to survive.

English Language was taught by Mrs.. Christie, who valiantly tried to make us understand the intricacies of English grammar. After a discussion one of us raised a hand to ask an explanation. She smiled wanly and said: “I am scared when either one of you raises a hand,” and admitted that English grammar is not always capable of reasonable explanations, a conclusion we had arrived at independently.

Dr. Mason dealt with childhood psychology. His lectures were stimulating; the course material was more or less familiar to us from our own experience. We were not the only ones in that class who had a family; there was another married woman who had kids. But we were the ones who asked questions and stated our opinions on occasion, something he rather liked and encouraged. At the final exam he gave us a whole exam of true/false questions, 250 of them, and it proved to be one of the toughest we had to write, for we knew that in so many cases there was no clear-cut “true” or “false”. We passed without trouble, but when we afterwards complained to him about his exam he laughed and said: “You people know too much, that’s all. For students who had just studied the text there was no such ambiguity.”

In our arithmetic classes with Dr. Farquharson a few very basic mathematical facts dawned upon me, facts that I had never seen in that light, for instance that multiplication and division are fast forms of adding and subtracting. The thought that my miserable experiences in math could maybe have been avoided if I had had better teachers and had tried a little harder has never quite left me since those lectures, but it is no consolation: the light came too late and was too feeble.

Music was taught by Dr. Gaddes, who also directed the College choir and encouraged us all to participate, which Moekie and I did. It was fun, even the performance we gave in the auditorium. He had a brother, his identical twin, who was a psychologist, studying development patterns of identical twins raised in different environments. The twin brother we visited in England, much later, in 1971, while staying in Oxford, waiting for our rental car. He had exchanged houses with a British psychologist who lived in a small town just west of Oxford. It was the second day of our driving experience in England. Right in the centre of the town where he lived the highway made two right-angle turns. We went very slowly, staying carefully on our half. It almost cost us our lives, because a sporty Brit came from the opposite direction, at a ridiculous speed, cutting both corners. He missed us. Gaddes said, when we told our story, that he had tried driving in England, but found it too nerve wrecking.

I think our favourite class was art with dear, kind, stimulating Mr.. Johns who managed to bring out the best in all of us, as far as artistic creativity was concerned. But his classes were dealing with actual projects and techniques that could be useful to us in our classrooms. There was never any emphasis on our artistic talent or the lack of it. What he had taught us proved to be enormously helpful and valuable later in our work. I had liked those classes so much that I took the next summer another, more advanced, art course, taught by an American from Seattle. He was, I believe, of the opinion that there must be an artist lurking in the shadows of the souls of everyone in his class and that he would bring that artist into the light of day. It took an enormous amount of time to finish all the projects. Most of it was sort of fun, but it didn’t teach me anything useful other than that I was not an artist. The curved piece of driftwood with the nails hammered into it that is still standing discreetly in the tall window in our house is one of the products of that summer.

We had to settle right quickly into a certain routine, if we were to find the time to work for our courses. The only time available was of course in the evening when all the kids were in bed. They must have understood their parents’ need for that time, for they co-operated without a murmur and were in bed at an hour that seems now, in retrospect, almost absurdly early. I don’t remember much of those evenings in any detail, except that we had to make “visual aids” and used the floor of the living room to sort and cut out pictures from the old issues of the “National Geographic” we had found in a little second-hand store in Victoria. Most useful, that magazine, for beginning teachers.

On Sundays we always did something with the whole family. We discovered Thetis Lake Park that has always remained such an important element in our lives in Victoria. We got to know it intimately. On one of our first walks there we were together with Jean Green. We have a picture of her struggle to cross the bridge that was supposed to span a creek at the far end of the lake, but had collapsed.

During our “professional year” Thetis Lake was the area where we collected the twenty specimens of local wildflowers that was a compulsory part of our science course. We have always been grateful to Mr.. Brand for that assignment. It was tapping into a keen interest in wildflowers we had brought with us from Holland that has spread to all other members of the family. In later years, after my first visit to the heart specialist who told me to start walking daily, Moekie and I walked around Thetis Lake every day after school, never tiring of the scenery. We got so familiar with the park that we knew more or less precisely where we would find which kind of flowers. If we had brought work that had to be done during the first years in Victoria, we usually found a sheltered sunny spot while the kids played their games in the Thetis Lake “wilderness” and were happy.

We discovered a wonderful beach near Metchosin, usually not heavily populated, full of interesting driftwood, Taylor Beach, that became one of our most important weekend refuges. To get there we turned off the main road into a short dead-end road that led to a more or less open area where we parked our car. On the left was a sandy cliff, on top of which a house was built in later years, to our disgust and dismay. I must admit that I watched over the years with a sense of satisfaction when, under influence of wind and water, the cliff face was eroded to the point where one could see that the house might well end up sliding down into the stormy water of Juan de Fuca Strait.

We crossed the washed-up logs that separated the parking space from the beach area and usually walked a little ways to the left until we found a convenient log where we could settle down, sheltered from the wind. Moekie and I had always lots to read and to prepare that first year, and in later years we used the time to do our marking. The kids spread out over the beach, in search of logs that would be suitable for use as kayaks. To get these into the water wasn’t always easy and sometimes my help was required, but once they were afloat they provided endless fun. It has always puzzled me that they could stand the numbing cold of that water on their dangling legs. I remember that I once retrieved a log that had ended up quite a ways down the beach by rolling it into the water and pushing it to where we were sitting. It didn’t take longer than maybe fifteen minutes, but when I arrived my legs were blue and numb. Hubert reminded me that his log was wide enough to allow him to keep his feet on top, not dangling alongside. Maybe the other ones did the same. Towards the end of the afternoon the logs were hauled up on the beach, (a major effort) and more or less covered with sand to make it less conspicuous that they had been and could be used as boats-of-sorts. We usually found them back.

When the water was really too cold the kids constructed shelters from beach wood or played with whatever they had brought with them, (we went through a period when they all made toy boats from bits of lumber in our workshop) but the amazing thing was that the beach worked on them like magic, dispelling antagonisms, promoting co-operation, soothing and stimulating them. For their parents it was as much of a blessing as it was for them.

To the left of where we were usually sitting the beach stretched a long way; to the right it ended against a rocky knoll where a high fence stopped further explorations. Beyond that was an area belonging to the Department of Defense, Albert Head.

Years later, when we had finished the little yellow dinghy, it came with us to the beach, an enormous improvement over the logs. Justus and I sailed it back once, all the way into Esquimalt Harbour to the spot in View Royal where you could reach the water’s edge by climbing down a little slope. I remember that occasion vividly, because after we had gotten on our way I was not at all sure that it was a wise thing to do, in a boat not quite eight feet long, and the sky was threateningly black. Nothing happened, and after arriving safely I felt that it was something of a little achievement. There was no real danger, because we were always close to the shore.

During the week the kids played usually in the rocky area that lay between the motel and the railroad. It was undeveloped and pleasantly wild. During one of those games John got hit on the head by the edge of some piece of fairly heavy metal, and had to be stitched up by Dr. Roach, who used to say in later years that he never saw the Havelaars unless they had to be stitched back together. And he didn’t do the worst of those stitchings, when Justus cut his thumb while he pulled a stuck blind, that he tried to close, from the wall and almost severed the tendon of one of his thumbs. That repair had to be done in the hospital.

Christmas came and, thanks to Elsie Smith and Miss Fleming, one of the faculty members of Victoria College, a single woman who lived with her mother, it was a happy Christmas, albeit very different from our celebrations in Terrace. Miss Fleming and her mother invited the whole family for an evening to their house, where we had fun learning Scottish “reels”. At the Smith house we had “Christmas dinner with all the trimmings”, including pistachios and funny paper hats. It was some dinner. We had never had anything quite like it. I imagine it was the first time we had turkey, and it was certainly the first time we had yams. It was very festive and very different.

There was, during that year and the following four, no way Moekie could make her own bread, and we had to find places where we could buy a reasonable commercial bread. We found such a store on Hillside, a little bakery shop, where we stopped every day on our way home. They had their steady customers, people you could meet time and again. One of those was a little lady from Scotland, quite elderly, who had lived for more than forty years in Canada, but talked about “home”, meaning Scotland. Later we bought our bread of course at the View Royal bakery.

Coming from Terrace we were utterly amazed (and delighted !) to find flowering calendulas around our cabin in January…… That year there was no real winter in Victoria at all. Somehow the gray skies and the rains have not left an impression, for I don’t remember having been affected by them at all. Maybe it was our Dutch background: we were used to low, gray skies and lots of rain. But the spring was real and much admired: all those flowering Japanese plum trees throughout the city !

With the spring came the practice teaching assignments. We had done some observing in classrooms in the fall, and probably taught one lesson or so, but this was our first exposure to the real job, being in front of a class every day, for a week, and trying to teach them something, under the critical (but mostly sympathetic) eye of the regular teacher. We were both assigned to View Royal Elementary, which was conveniently close-by. It was also the school where three of our children attended, Hubert in gr. 3 with Jean Green, John in gr. 4 with Miss Wallace , and Lies in gr. 6 with Mr.. Davies, the principal, helped by Mrs. Collins, who taught the music. Lies liked her a lot. That was the class where I would be, while Moekie was in gr. 5 with Mrs.. McAuslin. I don’t know how nervous Lies was, seeing her father there in front on his first try-out, but I don’t remember having been very nervous at all myself. Somehow we were involved in a topic I had first-hand experience in: logging, I suppose either in Reading or in Social Studies, and I remember the thrill of feeling that you really could tell those kids something about a topic you were familiar with because you had done it, not by reading, or hearing others talk about it. Lies behaved like a model-daughter, and if she had been nervous, she didn’t show it. I got along very well with Mr.. Davies, and had altogether a good time. My self confidence soared, but what was more important, I loved it and looked forward to the next time.

That was two weeks in another gr. 6 , but in a very much larger school, George Jay. Moekie was in another gr. 5, a “slow” one. The teacher was marvelous, a fairly young woman, and a dedicated, enthusiastic, even inspirational professional. Mine was very good, a smallish, slim redhead who ran a tight ship without authoritarian emphasis on discipline. It was not an “easy” class; there were a fair number of not very bright kids who were not easily motivated. He had discovered that they were very good at map-making and had some almost incredible successes with that. The finished products were pinned on a display board at the back of the class and the quality was phenomenally high. Competition was keen and their pride in the results of their efforts was wonderful to see. I loved getting involved in that project.

The one thing I did not like at all was that the principal was a “snooper”, who preferred to wander unnoticed through the halls of the old building, listening at doors, peering through windows, over the normal direct approach of checking on teachers by sitting in their classes from time to time. I found it quite unnerving when I caught a glimpse of his white hair at the door window while I was teaching. The classroom teacher laughed when I mentioned it to him and commented that everybody knew that he was doing it, but that “you got used to it.” I resented it.

And so we came to the last practicum, four weeks in Marigold, a bright, modern school in a suburban setting. I was again assigned to the gr. 6 where the principal, Mr.. Jarvis, taught, helped by a part-time teacher, a pleasant, efficient and unexceptional woman in her forties. Jarvis could not believe it when he discovered that this student teacher, who wanted to teach grade 6 kids, had never played ball, either of the soft or the hard variety, and was totally inept in catching balls by using a glove. The student teacher, on his part, could hardly believe it when he was asked by the principal to accompany him on a walk through the area after lunch, because he wanted to check on the number of houses that were being built, a number from which he calculated his salary the next year. I had a suspicion that he was a good deal more interested in that aspect of his job than in the kids he had to teach. Mr.. Jarvis and I got along just fine, although there was one morning when I found a note on the desk: “The discipline in this class is deteriorating rapidly. Do something about it.” I hadn’t noticed, but what I did in the class was not what he would have done and this was, after all, his class. Apparently I took care of the discipline problem to his satisfaction for I got a first class mark at the end. Neither one of us shed tears when we parted.

The teacher Moekie got was something else. She and Jarvis shared a keen interest in “playing ball” and she was good at it, so he told me. As teachers go she was a disaster, at least by the standards we had been told to apply. The arithmetic book in use in elementary schools was organized in a way that interspersed the text dealing with computations, fractions, etc. with separate, shorter chapters that dealt with special subjects, like “measuring”, “estimating”, “weighing”. The lady had found it distasteful to have to make visual aids for all these subjects and had conveniently skipped them to leave them till the end of the year, when she would likely get a student teacher to deal with them. The extra amount of work that entailed didn’t bother her at all, but it was a ridiculously heavy load for a student, who, furthermore, would have not one subject in arithmetic she or he could develop and work on for the duration of the practicum, but instead had to start a new subject every week.

Her arithmetic drills were handled in exactly the way we had been told to avoid at all costs: she started, let’s say, in the right hand bottom corner of the class and then worked up and down the rows so that every child knew exactly when her or his turn would come, and pay no attention at all during the rest of the exercise. That was the way she insisted Moekie had to do it as well.

In Social Studies we were supposed to deal with B.C. History, because this was the year of the Centennial Celebration. She had kept till the end of the year Mackenzie’s over-land voyage to the coast, and that entailed a discussion of the various Indian peoples who inhabited the region. She had undoubtedly avoided the discussion because it entailed of course a lot of reading and preparation. Wonderful, to get a student in your class towards the end of the year.

For us it was towards the end of a very difficult and heavy year, and we were tired. Moekie would have handled almost any other situation just as she had the other ones, that is to say: very well. This, however, was too much. She suffered a sort of a nervous breakdown. The College supervisor was called and arrived on the scene. It was clear to everybody (but the classroom teacher) that here was a case of a potentially very good teacher who was going to quit right there and then. Moekie was in tears, wanted only to be left alone, and forget about teaching. We drove to the coast where we ate our lunch, sitting in the car. I don’t remember what we said, but in the end we did go back to the school, where the experts had found a solution: she could spend the rest of that practicum with the Kindergarten teacher, dealing with nice little kiddies, a teacher’s helper of sorts. That her whole training had been directed towards intermediate classes was of no importance apparently, nor was it that she had not the faintest idea what to do in a Kindergarten class.

In retrospect I find it all hard to believe. These were all education specialists…. couldn’t they see what had happened and why? Was there not any other solution possible? Did anybody take the trouble to check the teaching assignment? Was there maybe reason to give that classroom teacher a very stiff talking to? Jarvis wouldn’t do that; I doubt that he could recognize a poor teacher if he saw one at work, as long as the discipline was looked after. But the College supervisor? Kindergarten, indeed. In the years that followed not one of her colleagues or principals has had any doubt at all about the quality of Moekie’s work. If vindication was needed, the four years that followed this scene of professional ineptitude have demonstrated beyond any possible doubt just how good she was. At the time it was as if our whole year’s efforts were about to evaporate…. and it was pretty grim.

She survived, I survived and all turned out pretty well. But thinking about Marigold holds no pleasant memories for either one of us. It meant, of course, that Victoria was not particularly interested in hiring her, since her final mark was a “Pass”, but the official explanation was that “it was against the school board’s policy to hire husband-and-wife teams”. She got the job in Langford and proved there to Mrs… King what stuff she was made of. And after that Victoria was no longer considering that hiring a husband-and-wife team was undesirable, and took her on with glee.

It was a nasty ending to a challenging, a difficult year; not difficult in an academic sense, but in all other ways: housing, finances, family adjustments, exam tensions, first exposure to teaching, etc. The winter rate we had paid for our cabin changed to the normal summer rate in June, and we had to get out. We were flat-broke and it was absolutely mandatory that I should earn some money. Jim Smith came to the rescue. He had made it a custom to go back to Terrace for the summer months, staying with his brother, doing some fishing in Babine Lake with his buddies and having a good time with all the people in Terrace he knew so well. I think he liked being once again a big fish in a small pond. He offered me that we could travel together in his car, there and back again, so that I could take over part of the driving. It sounded too good to be true, for I knew that my chances of getting a job for the summer in Terrace would be infinitely better than they would have been in Victoria where I didn’t know anybody.

I am still blushing a bit when I think about my driving during that trip. His was a big 8 cylinder Plymouth, automatic, quite powerful. I had never driven a car like that for any distance. I loved it and drove like a teenager, using the passing gear too often and for no good reason, driving too fast in general, while Jim didn’t complain once…. The first night we stayed in Kamloops with his brother Stan and his family. That evening we played crokinole, a game I didn’t know, but that I thought was quite interesting and fun. The second night we stayed in a motel in Pr. George (Jim paid !) and the third day we got to Terrace, where I found work right away in construction and could live with the Samsoms.

It was a good summer. I worked hard, with lots of concrete mixing and not very much painting, which was the job for which the (Dutch) contractor had hired me. I imagine I was too slow. But I didn’t mind the hard work and I earned a reasonable wage. The staying with the Samsoms was ideal.

Moekie and the children all went to stay with Elsie Smith. I imagine Jim and I must have left already well before the end of May, for I had earned some money by the time June 4th rolled in sight, and I could celebrate-from-the-distance by sending flowers, which were a real hit in Victoria. Moekie found, through the help of the music Gaddes, a temporary job by working in a kindergarten in Oak Bay, which helped financially. And she did some house-shopping and found the house in Langford where we lived for two years. It was brand new, big enough, and not expensive, the upper part of an “up-and-down” duplex. The owner was Mr. Dodd, a Sikh and a very nice man. It could hardly have been better, for it was close to the school where Moekie would teach and John and Hubert would be. Lies and Justus were registered in Belmont which was even closer.

` It sounds awful, but I have hated that place. It was built on a gravel bank where almost nothing would or could grow; there was, it is true, a wee bit of forest left behind the house (if “forest” isn’t too big a word for that small patch of spindly trees) but for the rest it seemed like a barren and nasty place to me. It looked out over he Public Works yard across the street (John enjoyed that part, for there were big machines coming and going) and from the side window across the gravel pit in the direction of Belmont school. It was, as apartments go, a pretty roomy place: a fair sized living room, three bedrooms, and a huge kitchen where we ate our meals.

Two truly amazing things I have to mention here. The first one is that Mrs… Dodd, a tiny, sinewy woman who spoke no English at all, started a garden in the gravel between their house and our apartment. She somehow Doug the patch and removed all the stones she could find that were of any size at all. It was, by definition, an impossible job, for there was no end ever to the stones, but she did it. After that she planted seeds for herbs she wanted, spicy, hot herbs, watered them every night, and, miracle of miracles, the tiny garden grew a crop, right on top of the gravel. Mr.. Dodd was sitting in his chair, which he tipped back against the wall of his house, to watch his wife toil, but never moved a finger to help her. That, we were told, was entirely in keeping with the customs of their people.

The second thing is that our children managed to create something where there didn’t seem to exist anything at all: they made a complicated, tricky course of narrow paths through the little bit of forest, and enjoyed riding their bicycles there. I thought their imagination was remarkable and a hopeful sign for their future development. We were invited, not to ride our bicycles, but to eat bannock, a mixture of flour, water and salt, rolled into balls, which were then stuck on the end of a sharply pointed stick and toasted over a little smoky bonfire.

We occupied the top floor of the building. Below us lived a family of three: a couple with a teenage son, who played the trumpet, or tried to. The sounds were awful, and because the whole place was built on the cheap, insulation between the top and the bottom was either non-existent or insufficient. We could hear every note hit or missed. They were friendly people. One of our bedrooms was located above their garage. Our downstairs neighbour wanted to make a motorboat of plywood, covered with fibreglass. He did that in the garage, and John and Hubert, who slept in the room above it, were exposed to fumes of the fibreglass resin beyond belief. In retrospect I think that we should have launched a complaint, for there was definitely a health hazard involved, and besides anything else: they could not sleep in that stench. It took him quite a while before the job was finished and the boat was sitting in the driveway: an ugly, heavy boat with enormous fins to suggest supersonic speeds.

Lies and Justus slept in one bedroom, Moekie and I in the third. Somehow we decided that changes were in order after a while, and we moved to the room above the garage where we slept on the floor on the new mattress we had bought (our first and only two-person mattress, now still in use on the bed on the loft).

But I am running way ahead of the story. It must have been about half of August when Jim and I returned from Terrace. It was wonderful that Moekie had found that apartment, but our belongings were still in Terrace and had to be brought down. We rented a truck from Tilden, and set off, accompanied by Justus. It was a fast trip. We camped, because that was the least expensive way, but did not take the time to look around or to make interesting side-trips. On the way up we took the road through the Fraser Canyon, where a lot of construction was going on. There was one section where we actually had to travel on a road very close to the river, I believe built on a trestle overhanging the water. We traveled on boards, that I remember very clearly, and it was very narrow. But the scary moment came after we had crossed the river and were traveling on a stretch that was carved out of the rock, twisting, narrow, with a lot of tight curves. In one of these curves we banged the right hand top corner of the truck against overhanging rock. But, fortunately, when we stopped and checked, we could not find any real damage. It was a good thing that those corners were protected by metal. The sound of the impact was awful…..We were in no position to face paying the cost of repairing damage to that truck.

I believe we camped just north of Quesnel but am not too sure about that detail. And we must have spent a night with the Dielemans (we would never just drive through Smithers without seeing them) but, again, I have no recollection of that visit.

We pitched our tent on the Samsom property in Terrace and watched the egg sorting and checking. We had never seen that and found it quite interesting. And heard that evening a lot about Niek’s struggle with the marketing board, a classic example of an entrepreneur’s fight with the bureaucracy of a large government-supported organization. It was created to protect “the egg producers” against the sort of competition that would likely kill the business, but was used to protect the interest of the largest producers, all located in the Fraser Valley, against the aspirations of the few outside that area to secure their corner of the total market.

The next day we collected and packed our belongings, wherever they were stored, beginning with the piano, which we got inside the truck and stored against the end wall without a hitch. When we had everything we needed we had a very full truck. I believe it was all done in one day.

` There was an urgency to get back, for there were rumblings of a threatening strike of ferry workers, and we didn’t want to (nor could we afford to) get stuck on the mainland.

The trip back was fast and uneventful. We wanted to avoid the Fraser Canyon, having learned our lesson on the way up, and went back via Kamloops, Keremeos, Princeton and Hope. There were only two moments I remember distinctly. The first one was when we were just past Prince

George traveling on a stretch of highway that had been reconstructed and was covered with loose gravel. It was late in the afternoon and we had to find a camping spot. A car approached us from the opposite side at high speed, a big, bulky Ford with a wrap-around windshield and an U.S. license. We were surprised when the same car overtook us shortly thereafter and even more so when the driver signaled to us to stop. We did. The driver of the Ford, a smallish thin man, was clearly quite mad and invited us to come and have a look at the damage we had caused to his, apparently brand-new, car. His grand windshield had a hole in it and a lovely star around it.

He told us that, at the moment that we passed him, a rock had been thrown up by our rear tire that had hit his windshield. He wanted us to pay for the damage. I explained, as reasonably as I could, that such was the risk of traveling on the gravel roads of Canada, and that I had no intention whatsoever to pay him, but that he might try his luck with the company that owned the truck, although I felt I should warn him that he didn’t have a hope of getting a nickel. He saw that he would not get anywhere and since he had no means of compelling me to fork out the money, he turned, beet red and furious, and snorted in departing that he was going straight back to the States, which seemed to us like a very sensible idea. Shortly thereafter we found a camping spot in a meadow behind a wooden gate

and pitched our tent, leaving the truck on the road side of the gate.

We were early on our way the next morning and made good time, even climbing the long winding road up to Manning Park and Alison Pass. The second memorable event took place while we were descending on the other side of the pass. Moekie was driving. In front of us was a little car with a very timid driver who used his/her brakes quite unnecessarily and far too often. We were in a hurry, because of that threat of the ferry strike: we wanted to get across that same day. And so, when her usually inexhaustible patience under almost all circumstances had finally evaporated, seeing a clear downhill stretch and no cars coming, she floored the accelerator. I said it above: our truck was very full and very heavy, and contained all that we possessed. Hard braking, with that load pushing us on a steep downhill slope was futile, if not just about impossible. I remember the strange mix of exhilaration and pride and cold fear that riveted me to the front bench as we roared past that little car, finally, and also the enormous relief when we got safely past and could slow down again to a more normal speed. Justus’ eyes were shining with admiration for his daring, cool mother. I don’t know how often she has been teased by members of the family for that bit of driving, even years after. In retrospect it was probably not very dangerous at all.

We got to the ferry and across without trouble. If my memory is correct, the strike was called off. Upon arrival in Victoria it must have been too late to unload, but neither Moekie nor I have any recollection of what exactly happened. We do remember that we backed it up to the steps that led to our front door, enormous concrete steps in a quarter circle. I suppose that must have been the next morning. Mr.. Dodd, our landlord and neighbour, came over to lend a hand with the unloading of the piano. What had worked well in Terrace while loading it did not work at all on this occasion: the piano slipped on the dolly and fell sideways against the wall of the truck. Mr.. Dodd, who tried to hold it, got his finger between the piano and the plywood of the truck….. and got it horribly smashed. It looked like a real mess and he was bleeding badly. I felt terrible about it, but couldn’t do anything to prevent it because I was pushing the dolly. He was quite heroic about it, wrapped his handkerchief around the injured finger and continued to help us to get the piano back on the dolly and into the house before going back to his own house to have the finger properly looked after. It was not an auspicious entry into the house where we would live for two years.

In Terrace we had always belonged to the United Church, and in Langford we found a welcoming acceptance. The most remarkable people in the congregation were a retired couple, the reverend Atkins and his wife,who had worked like missionaries all their lives and were now retired. they were wonderful people, very true Christians, of the kind represented by Oena who lived in the coach house of Over Holland. During the second year in Langford I was elected to be an Elder, together with Ken Dillabough, whom I liked very much and admired for his honesty and sincerity.

We had a new minister, and he proved to be the worst by far of any of the United Church ministers we had known. Not only could he not preach a reasonably decent sermon, but he was a bigot and an anti-semite. I could not stand to be in the congregation during his services and asked, and got permission, to teach the older boys in Sunday school. But eventually things got to the point where I felt that, in my position of Elder, I could no longer remain silent, for I felt that the reputation and the future of our congregation were at stake. I went to visit the Atkinses one evening, to talk over my concern with them. They gave me a warm and sympathetic hearing and said that they knew that I was not alone in my concern, but could not mention any names. However, they felt that if I thought long and hard, I would have no trouble locating the people they had in mind. I did just that and concluded that they must have meant Ken Dillabough and his wife. I visited them too, and carefully probed their minds. I could have opened a dam’s sluice gate. We decided that it was our painful duty to go and have a talk with the minister, to ask him to do at least some serious thinking and preparation for his sermons. It was a disastrous visit. He looked for just a moment with undisguised fury at me before turning to Ken and saying: “Ken, that this man would come here to say these things to me doesn’t surprise me, but that I would find you here hurts me deeply.” Total rejection of our criticism, not a hint of understanding that something might be wrong on his part, only fury that we would dare to come to him with such a request. We both got up and left. Not long thereafter we more or less patched up the rift, but nothing changed and I resigned my position and never went to that church again.

I would like to finish this chapter with a brief description of the schools where we started our teaching, and begin with Langford Elementary under Miss King, its small, ferocious principal. To get along with her was difficult enough, but, as a teacher, to win Ruth King’s confidence was an achievement, for her standards were exacting and she made sure that every teacher on her staff knew that by enforcing the rules, of which there were many, with an iron hand. In the Victoria district she was known as the “Dragon Lady”, the sole survivor of a long-extinct breed. Her distrust of any and all teachers around her was monumental. She made a point of personally administering I.Q. tests because it was her firm conviction that teachers would “embellish” the results. She was popular with the officials of the Sooke district because they believed that she saved the School board money, and with most parents, who liked the emphasis she placed on discipline. She was known to “run a tight ship”, and in an area like Langford, where parental discipline was often either brutal or non-existent, discipline was considered to be an item at the top of a list of goals of school education.

One of the school rules was that classes were to line up before they filed into the building, and that there was to be no talking in the line-up. Another, and more ridiculous one, was that art supplies were available only from Miss King herself, who was available for this distribution from the little locked storage room (she was the only one who had a key) between 4:00 and 4:15 daily. If a teacher came at 4:17 the wicket was closed and the room locked. You had to know precisely what you needed and you got exactly as many sheets as there were children in your class, not a single one extra, counted out by Miss King. This was one of the items quoted when the school board mentioned the fact that she saved them money. That she chased good teachers away because they did not want to teach in a school run by her, was never mentioned.

She liked Moekie from the beginning and gave her the support that she needed when she needed it. She did not like a gr. six teacher who had immigrated from England and who had the audacity to disagree with her on a matter of principle; I imagine it could well have been the fact that Miss King may have told him that she was going to administer the I.Q. test herself. Whatever it was that caused the rift, it was there and her dislike for the man caused her to write a report on him by the end of the school year that made it impossible for him to get any other job in the district. He was a nice man; Moekie quite liked him and she thought that he was probably a competent teacher. What happened to him was scandalous, but typical of the autocratic ways of the lady who did it to him. You disagreed with Miss King at your peril. He found a job teaching in a school in Ucluelet, at that time almost as isolated a community as one could find anywhere, and virtually only to be reached by boat or by float plane. It had trouble finding teachers.

The one thing that upset Moekie in that school was the preparation, in class time, for the Christmas bazaar, for which every class had to produce items that could be sold. That was not an option, it was a requirement. The bazaar made a lot of money for the school. The teachers were of course responsible for the originality of what was made, and for the finish. It took all the art periods for weeks on end and was a terrible extra burden for the teachers. There was never any complaint about this abuse of class time from either the parents or the Superintendent. I firmly believe that nobody had the stomach to cross Ruth King.

At the end of her second year we were going to move into our new house, and Moekie applied in Victoria, supported by a glowing report from Miss King. She was immediately accepted and got a job in one of the rather choice schools in the district, Doncaster, where the principal, Mr.. Taylor, was particularly interested in the fact that she played the piano: he needed somebody who could teach music. She was in charge of both the junior and the senior school choirs, worked incredibly hard, but remembers the school with fondness.

At the end of her second year at Doncaster the temporary license that had made it possible for her to teach without having passed the English 200 requirement ran out and she had to get that credit in order to continue teaching. We decided that she should take it in a winter session. There was the housework and on top of that a lot of studying. To find time for that was possible only with the total co-operation of everybody in the family. Maybe it would have worked if she had had her own room, separated from the rest of us but she worked in the living room and could not find the quiet to concentrate on the course. The kids, delighted that she was back in her place in the centre of the family, behaved as they had always behaved, complete with the usual squabbles about whose turn it was to do the dishes, and she was drawn in time and time again……it proved to be impossible to concentrate on her work. Another crisis was clearly at hand. We had a talk and decided that it was more important to have a family than the teacher’s certificate. My salary had increased to the point where we could just manage on it alone. It has not been an easy decision, but it was the right one and we have had reason, time and time again, to be thankful that we chose the way we did. It has proved to be blessing.

My own first school was South Park, a school that had the rather dubious distinction of being housed in the second-oldest school building in the city, built in 1905. When the only older school was declared to be unsafe, maybe two years later, we were the unchallenged champions in old age. It was a strange building. There were actually two separate buildings; in the main one there was an auditorium (with a small stage) that was two stories high, the office and a tiny staff room on the main floor, plus four classrooms. The upper floor had four more classrooms. At the ends of the upper hallway there were two steep staircases that led directly to outside doors: the fire escapes. The treads were made of concrete. During my five years there I have never quite overcome my worries connected with those stairs, for they were so steep and so high, that anybody falling could have caused a very nasty accident. In the second building was the workshop, on the main floor, and above that there were two more classrooms. The two bathrooms for the main building were in the basement. All classrooms had genuine slate blackboards.

South Park was the school with the “special classes” for “slow learners”, kids with mental handicaps: two junior, one intermediate and two senior classes. Besides those there were five regular classes, one grade four, two grade fives and two grade sixes. Mine was a grade five. The two junior special classes were located on the second floor in the annex.

Originally two schools “fed into” South Park: James Bay Elementary and Beacon Hill. The latter was a tiny little school, located in a remodeled large private house at the very beginning of Douglas Street. It had only three classes, a grade one, a grade two and a grade three, and there were three women teaching, one with the title “teacher-in-charge”, but the principal responsible for the school was the principal of South Park. The three women attended our staff meetings. It was a curious arrangement, unique in the district, but it worked quite harmoniously.

James Bay didn’t start as a full elementary school; it went only to grade four, but it had its own principal. During the five years I was in South Park it was changed to a normal elementary school, the first official “Community School” in Victoria, and it got its own, new building.

The teachers at South Park were a dedicated and competent bunch. Most of them had taught for many years. They were not given to experimentation, they were not innovative or creativity-inclined, but they were thorough and hard-working.

The principal was Wilf Orchard, a friendly, pleasant man, not an inspired or an inspirational individual. Few principals were. He was a member of the local Masonic Lodge and during the years I was at South Park it was his turn to lead that organization for a year. He confided to me that he was working hard to prepare himself for the task, and that it meant that he had to learn by heart the whole book of prescribed formulae for every one of the apparently countless ceremonies. I understood that the ceremonial aspects of the Lodge meetings were by far the most important part of their gatherings and that members were judged by their flawless recitation of the phrases, the responses and the set sequence of each of the many ceremonies. I suspect that he had joined because many people in the upper echelons of the Victoria educational scene were members, and it was believed that your chances of “advancement” (meaning: your chances of becoming a principal) were very limited if you were not a Lodge member. It didn’t seem to do Orchard much good: he was a principal all right, but of one of the smallest and least important schools in the city and without hope of ever getting a more challenging job.

He was a man of principle, based on a sturdy, unshakable set of moral values. He did not find it difficult to distinguish between “right” and “wrong”, certainly not in children’s behaviour, and knew that girls wore skirts, and boys wore pants. So, when a group of girls came to school, one bitterly cold morning, dressed in jeans, he did not hesitate at all: he sent them home with the message that they could only come to school wearing skirts. That they must have worn the jeans with permission of their parents did not make any difference: girls wore skirts, period.

The senior special class boys were entitled to get woodwork, since they were in the same age bracket as kids in the Junior High schools. When I joined the staff that job was being done by Bill Hardy, their teacher. He did not like it very much; he did not like to be with special class kids all the time, so that when he moved on to become a teacher in a normal Junior High school, Central, he suggested that I take over his duties in the workshop. Orchard took the science in my class, and I taught woodwork to the Senior boys.

It was an eye-opening experience, and often a frustrating one. There were no power tools to speak of (one electric jigsaw) which was understandable and in my case quite all right because I didn’t have any myself and would not have been able to teach the safe use of, for instance, a table saw to any kid of 14 years old, let alone a mentally handicapped one. It was difficult enough to teach the use of hand tools to these kids. The vast majority never learned to distinguish between a crosscut saw and a rip saw or when to use either one.

Measuring was for most of them a difficult, if not impossible concept. The only measuring tools provided were a class set of wooden rulers, the same rulers that were used in their other classes to draw straight lines. If I asked them to measure and mark eight inches on a board of six inches wide, with the idea that we would get eventually a piece of wood eight by six inches, the result would invariably be that they drew a line along the ruler somewhere in the neighbourhood of the 8 inches mark. It did not matter that I would endlessly, patiently, explain and demonstrate to them that what was needed was a little mark at a right angle to the ruler so that we could draw a line through that mark with a square for cutting. I would ask them to point out to me where exactly they were going to cut along their drawn line and they looked at me with bewilderment. Some did grasp the idea and went on to learn a few basic things about woodwork, but for most “measuring” remained an obscure idea. It was perfectly clear to me that I was not by nature a special class teacher…..We did have a good time together; they loved coming to their woodwork classes, and with a lot of help they did make some book stands, bird nesting houses, and a few other simple things. Their pride in the finished products made me feel that all that energy was, in the end, maybe not wasted at all.

From woodwork we shifted to working with clay, making pinch- and coil pots, which I could get fired in the kiln at another school. That got rid of the measuring problem but added a few in a different field, for clay is an excellent medium for fooling around. But we did all make pots of some kind and they were fired and glazed and widely admired by all other teachers and the parents. They liked working with clay better than with wood I think: the results were more spectacular.

It was a sad day when I learned from Orchard that the workshop was to be repainted and would be closed for that purpose for about a week. The painters in service of the school board were not a hard-working crew. They used to arrive late, then had to have an immediate coffee-break in the furnace room, before getting on with the job. Then there was another coffee-break before they reached lunch time. There was a tea-break between lunch and quitting time. It was amazing to see how long they could spin out a simple job, but it was infuriating to see them go about their business in their slow process that was keeping the workshop closed to us for over a month. What that crew needed was the vigorous supervision of an energetic person who had a proper training in his trade and knew how long a certain job would take. There was none. It drove me nuts and I complained to Orchard, but there was apparently nothing he could do either. When later some one, who had been a painter for the school board somewhere, turned on his vitriolic contempt for teachers, based on what he had seen during the years when he worked as a painter, I could only laugh, for I had seen the painters at work, and I told him about it. Of course he had not been one of those….

I can not leave South Park without mentioning two more details. The first one is the heating unit. It consisted of a huge furnace, occupying most of the space in the cavernous basement, that was fueled with coal and wood, great big chunks of it, and a massive and impressive fan that pumped the hot air in the ducts to get it to the classrooms. It was mysterious, but a fact nevertheless: some classrooms got a lot more than others. Some were absolutely dreadfully cold in the winter. Mine got the heat. It didn’t seem to make any difference whether the custodian adjusted the baffles that allowed or prohibited hot air to get through the different ducts: some classrooms were cold and others were not…. a matter of luck. It had nothing to do with a preference for certain teachers and everybody was convinced of that. If you happened to be in a cold classroom you dressed for that unpleasant but unalterable fact: more sweaters. What made the whole system even stranger was that one morning a whole shower of the ashes of burned paper came spouting out of the register above the blackboards and virtually covered everything. It was a minor disaster, but everybody in that building dealt with such disasters without getting too upset. They were part of your workload. I don’t know whether anybody ever found the connection between the chimney and the hot air ducts, the existence of which was revealed by our black shower.

The other little detail involved a seagull, which we named “Gulliver” ( “we” stands for our class). It was noticed and duly brought to my attention that there was a seagull who perched on the roof of the Annex every morning at about 10 o:clock. Those who were aware of it claimed that it was always the same individual, and that they could distinguish him (we assumed the seagull to be a male) by a spot above his eye. I doubted the story, but started to pay attention to it and pretty soon had to admit that, yes, he was there every morning at the same time approximately, and yes, it was always the same gull. We put some bread out on the outside windowsill and the gull slithered down the slate roof of the Annex, sat for a long time on the edge of that roof, facing the bread, but not having the nerve to fly across to get it because there were faces on the other side of the glass. But as soon as we went again about our business, he flew across and grabbed the bread before flying back to his perch.

It became a daily routine. The kids brought “Gulliver bread” and every morning we enjoyed his visit for a short while. He totally overcame his original reserve and came to sit on our windowsill, even pecking at the window if his bread wasn’t there waiting for him. It was wonderful, to have a pet-of-sorts. He even chased potential competitors off. I told about it in the staff room where we had a good laugh about it. Until the teachers in the Annex started to complain to the custodian that Gulliver made their passage in and out of the Annex hazardous by coating the narrow passage way between the buildings with his white, large and frequent droppings. And the custodian added to that his trouble of clean-up. The result was a total ban on feeding Gulliver, who continued to visit for a short while, but gave up fairly soon when there was no response to his knocking on our window. The class was saddened but understanding. Exit Gulliver.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 8: COMING HOME

 

During our second year in Langford it became more and more clear that we needed a larger house, at least a house with more bedrooms, for Lies and Justus should have had their own rooms already for some time, and it would be nice if we could separate John and Hubert, but in any case we needed four bedrooms as a minimum. We discussed our problem with… who else but Elsie Smith. She encouraged us to start looking around. We did so, for months, but did not find a single house that had four bedrooms, hard though that seems to believe. While talking it over once again with Elsie, she suggested that she would help us finance the building of a new house by providing a mortgage for the lot and the building of up to $ 15,000.-, which was in those years enough to get a house livable, not finished.

I had met in one of my winter evening courses a teacher in Belmont who was teaching construction I believe. His name was Bob Peach. He and his wife and family lived on Kingham Place in View Royal. He mentioned , when he heard that we were looking for a building lot, that there was a lot available close to where he lived, and that he thought that we should have a look at it. We did and fell in love with it at first sight. On the one side there was a double lot with one house on it, right in the middle, on the other side there was a road allowance and in the back it bordered on the View Royal Ball Park, and that part of it had not been developed but was still a tidal flat. The water came right up the little gullies at high tide, and the whole flat was flooded if the tides were very high. Across the flat we looked at a forested area with a heronry.

It was almost too good to be true, for here we had guaranteed privacy on both sides, plus an almost undisturbed bit of natural land at our back door and a lovely view. For our kids the change from Terrace, where they had enjoyed total freedom in a natural environment, to Victoria where their playing area was a lot less, albeit not bad for a city environment, finally to Langford where there was almost nothing for them, had been difficult. What we found here would solve that problem beautifully. The price seemed right; we talked to Elsie who saw the lot, liked it, and bought it for us. She had some trouble convincing her banker that what she did was wise: she was providing a total mortgage for the purchase of land and the building of a house to people who had no collateral of any kind. The bank suggested that this was unheard of and far too risky to be taken seriously, but Elsie insisted that she knew what she did, that she knew she would be paid back and that she had no doubt or hesitation about closing the deal. When finally, many years later, we offered her the cheque for the last payment we had the pleasant feeling that we had not let her down: we had never missed a payment.

We immediately started drawing sketch floor plans while looking around for somebody who would design the house. We came up with an architect who was Dutch, but had worked for many years in Canada. We visited him with our floor plan, told him what we wanted and left feeling that he had understood. But when he showed us the plan he had sketched he announced quite happily that it looked something like a Swiss chalet, didn’t we agree? Yes we did, and a Swiss chalet was not at all what we wanted, so we went back to square one and explained to him again what we had in mind. It was not easy, but when it finally dawned upon him he said with unmistakable disgust: “Ah, I see…. you want something like a chicken coop….” He would draw us a chicken coop. When the plans came we used them for the basic dimensions, but changed the placement and sizes of the windows.

Then came the search for a carpenter whom we could trust enough to let him go ahead without any supervision, for it had to be built during a time when I would be taking summer courses at UVic and during the fall, when we would be at school. We found exactly what we were looking for in Peter de Lange, who had been warmly recommended to us by the View Royal pharmacist. Peter’s national origin was no point of consideration in our decision to hire him. He was an excellent craftsman, a totally reliable and honest person, intelligent and very easy to deal with.

When the house approached the stage where we felt that we could move in (which was very far from completion) our money ran out and we had to tell him that we were not able to keep him working any longer. But by that time most of the essentials, the wiring, the plumbing, the heating (the house was heated by an oil furnace and forced air) were all in place and we felt confident that, over time, we would be able to handle the completion ourselves. It was a little bit optimistic, for the dry-walling, for instance, proved to be very much more tricky than anticipated and took quite an unexpected lot of time.

By the end of October we moved from Langford to Kingham Place. Mr. Dodd came to inspect his apartment and found several things that had to be repaired: there was an inside door that had a hole in it (Lies had kicked it in an attack of blind fury) and he noticed that the doors in the kitchen cabinets under the sink had some damage, but I could demonstrate to him that we were not really responsible for that damage, because it was caused by faulty plywood that should never have been used in that application. The door we replaced, of course, and the damaged door we took with us. It was later repaired and used in the hall in Kingham Place for the coat closet.

Bob Muir came to help with his four wheel drive army vehicle. He moved almost all of our stuff, and I don’t know how many trips we had to make, for the truck was rather small. Fortunately the distance was not great. The piano, always the main cause of problems when moving because of its weight and shape, arrived safely. The living room had a floor of just diagonally laid shiplap without any finishing layer of plywood, and if we sat in front of the fireplace we could look straight at the front door, because the wall between the living room and the hall consisted of 2 x 4 studs that had not been covered. We finished that wall rather quickly, both on the living room and on the staircase side, but lived on the shiplap for a long time. It had its draw-backs, for there were knotholes in it, and we lost at least one teaspoon that way.

It took years before we had the whole house finished, working on it whenever there was money and time. In fact, when we wanted to sell it after I retired, because we wanted to move to Denman, there were still no baseboards in the basement rooms. I spent most of that fall putting in the finishing touches, 20 years after moving in…..

I think it is true that we have loved that house, all of us. That is not to say that it did not have any shortcomings; there were several, and some were quite serious. For one thing, the drainage system for the septic tank, that had been installed very carefully to comply with new regulations, consisted of a two feet deep bed of coarse sand, about thirty feet long and four feet wide that had a V-shaped bottom, dug out of the clay. Two drainpipes, connected to the septic tank, were laid on top of the sand bed and one in the V at the bottom, connected to a drain that came out in the garden. It looked like a perfect system, but it failed totally within five years because it didn’t have sufficient capacity and had to be replaced.

More serious was the lack of insulation in the roof, which was also the ceiling of our living room: two inch cedar planks, tongued and grooved, and covered by hot tar and pea gravel. When there was an aerial night survey conducted to show which houses were poorly insulated (the infrared photos showed those lighter than the ones with sufficient insulation) our house stood out like a beacon. Had we stayed in Victoria we would have had to do something about that problem, as well as the enormous window, six by eight feet, single glass in a metal frame, that looked out over the garden. When it was blowing hard that window bulged visibly inwards, so that I, in order to secure it under those conditions, had to make a special brace system that could be placed against the glass on the inside and that was held in place by wedges top and bottom.

The carpenter ants loved the roof, for the grooves gave them perfect highways and the cedar was easy to chew. We were notified of their activity when we found on the top shelf of a little-used cupboard in the laundry room next to the kitchen a neat pyramid of sawdust about six inches high. We called a pest control outfit. They inspected the problem and came up with a drastic solution: we had to vacate the house for a day, while they would inject a powerful insecticide into the grooves and finally light a smoke bomb, also a very potent poison, in the basement. At the end of the day we could return and open all the windows. When we did return we found the whole house filled with a dense blueish fog that smelled abominable and threatened to make us sick. Even after we had cleared it out by literally opening all the windows and doors we spent a most unpleasant night. There were dead ants everywhere, not only on the floor of the living room, but also in the basement, clear indication of the massive nature of their invasion. Strange was that every spring thereafter we would find a number of dead or dying carpenter ants here and there, mostly in the living room, but throughout the house. The only possible explanation was that the poison used was still active and taking care of new arrivals. Collecting the corpses was a yearly and unpleasant ritual of late spring. But no more piles of sawdust…..

Notwithstanding those shortcomings it was a nice house, a different house, very much our own house. The heavy beams that supported the roof in the living room gave that space a very special character. But, above all, it proved to be a most pleasant house to live in, where every member of the family had his or her own space. And all those rooms had their own, special charm, reflecting the nature and needs of the occupants. What I found out after they had all left and I settled in Justus’s room in the basement as my study, was that those basement rooms were impossible to heat adequately when it got cold, because they all had low, concrete walls that sucked the heat out faster than you could blow it in. Insulation in those years posed a not very clearly understood problem.

We loved to light the fireplace and did so most winter evenings. Wood was not a problem during the years when we lived there, because logs floated in on the high tide from the Inner Harbour. We used to row out into Portage Inlet and drag them home as far as we could float them. Then, when we had a really high tide and they floated again, we pulled them over the area that would be dry as soon as the tide moved out again to cut them up with a rented power saw. The rounds were then moved by wheel barrow to our garden, where they were split and the firewood piled in the little corner at the side of the house under the wedge-shaped window in the end wall of our living room. On one of those occasions I happened to be by myself, the tide was coming in, the rounds had to be moved fast, before they would float away, but I had cut them rather on the big side, and it was a big log. I did get them in, but at the cost of a soon-to-be-detected hernia that put me in hospital.

I wrote above “very much our own house.” Yes, it was that. We had designed it, and we designed the many special touches. The beams, it should be said, were not so much “design” as structural necessity to support that cedar plank roof. But the entrance with that special mailbox-and-bench feature was designed, as was the railing that separated the hall from the staircase, and the bookcase in the living room was, too. Not very practical maybe, but rather nice visually were the different levels between living room and the kitchen/hall area. What worked very well was the division of the bathroom in two parts, one for the bathtub and one for the toilet. Both had washbasins, which sped up the morning proceedings.

We liked the black and white tiles of the hall, and the lovely, light coloured sheets of cottonwood plywood used to cover the walls. And the screens we built to more or less hide the kitchen door and lead visitors who came via the driveway to the front door worked well as a design, particularly when Moekie made a special design for the concrete slabs that paved that area, alternating pebbled surfaces with brushed ones.

I must mention especially the carport, built over the septic tank, which necessitated that the floor had to be removable to get to the tank for cleaning. I had poured the support walls and left in those a rabbet for planks. But where to find suitably heavy planks? Luck came our way. The inner, old city was rejuvenated, and to that purpose the old, and certainly characteristic but not beautiful, old warehouses had to be pulled down to make room for Centennial Square. Just at the time when we were looking for the planks we needed there was an ad in the paper offering beams, 32′ long, 3″ thick and 14″. I needed planks that were 16′ long….. It was close to the time when the crews at that wrecking job would be going home. We got into the car in a hurry, drove downtown, found the foreman still on the site and closed the deal. I wished I could remember how we got them home, but I don’t. We did cut them in half on the site. They were incredible: solid Douglas Fir, hardly a knot in any of them. Just imagine what one would have to pay for beams of that size and quality on today’s market, if they could be had at all, which is by now rather doubtful. They clearly dated back to the days when fallers cut the part of the log off where the branches started, because only the clear bottom part would be used. They worked just fine, and we all remember with fondness the wonderful rumble they produced when the car left or came home.

One last feature I want to remember is the very large deck with built-in seats on two sides, that could easily accommodate a dozen people or more, in the shade of the fairly big Douglas Fir growing next to the corner. It was lovely to sit there during the warm weather in spring, summer and fall. The deck was supported on one side by a large walk-in cupboard for garden tools and there was enough space left between that and the house to park a second car under the deck. Not totally successful were my attempts to make the deck waterproof, but it was good enough for most purposes.

We lived in that house for twenty years; it became part of the family traditions, part of family life. When we left it there were some serious misgivings. I think that those would have been stronger if we had moved somewhere other than to Denman.

The house did us a last, but important favour at the point when we sold it. It was put on the market late in the fall of 1980, but nothing happened for a seemingly long time, until, suddenly, in January, it was sold for a price that represented just the peak in house prices; within a month thereafter those prices tumbled.

It is fair to say that 51 Kingham Place was the home of a family that had grown roots in their new country.

 

 

No exit road

After high school graduation I spent a short period as a “student” in Amsterdam. I place that “student” in quotation marks because the one thing I did not do was to study. The memories still leave a bitter taste, after all those years. I entered the world of the university students as a member of “Het Studenten Corps”, the oldest student organisation in all of the universities in Holland, dating back I don’t know how long. I had chosen to go to Amsterdam in the footsteps of brother Charles who had really enjoyed his Corps membership and who made there some of his best friends.

It is tempting to describe that very exclusive world in some detail, but I’ll try to keep it short. The Amsterdam Corps is organized in a way that was different from any other student organization in the country, for it consisted of a number of smaller, more close-knit sub-organizations, the “Dispuut Gezelschappen”, “Debating Societies” in translation, but that original function had long been lost. The Corps divided its members in “years”, the years of entrance in the organization by those members, but the “Disputen” had members of all years, and one never lost the rights and privileges within the Dispuut that were bestowed upon a member at his installation. Note: HIS, for there were only male members. The women had their own organization, and women were not welcome in the Club where the Corps members gathered, feasted, talked, played pool and created mayhem on occasion. I shall not use those privileges ever, but for years, even after moving to Canada, I got invitations to attend “Dispuut” functions. Because they were so small, maybe 25 to 30 active members at any given time, and because you entered the organization with a very small number of your “Year”, in my case 6, the ties between those members tended to be strong. If you were to make close friends during your years at the university, they would likely be found under the ones together with whom you were installed in the “Dispuut” of your choice. And because you had to choose the “Dispuut” you wanted to belong to (and there were, I believe, nine of them) the competition among the “Disputen” was intense, particularly if there were seemingly outstanding young students entering the Corps in that year.

That brings me to the “hazing” period, lasting some two weeks, before the university opened , for it was during that dreadful relic of long-gone times that you had to make up your mind and choose the “Dispuut” you wanted to belong to. The night before you entered the Club for the first time you had your hair cut off. That simple device was by itself sufficient to reduce your ego to zero, for not only the Corps members but your whole world knew that you were undergoing a period of hazing.

In order to get some idea of each “Dispuut” you visited each twice, usually in the afternoons. These visits could be quite pleasant…..if the members present would like you to join them by selecting their “Dispuut”. If, on the other hand, they knew or felt that there was no chance, or if they disliked you, the poor “foetus”, (the name used to indicate those who wanted to become members of the Corps. The general term was usually “the greens”) could have a very rough time. It was automatically assumed that I would join the “Dispuut” to which Charles belonged, “Pallas”, and my visits there were very pleasant, but in most of the other visits it was pretty nasty. I have only very unpleasant memories of that period, but it achieved one thing: by stripping away so much of the protection any person carries with him or her, the true nature of any individual showed maybe more clearly: all pretense was quickly removed.

I loved Amsterdam. I disliked the university, where remote people lectured about subjects that didn’t interest me in the least. I went to university for two reasons: I thought that I wanted to be a journalist and had been told that a degree in law was almost mandatory; and, secondly, going to university was the thing to do, the thing expected of people with my education and background. I had no interest whatsoever in law-per-se and very soon stopped going to those lectures. Nor did I ever open a book or borrow notes from somebody who was going regularly. I enjoyed the company of my friends, but could not, of course, enjoy it wholeheartedly, because I struggled constantly with my guilt feelings. I knew that I should follow lectures and work at home, as they did, but could not bring myself to do it, hoping that I would manage to do the impossible by “catching up later”, with the help of a “repetitor”, a private tutor. Of course it didn’t work and I failed the year miserably. In retrospect I must assume that I might have become interested in Law, if I had dug in my heels and studied.

Looking back to that year I think I know what was wrong. I was very slow in growing up, had some money (not a great deal, but enough to allow me to finish a law degree if I worked) and had absolutely no sense of urgency or responsibility. There was, for the first time in my life, nobody to tell me what I had to do, nobody to tell me how to do it, and nobody to point out the consequences of not doing it. I was on my own and really incapable of handling it. Had there existed in “Pallas” a system whereby the older members kept in close contact with the younger ones, to make sure that they worked and knew where they were going, an “older brother” system of sorts, I think I might quite possibly have become a lawyer, and a reasonably competent and even happy lawyer at that. I was hopelessly immature for my age. It has taken me a very long time to gain the feeling of self confidence that comes with maturity.

The year in Amsterdam has not left many happy memories. The most dominant memory is one of uselessness, and of guilt. As it happened, it was a lustrum year, and I had really looked forward to that celebration, but it, too, turned sour. I had decided that I was going to break the feeling of “belonging to” any particular girl, and wrote Moekie a letter to tell her that. My only excuse for that letter is that it was written at a time when I was confused, thoroughly unsure about what I wanted, but convinced that things were generally not going as they should.

I asked a local Amsterdam girl to be my partner for the celebration. Her name was Frits, an unusual name for a girl. She was a pretty Jewish girl, a goldsmith, and I was quite impressed by her. But when, after the lustrum, I tried to develop our budding relationship into something more permanent she showed me quite clearly, albeit very politely, that she was not so inclined at all, and I gave up almost immediately. We went together to the lustrum play but I don’t remember at all what it was all about, except that it had a firm emphasis on symbolism: when the hero, after meeting the Devil, is by him introduced to his “Truth”, a gorgeous female in an evening dress made of a special kind of silky material with a quite incredible sheen, and asks what kind of material this might be, the Dark One answers with a leering smile: “That is “changeant”, my son; it changes with the light….” , a line that has stayed with me all my life. It seems hard to believe that one would, of a whole play, remember one line….

There was, of course, a formal dance, but I am a terrible dancer, and didn’t enjoy it. Neither did Frits, I suspect. And there was a concert, where “Sweelinck”, the student orchestra, played a modern piece, especially composed for the occasion, in which the first flute had one very tricky, high little solo, and I muffed the chance to shine because I hadn’t bothered practicing that little bit sufficiently. There was also a sailing event, a race for small boats, and in order to get there on time, (the race was held on a lake quite a ways from Amsterdam) it was necessary to leave with all participating dinghies, towed by a motor yacht, at some ungodly early hour after a very short night. I was to sit in the last dinghy, a 12 ft. open lapstrake hull, (with a sprit sail and a centreboard) that was very popular in those years, to keep the whole line more or less straight. It was a long and boring trip and I had trouble staying awake. Just when we entered the last canal leading to the lake, the leader of the flotilla decided that, if he was to participate in his event, he had to dash off. I was asked to sail my dinghy by myself to the start, on the other side of the lake. I had precious little experience in sailing, and had never sailed one of those dinghies, but there was nothing to do but to promise that I would try to be there. I had no idea how to rig the boat, and it took some time to figure out, more or less, before I got under way. There was not much wind, fortunately, for I was not used to such a tender little boat and was in fear of capsizing with every little gust. But I got to the start line, after discovering that the race the boat was supposed to enter in had started some time earlier. The owner was not a happy man at that moment.

I got a long letter from Moekie, who didn’t hide her feelings and thoughts. Reading that letter made me feel terribly ashamed, juvenile and stupid. In my answer-by-return mail I admitted as much and we got the situation ironed out. My ego had suffered some, but that had happened before and the effects were hardly lasting, I’m afraid.

I returned to Amsterdam in the fall, participated in the “hazing period” and tried once again to work, without much success. I had a strong suspicion that the study of law was not my cup of tea and talked about my problem with a friend, who suddenly asked: “Have you ever thought about publishing?” The idea struck me with almost physical power. We talked about it for an hour or so and I left with new hope.

I had a long and somewhat encouraging talk with the publisher of my father’s books, who had also been a friend, and it was through him that I got into a large bookstore in the Hague, not as a paid employee but as a “volunteer”, which was in those days a pretty normal way of getting training in a field like book selling. It was also thought useful to start at the retail end before getting to the production, the real publishing. My direct “boss” was a friend of my father’s, a poet, Dop Bles, a charming, cultured, somewhat shy little man, a great favourite with the store’s erudite clientele, who had gotten this job to give him some means of support. The owner of the store, Mr. Dijkhoffz, was a shrewd businessman as well as a wonderful person, but intellectually he was no great light. So the combination of the two worked very well, although I always thought that Dop was probably not paid what he was worth. And then there was the young, energetic, bright fellow who did most of the work in the store and who was charming, helpful, cheerful. He treated every customer as if it was an honour, a privilege to help and advise her or him, but managed to do so without a hint of servility. He greeted each customer as if he was happy to see that person, and in most cases his enthusiasm was not faked. His name was Godert Walter, Ode to his friends. We became friends, close friends, very soon, and remained friends after he moved to the northern part of the country, to Groningen, where he could take over a pretty well run-down bookstore. Under Ode it became one of the most popular bookstores in the city.

The book trade in Holland in those days was very tightly regulated. It could well be much the same today, although it seems unlikely. The rules were set by a central organization, the” Association for the Promotion of the Interests of the Book trade” (usually referred to as “The Association”) in which both the publishers and the retailers were members. All bookstores and all publishers were registered, and all people who wanted to get into the book trade had to take a pretty stiff, year-long course (offered by the organization) and pass the final exam. Only after you passed that could you become a “recognized” bookseller or publisher. Without recognition it was practically impossible to do business, because only recognized bookstores could buy the new books at a discount price from the “recognized” publishers and make a profit. One of the central rules of the “Association” was that there was no competition allowed in price. The price was set by the publisher and was the same wherever you bought your copy. The only competition was in the level of service offered. Of course bookstores could only display and advertise the books published by “bona fide” publishers, that is to say: whose firms had been registered by the “Association”. That meant that a publisher who was not on that list had practically no market for what he produced. All he could sell in the regular bookstores was what had been ordered in such a store by its customers, mostly single copies, few and far between.

When moving to the Hague I found room and board in the home of a friend of my father’s, Huub Gerretsen. He was an artist, mostly a lithographer, who made a living by teaching in a high school, a wonderful man. He was much younger than my father, whom he admired, and he used to come to our house fairly frequently. I knew him therefore quite well. He had married a young widow, Erna, who had one son from her first marriage. Soon the family grew: at the time I was moving in there were four boys, from 12 to 4 years. It must have been difficult for the Gerretsen family to have somebody living with them, but there was never any indication of that. I had a room on the top floor, behind Huub’s studio and loved to see him at work. The drawing of the beech-lane that hangs over our kitchen door was one of the things I saw take shape.

At Dijkhoffz I was given the task to look after the books that were sent to customers who had indicated an interest in certain subjects, be it literature in general, or poetry, or history, or….. whatever, so that they could look at it. If they wanted to keep it, it was charged to their account, but they were under no obligation whatever. It was a service to customers that served as a regular contact as much as a means of selling and it was very much appreciated by the customers because it enabled them to keep informed on new publications in their special field(s) of interest. Of course it entailed quite a bit of work on the part of the bookstore, for the books had to be carefully selected, then packed, delivered, and picked up after a week. The administration was almost a full-time job when it was busy. There were two boys looking after delivery and collection. It was a job, but a pretty boring one, for it was purely administrative: you sat behind your desk most of the day. And of course it entailed that you had to type. I could not, and instead of learning it as a first priority, I never did master the old Underwood. I did buy a portable typewriter to practice, but I have remained until recently a terribly inefficient, poor three- or four finger typist. Nowadays I use ten fingers, but I am still very inefficient and sloppy. And it would have been so useful had I been serious about learning that simple skill.

Mr. Dijkhoffz was not impressed by my effectiveness and, I suppose, doubtful about my enthusiasm. After about 6 months he “suggested” that it would be a good idea if I got some practice in a smaller bookstore first, and to that end he made contact with the owner of a small, but good store close-by, in the inner city, who was a member of the Christian Reformed Church and whose customers were mostly from that environment, of course. He could use some help and was eager to do a thorough job in training a young “volunteer”. His name was Evert Wattez. There was another volunteer who came to “Boekhandel Wattez” at the same time, Rijk Stigter. He had one lame foot, but in this kind of a job that was no great handicap. He was a bright, energetic, interesting man, a nice fellow to work with.

Wattez had a direct, practical approach to training us. He insisted that we had to “know what was on the shelves” in a literal sense: we had to memorize every title and author of the books he had for sale and to be able to stand on the floor, and, looking at those shelves, tell him exactly what there was by naming them, just by looking at the spines. There were a lot of books; there was a lot to memorize….. But we managed, and felt better for it, and quite at home when customers asked whether we had a certain title. I had no idea just how useful that familiarity was going to be in months to come.

Once a week I had supper with Ode in his room. He had a room in downtown The Hague and supper was included in his rent so I paid for my own meal on those occasions. His landlord came with a large tray where everything was neatly arranged, collected my dues (which were very modest) and left. Ode and I went those evenings to our “book traders” course which was conveniently offered in the Hague that year. We met there another young enthusiast, Kees Baars, who had the same job Ode had: “first clerk” (which meant that they had the “de facto” responsibility for the daily running of the store) but he lived in Rotterdam and worked for the largest bookstore in the city, Voorhoeve and Dietrich. He, too, wanted to finish the requirements for recognition by the Society as soon as possible. The three of us became and remained good friends. Kees had to come from Rotterdam of course, but in Holland the train traffic between the two cities was so frequent, fast and convenient that it was no real problem: a train at least every half hour, and every quarter of an hour at the busy times.

It must have been around that time that Huub Gerretsen announced that Erna was expecting their fifth and that they would need the room I occupied. He had already arranged that I could find room and board with friends of theirs, Leon and Saar Orthel, who lived close-by. Leon was a pianist and composer who made a living by teaching piano students who were on their way to become professionals themselves. You had to be pretty far advanced to get Leon as a teacher, I believe. I loved to hear him practice, in particular for a concert with the local Symphony Orchestra, where he was to perform a Mozart concerto.

The military service intervened at around this time. In the Netherlands the luck of the draw determined whether or not you would be called up. If you were lucky you were free. Brother Charles had been lucky. As long as a young man was attending school, university, or whatever, he was excused from military service, but I was “in”, since I didn’t attend any institution. I had decided, together with Gerard Hovens Greve, that we were going to ask for substitute-service in the civil service, based on conscientious objection to the military. I was called before a committee that had to decide whether my refusal was rooted in political motivation or in my conscientious abhorrence of military violence. I passed that hurdle and was assigned to the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Hague.

It was housed in its own building, a huge, shapeless concrete monolith and in it worked hundreds of people, without hope or ambition beyond getting one step higher up the bureaucratic ladder, like from clerk 3rd class to clerk 2nd class, and even (if you were successful in convincing your immediate bureaucratic boss of your reliability and good work habits) to clerk 1st class. Beyond that level none rose or even aspired but the exceptionally gifted and ambitious as far as I could determine. It was not that your work changed dramatically from excessively dull to interesting if you managed to climb. Statistics were, by definition, excessively dull and the work required to pump them out was even duller than the figures. Nothing was automated; all data were processed manually with the use of non-electric machines: enormous, heavy adding machines that were operated by pushing the figures on a keyboard which were then added by pulling a handle on the right hand side, and much smaller multiplication and division machines that had a crank. My first job was the processing of figures supplied by brick manufacturers who had to fill in cards to indicate the amount of fuel used and the number of bricks produced per month. The adding machine showed three columns: the first one had the four-digit number that indicated the manufacturer, the second one the amount of money used for fuel for each month, and the third one the number of bricks produced with that fuel during the month. At the bottom of each card the yearly totals were given. Therefore, if you had pushed all the right buttons, the totals for each item, fuel or bricks, had to match the totals obtained by adding the totals on the cards. My results never did. That meant that you had to find somebody else who was going to check each number by reading it out to you, card by card. It was a time-consuming process and it must have drawn the unfavourable attention of those in charge, although not as much as the fact that I was found, twice in one afternoon, sleeping at my desk. I’ll never forget the disbelief in the supervisor’s voice right above my head, saying: “He is asleep again…..!”

It was clear from the very first day that statistics were not my strong point, [a point that was emphatically driven home to me again, much later, when I had to take as a first step on my way to a M.A. in Education a course that was called “An Intuitive Approach to Statistics”. I quit the course before I was midway through and abandoned my vanity-(and greed-) driven plans to get a Masters degree.] What was not immediately clear was the fact that the excessive boredom was making me physically sick, so that I consulted a doctor, who checked me thoroughly, found nothing and gave me the blessed advise to “do something physical…. like a sport.” I took up rowing which I had done during my year in Amsterdam but had given up because both Mem and Charles felt that it would “take too much time”. I found in Amsterdam other, less conspicuous, ways of wasting the time, (except for the time that Karel Schuurman found his young cousin most conspicuously idle, drinking alcohol in the sunshine with a friend, on the terrace of one of Amsterdam’s famous hotels, “Hotel Americain”, at 11 o:clock in the morning.) I loved rowing and it did me a world of good. I was part of a junior four. Our success in races was minimal: we won two smaller races and lost our first big one in a big way.

I was still with boekhandel Wattez when I met a former school friend, Eva Wieseman, who introduced me to her mother and her sister, Riet. Mrs. Wieseman and I got along well and I visited them often. While I was at the Central Bureau of Statistics the family moved to a larger, more modern apartment on the edge of the city. They had one empty room and Mrs. Wieseman offered me to come and live with them, an offer that I happily accepted, although it was not easy to explain to the Orthels that I was going to leave and to give a plausible reason for that decision. The simple reason was that something was developing in my relationship with Mrs. Wieseman that I had trouble explaining to anybody: she had become something of a surrogate mother to me. What Mem had never been able to give me I had found here: warmth without criticism. My friendship with the Orthels survived, thank goodness.

Mrs. Wieseman (the Bes we called her; “Bes” is what old women in Holland were sometimes jokingly called) was a most remarkable woman. She was still quite young, (I believe nineteen) when she had married a well-to-do man who died soon after their marriage. They had no children. She had adopted both girls, Eef and Riet, and stayed in the very large house close to Nijmegen where she and her husband had lived. According to photos of her younger years she must have been quite beautiful. She was still very attractive when we met. But, although the number of men who tried change her mind and re-marry must have been considerable (a beautiful young widow with a lot of money!) she never yielded, because, as she explained to me, she felt that she could never be sure that they wanted to marry her for herself and not for her money. Her money was invested in Indonesian stocks, mostly in sugar.

When the local bank where she did her business got in financial problems she expressed confidence in the management’s ability to pull out and left her money there. Apparently that gesture more or less saved the bank from bankruptcy. The bank did not forget it and when the sugar bonds quite suddenly tumbled and became almost worthless overnight, I believe as a result of the shifting in the industry to sugar beets instead of cane, and left her in a very severely restricted financial situation, they offered her an annual income for life. Many people who had come to Holland from Indonesia in the hope of leisurely spending the years of their retirement there on the basis of their investments in sugar were totally ruined. She sold her house and moved in with her sister in the Hague, until she found the apartment where I joined them.

She was very well-read, both in French and in Dutch (she was born in Belgium and educated in both languages) and had a wide-ranging interest in many areas, but above all she was wise and warm, a loving presence and a most important person in our lives. She took to Moekie immediately when they met. The room that was available to me was probably meant to be occupied by her eldest daughter, Eef, who had graduated one year before we did and had married a doctor shortly before her mother moved to this apartment. Riet was training as a library assistant and lived at home. She and I were good, but not particularly close friends, almost like one would expect of sister and brother. There was one other room that was used as a spare for guests. Of course Moekie was a regular one.

I was at the time when we met working for Wattez, I think, but already at the Central Bureau of Statistics when she invited me to join them. The only other member of the family was a lovely dog, a Dutch shepherd, with thick curly gray fur, Heks (“Witch”) who needed her daily walk of course. Fortunately the apartment was at the edge of the city. There were no houses on the other side of the street, just a wide ditch. On the other side there was some land that had been part of a farm, I imagine, but was now no longer in use. Once you crossed the bridge across the ditch you could follow a wide path with trees on one side and that unused land on the other for quite a while: an ideal spot to walk the dog. Heks had her basket of bones, all well-chewed, with deep tooth marks. It was not possible to determine what made those old bones so good to chew, or what determined her choice from day to day, for they all looked much the same to us. Not to Heks, who selected her bone-of-the-day with care and chewed it with a passion. The sound of her teeth on the bones is inextricably fixed in our memory of Heks.

I had started rowing around that time and met at the clubhouse the man who looked after the racing shells and all the other equipment, Doesburg. He was a furniture maker by trade, one of a breed that hardly existed anymore: they who were trained to do everything by hand, from the planks to the finished furniture. There was no employment left for them, and “Does” was lucky to get this job. He was good at it, even though he didn’t know anything about rowing in the beginning of his new job. I spent a lot of time in his shop after the rowing, and talked. I learned a lot from him. When he bought a new workbench he sold his old one for a song to me, a huge heavy monster, but in good enough shape for what I needed. I wanted to make chairs of my own design.

In May ’40 the Germans invaded Holland and overpowered it after four short days and the firebombing of Rotterdam, where they encountered sharp resistance from the Dutch Marines who defended tenaciously the bridge the Germans had to cross. I will not forget (how could one forget?) the morning when it started: a beautiful, cloudless morning and these incredibly fast little planes that were diving sharply and dropping something on the military establishment further up the road, followed by an explosion and a black cloud slowly rising in the cloudless sky: Stukas dropping bombs. Holland had an army that used for its airforce two-winged Fokkers…… Or the brute power displayed by the invaders in their motorized columns: endless armoured vehicles and B.M.W. motor bikes with sidecars, and heavy-built, helmeted soldiers. The beginning of an awful time. The smoke of burning Rotterdam hung heavy in the southern sky for days.

The only good thing that came out of it for me was that I was dismissed when the army was sent home. I went to work in Rotterdam at Voorhoeve and Dietrich, with friend Kees. The store had found a place to start up business again. The old store had been in the inner city and was of course totally flattened. An interesting little detail: they had found the firm’s safe in the rubble, apparently intact, but far too hot to touch. It contained the whole administration, including the customers’ accounts and the accounts with all the publishers. The latter could easily be restored: all they had to do was place an ad in the Association’s news sheet. But the customers’ accounts were irreplaceable. After a few days, when the safe could be handled, sort off, they had a welder come to cut out the locking mechanism, for the heat had made the use of a key impossible. As soon as the torch had cut through the metal, there was suddenly some kind of a blast inside the safe: the incredibly overheated contents had not burned because there was no oxygen left inside, but as soon as the outside air could enter, the whole works burned in one fierce blast. Had they waited a few weeks, the whole administration would have been saved…… Experience with fires of that magnitude is uncommon.

It took some time before anybody, coming to the city from “the outside”, could get used to the picture of devastation presented by the destroyed inner city. It was not only the visual, the emotional impact, although that was, initially at least, by far the strongest reaction. There was a very practical problem that everybody had to get used to: to know where you were and how to get to where you wanted to go, for there were only very few points of reference left standing: the famous tall windmill in the eastern portion of what had been the city, the church tower, and a few tall buildings. Crossing the city at night was decidedly dangerous, for of course there were no street lights anywhere and the use of flashlights was forbidden, that is: if you could get batteries, which by itself was all but impossible. All the buildings had been demolished and the rubble had been cleared away, but that left the basements to gradually fill with water, deep enough to drown those who fell in if they couldn’t swim or couldn’t get out. The way to light your path was with a war-time invention that was marketed by Philips, a tiny light in the form of a flat egg, that had its own dynamo, operated by squeezing a handle. The sound of the mechanism, a high whine, had given it its popular name of “Knijpkat” (“Pinch-cat”). It produced sufficient light, but only for as long as the dynamo was running, and operating it for any length of time was rather tiring on the hand muscle. We had one that came with us to Canada. Using your bicycle at night was not easy either, for you had to cover your lamp with a shield that left just a small slit, and the remaining light was barely enough to see the edge of the street. Of course there was hardly any traffic, only German cars and they didn’t like traveling in the dark…. for obvious reasons.

One morning I got a phone call at Voorhoeve and Dietrich from Mr. Dijkhoffz: could I come as soon as possible to the Hague to see him? It was urgent, for the Germans had taken Wattez prisoner. I left immediately and went back to the Hague to see Mr. Dijkhoffz. His message was simple: “You were the last one to have worked for him; you know the store. You passed your qualifying exam. Somebody has to take care of that business while he is away, for his wife and children depend on it. I would like you to take on that job; there simply is nobody else we can think of. I don’t know how long he will be gone, but we don’t think it will be longer than a few weeks at most. No, nobody knows why they have picked him up. Will you do it?” There was no way I could say “No”, so I said “Yes.” Not only was I the only one who knew the business, and knew it well, but I didn’t need or want a salary since I had some money of my own. The store could not support two incomes.

I got the keys from Mr. Dijkhoffz and went to Wattez’ store right away to talk with Mrs. Wattez. She seemed relieved that at least something was being done to keep things going. The next morning I went to work. I stayed until Wattez was back, almost a year later.

It was an incredible responsibility for a young man fairly well new to the trade, to manage a business on behalf of a woman and her four children whose well-being depended on the income of that business. It was also an incredible opportunity. The funny thing is that I don’t remember ever having worried about the responsibility: it was a job that had to be done and there was nobody else to do it.

What helped enormously was that Wattez had already for some time worked together with another young fellow, Arie Prins, who organized book-circles in the countryside around the Hague. They worked on a simple principle: you had to find about a dozen people, who would each buy one novel and then, after reading, pass it on to the next family, all according to a certain set sequence, until after a year the original owner got his or her book back. All the organizer had to do was to make sure that the books were kept in circulation according to schedule, and to see to it that they were handed over in good shape and on time. The system worked amazingly well under his watchful eye, partly because this was war time and there was not much else to do in our spare time but read. I don’t remember how many circles he had going, but it meant that there was suddenly a much larger clientele for novels than Wattez, whose store had quite a strong leaning towards the religious aspects of life, had ever had. And although religious novels were sure-fire favourites under his customers there were not enough of them to still their hunger for reading material, and they showed no aversion for the more worldly side. Pocket Bibles in precious leather bindings were fine (and popular, particularly towards Easter), but rather a heavy diet as the only literature for daily use, certainly in times when everybody felt the need to be away once in a while from the daily misery of living in an occupied country. Arie sold a lot of novels.

Another most helpful factor was that the store had an experienced and utterly reliable bookkeeper, a woman whose name I have forgotten, but who was a pillar of strength. At any time we knew just how good or how bad things were going, and it was most encouraging to see that the sales figures went up from month to month, not fast, but steadily. It was mostly due to the times in which we lived: books were hard to get, and much more popular than ever before. Books we could not sell before because they were a few years old, not very new-looking, and not terribly exciting, all sold gradually over a period of time, for the full price. What went particularly well was books that still had hard cloth-covered bindings, because those were no longer made; never mind the contents it seemed. “Do you still have some novels in cloth covered bindings? Maybe somewhere under the counter?” and then the delight if you could produce some that didn’t look too bad. The other thing was paper that had no unbleached wood fibre in it, so that it would not turn yellow with age, no longer available either.

We had one female customer who went away happily with three books we had not been able to sell so far. She was happy because all had cloth-covered bindings, one in red, one in white and one in blue, the colours of the Dutch flag. The Germans could not very well arrest people who displayed a set of three books in their sitting room in a prominent place. I am sure that she had no idea what they contained, and that she could not care less.

We were already several months hard at work and totally involved in our jobs, when the owner of the building, who himself was the owner of a large bookstore close-by, came over to tell us that he had sold the building and that we would have to move. He had bought another suitable building on the other side of the same street and we could rent the bottom floor of that building, roughly of the same size, that we could rent for about the same sum as we were paying for the rent of our present store. It was bad news, but it could have been an awful lot worse. This change-over was unpleasant, of course, and it entailed an awful lot of extra work for a couple of weeks, but it was manageable. And we did manage it, without noticeable nasty consequences for the business. On the contrary: our customers, already very loyal to Wattez who was imprisoned presumably because he had displayed too strongly his dilike for the Germans and his love for the royal family, were more determined than ever not to let his family down in the hour of their greatest need. I learned a lot about that group of our population during the year I took care of the bookstore, and much I didn’t like. But their loyalty to the cause of Dutch freedom and culture and their spirit of constant resistance to the German occupation was admirable, as was their support for those they considered their own. It was no wonder to me that the resistance movement of the Christian Reformed Church was so effective.

It was during the second half of my year in Wattez’ Bookstore that father van Halst came over for a weekend to visit his daughter. He was coming with me to the store on a Sunday morning, because there was some small detail I wanted to take care of and he wanted to see the store. We were in there no longer than maybe five minutes, and we had the lights on because without them the store was much too dark to do anything, when there was a sudden knock on the locked front door: one of our good customers had passed by, seen the light on and wondered if he could come in for a moment and look at something he wanted to give as a present and had forgotten. Sure thing, I was there anyway. While we were talking, there was another customer entering, for I had not locked the door, and wondered if, maybe….he might….. In less than ten minutes I ended up having three customers looking for something to buy and I could help them all, so that it was close to half an hour later before the “little detail” I had wanted to take care of was looked after and we could leave the store. It was a freakish thing to happen, but it impressed my visitor, who from that moment changed his mind about me somewhat, we believe.

During the time I was boarding with the Bes, two things happened that had an impact on my (and on our) life, the one vastly more important as well as more positive than the other. The first one was that the Bes read an article about a fellow who lived in a houseboat and loved it. She showed me the article and we talked about it. A spark set my imagination afire and I mentioned the idea to Moekie, who was immediately for the plan, an agreement that was naturally critically important, for had she hesitated it might have spelled difficulties ahead, and if she had turned it down the idea would have had to be abandoned. The ultimate result we called the “Janneke Jans” and we have spent very happy years on it. All of our children were born aboard.

The second was that I saw a fellow member of “De Laak”, the rowing organization I had joined, daily arriving at the clubhouse on his motorbike, a beautiful B.M.W. He was a very powerfully built young man and a truly impressive sculler, but in races he went regularly to pieces and he never won a major race. I was jealous of his bike and started thinking how wonderful it would be to be moving, effortlessly and fast, to wherever you wanted to go. I wanted a bike. Strong desires have a habit of feeding on themselves and growing stronger in the process. I soon wanted a bike in the worst way. The encouragement came from another fellow, who worked at the Bureau of Statistics and was a motor bike enthusiast, and on his advise I bought a brand-new light motor bike, a 200 cc., two-cycle “Zuendapp” (an Austrian make, I believe), a bike that has disappeared from the scene, together with their main product, which was a large bike very similar to the B.M.W. I admired so much. Their sale slogan has always appealed to me: “Die fluesternde Zuendapp”, or “The whispering Zuendapp”, in contrast to the aggressively noisy Harleys.

The fellow at the Bureau of Statistics taught me how to ride it and in due time I passed my road test. My enthusiasm for that bike soon changed to annoyance, because the thing developed problems with starting and lost power rapidly. I don’t know why I didn’t go back to the dealer to explain my frustration, and why nobody mentioned the idea to me, but I didn’t. Looking back at the situation now I am sure that the trouble was a simple one of a faulty or poorly adjusted carburetor that could have been fixed in very little time and that the bike, with proper care, would have proven to be perfectly satisfactory, and probably more reliable than any of the later ones I owned. My absurd solution was to sell it for a lot less than I had paid for it within half a year of the initial purchase….. a good deal for the new owner. I could buy a much bigger and rather old second-hand Ariel – another make that has totally disappeared. When the war made it impossible to get gas so that I couldn’t ride it any more we lived in Nieuwersluis. I kept the bike in the building that had been the “orangerie”, was now known as the “coach house” but that was used for all kinds of storage. The Germans found it there, took it and ran it off the road somewhere near Utrecht. It wasn’t worth reclaiming, a total wreck. It was not the end of my adventures with motor bikes, but it should have been.

After about a year in prison Wattez was suddenly released and returned to his family. He was never charged of anything specific, of having done or supported anything of which the German occupation authorities didn’t approve. Why was he put in prison? It is of course impossible to answer that question, but the fact that he had a bookstore made him suspect in German eyes. That he belonged to a church that was known for its great loyalty to and very strong support for the Dutch royal family was certainly a good reason to suspect him, although by itself not good enough to put him in prison. There was a German fellow who built violins and ran a repair shop in the same street, close to where Wattez had his store. Although his business seemed unlikely to provide him with sufficient income to sustain his family (during the year I was replacing Wattez I don’t remember having seen more than one or two people enter his store) he didn’t seem to lack anything; in fact he seemed to be quite comfortable. While Rijk Stigter and I were learning the trade under Wattez’ watchful eye he told us to be careful with what we said and to whom, and mentioned the German violin builder as being suspected of being a German spy. I have a feeling that this fellow may have played a role in this case. There were quite a few Germans living in Holland under similar circumstances and the fact that soon after the occupation the Germans seemed to know where to find them strengthened our belief that this occupation had been planned for a long time.

Soon after his return, I believe the day after coming back home, Wattez visited his store: a stranger almost, no longer familiar with the stock and of course finding it in a new location. I believe it was in pretty fair shape, but I could sense that he thought we had too many novels and too few religious books. The store, his store, had changed its character during his absence and that worried and displeased him, but he couldn’t very well talk to me about that feeling. I stayed on a short while, but no more than a few days, before visiting Dietrich in Rotterdam and asking him if I could return there, this time as a paid employee, a request that was immediately granted.

During the whole year I spent at Wattez I kept up rowing daily, paying regular visits to Doesburg in his shop, and discussing with him our plans to find a houseboat. It was something that appealed strongly to him and he soon became very interested in the project, taking it upon himself to keep an eye open for possible good buys. Nothing turned up, and the two answers we received to an ad we had placed in a well-known daily paper didn’t lead to anything, although I did go, accompanied by Doesburg, to have a look. They were either totally unsuitable or in poor shape (one was a floating storage shed for something like building materials, the other a very poorly constructed and poorly maintained shack on a pretty awful looking hull). One thing became abundantly clear: people who lived on houseboats were in general terms a special group of painfully low-income individuals. Our quest seemed to retreat in the fog of dreams. Until….

One evening, early in 1941, while we got into our shell to go for our regular training, Doesburg emerged from his shop and asked me to drop in before going home. I did that, anxious to hear what he had to say. “I may have found something that comes close to what you’re looking for. There is a houseboat for sale in de “Trekvliet”, opposite the gas plant. I think it looks not too bad. Maybe you should go and have a look for yourself?”

It was February and the evenings were short, the light fading pretty fast. I raced over to the place he had indicated and there, amidst the usual awfulness, was one houseboat that stood out because it was much larger than its neighbours, it did not look shabby, and it had a clean coat of white paint, not the shiny finish paint, to be sure, but a good coat of clean undercoating. It had lots of windows, which was something I immediately liked. On top it had a ridiculous looking fence along all the edges, about 3 1/2 feet high, as if the owners kept chickens or had very small kids, but that was not a serious consideration: a fence is easy to remove. The total impression was favourable and my mood on the way home one of excitement and anticipation.

I went back the next evening, knocked on the door and introduced myself, explaining that I might be interested in buying the boat if it was what I needed. Could I come in and have a look? Most certainly I could, said the man who had opened the door, stepping aside. He looked and sounded as if he was somewhat misplaced in the environment where I had found him. We had entered into the fairly large kitchen where the family was sitting around a table, reading by the light of an oil lamp. Through a sliding door with a glass panel you could see into the living room. The walls were covered with varnished plywood from the ceiling to about 3 feet from the floor, the rest was finished with narrow vertical boards painted in a colour that held the middle between gray, pink and purple….. a weird colour. The ceiling was white. I was invited to come back the next Sunday to have a look in daylight, an invitation I accepted.

In daylight the boat, both outside and inside, was definitely less glamorous than she had appeared to me in the evening and by the light of the oil lamp. There was now something cheap about the whole thing that hadn’t occurred to me when I saw her before. The living room was finished in the same way as the kitchen. The furniture consisted of a couple of big overstuffed chairs and a small round coffee table. In the corner was something like a wooden mantel shelf , but I don’t remember whether there was a heater. There must have been one. From the living room a sliding door gave access to a bedroom, and through that you came to the other bedroom. That was it, if you discounted the toilet, in a built-on separate enclosure: a plank with a circular hole and a pipe straight out at an angle, ending above the water line…..

It was a bit of a let-down, but maybe that was ok, for it put my feet back on solid ground and got my head out of the clouds. But one thing hadn’t changed: there was a lot of space inside and so, if the hull proved to be in good shape and the wooden construction sound, we might be able to make something out of what we had that was more in line with our expectations. Doesburg inspected at a later date what he could without taking the plywood off and seemed satisfied. What we could see of the inside of the hull through a trapdoor in the floor of the living room seemed all right too, but that had to be further inspected. It was dry in any case, and that was something.

Early that spring, or at the tail end of the winter, in February, Moekie, working as a student nurse in the largest hospital in Amsterdam, the “Wilhelmina Gasthuis”, had been seriously ill with a throat infection. The hospital environment, combined with the brutally hard work and the frequently resulting general physical decline was often thought to have been responsible for student nurses’ illnesses. I remember that I was shocked to find her so dreadfully pale and weak when I visited her. But eventually she recovered and got six days off to fully recover (it is hard to believe: six days to recover from a serious illness, but that was it) in early March. She spent part of that time in the Hague with the Bes, and it was during that period that I showed her the houseboat-as-it-was for the first time. The owners, the family Helder, were happy to allow us to look around. Moekie was immediately enthusiastic about the possibilities she could envisage, and after we had returned to the Bes we decided in principle to buy it, if the results of a more thorough inspection would warrant it. The asking price, fl. 3000.-, seemed rather steep at that time, but if the hull and the wooden construction were sound it would be worth that much.

Doesburg inspected the wooden part and someone else (I don’t remember who it was, likely an acquaintance of Doesburg) did the hull and both seemed sound. The payment of that amount of money in cash was quite an experience in my life, a milestone of sorts or a divide: nothing was the same any more after we were the owners of the houseboat; I think it helped shape our lives. It took several weeks before the family Helder had left, but finally we could step on board as the new owners. The boat was towed to a small harbor next to the rowing club. We were still committed to look after the changes we wanted to make ourselves, hiring an experienced carpenter and under supervision of the priceless Doesburg. The two elements of the programme that had to be secured were therefore to find a reliable carpenter, and the materials that would be needed, particularly the lumber.

It seemed that the carpenter was quickly found, for the maintenance man of the student rowing organization in Delft, LAGA, was out of work because the Germans had closed the rowing club. He was a friend of Doesburg, who recommended him warmly. But just at the moment that we were going to contact him the Germans changed their mind, decided that the rowing club was not a subversive organization, and allowed the building to be opened again. That was quite a blow, but worse was to come, because we couldn’t locate any lumber anywhere, no matter where we tried. The German occupation had taken it all. Carpenters might be found, but without lumber they were as helpless as we were.

There was one thing that had to be done before we could start the changes we planned in the wooden structure: a large water tank had to be installed. We heard about a small shipyard near Delft that had the reputation of doing good work and that specialized in interior changes and repairs. The name of the outfit was Boot. I wrote them a letter, explaining what had to be done, where our houseboat was moored, and asked them to send somebody to have a look and maybe make us an offer. Mr. Boot himself reacted and we arranged a meeting at the houseboat early in April. He looked the situation over and suggested that the best solution might be to make the tank under the floor, so that no living space would be sacrificed, but which would make it possible to install a big tank: 2 cubic meters. The boat would have to be taken to Delft, of course, and they would clean the hull at the same time.

During our conversation I told him of our difficulties in finding materials, a problem with which he was well acquainted. But he mentioned that he had enough wood to do the whole job and that he would be glad to make an offer. I was not much inclined that way, for I stuck to the original idea of doing it ourselves. No decision was taken. Nothing would happen until we had found a way to get the boat to the shipyard and that proved to be not so easy. It took some time before I found an opportunity , but in March ’41 the trip was accomplished and I found the boat quietly moored alongside the yard, waiting for the ways to be cleared. We had during the time of waiting tried again to find lumber, without any success, unless I was willing to pay black market prices. I was not.

During that first visit Mr. Boot, Oudijn (the carpenter who worked for the yard) and I walked through the boat and Oudijn drew with blue chalk a sketch on the floor of the changes. There were many. Two important ones were that we would extend the structure to take in the bits of deck both fore and aft and make the entry at the port side. It took us three hours of concentrated work and discussions to finish it, and at the end I was both tired and happy, feeling that we had accomplished a great deal.

After that there was nothing more we could do but wait for them to give us their price for the work involved. And during that time we pretty well decided that the Boot yard would be the one to do the job. (“Boot” is pronounced as “Boat” and means exactly the same thing….How could one go wrong?) We never had reason afterwards to regret the decision. I was very impressed by Oudijn: the man was phenomenal, a cabinet maker as well as a carpenter, and personally, emotionally, strongly attached to the job he was doing. The “Janneke Jans” became his pride and joy, his pet project.

When the price quotation finally came, about a month after that planning session, I was shocked: fl 3800.- was a lot of money. It seems laughably little now but I am talking about 1941, and it was certainly a great deal more than what we had envisaged. But the decision to accept was very quickly made and relayed to the Boot yard. I am glad that we didn’t know at that moment of extra costs that had not been anticipated and that almost doubled the final price tag.

The first job was the water tank, and the boat had to be hauled up on the ways. They discovered that the hull was not in as good a shape as we had been told: the curved section between the bottom and the side was, in fact, so bad that it seemed possible to drive one of the rivets through the hull with a heavy hammer blow. That had to be fixed by riveting new plates over the weak spot for the whole length. That would cost an extra fl 600.-, but the hull would be as good as new …..There was no choice.

From that moment I went every week to Delft on my bicycle to see how things were coming along. The changes came fast: every week something else had been done, and some detail had to be discussed and decided. The co-operation with Oudijn was most pleasant; I liked the man, admired his work, and did not hide my satisfaction. It was fun to see a quick smile light up his face when he saw that I liked what he had done, for Oudijn was a quiet, very modest man.

When the job was nearing completion I asked Mr Boot to slow down, explaining that I had heard rumors about the Germans taking houseboats that were not occupied and I could not yet live on board. He understood and immediately the work was stopped. It proved almost to be a grim mistake. One day I got a letter from him to tell me that the boat had been in a collision with another one and was “seriously damaged.” I went as soon as I could to have a look and hear what exactly had happened. There had been a canal freighter moored behind the “Janneke Jans” that was going to be towed away by a tug that had already another boat in tow. It is difficult to stop in those circumstances, for the boat in tow is likely to run into the stern of the tug, and therefore the arrangement was that they would pass by slowly and throw a line from the vessel being towed. The fellow who had to catch and fasten that line made the mistake of fastening it to a cleat on the side where the tug was passing, so that the bow, instead of being pulled sharply away from the shore went more or less straight ahead and ran into the “Janneke Jans”, pushing in the outside wall of the kitchen. It looked pretty bad, but fortunately I had taken out insurance . An expert came to estimate the damage, and an amount of fl 600.- was paid out for the needed repairs. The actual work involved proved to be a lot less than had originally been thought, and the money paid by the insurance was far more than what was needed. Mr Boot didn’t dispute that and we agreed to share the bonus: I would get fl 100.-, he the rest.

In the mean time my job with Voorhoeve and Dietrich made it necessary to live in Rotterdam or close by. I found a temporary room with my friend Koert Lindijer and his mother, but that could not last for ever. Finding a place to moor a houseboat within the city limits proved to be difficult. There was a place reserved for them, but that was way too far out of the city to be practical, and on the other side of the river. For a moment it seemed that Mr. Dietrich’s contact with the harbour master of the city might provide a solution, but at the date we had arranged to meet the Germans picked him up for some reason. (Of course you never found out what those reasons were. Usually mere suspicion of lack of co-operation were sufficient. They had good reason to feel that way, for there was naturally hardly anybody willing to help them, unless he/she belonged to the in Holland most despised N.S.B. – the Dutch version of the Nazis)

So I tried in Schiedam, a little distance all right, but not too far: about 20 minutes cycling. And in Schiedam there was no problem: they had a place for houseboats in one of the old canals, spectacularly graced by the three tall, slender windmills that dominated the city’s skyline. One of them had lost its arms, but the other two were complete. The canal itself (probably the old city moat) was far from spectacular. My side, where all the houseboats were moored, was not too bad, but the other side was grim and seemingly inhabited by a not only poor but also violent part of the population: rather recently there had been a brutal murder of a Jewish woman and her teenage daughter. I must add that I never had any trouble at all, not personally and not as far as the “Janneke Jans” was concerned. The water was indescribably black and foul, and the smell of alcohol was permanent in the air, for this was the area where the distilleries were located that made Schiedam’s reputation; Bols, for instance. It was not too bad as long as you kept the windows closed. And so, on August 5th, the boat was moved to her new spot after an uneventful trip that was only prolonged because she had to go through the railway bridge that took ten minutes to open and close while the train traffic was so frequent that it was almost impossible to find that space of time: every half hour a train between Delft and Rotterdam in both directions, and every hour between Rotterdam and Vlaardingen. But after a long wait she was allowed through and with feelings of enormous pride and joy Moekie, who had come from the Hague to watch the arrival, and I saw her stately, quietly approach over the ink black smooth water. Koert was there as well…. it was a festive, a momentous occasion.

The boat had to be cleaned before I could move in, and the cleaning lady who worked for Voorhoeve and Dietrich, Mrs.. Hogeboom, came the next day to do that, and thoroughly. For as long as I stayed in Schiedam she came once a week and kept things spic and span. I continued to eat at the Lindijer house, so that I didn’t have to worry about cooking or keeping foodstuff on board. Every morning I was at eight o’clock at the Lindijers for breakfast. Mrs.. Lindijer made a lunch I could take to the bookstore, and at six o’clock I had supper at the Lindijers again before pedaling home….the first time in my life returning to a place that I owned. A very special feeling that gives a new meaning to the word “home”.

The evenings were somewhat quiet, but there were time and again visitors. Moekie came over from the Hague usually once per week. One evening per week I had supper at my aunt Emmy’s and I always looked much forward to those visits and the stimulating talks; real high points in my life in that time. I visited Kees Baars and his family regularly and I got to know more people in Rotterdam all the time. In a way it was almost like a homecoming, the return to the city where my roots were.

The only thing that was a continuing frustration and worry was the generator. There was between the buildings along the canal rarely sufficient wind to turn it and enable it to load the batteries, (there was obviously a very good reason for the height of the three windmills) but what was worse was that at the times when there was sufficient wind the noise and the vibration were such that it became almost impossible to hear what other people might be saying.

The only generator available at the time when we installed the electricity was a Dutch make, unknown, and, as far as I could determine, untested. Maybe it would have worked mounted on its own mast away from a farmhouse in a flat rural area where, in Holland, you would expect lots of wind, almost always. It seemed to me that the fact that it had no automatic braking system, standard on all American models I had seen illustrated, to prevent the thing from running too hot and ultimately seizing up, was a serious technical shortcoming. It seemed that ours was likely to do just that in a stiff breeze. But a generator on top of a houseboat may be an unworkable idea, not only because of the noise and the vibrations I mentioned, but also because, when looking for a mooring place for a houseboat, it is important to find a spot that is sheltered. They are by definition high and catch a lot of wind, which makes the mooring a more or less permanent problem, but to use a wind generator…….

Anyway: I have cursed the folly that made me decide to get one installed and I have blessed the moment when we were hooked up to electricity in Nieuwersluis. Between those two lies a time of much vexation, anger and extra work that never paid off: the batteries were never re-charged after I had used up the power they contained. We relied on oil lamps, which by itself are not an unpleasant source of light…. unless you have counted on just flipping switches.

The distance to my work didn’t ever pose a problem. It was sometimes a bit hazardous to cycle at night during the winter months, because I had barely enough light to see where I was going, due to the screened light that was mandatory for the German-imposed total black-out, but not really enough to avoid puddles and obstacles. I believe I fell only once, though, and not with serious consequences. What was definitely unpleasant was that in cold weather I got up, washed and dressed myself without heat, had a cold ride into town and got only a brief chance to warm up at breakfast. Mrs. Lindijer was incredibly good to me and the memory of her help and hospitality will always be a very warm one but half an hour is not much, and then the bookstore was again cold, so that it took sometimes until half-morning before I would feel comfortable.

During the fall I had the first of quite a number of more or less long-term guests: Dof Backer Dirks, Otto’s younger brother, had to “dive”, for students were being targeted by the German occupation for forced labour in German industries.

A short explanation is maybe useful at this point. The deportation of male students to Germany served two purposes: there was an increasing need for labour in Germany, because such a large number of young men served in the armed forces, but the other reason was that the universities were among the first places where the resistance movement was born and organized as a result, among other things, of the removal of Jewish professors from the faculties. The Germans hoped that by taking many students away to Germany they would kill that resistance “in the bud”. And because they suspected that very few would heed the call to register voluntarily, they used a sort of blackmail to force them: “If you don’t register”, students were told, “we will take your father.” I don’t know of any case where that threat was actually followed by arrest and deportation of the father, but the threat was sufficient to do the job, for a lot of students, Moekie’s brother Henk among them, did register and were shipped to Germany for the duration of the war. Of course the one thing that completely failed was the “nipping-in-the-bud” of the resistance organizations. But if you had been a student it was practically impossible to continue to walk, so to speak, in broad daylight; you had to disappear from view, to “dive”. The “Janneke Jans ” had its share of those. Dof was the first one. He stayed for only two weeks, and went back to his parents’ house when it seemed safe to do so. I enjoyed those short two weeks. It was nice to come home and have company. Dof was followed in fairly short order by the younger brother of Gerard Hovens Greve, Hans, for a totally different and altogether more pleasant reason: he had found work with a large architect’s bureau in Rotterdam and needed a temporary place to live until he had found suitable rooms. I didn’t know Hans very well, but had met him often of course and had always liked him. He proved to be an interesting and charming guest and for two weeks we had a fine time.

Then I got a message from Harry Lim, a fellow-member of “Pallas”, who studied medicine, that he, too, had found work in Rotterdam, in the hospital for sick children, and needed a place to stay. Of course he was welcome. Somehow Harry made contact with the family that lived right across the street from the “Janneke Jans” , a contact that rapidly developed into a very pleasant relationship. They were a nice family. Since Harry came home earlier than I, we had an extra key to the boat at the Fontijne house, where he could pick it up. Harry had several scare-moments, but by far the worst one was when he suddenly saw members of the dreadful “Gruene Polizei” stop their car in front of the hospital and enter the building. He and a fellow-student, sure that the Germans had been told about the presence of two students in the hospital, left fast through a side entrance without being noticed, but learned later that day that the gentlemen had come for an unrelated reason. It was that feeling of insecurity, of hidden danger that was always present, no matter where you were or what you were doing, that was hard to take during those years. But on the whole the months I lived on the boat in Schiedam were pleasant enough.

In January Mr. Dietrich told me that he had heard from one of the two partners in the publishing company De Haan, a well-known and respected name in the book trade in Holland at that time, that they were looking for a junior partner, somebody who would be interested in investing in and then heading a “daughter-company” with the specific purpose of publishing children’s books. He wondered if I would be interested in finding out more about it, and if so, if I would like him to make contact with them. It sounded almost too good to be true, but I was most certainly interested in finding out more. That initial contact led to a series of discussions with the two partners, De Haan and Van der Woude, and with Oom Ru , Mr. Dietrich and Wattez, with the result that a decision was reached that we would proceed with the founding of a new publishing company under the name of Uitgevers Maatschappij Havelaar, that would be housed in the same building and that would have three partners. For the time being I would work for De Haan in order to gain some experience. I could not shake the feeling of a dream becoming reality.

Publishing business is very risky and the possibility of losing a lot of money in a short span of time is a daunting reality. Starting from the bottom up makes the risk factor that much greater and was almost impossible under the circumstances imposed by the war. But in this case I would be trained by a couple of very experienced people in the business, people who had over the years established a reputation of success; people, moreover, who had established valuable relationships with the paper suppliers, the printers and bookbinders that were all-important during the years of great scarcity. Working in close connection with them would make an enormous difference. It was an incredible chance to do what I wanted to do. For the time being it meant that I had to move to a location near Utrecht, to be close to my work.

The possibilities to find a suitable place for mooring a houseboat around Utrecht were as limited as they were in Rotterdam, (or, for that matter, anywhere in the urbanized part of the country, a fact that should have been, but wasn’t, prominent in our plans to live on a houseboat) Two old little rivers, the Oude en de Kromme Rijn, were blocked by masonry bridges that were far too low to allow the “Janneke Jans” access. The only possibility was de Vecht, that had once been a river, but was now canalized. It used to flow north from Utrecht and emptied in the Zuiderzee. The only time the water still moved, slowly, sluggishly, was when the city canals in Utrecht were flushed, and it often happened that the same garbage that we had seen drifting north one day, came past going south the next day when a strong northerly wind was blowing.

But once the Vecht had been the area where during the 17th century rich Amsterdam merchants built their summer houses, palaces one is inclined to call them: they were huge, with enormous rooms and kitchens, meant obviously to entertain important and influential guests….and to impress them. Some had ornate wrought iron gates on the road side, but most of those close to the river displayed their well- proportioned neoclassical fronts to the water side, for most traffic was by boat, not by the road. There were sometimes beautiful landing places at the houses, with wrought iron railings.

Highways in 17th century Holland were narrow, often poorly paved and poorly maintained. The comfortable way of traveling was by boat, a boat that was pulled by a horse with a rider on its back, moving along a special path that followed the river exactly. “Trekschuit” (“tow barge”) they were called, those boats. They were roomy, comfortable and noiseless and therefore allowing for a lot of effortless socializing, in contrast to the diligences, which were noisy and rough. The boats, although slower than the diligene, moved faster than a person could walk. And who was in a hurry in those days? Only the rich who had their own riding horses and carriages. The pulling horse’s harness was fastened to a long rope that was on the other end tied to a pole on the covered barge. A helmsman kept the boat in deep water, away from the shore. Because the river meanders there were poles dug in between the towing path and the edge of the water in curves, to prevent the rope crossing the path, which was also used by walkers: the poles would catch the rope once the horse and its rider were past, and guided it around the curve. From the living room on the”Janneke Jans” we could see the tow path on the other side. It had been paved and was used a lot by cyclists, because it offered better scenery of course, and it was much quieter and safer than the highway. Some of the old poles were still standing. An odd car came by as well: always a German, for there were no Dutch cars on the roads any more. Whenever I saw one coming during the last period of the war, when the age-limit for deportation for forced labour had been raised to include my age group, my immediate, automatic reaction would be to duck below the window sill….. a reaction rooted in deep-seated fear: one should not be seen. There is something immensely demoralizing in that kind of fear.

When I started to look along the Vecht for a suitable mooring I was guided by a few basic needs: Otto would join me on board, and we had agreed that we would stay as close as possible to Utrecht, because we would have to cycle back and forth to our work. That was one. Number two was that we wanted to be in open country in order to catch enough wind for the generator and to give us the feeling to be removed from the city. I cycled along the Vecht to the point where the highway swings west, away from the Vecht, which runs from there on, beyond Vreeland, through flat polder land. The most beautiful stretch, the area that gave the Vecht its reputation, lies between Vreeland and Maarsen, which is more or less a suburb of Utrecht and already quite urban. I found a possible site in Zuilen that seemed to fit our needs, on the shore of the municipal storage yard, a place where bricks and other heavy, bulky materials were kept. The municipality had no objection. The only problem was: how to get there?

I had talked with Jan Havelaar, a very distant cousin-of-sorts (our common forefather lived from 1725 till 1805) whom I had met in Rotterdam and liked very much, who was in the business started by that common forefather: insurance brokerage, and who had through his work very many connections, also in shipping. It didn’t take him long to come up with a guy who contracted to do it for Fl. 80.- and that was, even at that time, an incredible bargain. What was very important was that he would tow only the “Janneke Jans”, for if a houseboat is towed with other barges it is invariably at the end of the line, and because it is light and catches a lot of wind, it swings uncontrollably across the channel. If it is placed right behind the tug the weight of all the other barges pulls on the light houseboat, which isn’t built to withstand that pull. The only minor problem was that he would pick us up in the “outer harbour”, so that we would have to find our own way to get from our present mooring right across the city to the spot where he could find us. The harbour master helped and we arrived without damage on the appointed spot on the evening of March 16 and tied up alongside an empty oil barge. My cousin Jaap Mees would make the trip with us, (that is: with Harry Lim and me) as would Jan Havelaar, but the latter would join us early in the morning of the 17th, the date for our trip.

Access to the boat was temporarily reduced to climbing through the skylight, for the boat was moored with its starboard side against a Shell oil barge, and the door was on the port side. It proved not so easy to get out, and it took several unsuccessful tries before I found out what the problem was: jumping up from a chair and at the same time pulling myself up on the rim my elbows made it impossible to get through the opening. I had to place a big box under the chair, which resulted in a somewhat shaky installation, but an easy exit. Jaap came on board that evening and we hoisted his bike next to my own on to the roof.

We woke up that morning to discover to our consternation that a heavy, dense fog made it impossible to see more than a few meters ahead. The apt description I wrote down in the “Janneke Jans” book was that I felt as if the boat was like ” a jewel packed in cotton”. The burning question was whether 1) the tug would be able to undertake the trip, and 2) whether it, as well as Jan, would be able to find us. Jan found us first. At eight o’clock a whistled signal sounded from the whiteness, and guided by our answering calls he emerged from the fog. How he had found his way from the other side of Rotterdam remains an unsolved mystery; I suppose that the fog near the river was much worse than it was farther inland. We waited for the fog to lift, but nothing happened. We walked to the end of the breakwater that protects the harbour entrance and found that it was worse to be there: the fog was just as thick, but so near the river it was colder. We waited some more and suddenly some one detected that the other side of the river began to show, indistinct, unreal, veiled like a hidden promise. Back to the head from where you could now see boats emerge and disappear again. Jan told us that the name of the tug was “Anna”. We peered in the fog to see if we could read any names during the short time the passing boats were visible. There were tugs coming by….. no “Anna” . It was by now possible to judge by the course they followed whether a boat was likely to enter the harbour or pass by, and the tension rose with our hope. In the end there was a tug that was by itself, that seemed to be heading for the harbour…. could it be….? It is a big one….! And then, in unison: “Anna !” Running back to the “Janneke Jans”and shouting to the captain:”Here you have to be…!” But why does he tie next to those empty barges? What does he say? That he has to get those…? Unbelievable: a different “Anna”. Two tugs of the same name, apparently called to the same spot at about the same time.

Disappointment and waiting. Until, finally, the real “Anna” emerged, a much smaller and somewhat shopworn “Anna”, but coming for us. It was eleven o’clock, the fog was getting much less and as soon as we turned up the river the sun broke through. We passed Rotterdam in gorgeous, sunny, still weather, and the boat was calmly, serenely moving over the light waves. It was a wonderful trip. Harry, for the first time in weeks, felt safe enough to come up and join us on the roof, enjoying the view of the scenery and the few old towns we passed. At three o’clock we passed through the new, enormous locks that boats have to pass through in order to get from the river into the canal that leads north. It was a humiliating experience to be that small between those immense concrete walls, but it functioned with uncanny, noiseless precision. There was one tight spot: the sharp turn from the canal into the small lock that leads into the Vecht and that one has to enter by passing under a concrete bridge that looked as if it might not be quite high enough to let the “Janneke Jans” through. It just fitted, with very little to spare. The last stretch along the Vecht was again unbelievably beautiful, past the old castle, at that time one of the few left that was owned and lived in by a family. We reached our destination shortly after six o’clock. Jan and Jaap remained on board for the night to go back the next morning.

Otto Backer Dirks joined Harry and me on board after a week. We soon discovered the difficulties of work-and-housekeeping combinations: we came home around six, and then had to cook our supper on one primus, with the result that we never started to eat before eight, then washed the dishes and finally, around nine, could begin doing what we had to or wanted to do. The evenings were short and precious. On top of that there was the urgent need to clean the whole boat once in a while, because dust appeared miraculously, apparently from nowhere, but in abundance: under the furniture, under the beds, on the floor, everywhere. Once we even went so far as to roll up the floor mat and drag it outside to be cleaned with an authentic carpet beater, with astonishing results: who would ever believe that so much could come out of a single floor mat? Otto in particular became a bit distressed with all the housework and the resulting meager success, for he had work to do. I suspect, in retrospect, that he was already preparing for or working on his large-scale research among school populations with fluor in drinking water.

Our meals were nutritious and simple: we cooked potatoes in the peel, and added raw lettuce or spinach once they were done, plus a lick of suet (we had one potful of the precious stuff that was practically no longer to be had) for taste and nutrition. The vegetables we bought from the greengrocer who lived behind us.

While in Zuilen I learned some valuable lessons as the owner of a houseboat. The first one was related to wind generators on the roof and the lesson amounted to a resounding “DON’T”. There was lots of wind (by itself a detrimental factor) at the mooring place in Zuilen, the generator turned like a mad thing gone wild, but the batteries were never sufficiently charged. The noise factor was unbearable, and the vibration the thing transmitted to the boat was such that I was scared that it might do real damage to the wooden construction. Once the generator seized up and had to be repaired at some considerable cost. Lastly: it acted apparently like a sail, so that it was very hard to tie the boat well enough to prevent it from drifting away…. as one of the following tales will illustrate.

The second lesson was so elementary that I am almost ashamed to mention it as something that I had to learn: your mooring and tie-up can not be too safe and too secure. There are two elements to the technique of tying up; in the first place: fastening the boat in such a manner that it can not get loose until you untie it and can not move forward or backward more than within a very limited space, for instance 6 in. in total, and secondly: to rig something solid, like poles, to keep it at a certain distance from the shore. If one fails in either one of these two elements there is an acute danger that the person trying to enter or leave ends in the water with the gangplank, or the boat may get solidly stuck in te mud and develop a nasty lean when the water goes down. Both are undesirable.

Our attempts to find a cleaning woman went nowhere, and something had to be done, because the situation on board was rapidly becoming untenable: the boat was getting filthy. We have been enormously grateful for sister Lieske’s offer to come once a week and do some house cleaning for us as “Aal”. Aal made all the difference. She had the whole boat clean and our supper waiting for us by the time we came home; at least one day per week we could look forward to going home.

Shortly after Otto’s arrival on board several unexpected (and unwanted!) events occurred. He was not the cause of any of them; it was purely coincidence. The real cause was that the owner had no experience with houseboats and made serious mistakes in mooring his new acquisition.

The first one was a triumph-of-sorts for Otto, who insisted on locking the front door every night and proved to be very hard to convince that the slightest unusual movement in the boat would wake me up. And so it happened that we woke up one morning, as usual, because the hellish noise of the alarm clock made it impossible to ignore it (those were the days when I owned , and used, a particularly wicked alarm clock). Looking out of the window with sleepy eyes we saw to our astonishment that the shoreline vegetation moved slowly, inexorably, past the window. That woke us up in a hurry. The reason: two burly fellows, one fore and one aft, pulled us to another spot. Otto was delighted, not , of course, because we moved, but because what happened proved him right beyond a shadow of doubt: he claimed that it demonstrated that “they could steal the boat from under my nose without my noticing a thing”. A barge had arrived earlier that morning and they were going to load bricks on it from the pile where we were moored.

But when we arrived home that evening we were not at all happy with the new spot, and, convinced that they must be through loading that barge, which looked to us to be pretty well loaded, we decided to pull everything back to where we had been. However, the next morning, even before the alarm clock had had a chance, we were woken up by loud bangs on the door, and one of the fellows who had been there the previous morning, looking not at all pleased, told us that he was going to move us again: more bricks had to be loaded. He didn’t do it himself, but he assigned the job to a single, older man who had a decidedly sour look on his face. Not without reason: the boat was heavy enough to move with two people pulling and he had to do it by himself. Of course he could not pull both the nose and the stern at the same time, so, after frustrating attempts with the nose he concentrated on the stern, which moved beautifully, for the wind did the rest: there was a stiff breeze blowing across the water and it didn’t take long for the nose to drift right across the Vecht, which is very narrow at that point, closing it effectively to all other traffic.

Otto and I were eating our morning porridge (Harry must have left earlier, but the story doesn’t mention it), which happened to be a good one on that day, and felt somewhat relaxed and not in any mood for drastic action. There was no action we could take at that moment anyway. We finished our porridge, wondering cheerfully what would happen if another boat would want to get past us. Just by the time the breakfast dishes were moved to the kitchen we saw to our amazement that the breeze had shifted suddenly to the north, blowing the nose back across the water; the time for action seemed at hand. I waited for just the right moment, took a mighty leap from the front door, landed on dry land, managed to get hold of the boat with a pike pole and hold it until Otto was there to help me secure it again, this time to one of the large, heavy concrete sewer pipe sections that were stored there. So far so good.

When I came home a few days later I found the heavy brute lying on the sloping shoreline close to the Vecht, not only much too close to the water for my comfort, but distinctly wobbling. Those sections were really big and really heavy; to roll one on level ground would be heavy work for two people, but to roll this one back up the slope was totally out of the question. I had to find something to secure the “Janneke Jans” to and didn’t see anything that would do. There was a lot of wind at right angles to the water. The situation was critical: that section of concrete pipe might well end up in the water at any time if there was a sudden strong gust and the results of such a thing happening were impossible to predict, but most unpleasant to contemplate. I could only see one solution: roll another one down and tie the boat to that. How I got it done I don’t know

but I did. My plan was to hold the boat with one hand and use the other one to pass the cable through the pipe, then grab it and tie it using both hands.

At this point I made some serious mistakes: I did not turn off the generator and I did not test if it was possible to hold the boat with one hand. Instead I managed to untie it. At that point I found that there was no way I could hope to hold the boat, with the roaring generator acting like a sail, with one hand; all I could manage was to hang on for dear life with both hands and hope that Otto would come home before I would have to let go. It was a desperate situation. Just holding the boat took every ounce of my strength, and I could feel my muscles tremble under the strain. If Otto didn’t come very soon, I would have to let go, for my strength was draining away fast…..

Just at that moment there came, totally unexpectedly, a sudden lull in the wind. With the last bit of strength I managed to get the cable through the sewer pipe, grab it with both hands, pull it through and fasten it somehow. It took every bit I had and it left me exhausted. After resting for a few minutes I managed to stop the generator and consolidate the mooring somewhat. I had just finished when Otto appeared and cheerfully asked what I was doing. Together we tried to roll the sewer pipe section that had slid to the water’s edge back to where it had been. We could not even hope to move it. During the next few days the municipal crew managed it, I imagine by using machine power. They told us in quite clear terms to keep our ….. hands off the municipal property in the future. I dare not even imagine what they would have told us had they found the thing in the water.

After this experiment it was clear that a section of sewer pipe wouldn’t do as a reliable anchor; we had to find something else. We pounded a stake in the ground, a sturdy stake, I thought, for it took quite a lot of pounding, and tied the nose to that It looked quite secure. The stern we tied to another post, the last post of a somewhat rickety fence. It is true that the post by itself did not inspire much confidence, but it was tied with barbed wire to the rest of the fence and the barbed wire was in good condition. It might do.

I had spent Easter in Amersfoort. Charles and Do, with Karel Just, stayed with friends in Zuilen. We had arranged that on Easter Monday I would join them in Zuilen for lunch and after that we would cycle to Maarsen to visit the “Janneke Jans”. Charles had seen her only once, in Delft, and Do had never seen her at all. I looked much forward to the occasion. On my way to Zuilen from Amersfoort I had checked and found everything on board all right. There was a strong wind blowing from the west, it was clear and rather cold.

When we approached the mooring and could see the boat from some distance, I thought that there was something strange in the way we found her in relation to the well-known objects close to her, the piles of bricks to the left and the neglected, shabby appearance of the couch factory, owned by a family of fervent N.S.B. (the National Socialist Party) members, to the right. My heart was in my throat when I raced ahead…. and saw that my pride and joy was lying peacefully, apparently content, on the other side of the Vecht. The door was facing us across the water.

The cause of the disaster was clear enough: the front peg had snapped off at ground level; the last fence post was separated from the rest of the fence and had left the barbed wire behind. What had to be done about it was not clear at all, except that we had to obtain the use of a boat-of-sorts, and the only boat visible belonged to the couch factory: a clumsy-looking, large lapstrake boat with a disproportionately large cabin-like structure on top. It floated. It proved to leak rather badly and it had no means of propulsion other than one pole that was too short. We could borrow it.

My story in the “Janneke Jans” book doesn’t mention Do any more, but I suppose that she must have crossed with Charles and me, because we made tea once we had gotten in through the kitchen window. How Do, who is not athletic, managed to get through that window is unclear to me, but she must have done it, for later I mention that I cycled back with both of them to Zuilen. More likely seems that I got in through the kitchen window, and then opened a much larger one in the bed room. Crossing was easy: the wind blew us. Coming back was not, but somehow we did get back. What was rather nasty was our discovery that “the other side” of the water, the side where she was now, was shallow and lined with rocks, and that she was solidly aground on those rocks. There was no movement at all and we had to give up trying. There was nothing we could do but wait for the water to rise again. We borrowed a long rope from a near-by farmer and secured the nose by tying it to a little shed. After accompanying Do and Charles to Zuilen I cycled back to the boat along the former tow path on the side where she was lying, left my bike at the farm, pulled on a pair of wading boots and climbed on board through the bedroom. That evening I noticed that the water was rising, but alone and in the dark there was nothing I could do and the next morning it was stuck again. On my way to work I left the boat through the bedroom window, and waded to the bank: it was the only way I could get out and back in for now. My wading boots could be left at the farm.

If I needed Charles’ help in getting the boat back to where she should be, (and there was no way I could do it by myself) we had to do it on Wednesday at the latest, for on Thursday they would go back to Amsterdam. Anticipating that the water would come up again in the evening I phoned him on Tuesday afternoon and arranged that he would be there to help the next morning. It worked out as I had hoped: Tuesday evening the water rose, the boat floated free, and with the help of a pole I managed to secure it in such a fashion that it would stay at a certain distance from the rocks. Wednesday morning the water was down again, but she was still afloat when I got up. The water was going down pretty fast. I dressed in a hurry and managed to get her afloat again (she was just getting stuck) and just far enough from the bank to keep her floating until Charles arrived. He had brought with him a pair of oars; a great improvement. He needed them, because there was still a stiff wind blowing, this time from the opposite direction, pushing the boat away from the land, and he found it was barely possible to row the monster row boat against the wind.

The plan we arrived at was that we would tie together all the cables plus the rope we had borrowed and tie it to the nose of the boat. Charles was to row across with the rope and while he did that I would hold the nose in place by a short piece of rope that I would only let go when Charles was ready to start pulling from the other side. The wind pushed the nose strongly away from the bank, but the stern was still tied.

Charles pushed off hard and started rowing like a man possessed with the bulk of the line on board while I tried to hold the nose. There was no way I could do it, the wind was far too strong. I did one desperate step too much so that water gushed into my wader and had to let go. With an elegant, easy swing the nose made a half turn. It was almost a miracle that Charles had been able to get out of the way in time, otherwise he would undoubtedly have been in some trouble. As it happened he reached the other side safely and started hauling in the line. I got on board and undid the stern line, the wind did the rest. The whole operation took only a few minutes…. a few very tense minutes. We managed to moor it securely.

A few days later another small problem disturbed the peace. Due to a slight technical problem with the infernal alarm clock, it didn’t go off precisely at the hour for which it was set. The difference was at first small, a few minutes, but it became more over time. One morning it went off, Otto jumped out of bed, dressed partially and started shaving, but I was suspicious because it seemed so dark outside. I checked my dear Vacheron, the reliable, accurate golden watch the Bes had given me. It indicated 5:45 instead of 7:00….. and there was friend Otto, energetically shaving himself by the available light.. The effect it had on me was that I started laughing, first silently, but soon uncontrollably, so that I was totally unable to tell Otto what was so funny. He didn’t see the joke at all, maybe thought I had taken leave of my senses or something, but became suspicious when it occurred to him, too, that it was rather dark….. and checked the Vacheron. Result: a suppressed oath, a little sour laugh, and the immediate determination to make the best of it: after he was dressed he sat down at my desk and started working.

Soon thereafter a neat, well-kept house trailer was pulled into the yard, carrying the name of a well-known contracting company. I saw a man once, said “Hallo” in passing but since we were away the whole day we didn’t meet. Until, one evening, after coming home the man knocked on the door and introduced himself: “Boonstra”. He had an intelligent, open face and a pleasant manner. He had come over to tell me that they had seen somebody near the boat early in the afternoon, who had been trying to get in the door. He had disappeared after a short while and Boonstra had gone over to check whether everything was still o.k. and had to his surprise found the young man, obviously of Asian descent, sleeping in the grass near the boat. Being quite tuned in to the prevailing need of young males to disappear he had not asked any questions, but invited him to come to the house trailer, where he would undoubtedly be safer. There was no doubt in my mind: that must be Harry, who had returned. So it was.

And so we met Mrs.. Boonstra, a small, vivacious woman with un-Dutch spontaneity (she was born in Czechoslovakia) and her two daughters, six and eight years old. As soon as darkness fell Harry moved back to the boat, to continue living behind closed curtains. The two daughters Boonstra, intrigued by those curtains, expressed an ardent desire to see the “Janneke Jans” on the inside. To allow that would expose Harry, so we agreed that he would stay in the bathroom during their visit, hoping to distract the girls sufficiently to avoid that they would want to look behind that door as well. It was a little tense, that visit, but everything worked out fine.

The housekeeping remained a constant problem, and Harry could not do anything meaningful to alleviate it: his only pressing problem was to remain invisible under all circumstances. Lieske’s help was naturally temporary. And we were not at all prepared for the possibility that I, too, would have to disappear from view. So started the talk about getting married. After all, I had a steady job that promised a future. And that talking led to the need for an other, better place for the “Janneke Jans” and to my subsequent exploration of the Vecht further north, an area where I had been only once before.

I traveled on my bike along the old tow path and decided that Nieuwersluis was the ideal spot, because it had easy access by train to Utrecht as well as to Amsterdam and there seemed to be a possibility along the tow path road just opposite “Sterreschans” and “Rupelmonde”. I had looked at all three large places from that little road across the water with envious eyes, for there were houseboats moored at “Over-Holland”, but it seemed to me that all three were owned and inhabited by families related to the owners of the place and that there was just no hope at all of finding anything on that side. It was just too beautiful, too ideal, too much like paradise under those beautiful big, stately trees….surely such a site was only available to those fortunate enough to have family relations with the owners. With the plan for a mooring along the tow-path I went to the same official at the local (Utrecht) office of the Department that had jurisdiction over these matters, who had helped me find the place in Zuilen. When he heard what I had found he shook his head: “We don’t want any houseboats along that side, for the road is still frequently used. But why don’t you try “Over Holland”? That is owned by “The Utrecht Landscape”, and I know they have in the past allowed houseboats to use it for mooring.” So it was not privately owned….. Would there be a chance to live in paradise? He gave me the name of the manager, a Mr. de Jonge, and added as an afterthought, “Wait, I’ll phone him.” Then the miracle happened: the permission was granted, over the phone, just like that. I could not believe my good luck and I floated back to Zuilen on a bubble of sweetly scented warm air.

That solution simplified the problem of “moving” to the narrow, literal meaning of the word: how would we get the “Janneke Jans” to the new location? Where would we find a tug-of-sorts? Charles was visiting one day and saw the freight boat of the firm Mur in Breukelen come by, who maintained a regular, daily service connecting all the towns along the Vecht from Utrecht to Vreeland. He suggested that that was a possible solution, and I had to agree. One evening I was home in time to see the boat come by, and hailed the skipper, who switched off his engine for a moment to hear what I wanted. He said that such a plan would be possible, albeit not cheap and gave me an address in Utrecht where I could reach him. In that office we discussed the plan and reached an agreement: He would take us along on May 26th. Maybe we would not reach Nieuwersluis that evening, but in that case he would take us from Breukelen to “Over Holland” the next morning.

Moekie would be on board for the journey, as would Lieske and Miek, and, of course, Harry. Everything went exactly as planned and the trip was uneventful and unbelievably beautiful. Harry felt that it was safe enough for him to join the rest of us on the roof and enjoyed the short break after his long period of hiding immensely. The weather could not have been better: sunny, warm and no wind. It was indeed too late when we arrived in Breukelen to reach our destination that evening and so we slept on board with quite a few people, but everybody had a bed. Otto would meet us in “Over Holland” , so that Moekie and I took our bicycles to see if he was there, but didn’t find him and went back, thinking that he had not been able to make the trip.

At about eleven o’clock, when everybody was bedded down and either asleep or nearly so, there was suddenly a noise on the roof as if somebody climbed on board, followed by the appearance of a pair of long legs through the sky light: Otto had come anyway. Poor man. He had had quite a trip, had not had any supper and was tired. He had taken the train to Nieuwersluis, had not found us there and had taken the next train back to Utrecht. There he had climbed on his bike and had pedaled along the tow path to look for us. He must have passed us, but didn’t see us, didn’t find us in Nieuwersluis either, had gone back to Zuilen and had been told by Boonstra that we had left. So: back on his bike to Breukelen, now in the dark, where he had finally found us. We gave him a warm welcome and some (cold) supper, and made a bed for him. The next morning early we were just up and Otto was shaving, when Mur called from outside that we were to leave. No time to give him breakfast; he would get something to eat in Utrecht, he said, and left in a hurry. As it turned out he might as well have stayed, for within half an hour we were peacefully moored at our new berth. Otto’s memories of our moving from Zuilen to Nieuwersluis are less rosy than those of us, the other travellers.

 

 

PART 2

 

We were married on June 4th and started our life together almost literally with a “Bang!”. With the help of Ode Walters we could get a room in a family hotel in Gieten just south of Groningen from Monday June 7th till the following Saturday. Since the German occupation there was of course no longer a possibility of traveling to foreign countries, with the result that all hotels in Holland were booked almost solidly.

We spent the Saturday and Sunday on board, and went on Monday by train to Assen, and from there on our bicycles to Gieten. The hotel had a nice “feel” to it, very simple, but quite good. Our room was on the second floor, on a long hallway that had a toilet at the end, the only toilet on that floor, built in a plywood enclosure, a bit primitive, but clean. Our room was lovely and bright.

That night I had to go to the bathroom, which meant that I walked down that dim corridor to the little toilet compartment. What happened there I don’t know, but I fainted and fell off the toilet with a bang against the plywood wall. I came to almost immediately and left the enclosure, feeling somewhat dizzy. Halfway down the hall I fainted again and fell with a terrific “Bang!” full length on the floor. Again I regained consciousness almost immediately and continued to the bedroom, but crawling now on hands and knees. Moekie found me in that position, helped me get up and into the bed. I believe I slept.

The next morning a doctor was called. I am glad that I didn’t have to face the questions of just about the whole hotel population, but Moekie did. It was all very embarrassing. The doctor came, introduced himself, and tried to keep a straight face when the presumed “wife” of the man in the bed immediately introduced herself as “Van Halst” , not as “Mrs. Havelaar”, being in the presence of a doctor and promptly back in her role as a nurse…… He checked me, concluded that I had some sort of a ‘flu bug and prescribed a medication: a salicyl potion. The immediate problem was the limited time we could have the room: what if I was too sick to travel?

The medication arrived and Moekie ordered a small glass, a jenever glass I believe, from downstairs. She had no way of measuring the prescribed amount, but I suggested to just about fill the little glass. She did. The results were almost frightening: I broke out in a terrific sweat, almost enough, I felt, to float me out of the bed, which lasted for quite a long time and then I slept again, without eating, through most of that day and the following night. But the next morning, oh miracle, I felt fine. I had no fever any more, and Moekie agreed that maybe I could and should get up. The reception in the dining hall was again embarrassing: we were quite the newly married couple. But I ate a good breakfast and still felt fine. We decided to return what was left of the medication to the doctor. The good man opened the door himself and could hardly believe what he saw.”I know I am a doctor,” was his comment, “but I didn’t know I could work miracles.” The disease did not return.

After our five days in the hotel we cycled to Haren, a suburb of Groningen, where Ode and his wife Agnes lived, to be the weekend with them, spending one whole day at a lake, sailing and loafing. In Haren we saw a stork on his nest. That was quite a thrill, for they were becoming rare in Holland. It is the only stork we ever saw, in a country where they were once common, and we lived in the area where you would expect them: flat meadow land and lots of water.

Our spot along the bank of the river on the property of “Over Holland” was about the best we could have found . On the port side we looked in the “Over-Holland” forest, with its impressive straight oaks, at least 60 cm in diameter, and on the starboard side on the Vecht and the ducks. The water was fine to look at, and it didn’t smell. In retrospect that is amazing, for all the municipalities along the “river” got rid of their sewage straight into the Vecht, and the “Janneke Jans” did the same thing. Our kitchen refuse went overboard through the porthole above the sink, and (to finish that unpleasant part of my story right in the beginning so that the reader may have forgotten it by the time the end is reached) when there were babies, their diapers got their first vigorous rinse in the same water. A special flat stone slab had been dug in for that purpose next to the gangplank, almost level with the water. We got our drinking water from a tap near the road, 100 meters from the boat, by carrying it once a day in two pails on a yoke; five trips a day would keep the tank filled. To begin with we had no electricity and used oil lamps.

The spot was problematic in only one detail: the soil was very wet peat and to keep the boat at a fixed distance from the bank we used two poles, about three meters long and about 15 cm thick, with a heavy hook on one end and a iron loop on the other. The hook fitted through an iron ring that was welded to the hull, while the loop went over another pole that was driven into the soil at an angle. The nose and the stern were of course securely fastened with steel cables to some bushes on the bank. The system seemed just about fool-proof, but it wasn’t. Satisfactory under most circumstances, yes, but not fool-proof. The problem was that not all freight-carrying boats had skippers as considerate as Mur, who always slowed down when passing. If the skipper did not do that the resulting suction along the shallow shore line was impressive: first the “Janneke Jans” would lurch vehemently in one direction when the water was sucked away from the bank, immediately followed by a similar movement back when it returned in the stern wave. That double lurch made the boat first exert a tremendous pull on the poles that held her from the bank, and because the soil was so sloppy the poles that were holding them moved quite a bit. The following lurch would push her back, and that resulted at times in the loops sliding up on the poles and slipping off the end, leaving the boat loose and the gangplank in the water.

The river bank was protected by a tight row of small poles, driven into the soil. Of course it was impossible to drive them in so close together that there would be no openings between them. The rats loved that system; I think they used it to protect their nests. We never left any food uncovered in the kitchen, for they would be quickly there to help themselves, climbing on board along the steel cables. We never had any real problems with them, but we knew they were there all the time. Moekie sometimes saw one sitting on the small steel triangle right outside the kitchen window that looked back along the Vecht, and they gave her a real scare. They must have been the size of a small cat.

What was particularly good about our spot was that we had an open space right beside us to separate us from the high trees. Apparently there had been a boathouse on that spot that had been removed. Our neighbours had tied their boat under the trees, and therefore they were always in the shade. It must have been pretty dark inside. We had no contact worth mentioning with them. He came from Amsterdam, that was all we knew. We never found out how he made his living , nor did anybody else, but he had clearly a lot of money and there was widespread suspicion that he didn’t have to work, in the narrow sense of the word, because he might be deeply involved with the black market. He was a braggart, but his little son was worse than his father and, on top of that, very spoiled. Our boats were far enough apart that we could maintain our distance also in a social sense.

Already before we moved our boat to Nieuwersluis I had met the village blacksmith, de Rooy. He had lost his wife, lived by himself and seemed to have adjusted to his lonely existence. De Rooy became very soon our main source of local information, our rock solid friend-in-need, the person on whom we knew we could rely under all circumstances. He has on several occasions been the person whom we could (and did!) thank for getting us out of a very tight spot. I believe that de Rooy was really sorry when we finally outgrew our boat and had to move to a house, because our personal relationship was valuable to him.

To begin with it was de Rooy who looked after an electrical connection to the boat. He installed the wires (ordinary, albeit extra heavy gauge, fencing wire) that were fastened to insulators screwed into the trunks of trees. The actual work was done by a fellow working for de Rooy, much younger than he was himself. When he climbed the ladder to screw the insulators in the tree right across from the boat, he suddenly yelled and literally slid down the ladder. He didn’t hurt himself in his hurry to get down, but he was a shade pale when he arrived on the ground, pointed up the tree and blurted: “Hornets……! A whole nest of them !” There was no argument that could convince him to go back up. Finally de Rooy himself climbed the ladder after the hornets had quieted down and screwed the two insulators in the trunk a little distance below their nest. They didn’t bother him.

As it happened we had the Bes and Riet over just on the day that we were hooked up. I had switched on all the possible lights, but not pulled the main switch. When everybody was seated I switched on and the boat lit up like a Christmas tree. A great surprise. And what a blessing it was, to have power, reliable power, without thundering noises overhead, or worries about an overheating generator, or too much wind, or no wind…..To have electricity made an enormous difference in our life on board, of course.

A week after our arrival the father of our neighbour put his boat between ours and his son’s, as the son had told us. That was a pity, for it spoiled the view from the kitchen window, but otherwise we did not notice much of their presence. He and his wife had a boy of about 13 years and there was another boy on board of about the same age, but much better educated apparently than the son, judging by his speech, and much more articulate. He looked a lot as if he might be Jewish. And there seemed to be also a mysterious female figure on that boat, no more than a furtive shadow. The father had, just like his son on the other boat, apparently a lot of money. The whole situation smelled a bit as if they hid Jews….. for a price. Not a pleasant thought, that people would make other people’s life the object of a business transaction. But I have no indication other than what I thought to have seen, and even if that perception would be true, I have no other basis for my suspicions than that I didn’t like Bakker Sr.. or his son.

They had ambitious plans, the Bakkers: they had bought (or contracted to be built) big, concrete tubs, twenty by four meters, with walls of about ten cm. thick. They had one longitudinal partition and three across and were roughly a meter deep. I saw them before they had superstructures built on them, for they were tied up at the local carpenters,’van Schaik, who were going to finish them. I suppose they had reinforcing steel in them, but of course that was not visible. Bakker Jr. told me what he had in mind: brick walls, parquet floors throughout, a complete bathroom….. you name it. When I asked him if they wouldn’t be very deep in the water and at the same time quite top-heavy, he laughed. When it was finished and pulled to its mooring behind us it looked impressively massive and big. We have never been inside, but we heard from people who had seen it that it did have a bathroom with a full sized bath tub and parquet floors, just as his proud owner had described it to us. The walls had been built of hollow bricks and the structure was so heavy that there was only about twenty cm. of freeboard left. What it would take to move the monsters….. The thing that seemed to us a bit scary, from an owner’s point of view, was that it had a tendency to sway more when ships passed than one would expect in a colossus like that, which might be an indication that it was indeed unstable. Bakker Sr..’s houseboat was towed to its place while half-finished, and they finished it on the spot. What was awful was that the two were so big that they interfered seriously with our view and that they didn’t fit at all in the natural environment. They were, in fact, much like a curse in polite conversation. That was not an argument that bothered the Bakkers who had no feeling for the natural beauty around them and happily abused and littered the shoreline next to them.

Then a very unpleasant rumour came floating down: the Germans were in the process of taking houseboats. Although it was at that time no more than that, an unsubstantiated rumour, the Bakkers were alarmed enough to try to sell their floating mansions, at least that was what we heard. We didn’t maintain any contact with them, and so couldn’t verify the story. But shortly thereafter what we had heard was changed to fact: Bakker Jr.’s boat was sold to a buyer for a German outfit, and towed away. Not long after that we heard that it had capsized….. in the locks between the canal and the Rhine. Bakker Sr.. left not too long after that, and we were happy.

We met the family Meyer, living in “Rupelmonde”. Mr. Meyer was a minister and the Director of the Martha Stichting, an enormous Christian orphanage that had its own establishment in Alphen. The whole outfit was kicked out by the Germans who needed the buildings for barracks or something, and re-housed in the three large mansions in Nieuwersluis, “Over Holland”, “Sterreschans” and “Rupelmonde”. The properties were adjacent. “Over Holland” and “Sterreschans” were used by the orphanage proper, kids and personnel, “Rupelmonde” became the home for the Meyers.

We got quite friendly with the family Meyer and visited them often. Mr. Meyer was an admirable, wise human being. His wife made at first the impression of being somewhat sentimental, but that disappeared when we got to know her. They had quite a family: six children. The eldest, Jan, had just spent a year in Berlin as one of the students who had been sent over for forced labour. After several failed attempts to get away he had finally succeeded and the family had found “legal” ways to keep him in Holland, with the unexpected help of an S.S.. officer. He and his girlfriend, Jeanette, came over to the “Janneke Jans” quite regularly. Then there were two girls, two boys, and another girl. They formed a very close family. When Mrs. Meyer heard that Justus was expected, she found all kinds of valuable things she didn’t need any more, like diapers and baby clothes and such.

Two other very good neighbours were the family Soede, and Korver and his wife Hilletje. Soede and his wife were full cousins and had ten children, quite a few of whom shared a certain eye problem that was apparently common in the family, but otherwise they seemed a healthy lot. Ma Soede was enormous, so enormous that a pregnancy hardly showed. Both the Soedes and the Korvers were dairy farmers, as were almost all farmers in the area. They had to make do with incredibly small pieces of land (each farm was about ten HA), so that the number of cows they could have was very limited, but it was just enough for a living. They didn’t own their land but leased it from a distant landlord, often some member of an aristocratic family. The whole system clearly had its roots in a feudal past, traces of which you could notice in the respect the farmers showed for the land owners, who were a pretty grasping lot by our standards. The farmhouses were both ancient and, in a way, beautiful. But that is only in an aesthetic sense; they were uncomfortable to live in. Most were damp and hard to heat. Because of their age they had no bathrooms, but an outhouse. How the Soedes managed to house their whole family plus an old, cantankerous father in a dwelling of modest size that had not even a shower, was a mystery to us, but the whole family was always clean, well fed and neatly clothed. An admirable family, theirs, and most of that was the work of Ma Soede, who was very clearly in command; “had to be”, I should add.

Old farmhouses in some areas in Holland have stable and house under the same roof, which lowers the building costs and makes it easy to care for the cattle during the winter. For the same reasons the hay loft is sometimes above the stable. If the hay is not perfectly dry it may spontaneously ignite….. The resulting fire is almost impossible to fight and house and stable usually burn to the ground. The farms in our area had the stable attached to the house, but the hay was kept in a haystack, apart from the building.

It was unbelievable to us, but on Saturdays the whole family had a bath, during the winter on the kitchen floor, but during the summer in the empty stable. All the water had to be heated on the kitchen stove, and was poured in a large sitting bathtub. All children were washed in the same water, the one after the other, starting with the youngest, before the adults got their turn. We were once invited to see the small ones bedded down: three in one bed, two side by side and the smallest one across the foot-end. If I am not mistaken child no.11 was born shortly after we had left Nieuwersluis. But by that time the landlord had installed a shower….. an enormous relief.

Soede was a progressive farmer: he was the first one in that neighbourhood who used electric fences to achieve a more efficient use of the available land by forcing the cows to eat all the grass in one section before they were allowed in the next one. The grazed-over sections got a chance to recover before the cows were allowed in there again. His herd was also guaranteed free of tuberculosis and for that purpose regularly tested. The farmers who achieved that got a somewhat higher price for their milk. Soede considered that the higher price had made the effort to reach that stage well worth-while.

The way for farmers to make a lot of money during the war years was to sell in the black market, and because most in that area were borderline-poor, the temptation was enormous. Neither the Soedes nor the Korvers wanted any part of that. The Soedes even went so far as to ration the milk in their own family, in order to have enough to be able to sell one litre per day to people who needed it, but had no ration coupons, because they had been forced in hiding, for the regular price.

No sooner were we installed in our new environment than the guests started to arrive. The attraction was evident and had not so much to do with our popularity as with the fact that we lived on a houseboat, and in the famous Vecht, of all places. I don’t count the “regulars” under the guests: Otto had spent more hours on board at that time than my wife, so that we considered him almost as part of the family. All during the war he made an effort to come once a week, usually for a weekend, on his bicycle from Utrecht. He needed to get away from the city where he was heavily involved with underground work, and relax a bit. It was through him that we got most of our news about the war and the resistance movement, but he was extremely careful never to tell us more than he thought we should know. It was a ground rule: don’t talk about what you were doing, for the fewer people knew the better. What you did not know you could not spill, by carelessness or under pressure. We only found out after the war just what role he had played. We were quite impressed.

I once talked to him about my inactivity in these matters, which was something that worried me a little. He was very serious when he said not to worry. “You must never seek involvement in that sort of work,” he said. “When there is something that you know you must do you’ll do it and that is as it should be.” His own involvement dated back to the time when Jewish faculty members were being fired, and later picked up for shipment to concentration camps, so that they had to find places to disappear, (“dive” was the common term). Support groups were organized because there had to be people and places found that would hide them. Once in hiding they would need coupons for themselves and their families, which resulted in the organization of support groups that specialized in raids and hold-ups in distribution centres. That sort of work demanded the uses of fire arms, and those had to be found…… and so it rolled, like a snowball. A lot of people risked their lives.

Otto knew that, should he be caught, he would be in deep trouble and in acute danger. He always carried a little filing box with him, that contained the names and particulars of all his patients. He was looking after the nurses in the university hospital in Utrecht and enjoyed in that function the status of somebody whose services were “essential”, which meant that he was protected against being picked up during random round-ups (the term we used was “razzias”) to supply workers for the dwindling human resources in Germany.) It did not mean that he was protected if the Germans suspected him of being involved in illegal activities and arrested him for “questioning”. His best protection there was to avoid suspicion. He succeeded in doing that, was never stopped and never questioned. He was also extremely careful.

Once he got too close for comfort. He was on his bike on his way to Nieuwersluis, taking, as he always did, the country roads and “het Jaagpad”, the road on the other side of the Vecht that was once used by the horses pulling the passenger barges. At one point he noticed that he was being followed by two Germans, also on their bikes, maybe accidentally going the same way, maybe following him. It was an unsettling discovery. He could not raise suspicion by increasing his speed very much, but he made sure that the distance at which they were following him remained the same. At one point, close to Breukelen, the road crosses a small canal by means of a draw bridge across a set of locks. His luck held: the fellow operating it saw him coming, as well as the two Germans, pulled up the bridge after he had passed and busied himself opening the locks. Otto did not wait to see how that encounter would end, but the bridge was up and cut conveniently all communications. I imagine that what had to be done about the locks may have taken a long time.

Discounting his visits the guests and visitors were numerous, it seemed almost day-by-day during the summer. Most did not stay for the night (the train connections with Utrecht and Amsterdam were excellent, and there was the bus, which still operated on a regular schedule in those days), but some did. There were days when we took one set of visitors to the station in Nieuwersluis and picked up another set from the next train going in the opposite direction. The rush culminated with the arrival of the members of most of our graduating class for a reunion, on July 31, ’43. It was a warm day, the eleven guests arrived on a houseboat and were convinced that they would have a swim. They did, getting out through the large open window in the living room and diving from a broad plank I had rigged for the occasion just below that window. Every time someone dived the dirty water splashed through the window on the floor of the living room. It was a good thing that there were so many hands to help with carrying the water to the tank, for everybody needed a shower in the worst way after getting back in: they were covered with a black residue that stuck in spots all over them, much like a black version of measles. The amount of water used was amazing, but nobody got sick. They hardly realized what they had been swimming in. I must admit: even their host got in…..and he should have known better.

Of the thirteen adults four slept in Breukelen; the other ones, plus one baby, could all be accommodated on board. The whole reunion was a real success, but I do not think we would have considered another one.

By the end of February ’44 the results of all those guests must have shown, for the guest book has a short entry, written by me, that clearly indicates that we did not want to see anybody for a while. I imagine that the expected arrival of Justus had something to do with that decision. Between Feb. 28 and May 6 there are no entries. When the guests return there seem to have been fewer.

During the time when we had no guests I developed a mysterious open wound on my left shin. The skin is thin there, pretty well tight over the bone, and there are not many blood vessels. The hole was about two inches across and oozing, but not painful. Under normal circumstances I would have sought expert help in the university hospital in Utrecht, but this was a time when I did not expose myself more than was absolutely unavoidable, and I stayed away from the city. The wound was aggravated when I had to change the electric wires to another set of trees because woodcutters working for the Germans had told me that one of the trees to which it had been attached had to be cut as one of 150 trees they had to cut on “Over Holland”. Standing on a ladder a whole day while transferring the wires to different trees had made the situation considerably worse.

I went for help to the Diacones (a registered nurse, member of a Protestant religious order of nurses) who worked for the “Martha Stichting” in “Over Holland”, Sister Rika. She ordered rest, no physical activity, and exposure to sunlight. When after close to two months there was no progress I went to the hospital in Utrecht anyway, where they applied an ointment, told me not to remove the bandage for several days, and to come back. The improvement was amazing, and I felt terrible that I had not much sooner told the good sister that I was going to get a “second opinion”. She would not have liked that, but it would have saved us a lot of trouble. With the ointment they prescribed the whole thing cleared up fairly rapidly. The sunlight apparently had made the condition a lot worse.

During the period of my forced inactivity we had been given a young crow, a small sub-species that lives in church towers in Holland, which provided me with a lot of fun, training and feeding it. I cut the flight feathers of one wing and was afterwards sorry I had done that, because the poor thing could not fly properly after that, but just enough to get into the trees, and we had several anxious moments trying to get him to return, but he always did. He had his own seat on the back of a chair, and to catch whatever he produced I had placed a sheet of zinc on the floor. He would once in a while turn around, and I did not want that, for obvious reasons, so I made him turn back by pushing gently with one finger against the side of his tail. After a while he knew exactly what was going to happen when I got out of the chair I happened to be sitting in, and he would hop around without any need for a push, before I had reached him. We had named him “Kareltje”. I don’t remember what I fed him, but worms and spiders were favourites. He sat on my shoulder when I went to see sister Rika in the morning, and flew up to a ridge above the front door when I entered, there to wait until I returned. The children loved him.

That he liked spiders was sort of fortunate, because we fought a constant battle against them: big spiders that started to move about when it got dark. Before Kareltje arrived I used to pick them off the walls and the ceiling and throw them in a bowl of hot water, where they died an instant, albeit gruesome death. Throwing them in the river was utterly useless: they swam back in a straight line. With Kareltje on my hand I made an inspection of the living room every evening, allowing him to pick the spiders wherever he found them.

In the fall, when his kind moves southwards in great flocks, Kareltje tried to join the rest, but could not because of his cut flight feathers. All he managed was to get higher and higher into the tree tops…..He didn’t respond to my calls anymore and we don’t know what happened to him after that. I imagine that he would have survived the winter, for he was not afraid of human beings and would probably have found enough to eat. In the spring he would have grown new flight feathers and rejoined the flock. I missed him but vowed never again to have a tame crow.

My long absence bothered the two owners of N.V.. De Haan at least as much as it did me. They came to visit and I think that one of them, Van der Woude, was somewhat suspicious of the nature of my problem, almost as if he suspected that it was more or less an excuse not to come to work. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but I had nothing to offer that would disprove that feeling. They brought with them the first printing of a novel, with the request that I proofread it: surely a “sitting occupation”. I am a lousy proofreader and got more interested in the novel than in the misprints. I overlooked quite a number, thereby strengthening v.d.. Woude’s misgivings about my seriousness. I should have asked Moekie to check…. she is excellent at it. Even now, after I have been over the text I have typed, revising it, correcting it, changing it several times, I overlook typing errors that she picks out. Proofreading is a special talent, and it is not mine.

I mention the little incident because it was the first sign of things in the joint venture of the N.V. Havelaar not developing as smoothly as all parties undoubtedly had hoped. There were a number of reasons for this, of course, and some I can identify in retrospect. The first one was that the war lasted longer than we had hoped or expected, with all the nasty effects that had on the publishing of books in general, and on the prospects of a brand new company in particular. It was, for instance, almost impossible to obtain paper, quite impossible, in fact, along regular channels. It was difficult to get the book you wanted to publish printed and bound. All aspects of the industry were suffering from the same circumstances: the war and the German occupation, which had caused shortages in all essentials. It made serious planning useless and futile. That meant that I had to fill my time with work for de Haan, something I did not mind, but what I was asked to do was mostly physical work, like helping upstairs where the books in store were shelved and where packing and shipping of orders took place. It did nothing to give me a feeling of getting a little closer to the point where I knew I had to come to: the ability to act independently as a publisher. I was filling in time.

The second reason for the turn of events was undoubtedly that I am not a business man, not really interested in making money as a primary objective. They thought that they had found in me the person they were looking for: eager, with the proper background, education and training. What they didn’t know was that my “business sense”, the drive to make money, was as weak as my idealism was strong. Lots of idealism without a strong motivation to turn it into something profitable doesn’t lead to a successful career in publishing. It is, after all, a business in the first place. V.d.. Woude knew that better than most. I am afraid that it was that side of him, that basic coolheaded attitude of “me first”, that I have never liked in the man. I am sure that it was he who was mostly responsible for turning the N.V.. de Haan around after joining it and investing some money, and that de Haan himself would never take a decision that wasn’t approved by v.d.. Woude. In other words, in the co-operation of the two it was the latter who represented the hard-nosed side of the business that had been one of the basic reasons for their success.

A third reason was that I had started with the idea that they would give me an opportunity to “learn the trade” by being in close contact with what they did, by showing me the ropes, by having regular planning sessions focusing on the future of the young daughter company. They had never considered our co-operation from that angle at all; they thought that I would, unaided, be able to make some money for them. The only training I got was that I took a short course in bookbinding at the local trade school, an experience I enjoyed and have found useful. It resulted in the blank “Janneke Jans” book. It is probably true that there are a number of examples of young publishers who just jump in and swim; I have known at least two. I am sure that, given that you have promising projects, some money, a strong business sense and a good deal of luck it can be done. I had only the second of those requirements, the money, but no projects and no idea of how to go about getting even a manuscript for a children’s book for a start.

It is difficult to stick to a strict chronological order during the last years of the war, from the time we were married until the collapse of the German resistance, because we lived in our own world, the world events didn’t play a direct part in our lives, were only discussed after listening to the radio once a day. The “Janneke Jans” book is no help, because it was written during the time of my inactivity and it ends with telling how the leg injury was made worse because I had to stand on a ladder to change the electricity wires over to different trees.

“Listening to the radio” brought back a lot of memories. The German occupation forces had ordered all radios to be handed in, already early in the war. It was, in fact, one of the very first things they did, or tried to do, for the response had been what you might expect: negative. It was, however, from that moment on a serious offense to have a radio, so the risks of listening were quite real, and everybody knew that. Radios were hidden in all kinds of ingenious places, but under the floor boards was a favourite solution: you cut a hole in a spot that was normally covered by a floor mat or carpet to put the radio in the space below it before replacing the cut-out section, and pulled it out once a day to listen to whatever station you could reach. Most people listened to the Dutch broadcast from London. I write “listened” but it was not quite as simple as that, for the Germans tried hard to make their interference signal so efficient that you couldn’t hear anything. It was amazing though what you could pick up if you really tried hard. And you got better at it with time and practice. I usually ate my lunch with Otto in his room and we listened during that time. His landlord was fortunately “good”, that is to say: “reliable in his detestation of all things German”. If you could not be 100% sure about the attitude of the people you rented from, you had better not listen to the radio……The radio had to be dug up from a hole in the floor, covered by a piece of carpet, the usual way for hiding one’s radio. There were two things beside the radio that made the lunch visits with Otto very special and memorable. The first thing was that his landlord, a quiet, rather shy man with the appearance of a very minor bureaucrat, was a painter, an artist. He did it as a hobby only, for he had a steady job, but his work was incredible. The attic next to where Otto had his room was his studio, so that I had to pass by his work every time I went to see Otto. He painted surrealist pictures of a grotesque and sometimes frightening kind. The two examples I remember were a nude woman on a bicycle, in the sun, seen from the back, with a violin strapped to the carrier over the rear wheel, and another female nude, a torso, where one of the breasts was replaced by an atrocious, horrible wound, from which a glorious red rose emerged. The technique in each painting was astonishing, so accomplished, so detailed and accurate that they almost seemed to be enlargements of a bizarre photographs. I have no idea where he learned his technique, but according to Otto he mostly taught himself. Years after we had moved to Canada Otto told me during one of his visits that the man had indeed received the recognition as a surrealist artist of some importance he so clearly deserved, but didn’t seem to be very interested in at that time.

The other thing was that Otto had a source in Gelderland for the supply of the most delicious rye bread I have ever tasted, great big heavy dark loaves with whole kernels of rye. That was a rare treat and Otto was most generous in sharing the treasure.

It is a truism to claim that the first casualty in any war is the truth, and it was true that no station could be believed totally at face value, but the German “news” had been re-made into an effective tool of Nazi propaganda by Goebbels, and it was so blatantly distorted that nobody we knew bothered to listen to it. Some wit, who knew something about shipping and shipping volume across the Atlantic, figured out that the totals of the Allied losses due to successful U-boat attacks, as reported in the German press, was larger than the combined total tonnage of both the British and the American merchant fleets had ever been. An interesting observation, that didn’t change the fact that the German submarines were devastatingly effective.

We did not have a radio on the “Janneke Jans”, but went over once a day to “Sterreschans” to listen to the radio there. Our most reliable source of information, however, remained Otto, whose weekly visits brought us up to date on national and international developments and events. Where or how he got his information I don’t know, but he knew more than anybody around us. The “underground” obviously had sources not available to others.

It was from him we got a detailed description of a daring and successful raid by an R.A.F. “Mosquito”, a wooden plane (I imagine the last type ever developed and used) that was highly effective, because it was fast, maneuverable, and it carried bombs which it could place with uncanny precision. It was glued together with a revolutionary new type of wood glue, casein glue, that remained for many years after the war a favourite among woodworkers.)The problem that attack eliminated came too late to save thousands of lives, but there was no method by which it could have been done before that time without unacceptably high loss of innocent civilian life. It was this: the Dutch bureaucracy was incredibly well organized to register every person in the country from birth to death, with all details of the father, the mother, religious affiliation, marriage, address, and whatever else seemed pertinent. In Holland you could not move from one house to another without asking and getting permission from the central registration office. The result was of course that the German occupier found an ideal tool to hunt down every Jew in the country…. and they used it. It would have been an act of civic duty for the bureaucrats to destroy or hide these files immediately after we were occupied, but they were well-trained little bureaucrats who didn’t mess with something as holy as that registration office. It was clear that it was far too convenient for the Germans to leave it intact, and to take it out was one of the priorities of the Government in exile, and, through them, of the R.A.F. But it was housed in an ordinary house in a row of houses in a populous area in the Hague, and dropping a bomb would have been disastrous. The new aircraft offered possibilities. The crew was trained for weeks and months by attacking targets that were made to represent the actual circumstances, and by the most careful aerial photography. The crew could dream the location, not approximately, but exactly, and knew which house to take out. They did it: just the right house, no other casualties.

The walk to “Sterreschans” would not have been possible (the highway was too dangerous for us) if there had not been a small river freighter hidden in the wide ditch between the two properties, camouflaged by a lot of branches so that it could not be seen from either the Vecht or from the highway. The skipper of that boat had placed planks to both sides, so that we could use it as a bridge to avoid walking along the highway.

Gerard Hovens Greve moved in with us some time during the spring/summer of ’44 after the Germans had cut all the trees in his young orchard at ground-level to improve the view for their gunners. He was lucky in that he could get a job-of-sorts looking after the orchard of the mayor of Nieuwersluis. It was an older orchard with high-trunk fruit trees and it was badly in need of some professional attention. Unfortunately, the orchard was located on the other side of the Vecht, right across from where the “Janneke Jans” had her mooring. He had a choice of walking to Nieuwersluis, crossing the Vecht by bridge and walking back again to the orchard, or he could get into the heavy, wide boat the mayor had made available and cross that way. The first option would take at least half an hour each way, whereas the second would get him there in minutes. For anybody else the choice would have been non-existent: of course you would take the boat across. But Gerard could not swim and had a pathological fear of water, which made the choice for him very difficult. In the end reason prevailed and he chose to cross by boat, but every time he did so he went through hell. I remember looking at him with admiration, when he prepared to leave in the morning, tense, a shade whiter than would be normal, and obviously fighting back his innate fear.

So the time was drawing close for our first child to make his/her entry into the world. There was some real hope that this major event in our lives would happen in a free country when the Canadian and British troops entered Maastricht in the extreme south of Holland on September 13, ’44, and that was being followed by the daring airborne attack by the British on Nijmegen and Arnhem, to secure the bridges across the two main arms of the Rhine. The first succeeded, but the second one, after initial success, had to be given up when the Allied tanks were held up in Nijmegen and could not give the airborne regiment at Arnhem the support they needed to fight off the Germans. That failure started the worst part of the war years in Holland.

As soon as it became apparent that liberation of the whole country might be a matter of days the Dutch railways went on strike, in order to make it impossible for the Germans to move their troops rapidly by using the railroads. But when the attack was halted at Arnhem the railroad crews did not go back to work. The result was that no produce could be moved from the places where it was grown to the cities in the west…. and almost all the larger cities in Holland are in the west. The situation became very quickly first serious, then urgent and finally desperate; what had not happened in any time before in our history up till that winter, was now suddenly a stark and awful fact: there was widespread hunger and it quickly became a famine in the big cities. People dying of starvation in Holland…. the unimaginable was happening.

From the cities a continuous long file of people of all social milieus, from the well-to-do

to the very poor, moved into the countryside in search of something to eat, pushing and pulling all manner of carts and buggies, along the cold windswept dykes, a gaunt, ghostly, dreadful host of humanity. People collapsed while walking, and quite a few died on the spot.

It was clearly not a good time to have your first child, but it was on its way and we had to get ready. Childbirth in the home was the general rule in Holland at that time, and that for us the “home” was a houseboat made no great difference. Our doctor, van Dop, had surveyed the situation and ok’ ed it, if I made a couple of supports to raise the bed by about six inches, and if we would get the help of a nurse to help during the first couple of weeks. We had arranged with a friend of Lieske’s, Gre van der Ven, that she would be available, but…. she lived in Wormerveer, a town just north of Amsterdam, and there was no train service. I rented a tandem and rode it to Wormerveer, spent the night there, and brought Gre back with me the next day, with her suitcase strapped on the carrier. We were prepared. The housekeeping duties were going to be taken care of by “tante Jette”, a sister of the Bes and the owner of the boarding house that Moekie had been managing in the Hague. It was all very well timed, for labour started the day after Gre had arrived.

Van Dop, the doctor, was very tall and the ceiling of the “Janneke Jans” was very low, so that he had some problems when he entered. The usual thing to do for him was to duck as soon as he entered the living room, to move quickly to the sky light, where he had a little stretch before ducking again to get to the bedroom. Once there he was fine because he could sit on the side of the bed, and whatever he had to do he could do only bending over anyway.

To be present at the birth of your children is an experience I would not have missed for anything: an amazing happening, as scary and traumatic as it is wonderful and uplifting. There was a time when the husbands, the fathers-to-be, were carefully kept out of the delivery room, when it was simply unimaginable that they should witness this most feminine of all feminine acts. I doubt that my father was ever allowed to be present; maybe at the birth of Miek, but not likely at any of the older ones’ arrival. It may give them a stronger feeling of respect for their wives, and it may bond them stronger to their own offspring: “I was there when you entered the world…..”

The weeks following Justus’s birth were happy and more or less carefree. The neighbouring women came to visit and brought gifts, Ma Soede with a dozen eggs, a most precious thing in those days and the promise of a litre milk every day, to be provided by her and Hilletje Korver, and Hilletje herself came. Mrs.. Boellaert, the wife of the grocer, asked Jo, her daughter, who came once per week to collect the list of groceries and then returned later to deliver them, to take with her a big pot full of barley soup, “because barley was what nursing young mothers needed”. We had not seen barley for years…..Gre was unbeatable, funny, with a delightful, dry sense of humour. Together we sang operatic duos “a l’improviste” when we made the mother’s bed in the morning, which made the mother laugh so much that the repaired damaged part of her anatomy started to hurt and she pleaded for mercy. Tante Jette managed beautifully with the rather primitive facilities we had to offer. The whole atmosphere on board was relaxed and sort of festive. Justus did not seem to grow much those first weeks, but showed a dreadful tendency to bring some of the precious stuff back up after each feeding. Gre and Moekie assured me that this was nothing to worry about; that it, too, was quite normal. Maybe so, but times were hard and I would have liked it much better if he had kept it in.

How Gre got back home I don’t remember, but a sure thing is that I did not take her back by tandem. I imagine she took the bus to Amsterdam and another one to Wormerveer. A slow trip for sure. Ordinary diesel fuel was of course no longer available, so our bus ran on wood gas, generated in a little contraption on wheels that was attached to the rear of the bus, something like a little heater in which wood was kept smouldering. It kept the bus going, but power and speed were a distant dream, because wood gas does not have anywhere near the same “kick” as diesel fuel. So it happened time and again that the driver had trouble climbing the incline to the bridge across the canal, a couple of km farther north, and had to stop to poke in the glowing mass in the burner, hoping to get enough gas generated to make the crossing. It was a very lucky thing that Holland is such a flat country and that this bridge approach was just about the only “hill” on its journey. During the last part of the winter and in the early spring crossing that bridge by car became a life-threatening experience: the British Spitfires were regularly on patrol in the area and attacked every car that crossed the bridge with machine gun fire, believing (mostly correctly) that the only cars on the road were enemy cars, and the Germans didn’t have any planes left to protect them against such attacks. The war was in its last stages….

Life on board was concentrated around a few very basic items: first of all the fact that Justus did not grow as well as he might have under normal conditions. We had obtained the use of a scale on which he was weighed every day after his bath. A careful record was kept and his growth was followed by studying the line that connected these weighing results. It kept going up, but slowly. I remember that I went inside after each bathing to hear the latest news…. tense times. It didn’t help when van Dop came in one day, maybe a month after Justus was born, and looked at him while he was sleeping in his boat-crib. That crib had curtains, but because material was scarce Moekie had used what she still had, which happened to be a blue cotton gingham. It was not a colour that enhanced the baby’s complexion, and van Dop said after a brief searching look, in his usual blunt manner :”Holy cow, that child is pale!” It was also van Dop who told Moekie, when she mentioned that Justus didn’t cry much and seemed content, “I don’t like it when they are so quiet; so they are here and so they are gone….” Van Dop was an excellent doctor and we liked him very much, but tact was not his strong point. Fortunately there was nothing in Justus’s later development that indicated that he had had a difficult and somewhat slow start. To give him a bit more than what his mother had available we ground wheat kernels in an old-fashioned coffee grinder and made with that a sort of coarse wheatlet sauce. We were lucky to have the wheat and the incredibly precious milk.

A second item was of course our daily food. We had always had extra ration coupons for potatoes, for Moekie’s relatives in Zeeland had their own potatoes and didn’t need the coupons, which they sent to Moekie’s parents in Nijmegen, who mailed them to us because they couldn’t use them (they were “country coupons” as opposed to “city coupons”), but after the debacle at Arnhem that supply stopped of course.

However, I have to admit that, although food was scarce and the thought of food was always in our minds, we were never in the dire situations that prevailed that winter in the cities. We had always enough to eat; not abundant, but enough. I often felt embarrassed and annoyed that the subject of “food” was so much in my mind that it seemed there was hardly place for anything I would have considered worth thinking about in “normal” times.

I must recall here for honesty’s sake a little episode that has filled me with some shame ever since. With my cousin David Mees, a younger brother of “tante Leonoor”, we had developed an unexpected and surprisingly close relationship, “unexpected and surprising” because there had never been very close ties between the two families and he was much younger than we were. He was a frequent guest aboard. I had borrowed his air rifle, not a pellet gun, but a true rifle, pretty powerful for the type. I had admitted an interest in this weapon because the possession seemed to me to open possibilities to add to our food supply…. There were ducks all around us, dozens of them.

So, one afternoon, while Moekie was resting (she was expecting Justus) I took the gun and sneaked up to the pond behind the “Janneke Jans”, the same pond where later the picture was taken of Moekie and Justus on skates. There were about four or five ducks, mallards, peacefully swimming around. I took carefully aim at the closest one, a drake and pulled the trigger, watching with a mixture of horror and excitement when his head suddenly drooped and the poor thing swam aimlessly around a few times before coming to a dead stop…. literally. I had shot my first game. It should have been my last as well, but it wasn’t. Not quite, because it was followed by a hare that was caught in the berry cage of Rupelmonde…. another story.

I fished the bird out of the water with a long stick and, holding the limp body, felt suddenly more ashamed than excited. But here it was, a plump duck, and it was war time and our meals were anything but abundant, so it didn’t take long to decide that I could not ask my dear wife to pluck the feathers off…. (it would be difficult enough to convince her to cook it) and as a consequence had to face that disagreeable job myself. I did it, after dipping it in hot water, sitting on the gangplank in front of the door, in the sun. It didn’t take long. After that I took it inside and put it on the counter in the kitchen.

When Moekie woke up and found the bird she was horrified: that might have been one of the ducks she had fed bread crumbs from the window, she said. It might well have been, but it was very dead, and plucked, so in the end she did cook it, and I have no trouble admitting that it was delicious.

After that “successful” hunting experience I was prepared for more exciting game: hares. There was, of course, no way I could shoot another duck: the body would have been thrown in my face. Hares were different: we did not have any close personal relationship with them, like feeding them and their family from our window. I remembered where I had sighted one recently: in a meadow across the road, and that is where I, armed with my air rifle, headed early one morning soon after the duck. I had luck, for there, not too far from the path, he or she was sitting, bold upright. I got down on my belly, very quietly, shielded by some bushes, and took careful aim before pulling the trigger. The loud “Plop!” from my rifle made the hare sit up straighter and look in my direction. Being reassured that everything was all right, it went back to whatever it was eating. I had seen the grass between us, close to the hare, move slightly, so that I figured I had aimed too low. I did it again, aiming higher, but nothing happened. The hare didn’t even move. Another lead bullet in the barrel, and another try. Same result: nothing at all. I got mad, put another projectile in the barrel, shot:…… nothing. Not even a single halm of gras had moved. Another pellet, but before I could pull the trigger the hare got up and hopped, not raced or ran, just leisurely hopped away, with the casual ease of a deliberate insult .

I was defeated, defeated by the very hare I had tried to shoot. Just to check I opened the rifle and looked down the rifled bore……pitch dark, no light at all. And suddenly the horrible truth dawned: after that first shot the other pellets had jammed in the barrel and there were by now at least three pellets jammed tightly in there, each following one making the situation worse. This was not my gun…. how would I get them out? I don’t remember how I did it, but I got the barrel cleared eventually, much to my relief.

The last of my hunting “adventures” came when Jan Meyers came to the houseboat one morning and said excitedly :”Just, you have to come quickly with your air rifle…..there is a hare caught in our berry cage and it can’t get out !” I went with him and there it was, a hare that somehow had found its way inside the large cage that surrounded the berry bushes but didn’t have a chance to escape. We cornered the poor thing, I aimed ….. and shot…. The hare jumped but was in no way seriously injured. I did it three times, and the last time I saw the pellet ricochet off its skull, but that was all I could accomplish. The air rifle clearly didn’t have the power to kill the animal. The end of the story had better remain brief: we killed it by clubbing it. I do not remember eating it; I suppose that the family Meyers took care of that detail. It seems almost unnecessary to add it, but I’ll do it emphatically: I have not hunted since that shameful episode.

As I mentioned above, our food situation was not desperate at all. There was soon a community soup-kitchen in operation in near-by Loenen and a family with teenage boys that had moved into the coach house of “Over Holland” went every day to get the rations for them and for us. What really made the difference for us was that brother Piet, working on a farm in the Wieringer Meer polder, collected food for the whole family. It was “only” a matter of going over there to get it.

There were some bicycles available with proper tires, three in all, and we had big bags that hung over the carrier on both sides of the rear wheel. We were, furthermore, in pretty good physical shape. There were two expeditions made, if I remember correctly, by different people each time, to distribute the effort more evenly. The trips were awful, not so much because the distance or the weather (although it was a long way and the dark skies I remember from the time I went left a strong memory of general gloom) but because of the dreadful suffering that was evident from the long line of desperate, pale people that was strung out along endless roads following the dykes through an empty flat country. The contrast of that scene to our reception on the farm was incredible: all warmth and abundance.

In order to avoid the Germans that were preying on the food gatherers when they returned to the city we had to leave at an ungodly early hour the next morning, loaded with all kinds of wonderful stuff. In the dark, with very poor light on our bikes, I happened to hit a little pole that was planted in the middle of the bike path to prevent its use by tractors. The fork of my bike was bent and as a result the bike pulled terribly to one side. There was no way to get it straightened out of course, and I was lucky that I could still ride the bike. It slowed us down a bit, but we got through Amsterdam without being checked and arrived home with all that we had been given. It was promptly distributed among the families, an unimaginable wealth suddenly.

Mem, Miek and Co had left Amersfoort and had found a safe place in the house of a lady who lived by herself in Loenen. Everybody called her “Tante Zetta”. She was a jewel. What exactly was the reason for this move I don’t remember, but it had something to do with a perceived great risk of bombs falling, maybe because the military airport was close-by

It was around this time that there was suddenly a warning circulated among all our neighbours that the Germans were rounding up all males below a certain age (I don’t remember what that age was, but we were involved) for labour in Germany. Gerard and I had to disappear…. quickly. We decided that the empty pig-sty on the other side of the road would do just fine. It was on the “Over Holland” property but well away and invisible from the road and it had not been used in years. It was supposed to be clean. We left immediately in a hurry and found refuge in the little house that was indeed fairly clean and only a little bit smelly. Such little details didn’t matter of course; as long as the Germans would not find us. The time went slowly, and we had no idea how far the Germans would have gotten or how serious they were in their search. There was nothing to do but to wait until finally somebody came to tell us that everything seemed safe again. A big sigh of relief…..

During that search it was that the Germans discovered, quite by accident, the hidden, camouflaged river freighter. After searching “Sterreschans” for hidden males (there were not any) they thought they could take a short-cut to the next house, “Over Holland”, not knowing of course that there was a wide ditch between the two properties. They followed the same path that we always used at night to go over to hear the latest news…. and that path led right across the hidden boat. They immediately confiscated it and took it away.

When Gerard and I wanted to hear the news that night we thought it was safe enough, hours after the “razzia”, to go there by using the road. It was a mistake: we walked straight in the path of two German soldiers on bicycles. I don’t remember exactly what we told them, but it must have had something to do with papers we said we had at home, on the houseboat, that excluded us from service in Germany. They had orders to do something and were going to do that right away, but after that they would be back to check our papers. We were lucky…… and did not need any stronger motivation to disappear again. When we were warned again that the coast was clear we heard that the two had indeed come to the “Janneke Jans” as they had said, and not finding us there had told Moekie, who had made a good show of breast feeding her baby, that we had to present ourselves the next morning at the “Kommandantur” in Utrecht. If we didn’t show up they would be back and pick up her instead. When she protested that she had to look after her child, they told her that they knew exactly “what to do with babies…..”

At that point it did not seem likely that they would really make the effort to come back all the way for just two fellows or a woman: it was toward the end of the war; things were going very badly for the German army and they were running out of vehicles and gas. They (the two soldiers) showed signs of being tired and dispirited. But one could not be sure, and the only thing to do was to avoid being on the “Janneke Jans” for a while. I believe Gerard went to “Over Holland”, I went to “Sterreschans”. We stayed away for about a week, I think, before returning to the houseboat.

Had that episode been our only nasty personal experience during that last winter under German occupation we would have counted ourselves very fortunate, but it was not. One morning, it must have been at the end of February or the beginning of March, there appeared suddenly a uniformed figure outside the window that was facing the water: a German naval officer, standing in a small motorboat, accompanied by a few ordinary seamen. He told us that our houseboat was being taken over by the German forces and that we had 48 hours to find other living accommodation and move out. He was polite, seemed almost apologetic, but determined to carry out his orders.

I am sorry to be not able to remember just what happened immediately after we got the message, but things moved very fast. We were informed by the municipal office that there were two rooms for us available in the house of the mayor, who had, wisely, moved underground for the duration of the war. We would share the house with a few of his relatives, if I’m not mistaken a woman and her son. It was close-by, a lovely old cottage-style house, right on the water. It could have been a lot worse. We packed up in an awful hurry, taking only what we really needed for furniture, while the rest (including the Bechstein!) was stored in the “Rupelmonde” coach house. We didn’t have many clothes, but we had to take whatever we needed for the little Justus in his crib. And, of course, we took care that all our foodstuff came along. Not knowing when, if ever, we would get our “Janneke Jans” back, we took with us one of the teak window sills that was not too difficult to remove: a sentimental memento.

Few vivid memories remain of the time we spent in the mayor’s house, but among these:

It was a lovely mild spring and Moekie and I were cutting a section of an oak log for firewood in the sun, using a two-people felling saw, while Justus was lying on his tummy in his crib nearby, his white head showing time and again above the edge.

It was difficult to find extra food, but one thing you could get (if you were lucky) was sugar beets, enormous, whitish, sharply tapered things. Some of them were over 30 cm long and about 10 cm across the top. You rasped them on a coarse rasp into slivers and boiled those until they had yielded all the sugar they contained to the water, before boiling the excess water away to leave a sticky, pale, thick liquid, like a thin syrup. It was sweet with a sour after-taste…. not bad, but certainly not delicious. We had tried to eat the pulp that remained after all the juices had been squeezed out. I don’t think it contained much that was digestible, let alone good for you, but it filled you for a little while, so it was said. It had only one – immediate! – result for me: I got sick, had a violent diarrhea and was instantly cured of my desire to try the stuff again. But we did get a jam jar full of the sugary mess and I remember Moekie and I sitting in the sun on the teak window sill we had rescued, the jar with syrup between us, each with a fork, dipping and licking in turn…… until we had finished half. I find that scene now hard to believe, but it is true. A celebration of spring of sorts.

Another one: it was here that we tried- and liked – to eat the tulip bulbs Moekie had been able to get somewhere. As far as I remember they were surprisingly good, but we have never tried them again; they were sort of hard to get.

It must have been around that time that Ode Walter was killed by the Germans. We did not know anything about it until some time after the war was over and more or less normal communications were restored. He had been sitting with his wife and their two children close to the house in front of the door leading into the garden when a German car stopped. Two members of the hated “Gruene Polizei” got out and approached the family .They took Ode with them to the kitchen on the other side of the house and shot him there. The reason has never been given of course, but it seems likely that he was the victim of an N.S.B.. informant who had told the Germans that his bookstore was a hotbed of resistance. Although it is probably true that Ode and his trusted customers talked pretty freely about the German occupation, I don’t believe for a minute that he himself was actively involved in the “underground”. But the Germans did not need proof of active involvement; just the suspicion was often enough for them to act.

The last months of our war-time experiences cannot be fully understood without some explanation. If you are familiar with the information that follows, or find it uninteresting for other reasons, you should skip to page 11, where the actual story continues.

In Holland water is a great asset as well as a constant threat, something that in terms of national mythology would best be represented by a huge monster that has been tamed, but never eliminated. Tamed it is helpful because it provides the Dutch with easy, inexpensive transportation, as well as being an invaluable ally in times of war, but when it breaks loose it is instantly the most dangerous, the most destructive and feared enemy. What is needed is absolute, constant vigilance and a profound knowledge of its characteristics in order to control it and make it useful. Even so it remains ever dangerous, as the terrifying flood of 1953 proved so convincingly.

It is therefore not surprising that the government ministry that deals with it, the Ministry of Water Management, is one of the largest, if not the absolute largest, of the government agencies and has powers to match its size. What is likely surprising to non-Dutch readers is that it also is the ministry that is responsible for the construction of highways. This is not so strange as it may seem, if one realizes that a goodly portion of Holland (the whole western section) is really a huge wetland, that is artificially kept dry by a complicated system of pumps and large and small waterways. Stop the pumps and the whole country would quickly return to its original state of a swamp. Because the soil is soft peat, it is not easy to build a road or a railway, or, for that matter, a city. The cities are quite literally built on poles that are driven through the peat until they reach the underlying sand. They used to be wooden poles that don’t rot because in the peat there is no oxygen present.

This is not a construction method that lends itself to the building of road beds, be they for railroads or for highways, for which you need something like a dike. To illustrate the potential danger inherent in railroad construction these two stories:

My father traveled from Amsterdam to Amersfoort, one of the busy railroads in the country, at the time when heavy steam locomotives pulled equally heavy coaches, before the system had switched over on most lines to electricity. The line runs through a particularly wet stretch, famous as a vacation spot because of the wonderful lakes that offer fine sailing, and as a wildlife reserve for waterfowl. He shared his compartment with one woman, sitting in the opposite window corner. Suddenly he felt the coach sway, first to one side, then to the other, and at the same time he heard the sharp hiss of steam and the squeal of the brakes that were activated as if somebody had pulled the emergency handle that was found in every compartment. The train slowed down rapidly….. and then it swayed again, this time only to one side, the opposite side to where he and the woman were sitting, and at an alarming angle. By impulse more than guided by reasoning he swung open the door widely, grabbed the woman and fairly shoved her out, shouting: “Jump !” before he jumped himself…….just in time, for behind them the whole train, locomotive and all, rolled over with a horrendous crash and roar. The whole track section had collapsed in the swampy ground.

[The facts of the above story are true: he did jump and he did save a woman’s life by shoving her out. The details are what I imagine may have happened. The number of casualties was high and the accident remained a vivid memory in many people’s minds as one of the very worst accidents in the history of the Dutch railway system, which has an enviable reputation for service and safety.]

I was too young at the time to remember anything about it, but I believe that oom Charles and tante Lieske both remember the tension and anxiety in the family before it was known that my father was safe. I don’t know how the news reached my mother, for there can not have been a telephone in the house (I remember the arrival of that marvel, and that was much later, when we lived in “De Vier Winden”). Maybe a telegram ?

The other story could have been one of another crash, but ended up being no more than a close call. The engineer of a steam locomotive pulling a passenger train from Utrecht to Rotterdam/ The Hague noticed with terror that in front of him the whole track seemed to be moving up and down in a wave-like motion while he was crossing the lowest section of the line, just before Gouda. (Gouda had the strange reputation of needing the longest foundation poles in the country because the peat layer was so thick) He applied the brakes immediately, and proceeded very slowly. I don’t know just what action was taken right away, but I do remember very vividly that for many years the trains on that section slowed down to a crawl while crews were working on the line. It was restored to full service after the whole existing roadbed had been replaced by a sand dike that rested on the underlying natural sand bed. The sand was being dug in the eastern part of the country and transported in seemingly endless (both in number and in length) trains of special cars. I often had to wait while they were passing the street I had to use to get to the Gymnasium. The weight of the sand pressed the peat out of the way sideways, where it formed black bumps in the green pasture land.

In order to build a highway between Utrecht and Amsterdam there was first a canal dug, just before the war. I remember that Jur Haak, a friend who was teaching in Amsterdam, came to visit us during the winter and had covered the whole distance on skates. The ice in that pseudo-canal was splendid, he said, because there were no boats using it. The canal was filled with sand after the war in order to construct the highway. I believe that method of highway construction was (and maybe still is?) standard in the western and most densely populated part of the country.

Time to return to my story. The German occupation never mastered the knowledge and the accompanying technologies that are so essential to keep Holland livable, but left it to the Dutch themselves. However, they knew about the strategic defense against advancing armies from the east, which was simply to inundate a strip of land immediately south of the lakes mentioned above. It was known as the “Water Line”. This method is still as effective against attacks by land as it ever was. The trick is to inundate to a certain preplanned depth, which is not much, maybe between twenty and thirty cm. or thereabouts. This obscures the many ditches and other waterways, as well as the lakes, and renders the soil into something too soft to travel across by any vehicle, let alone an armoured one. It makes travel by foot or on horseback practically impossible; in short: it stops land armies in their tracks. However, if you don’t control the water to that exact depth but make it deeper you enable flat bottomed boats to get across without difficulty. The Germans never got the hang of this control, and there were no Dutch engineers going to tell them how to go about it. The Water Line became under their supervision a veritable lake.

The house where we lived after the “Janneke Jans” had been taken was situated on a narrow strip of land between the highway and the Vecht, which forms more or less the western boundary of the Water Line. We were told that everywhere along the Vecht on the west side the Germans were digging holes to hide their heavy machine guns. Several had been dug near the spot where we had lived on the “Janneke Jans”. Of course they had to be deep enough to hide a man and of course you reach the ground water level long before you have dug a deep enough hole. The German officer who came the next day to inspect what had been dug found the holes, every one of them, more than half-filled with water. The story mentions that he had trouble containing his rage and all he was able to utter was: “Sabotage…….!” The Germans, after five years of exposure to the “Low Countries”, still didn’t grasp the essentials of the Dutch environment.

They were obviously preparing for an Allied offensive across the Water Line. (In retrospect such an offensive would have been unlikely because the war was clearly in its last phase and it would have taken a heavy toll on the Dutch population, but neither was it impossible because Allied amphibious vehicles, “DUCKWs” they were called, could get across easily). It was the kind of news that made us nervous: if there was any fighting, no matter how short, we would be in the zone between the two armies. It seemed most unlikely that the house where we lived would not be used by the Germans and therefore leveled by some means or other by the Allied forces. It was not a pleasant thought.

I went to talk it over with Bertus and Ton Sondaar, who lived in a large (and beautiful!) house down the river, “Oud-Over”, on the other side, opposite the village of Loenen. If the Allied forces would indeed attack across the “Water Line” the people living on the east side of the river would be the first to be liberated. They understood immediately what our problem was, especially with a baby, and offered us a room in their house. We could, for the last bit of the war, live with them as one extended family, sharing whatever we had. We accepted the offer immediately and prepared to move our few possessions on a pushcart, borrowed I don’t remember where. It was quite a novel way of moving: everything was piled on the cart and right on top of the pile we secured Justus in his boat crib. It didn’t take long, our move, and we were enormously relieved.

We spent in their house a rather pleasant time, those last weeks of the war, with lots of music (they had a wonderful French grand, a Pleyel Moekie loved to play, and we played there in that large music room whenever we felt like it). There was a general atmosphere of co-operation and well-being, which was helped by the fact that the Sondaars had, throughout the war, been able to get more food than most people, not because they were so prodigiously rich, but because Ton was a member of the family Dobbelman, famous in those days for the cigarette tobacco they produced. In that position she had been entitled, like all the other members of the family, to a monthly ration of tobacco. It was not much, but you could get anything you wanted in exchange for tobacco, especially if it was a well-known brand, and they got enough to provide them with all they needed apparently. They were very generous hosts.

Bertus listened every day at certain times to the B.B.C.. broadcast, which provided you with news, notwithstanding the heavy interference signal, if you listened regularly. I tried it once or twice but could not make head or tails out of it, but Bertus had persisted, was used to it, and did get the news from the British, “our”, side. We were therefore pretty well informed about the progress of the Allied offensive. It went awfully fast in the end and the total collapse of the German resistance made it more and more unlikely that we would have to go through a period of real fighting close to us. What we did get exposed to (and that was scary enough, although not without its humorous side) was that there were one morning suddenly soldiers in German uniform, but not at all looking like Germans, running through the garden and shooting at pigeons with their heavy infantry rifles. The strange thing was that they looked to us almost exactly like Jews….. We were told that they were Armenians, pressed into service towards the end of the war. It was another sign of the desperate situation in which the Germans were at this time. After the miraculous discovery of the bridge across the Rhine in Remagen (it was supposed to have been blown up, but the order had not been carried out) the Allied armies moved rapidly through West Germany, while the Russians closed in from the East. The war was clearly almost over.

I remember that Bertus came down one day after listening, all excited: “I have now heard a voice…. incredible. A contralto.!” It was the first time we heard her name mentioned: Kathleen Ferrier. Through all the interference static she had made an indelible impression upon him.

We ate well; better, really, than we had eaten in months. The Sondaars had their own garden and had never had to resort to the community kitchen, but apart from that the tobacco made it possible to get extras from time to time that made things sort of special, like the pig’s head Bertus obtained from the local butcher. He turned it with great, meticulous care into a real head cheese and it was delicious. It was during those weeks that we ate our first ever aubergine. Bertus loved wild mushrooms and we ate champions fresh from the meadow where he knew they grew. I had never eaten anything like that in my life.

Then arrived the day we all had anticipated for quite a long time: Liberation. Every Dutchman who lived through the war years has of course her or his very own and very vivid memories of that moment. For me it was the sight of those big American planes coming low over the flat meadows and dropping their load on large white parachutes: bundles of all manner of food stuff, of which I remember most vividly the incredibly white loaves of bread and the canned meat, the corned beef. We had not seen, let alone tasted, white bread for years and corned beef seemed like an unbelievable luxury. And we were among the people who had not known the real hunger, the hunger that kills…. What this meant to those living in the cities I can only guess.

(I must add a somewhat sour comment here: after those terrible winter months it took only a few weeks to hear people complain about the monotony of always eating that same bread and the same corned beef…. and could the Allied countries not find anything better to send? We could not so easily forget that there were people in the big cities who had actually died of starvation.)

I don’t remember at all when or where we saw our first Canadians, but it could be that it was when some officers came to visit “Oud-Over” and arrived, of course, in a “Jeep”, the famous “Jeep” we had heard so much about as one of the great inventions of the war. They also brought, probably at a later date, a piper who demonstrated his instrument. It convinced us that bag pipes are best if heard over a great distance. We could hear them on occasion, from “Kasteel Nijenrode” and thought it was a rather nice, romantic sound from that far away. Not so when we heard them at close quarters: eardrum tearing and raucous.

The retreating Germans were by now a sorry lot. They were assembled from all areas of the country and marched to the west. We saw them pass, mostly older men, tired, almost in rags, on foot and beside their horse-drawn carts, with the mental stamp of defeat all over them. It was inevitable that we would be reminded of their entry, five years ago, in their endless motorized columns, heavy, well-fed, young fellows with an air of brutish arrogance; a seemingly invincible force. What was left of that horrifying army was assembled in certain areas in western Holland and subsequently marched over the dike that closes the former Zuiderzee, back to Germany.

In the dunes along the coast were large numbers of bunkers, the beaches were barricaded against an eventual invasion force from Britain by nasty metal structures, and all of that had to be cleared away where it was possible to do so. But the worst thing was that the dunes themselves were changed into mine fields, and to clear them a certain number of German troops were retained. Someone told us that after an area had been cleared the Germans were lined up, ordered to link arms and then told to hop across that cleared area….. an effective way to make sure the job had been done properly. Nevertheless, when another “camper” and I went to our campsite behind the dunes in Vrouwepolder to see if that could be used again we encountered a small number of young boys who came out of the dunes pulling by a rope a smallish green metal box with certain knobs sticking out. My friend immediately recognized it as a land mine (I had never seen one, but he had) and could convince the boys to leave the dangerous box behind and come out in a hurry, whereupon we reported the incident in the village. Apparently some areas had been more successfully cleared than others. I must add that I have not heard or read about accidents with land mines in the dunes in later years. The only time I read about such an accident was when a farmer drove with his horse-drawn cart into a field and was blown up when he passed the gate that gave him access. He had passed that same spot quite a few times before…..

Our thoughts went almost immediately to our precious “Janneke Jans” which we wanted to find and recover as soon as it was at all possible. To get from the Vecht anywhere with a boat that high you had to pass through a lock that gave access to the large canal that ran more or less parallel to the Vecht; the same route we had followed to reach our mooring place in Zuilen. This was important, because the people operating the locks kept a record of the boats that passed. It was naturally the first place I wanted to go to. But I had no bike and therefore I made use of the connections the Sondaars had made with the Canadian officers in “Nijenrode”, where large quantities of bikes were kept as part of the things they had taken from the Germans. I had nothing to trade besides a camera, a good, but not a great little camera. But my story apparently moved the Canadian officer I spoke to, the same whom we had met as guest of the Sondaars, and he agreed to the trade. I picked the bike with the best tires I could find. What followed was a lot of bicycle riding, and it was not for fun.

At the lock they could tell me, after consulting the records, that indeed a number of houseboats had come through there at a date that corresponded with the time we had handed over the “Janneke Jans”. No names were recorded. Where had they been towed? Not known, but they thought probably to or near Haarlem. That is where I went. I was lucky, for I did find her, in a canal on the edge of the city, together with quite a number of other ones. It seemed to be in good shape.

While I was in Haarlem I visited the family Schippers, friends of the Bes from the time she lived in Nijmegen. There I heard the horrific news that apparently both Moekie’s parents had died in Nijmegen, the victims of bombs. Losing your parents is difficult to take at any time, but to lose both of them under these circumstances is simply unimaginable. Instead of going back with just good news I had the worst possible. There were no details. They came later, in the form of a postcard, the only thing you could send by mail just after the war. Her mother had been on a shopping trip in the city on her bike when a stray bomb had hit the marketplace where she happened to be, and her father had, weeks later, been hit on a bright Sunday morning, on his way from the house to the garage. One outside wall was completely sheared away in the blast. I don’t believe that anybody we talked to could even remember hearing a plane.

It was not the only terrible news the liberation brought with it. My cousin David Mees, with whom we had established such an unexpected and wonderful relationship during the war, was shot in his own garden on the day that the Germans capitulated. The Germans had established a fuel depot in the back of that enormous garden, a stack of oil cans containing gasoline. As soon as the news of the official capitulation had been broadcast over the radio David had run out into the garden to check on the supply, make sure that it would not be touched by anybody but the “underground”. The German soldier standing guard at the pile had not yet heard the news apparently. He shouted at David, warning him to stay away, but when he got a response that he either did not understand or did not believe, he did what he was ordered to do, and fired a shot that killed David instantly.

 

 

PART 3

 

After the liberation our two main concerns were of course to get the “Janneke Jans” back as soon as possible, and to go to Nijmegen to look at the house and talk to the family Noordman, friends of Moekie’s parents, who had written the postcard that confirmed the dreadful news I had heard in Haarlem and who had made sure that the furniture (most of it undamaged) was put in temporary storage.

In order to get the “Janneke Jans” back I returned to Haarlem and talked to the Canadian forces’ officer who was, I had been told, in charge of these matters of returning properties that had been taken by the Germans. I showed him the papers I had brought to prove that I was, indeed, the rightful owner of this houseboat, and he had no difficulty signing a piece of paper that authorized its release. That paper I had to present to the Dutch authorities, who had to give the final consent to move the boat back to Nieuwersluis. They had apparently a lot to decide and to organize, because it took 2 more weeks before we could have her towed back.

It must have been during those two weeks, while we were waiting for the release of the “Janneke Jans”, that Moekie and I went by bicycle to Nijmegen. The city had suffered a lot of damage during the fighting for the possession of the bridge across the Waal, but that fighting had all been taking place in an area adjoining the bridge of course, and the area where Moekie’s parents had had their house was on the other side of the city and on the whole quite undamaged, which made that bomb hit that killed her father stand out as a terrible accident. The family Noordman, who were friends of her parents, lived close-by. They had looked after everything: the funeral, the removal of the furniture as well as its safe storage. They assured us that the furniture had not been badly damaged and was in good shape and safe. Looking at the house was pretty grim: one wall had been completely sheared away, so that you looked in all the gaping rooms located on that side, and the garage was gone. The rubble had been cleared away.

While we were on our bikes pedaling along the main road from where they had lived to the centre of the city we suddenly saw a most familiar figure walking in the same direction on the sidewalk: Moekie’s brother, Henk. We had not at all expected to see him, for the only thing we knew about him was that, after he had reported to the Germans (as students were ordered to do) to avoid that his father would be picked up in his place, he had been taken by the Germans to Silezia in eastern Germany, close to the border with Poland. Finding him in Nijmegen was a bit of unbelievable chance and luck, and a wonderful surprise. How he came to be in Nijmegen at that time is a fascinating story. While he was telling it to us, years and years later, when he was the manager of the malt factory in Wageningen that had been started by his father-in-law, I took notes in the hope of making it all into a coherent tale for you to read. I still hope to do that.

While we were there we visited the cemetery where both Moekie’s parents were buried. It did not help much to make the grim emptiness seem more acceptable. After Justus was born we sent him a postcard via the Red Cross, the only, but very unsure, way of getting any message of that nature across to the area in the hands of the Allied forces. Of course we did not ever find out whether that arrived.

Before going back we discussed with Mr. and Mrs. Noordman what had to be done about the furniture. I believe they had already contacted Moekie’s uncle Joost in Wissekerke.

Those two weeks it took the Dutch officials to make up their minds about something as simple as the return of an essential piece of stolen property had proved to be disastrous for the well-being of the “Janneke Jans”: when I arrived on the day when the trip back was going to take place I found that most of the windows had been broken and that the interior was dirty beyond description. Human excrement was everywhere throughout the boat, not only on the floor, but even in the hold. We did not try to find out who could have done that; it would only have delayed our departure and served no purpose. We had a lot of cleaning-up to do. Interesting details: the Germans had left a coal heater in the boat that was in good shape and that served us for years, and in the storage space under the bench in the living room, that served as a spare bed, we found a large number of straw bottle covers as they were used for the shipment of good wine…. The navy officers were obviously used to some compensation for the hardships they had to endure.

I don’t remember at all how we arranged for the towing-back, but we managed it and tied the “Janneke Jans” behind “Het Sluishuisje” (“the little house at the locks”, so named because it was situated at the locks that allowed boats to get from the Vecht to the lakes near Loosdrecht). We had moved after Mem, Miek and Co, who had spent the last months of the war there, were back in Amersfoort.

To get the glass for the windows was our second worry: glass was not easy to get. Fortunately I had a goodly amount of a (terrible) Dutch tobacco and with that as a bargaining asset I got the glass I needed from a firm in Utrecht where Piet de Haan knew the owner. I could put it in myself in my free hours. It was quite a job, but it got done and after a month or so we could thank Tante Zetta, our host, the wonderful owner of “Het Sluishuisje”, and pull our “Janneke Jans” back to “Over Holland”. That sounds delightfully easy, but it was very hard work to pull that heavy boat by hand for the two km that we had to travel, I walking along the road and pulling , Moekie standing on top of the roof at the helm to keep the boat off the shore. The hull, heavy as it was, moved easily enough through the water when pulled straight. What made it so hard was the fact that, in order to keep it off the shore, she had to steer into the river, so that the boat was more or less “crabbing”. The longer the rope, the easier the pull, but I had only one rope, a short one for the purpose.

When we had come to a spot opposite our mooring I climbed on board and gave us a mighty push with the longest pole I had, and that was not nearly long enough to reach the bottom once we were away from the shore. The trick was to push so hard that the boat drifted across by its own momentum, then to jump before she went aground and hold her off. A tricky operation…. but we did arrive, albeit that I had broken another window in the crossing.

After the boat was again at her place and we had moved all our furniture back on board we went, this time with baby Justus, back to Nijmegen where we would be met by oom Joost who had rented or borrowed a truck in order to bring all the furniture that we did not want to keep for ourselves to Wissekerke, where it would be sold to family members. I believe that the only thing we kept was the radio. Henk was not interested in the final solutions for the family’s furniture. He had enlisted with the Dutch army that was being sent back to Indonesia to fight the Japanese. Long before they arrived The Bomb had ended the war, and the function of the army changed from fighting the Japanese to fighting the Indonesian independence movement under Sukarno. It was called a “police action” to bring order and quiet back to the vast territory that the Dutch government claimed was still a region that resorted under the Dutch Crown. Henk had always wanted to go there to work. It took a long time to get there and when they finally arrived the military action was finished, the independence an unalterable fact and the only thing that could be done was to work together with the Indonesians. He found work managing the leasing of army vehicles to different groups that were trying to clean up the mess and start something like an economic recovery. He stayed for six years, got married to his girlfriend of student days in Wageningen, did an excellent job and enjoyed those years like nothing he had ever undertaken.

I shall not ever forget our trip on that truck from Nijmegen to Kortgene. The truck was loaded to capacity and there was really no room left for us plus little Justus. The last pieces of furniture that were loaded were two heavy arm chairs. They were secured on the lowered tailgate, facing each other, so that Moekie with Justus could sit in one and I in the other; no seat belts were required or even known then. The trip was pleasant, entirely uneventful and the weather was fine.

In Kortgene everything went as oom Joost had anticipated: the furniture went to aunts and uncles, the money came to us. Of course it was very good to see all those relatives again after quite a number of years but it was not a trip undertaken as a holiday and we wanted to go back as soon as was possible. I believe that it was while we were there that we heard that Jan Havelaar, who made the trip on the “Janneke Jans” from Schiedam to Zuilen with us and had escaped to England shortly after that, had been killed in action in a small town on the northern shore of North Beveland while repelling a small group of German soldiers who were testing the Allied defense. Schouwen, the island north of North Beveland, was in German hands, but North Beveland had been liberated by the Allies. He was the only casualty. The community named a street after him.

To get back to Nieuwersluis we were driven to Goes on Zuid Beveland by oom Joost and took the train from there. It was a very slow train, and when we came to Den Bosch we decided that it would be much faster to hitch a ride north from there to Utrecht, which is not a great distance, and take a bus from there home. If we had chosen to stay in the train we would have faced an enormous detour, because so many bridges had been blown up and among those was the railroad bridge across the Rhine near Rhenen The first river we had to cross was at Zaltbommel, where the traffic bridge had been destroyed, but the railroad bridge was intact. It had been opened for military traffic by placing planks across the tracks, but of course there was no easy connection to the highway and the bridge was accessible only via the railway dike.

So we left the train in ‘s Hertogenbosch and walked to a spot near the highway leading north. We were there for only a short while before a smallish truck with a canvas top stopped. In it we found maybe five or six people, all sitting on the floor with their backs to the canvas, facing each other. Our driver had clearly never made the trip before and did not know where to turn off the highway to get on to the railway dike. He missed the turn-off and got on the wrong dike, a narrow, steep one. When he found out he decided to back up, but instead of telling his passengers to get out and help him get back to the road, he thought he would just do that, the backing-up. It was no great distance, but, as I said, the dike was narrow and the driver was not a very good one….. In short, he got off the flat top of the dike with his left rear wheel so that the whole truck, with passengers and all, toppled over and rolled down the dike, landing upside down after one-and-a-half full turns. Moekie remembers that she saw a thick rain of sand and dust come down over all of the bodies that were lying there in a tangled heap. No-one screamed; everything happened in respectful, total silence.

Our first thought was of course: “Justus….!”. He had been sitting on Moekie’s lap, wrapped in a blanket. She saw the tip of the blanket sticking out from under another passenger who just got up and out. And there he was: unhurt apparently, crying, but whole. I got out as soon as I could, but immediately got a spell of vertigo and had to lie down in the grass. I could hardly move, let alone get up. I believe I was the only person in that vehicle who did not get out of the accident without a scratch; all the other ones were, wonder of wonders, fine.

A doctor, summoned to the scene, examined me, diagnosed my case as a concussion and ordered me taken by ambulance to the hospital. To be in a hospital in Zaltbommel, separated from Moekie and Justus, did not appeal to me at all. Transport to our home was clearly out of the picture, but I mentioned that we had friends living in Zaltbommel: Gerard en Mien Hovens Greve, just married and on their honeymoon (we did not know that detail). I asked if it was possible to be taken there? The doctor thought that would be o.k. and so we arrived at their home. It was an apartment on the second floor of a house on the main street. The son of their landlord, a very powerful fellow, carried me up the stairs. I could not do anything to help him but he managed to deposit me on the double bed of the newly-weds.

They came home, if I’m not mistaken, the next day. Imagine their surprise: not only did they not expect guests (they certainly didn’t need any either), but one of the guests was in their bed and could not be moved, not even to another bed. If I only moved my head a little from side to side the whole room would suddenly turn around me in a slow and stately movement. The thing to do was therefore not to move it at all, It is not easy. Over the next days I learned that I could do it if I moved very, very slowly. Where Moekie and Justus were sleeping I don’t know, nor do I remember how long exactly we were there.

What I do remember with awful vividness is that Zaltbommel was celebrating the end of the war, the liberation. Because of the number of people involved in these celebrations the city had been divided into neighbourhoods and each had its own festive evening in turn. The number of suitable locations was limited, with the result that, when their turn came, they all seemed to gather in the same hall, a hall situated at the end of the main street. It was probably a sensible plan, to make the celebration a neighbourhood event. What had not been foreseen, however, was that all celebrations would end around midnight with a parade of all participants, who apparently (I could not verify this by looking) linked arms so that they filled the full width of the street and then marched up the street and back down again, turn around and do it again, and again… and again….. and always singing the same song. I used to dread the time when the celebration would leave the hall and pour out onto the street, for I could hear them come, and go past and away and come back, and so on, and so on, and always that same bloody awful song. There was nothing I could do to escape or to change matters: I had to listen to it all. I don’t know how much the other ones could hear, but my room was above the front door and it was warm so that my window was open.

I recovered rather rapidly and after maybe two weeks the doctor thought that I was well enough to travel home if it could be done in such a way that I was more or less lying flat. Otto came to the rescue. Cars were pretty rare just after the liberation, but he had the right connections and could borrow a small car (a D.K.W.., a small, popular German car, the first one that used a two-stroke engine) that had a passenger seat with a back that would fold almost flat. The strong son carried me down again, somehow I got into the car, and we were on our way. Moekie with Justus must have been on the back seat, but I don’t remember that. Otto did not have any difficulty finding the access to the railway bridge and I can still hear the thunderous rattle of the loose planks. We arrived at the “Janneke Jans” and the problem arose: “How do we get him inside?” It was solved by placing the gangplank into the large window of the living room. I could move myself backwards, half sitting, half lying down along that plank, assisted by both Otto and Moekie. But the vertigo, albeit in a somewhat lesser form, came back after that trip. It must have been towards the end of September, for Justus was going to celebrate his first birthday and I had no present for him. Not that it mattered a great deal at that age, not to him. Moekie found a lot of chestnuts, beautiful, shiny chestnuts, and I strung them together to make a necklace of sorts, using a tough, thick needle with a flattened point, very sharp. Justus seemed pleased.

The years that followed, from ’45 to ’49, (when, with four kids, we had outgrown the “Janneke Jans” and moved to the house in De Bilt) were the happiest of our life on board, but increasingly unhappy when I look back at them in the light of my work and our future. At first everything looked rosy: the war was over, the chances of “doing something” within the N.V.. Havelaar looked better than before and success seemed to be merely a matter of time, opportunity and preparation. It proved to be also, and to a very high degree, a matter of money: the inflation after the war was such that the actual worth of the little capital we had assembled was maybe a little, but not much more than half of what it had been when we started up.

Looking back at those years now I am amazed that I did not ask the questions that I should have asked, about making a plan that included the immediate future as well as the course we were to follow in the years ahead, when real activity would still be difficult and uncertain. We could have planned ahead; we could have tried to solve the problem of getting hold of a good manuscript or two, but I can not remember any meeting or after-hours planning session where the original concept of children’s books was discussed, let alone that the route to follow was sketched out. In hindsight I believe that the real motivation was for them that they had some surplus money and thought that investment in a venture of this kind might prove to be profitable. Whether we were focusing on children’s books or something entirely different, or even whether there should be any specific focus at all, was not of primary importance to them: the N.V.. Havelaar had to make money.

The situation was made worse by the fact that I had not only no experience in this business, but that I had no ideas at all of what to publish, how to go about getting a manuscript or two, in short: that I was willing, but totally in the dark, because of my lack of experience. I had always anticipated that my two partners in this venture, de Haan and van der Woude, would give me a practical training by showing me the ropes from close-up. Nothing could have been farther from their minds. And no meetings were held specifically to talk about the new business that had to start up somehow, and preferably soon. I didn’t ask questions….. It seemed that what was expected of me was that I would come up with some smashingly good ideas. I did not have any.

On one occasion, while I was inactive at home on board because of my leg wound, I got quite excited about a plan that I discussed with my partners as soon as I returned. In it I proposed a whole series of monographs on a wide range of subjects, culture, politics, art and artists …. The N.V.. Havelaar hardly had the resources to publish one of those, let alone a whole series, and success in that rarefied air that only intellectuals breathe is dubious at best. The senior partners made that quite clear to me, as they should have, but were not in any way helpful in finding something better. What my plan likely did suggest to them was that their junior partner was not a business man who was likely to succeed in the hard world of the publishing business. I don’t remember what got me so excited about that project, but what amazes me most is that we, all three of us, seem to have almost completely abandoned the original plan of children’s books. What I should have done was to talk to Mr. Dietrich and ask him for advice, but the thought never occurred to me at that time. O, the clear sightedness that comes with looking back at events !

Time to get back to my story in more or less chronological order. I wrote that we had “almost completely” abandoned the idea of children’s books. It could have been left out, that “almost”, were it not for one project that was published during the war. It was based on the plans of a fast-talking young man with ambitions, who had secured quite a lot of printing blocks of illustrations for most of the popular fairy tales. His idea was to have those re-told and then publish them in small format that would allow us to make up six little volumes that would be sold together in a” sturdy” cardboard box under the title of “Library of Fairy Tales.” The idea was original and appealing, but the illustrations that were the basis for the plan were not, in my opinion, good enough. They struck me as “cheap”. The two senior partners didn’t think so, and the plan was accepted. It had a modest success, but the boxed set proved to be problematic in bookstores, because the boxes came apart. They were made of the only materials available due to the restrictions imposed by the war and they were not strong enough to withstand repeated handling. We made a bit of money, but not much, and no re-issue was ever contemplated. It was our only venture in the domain of children’s books.

In the second year of my association with the N.V.. de Haan they celebrated the 25th year the firm had been in business. I talked with the rest of the staff about something that we could do to make a contribution to the event. I had met and befriended a young sculptor, Cor Hunt, who had just won a prestigious competition and was rapidly becoming known as one of the prominent young artists. I discussed with him the possibility of a small sculpture, thinking that something of that nature would have a lasting significance. He was interested, named a price, and I convinced the other staff members without difficulty that this would be both fitting and welcome. The price was something within our means. The resulting repeated visits with the family Hunt (they had one little boy) remain a warm memory. He made a first plan, something equivalent to a sketch, which he produced as a plaster of Paris model so that I could get a proper impression of the direction he was suggesting. I was immediately captivated by that little statuette, but the real sculpture did not resemble that first plan any more than a baby resembles the adult person. It had lost the illustrative quality of the “sketch”; it was abstracted, stilled, had a more reflective character and was a far superior piece of work. But I still liked and admired the “study” and he gave it to us. It now stands on a shelf in our book case.

Around this time there were two events that I must mention, both related to living on the “Janneke Jans”. The first one was the arrival of a young couple with their little daughter in another houseboat, the Westermanns. They put their boat not at the “Over-Holland” mooring, but two houses upstream, at the house of a lady who was known to be a member of the hated and despised N.S.B.., the Dutch National Socialists, who co-operated so enthusiastically with the German occupation in all matters. I think that she was not one of those who had actually collaberated with the German occupation. Her membership was of a different kind, I think, based on a hatred and fear for anything that was “red”, coupled to an admiration for “strong leadership”. That attitude was fairly common in Holland, particularly among the “old families” and the rich, before they experienced the German invasion and the occupation with all the appalling hardship and horror for so many that was the result.

Their selection of a mooring was a mystery to us, but they had few choices and they claimed that the lady in question was in fact very nice, so that not their choice but hers, in joining that organization, became the unsolved enigma. Most N.S.B.. ers lost everything in the way of furniture they had owned….The Dutch government simply confiscated it. It is quite possible that they lost more than their furniture, but that I don’t remember. It was a measure that might have been understandable as a popular impulse after the Germans were gone, but it is hardly defensible as an official government decision. There was a clear need to bring the country back as soon as possible into a state where the rule of law prevailed and this confiscation was obviously not supported by any law but inspired by a need for revenge. After writing this I should add that we were not much moved by those ethical arguments at the time: we bought our crib as well as Moekie’s desk at the auction in “Over-Holland” where the stuff was being sold. The crib was large enough to serve for years as Hubert’s bed. It was painted in nasty shades of pink and yellow when we got it. While we were living in De Bilt I stripped it completely, found that the wood hidden underneath was beautiful beech, and varnished it. It took quite a few days…..

Of course we met the “Westermannen” soon after their arrival, and we became good friends. After their marriage their houseboat had been tied up in the “Wieringer Meer”, the same polder where brother Piet had spent the war years. Ann, their oldest daughter, was born there, before they moved to the Vecht. They had spent quite a bit of time together before they got married cycling around the country, spying on the Germans and reporting all troop movements to the underground which sent the information, together with the other stuff they routinely collected, to England. Of course it was dangerous work, because, although it was hard to prove that you were actually spying, the Germans did not need proof before they picked you up, jailed you and used every kind of interrogation techniques to extract information they suspected you might have.

Lootje worked in Nieuwersluis for the local coal dealer, a job neither he nor Trudi liked, but that paid well enough to hang on to it, always looking out for opportunities that might offer something better. Lootje wanted to farm, but for farming you need a) special schooling and training, and b) access to sufficient capital to buy a farm. He had neither. Duncan, Canada, looked pretty good when the opportunity to emigrate there appeared on their horizon. I think it was their example that put the idea of emigration in our head.

The other thing I wanted to write down is the story of a pretty horrifying situation that looked bad enough to make us realize that we were in dire danger of losing the whole boat. What is particularly bad in retrospect is that the threatening disaster was of my own making. It resulted from a construction that could have been easily changed to something quite safe at the time when the boat was refinished on the ways. No longer….

When we bought the boat, the toilet was a true indoor biffy: a plank with a hole, and a pipe down that ended above the waterline. In the remodeling we had that changed into a real toilet, and the outlet was below the waterline, very discreet, and also, as was demonstrated dramatically on this occasion, very risky. The down-pipe was lead of ample diameter. All underwater fittings that lead out of (or into) the hull are of course critically important, for a leak below the waterline is potentially disastrous. To make a watertight connection of the lead pipe and the steel hull they had hammered out the pipe edge until it formed a flat flange, about 3/4 inch wide, something like an attached washer. This was clamped between the hull and a flat steel ring that was bolted to the inside of the hull. Because lead is soft it formed a waterproof seal when the ring was bolted tightly.

It worked beautifully…. until the day that I had to do something to the toilet. I don’t know anymore what it was, but something needed fixing and in working on that I apparently moved the bowl enough to put some strain on the lead down-pipe. The result was that the flange that formed the seal was pulled away from between the steel ring and the hull, allowing the water to rush in. Without thinking I pushed the bowl back, and that reduced the flow to a thin rivulet instead of a stream.

I left it at that, raced on my bike to the village and told De Rooy about the impending disaster. He came immediately with me, looked at the situation, thought fast and hard, and said: “We have to get the bow up somehow, so that the fitting is above the waterline. The only place where we may be able to do that is in the little

harbour of the vacuum cleaner factory, where they have a small crane. You pull it over to there and I will get help and some tools.” The factory he mentioned was close-by, maybe 150 m., and I didn’t need any more advice. The trouble was that, in order to get there, we had to cross the Vecht and crossing was a somewhat tricky, risky process, because we had no pole that was long enough. There was no way to pull it that distance on our side of the water. We succeeded without any mishap. Moekie, pregnant (I imagine with John), managed to pull the boat to a spot opposite the harbour, where De Rooy and his helper were already waiting and ready. I wish I could remember why she had to do the pulling and not I, but I don’t. There must have been no alternative. So we had to cross the water again, thank goodness again without accident, and watched as they pulled it to where the little hand-operated crane stood. They slipped a steel cable noose around the nose of the boat, placed a fairly heavy beam, a bit longer than the width of the boat over the roof to take the strain the tightening of the noose would exert on the wooden structure, attached the noose to the crane cable, and started to winch. Inch by inch (or rather cm by cm) the bow rose. It was very hard work for the two fellows, De Rooy and his helper, who turned together the handle of the winch, while Moekie and I were standing by, hardly daring to breathe. Would they be able to lift it high enough to get the outlet clear of the water? The cable was as tight as a string of an instrument, the two men were sweating profusely, but we gained, a little bit with every turn. I watched the beam over the roof and noticed with alarm that the cable was cutting into both ends and that the beam was bending slightly in the middle while creaking ominously…..The two men were clearly just about at the end of what they could pull. If that beam would either split or snap in two the cable would cut into the roof, which was not at all built to withstand that kind of pressure and would likely be crunched like a cardboard box….

And just at that time the bow was high enough to get the outlet clear, but only just, by half an inch or so. It was enough. De Rooy and his helper clambered on board, while we stayed on the shore to lessen the weight. We could not see what was happening of course, but evidently they could loosen the nuts of the bolts that held the ring . (I had been afraid they might have rusted tight…. and what then?) They straightened out and re-positioned the lead flange and tightened the nuts again on the ring. When they re-appeared they assured us that everything was tight and waterproof, and then proceeded to lower the bow slowly, carefully back in the water.

The rest was simple, although also hard work, but this time for us. We successfully managed to go through the same process in reverse: cross the water, pull the boat over the required distance, cross over to our shore, pull the boat back to her mooring and tie her down. Too close to a catastrophe, that adventure. It is strange, but in thinking about the whole episode I could not remember what we had to do to get the water out of the hull, but we must have dried it somehow.

Of course I had to draw a salary, and that money came out of the capital that was the financial basis of the N.V.. Havelaar. The war lasted longer than was anticipated, and the continuing salary was of course a very real burden on the fledgling company. To relieve that I was given the job of junior sales representative

(read “salesman”) for the parent company. Their chief sales person was energetic, a real salesman, not too concerned about the ethics of the job, a fast and convincing talker. Bliek was his name. I believe that Bliek could have sold rocks in Western Canada. His job was to sell books in all bookstores of any importance, with the exception of a very few of the largest ones (both Dijkhoffs in The Hague and Voorhoeve and Dietrich in Rotterdam belonged to that small group) that were visited by the two partners themselves. Those that were too small to be worth Bliek’s attention would form my hunting ground. What they lacked in size they made up in numbers, so I was told, but of course that was rather far from the truth. It had to be a very small business to be too small for Bliek, who liked to live well.

The fact that those small bookstores were often located rather far from the centre in large cities and in small communities that were spread out over the country side was the main reason that I had to do roughly twice as much work as Bliek did for a lot less than half his salary. It was not too difficult to sell fairly substantial numbers of the books N.V.. De Haan published in larger or medium size stores, for they were popular and sold well, generally speaking. To sell twelve copies of a new title in one place was for him quite routine. I had to visit at least six and possibly ten or twelve stores in order to sell that many.

What I hated was the feeling that I had to try to bring back orders for certain titles from stores where I thought they would be very difficult or impossible to sell. But that was the instruction de Haan and van der Woude had given me : ”What they haven’t got they can’t sell, but once they have a title they will likely put in a bit of extra effort to get rid of it.” That made sense from their business point of view, but it left out the aspect that to me was more important: the good relationship with the owners of these little bookstores, a relationship that could prove more successful in the longer run. They felt that good relations with small bookstores weren’t worth anything anyway. I knew that small store owners hated the pushy salesman. I had my own experience when substituting for Wattez and when one of them entered the store I know I was prejudiced towards anything he told me and certainly not going to put in extra efforts for those titles.

For me the painful moment invariably came when I entered a store and saw unsold copies of certain titles of N.V.. de Haan on the shelves. I knew who was responsible for placing them there: Bliek had done his usual masterful job of convincing the store owner that he should and could not be without that book because people would ask him for it. But I knew how difficult it could be to sell such a book, and Wattez’ store was larger than any of the ones I had to visit (Bliek had “claimed it” when he divided the stores between us), and it was located in the centre of a large city instead of in a town or village in a rural area. Usually the situation that followed was predictable. When the time came for the owner to decide to buy or not to buy he would, as a condition for the sale, stipulate that he could return for full credit the book(s) he could not sell. That put me in an awkward position: on the one hand I knew that the man was probably quite right, but on the other it was not difficult to imagine the uncomfortable situation back at the office when I had to defend my decision to grant him that condition. In some cases the value of the titles that were to be returned was more than the value of what was bought. That was one of the reasons that the book had been impossible to sell in that place: the price was too high. And I could not tell my partners that Bliek had been wrong in his judgment for they thought the world of him. Of course neither one of them would ever be in the position of the owner of that small bookstore, or even enter his store to talk to the man himself.

In re-reading this it sounds as if I hated the job and did it grudgingly, but that is not so: I quite liked it in fact, and earned enough to feel that I had no financial worries. Usually I took my bicycle with me on the train (common practice in Holland at that time. All the bicycles went together in a freight car and unloaded at the place of destination, where you picked it up on the platform) to a major town or city that was more or less central to the area where I had to be and did the rest on my bike. I saw a lot of the country. I also learned to fear the wind that could make travelling by bike very hard work. On one occasion I tried to pedal against a stiff south-westerly to reach one bookstore in the town about 20 km. away and had to give up: the wind was so strong that I had to stand on my pedals to make any headway. Dutch bikes at that time had, as a rule, only one gear…..To own a 3-speed bike was high luxury. (I had my first one given to me in Terrace by a friend who had found a good job “back east”.) I also learned to fear the smell of rotting refuse dumped by the potato-flour mills in the canals in the north-east of the country. People living in the area claimed you got used to it, but it made me physically sick and I left the area without going to the two or three little bookstores I had planned to visit. The relief of getting away from that stench and breathe fresh air while riding through a moor was incredible.

The real draw-backs of the job were not low pay or facing difficult situations that were not of my making , but being away from home for a whole week. I left on Monday morning and returned on Friday just before supper. Once, when I came home and bent over Lies’s crib she started to cry, seeing a stranger….That is funny to tell later, but not at all funny when it happens to you.

What the long bicycle journeys did to me was, in retrospect, quite predictable: it brought back all the memories of riding a motor bike and how fast and effortless it had been. When I thought about it and imagined how much more I could do with a lot less effort, I wanted a motor bike, and quickly. I am afraid that my rational motivation was severely influenced by a very irrational urge, the urge of many young men: to go fast…. It took me a long time to grow up. I had not overcome that urge, the same that had made me decide six years earlier to sell off that first bike, the small Zuendapp, and change it for an old, but much bigger one. The Germans, retreating, abandoned that one, ruined, in a ditch near Utrecht.

Anyway, once I had let my thinking go towards motorbikes it soon became something of an obsession. In writing this down I still feel ashamed and unbelievably stupid about it all. The whole story of motorbikes in my life is one continuous tale of mistakes, stupidity and waste, until it finally ended when I woke up in the hospital in Gouda and had to promise Moekie that this was IT: no more motorbikes.

Riding a motorbike is undeniably fun: there is nothing else that gives one the same feeling of controlled power and speed. That is to say: when the weather is good. In rainy weather you get soaked in very short order, and at that time there was little you could do against it, apart from taking the train, which was probably the sane thing to do anyway. My motorbike clothing consisted of an incredibly heavy, long leather coat. Underneath I wore in cold weather a vest of lambs fur (it is still in my cupboard, and as warm as ever). But leather, no matter how hard you work to grease it , does not make an impenetrable protection against rain that is driven at speeds of at least 60 km per hour. It was clearly not possible to use the bike when it was raining or threatening to rain, because I arrived at my customers like a drowned cat and needed far too long to get out of my wet gear and back into it at the end of the visit. For long distances the train-and-bike combination was still preferable because in many situations it saved time. In short: the use of a motorbike became a little dubious. For the trip to and from work in Utrecht it was fine most of the time, because the distance was short and nobody cared if I had to peel off some layers of clothing once I was in my office.

The first motorbike after the war I co-owned with Otto: I used it during week days, while he could have it on weekends. It sounded better than it proved to be, and in actual fact he used it very little. It was, by the way, a terrible bike, most unreliable, almost an antique in design, and not comfortable to ride. But we had a lovely girl working in the office as a typist-stenographer who had a handsome boyfriend who came after office hours to pick her up, riding a large, shiny Harley Davidson, older, but apparently in good condition. She told me on one occasion that he might sell it…. From that moment I was looking out of my window to see him arrive and depart, fairly green with envy and burning with desire. Of course we came to a deal, a deal that was certainly more to his advantage than it was to mine, because the bike proved to be not at all in good condition and he must have known that. But so strong was my desire to have it that I didn’t even consider to have it checked before buying. I could have saved myself much money and more grief. I hope that he proved to be more reliable to his girlfriend than he was in his business dealings. On one occasion when Moekie and I had been together on the Harley to Utrecht (I don’t remember what we did with the children) for a visit with Do and Charles, and came back fairly early in the evening, suddenly, about 5 km. before we were home, the engine just quit and we had to push the heavy brute the rest of the way. Fun and games…..I was wearing my heavy long leather coat. There was something wrong with the electrical system and the battery had not been charging. However, that was the bike I was riding when I had to be in Gouda to sell books and was looking for an address, going very slowly….. and after that I don’t remember a thing until I opened my eyes in a hospital room. Apparently my footrest had hit the wheel of a push cart parked along the curb. It seems that I must have been thrown off and landed on my head, for I was unconscious when I was picked up and delivered to the hospital. I could have killed myself, just as a similar accident killed brother Piet. Helmets were unknown then. I got away with yet another concussion. The doctor who looked after me was Jan van Woerden, a brother of oom Simon. We had met before and he recognized me immediately. He told me the next day that he didn’t like at all what he saw when I was brought into the emergency. Moekie came that same afternoon to visit. How did she get there so soon? She thumbed a ride and got one on a motorbike…..

I have no idea what happened to the old blue Harley, that made up the last chapter in a sad story that still makes me feel awful. It is a prime example of an “if only” story: “if only” I had realized that fixing the Zuendapp was a matter of a few minutes…. That bike would have served me better than any of the later ones. “If only” I had listened to the wise Bes who thought it was foolish to sell an almost brand-new motorbike that you have had for such a short time….

I got one idea for a publication that was my own: I wanted to reprint a small book about Rodin that had been written by my father quite a number of years ago and that was long out of print. It is one of his books that I really liked and admired and the idea of another edition, in a larger format and with new illustrations, appealed to me and to my senior partners. Bertus Sondaar was immediately very interested and encouraging about the project and was most helpful in getting it done. We would get new photographs from the Musee Rodin in Paris. The final book looked good, although we did not get quite the quality of photographs we had hoped to use. It was fairly well accepted.

During that period the N.V.. de Haan had started on a new venture: the publication of scientific works in economy, aimed at professionals and students. To judge the manuscripts and the potential sales if they were published de Haan and van der Woude had engaged a professional, a Dr. Stridiron. I believe it was he who had made the proposal to them and sold them on the idea. He was a most engaging individual, a nice man in every aspect, and a very shrewd businessman to boot. We used to talk often and for long periods about my work and the prospects for the N.V.. Havelaar, but he was always very careful (he had to be, of course) not to be critical of the senior partners in that undertaking. I think it drove him to despair when he started to suspect that I lacked that spark that makes young businessmen succeed; he said that they had to be “hungry” individuals. I was not hungry enough, no matter how hard he tried to convince me or inspire me. I was unsure, confused and at a loss.

Two young men turned up around that time to try to get the N.V.. de Haan interested in the publication of a book they had written. It was a guide for business people that would show the user how to make their letters more effective. It dealt with all topics that might necessitate the writing of letters, like collecting money on an outstanding account, or selling a new product, or gaining access to a new market, or whatever. It was aimed at all business people, but with special appeal for small to medium-sized businesses. The concept was of course not at all new, and the need for yet another title in that field was maybe somewhat questionable, but what made this book outstanding was their original approach. They used as their basis actual letters that had proven their value, collected over several years from businesses all over the country, not the usual hypothetical letters written by the authors. It was an attractive idea, and they did a good job of putting it together, but N.V.. de Haan was in the field of economics interested only in academic titles, not in practical guides. They could see, however, that the book might sell, and might sell well, and therefore they suggested that the N.V.. Havelaar should take it on. It was another title that had nothing to do with what we set out to do, but something that might make some money. Of course I accepted; I wasn’t thinking about the children’s books any more either. The book appeared and was rather warmly accepted by the book stores. It sold well initially, but the intensive advertising campaign that might have turned it into a real success was well beyond our means, and it, too, was never reprinted. And so the total output of the N.V.. Havelaar was three titles, none of them failures, but none that had the success that could have saved the company.

Others with more insight in business would likely have foreseen the next move by the senior partners, but I didn’t .Van der Woude asked me one morning to come into the main office. As usual he spoke for both partners when he explained that the N.V.. de Haan needed more money and that therefore they had decided to sever the ties with the N.V.. Havelaar in order to free the capital they had invested in that undertaking. That was it. The message was simple, unconditional. It came as a devastating shock: all the initial bright hopes, all plans for the future, in fact the whole basis for that future…. gone. as quickly and easily as it is to blow out a candle. I did not do the blowing. What I failed to do was to make it burn with such a bright flame that my two partners would have been keen to invest more.

What made matters worse was that we had decided about half a year before that brief, fateful conversation that the “Janneke Jans” had really become too small for our needs: the four children slept together in the only bedroom, a small bedroom at that. Oom Ru and tante Miek had offered to make it financially possible for us to move into a house if we could find something suitable. The house we found was under construction in “Park Arenberg” in De Bilt, just outside Utrecht, as one of a small row of four townhouses. Because the building had just been started it was possible to make some small changes to suit our tastes and needs.

“Park Arenberg” was an alluring name for a modest subdivision, built around an open space that was designed as an oval and had in its centre a group of cultivated shrubbery surrounded by grass. It was situated just off the main highway leading east from Utrecht. The noise from that highway was not only audible, but usually bothersome, particularly since the motorized bicycles raced past at full speed, their noisy little engines sounding like a swarm of angry (very angry!) wasps. Double windows were unknown in Holland at that time.

We had an interesting population in our row. We occupied the corner house closest to the highway. Next doors lived a quiet, childless couple who shared their space with a retired teacher and his wife, wonderful people. She used to save herself a trip down the stairs and back up again to receive the bread, the milk, and so on, that were delivered to the door, by lowering a basket on a rope from a window above. The next house was occupied by the young family of a meteorologist and in the other corner house lived the retired psychiatrist with whom I made music and who solicited my assistance sometimes in trying to solve his impossibly tricky crossword puzzles.

Notwithstanding this pleasant company we were never very happy in that house. The cost of the mortgage payments was high enough to make us decide to rent out two rooms upstairs to a young couple of immigrants from Prague, the Havrdas, who had escaped the communist forces that had occupied their country. He studied at the university in Utrecht, she made the most elaborate and gorgeous dolls we had ever seen. We had real admiration for both and were amazed that they had learned the language so quickly and apparently thoroughly enough to enable him to follow university lectures. We shared the kitchen with them, but that didn’t lead to any difficulties. I believe they had their warm meal at noon. He did most, if not all, of the cooking, and he taught us a few things that we have used often ourselves.

It was nevertheless a brand-new experience to share our space with others, new and not so easy, particularly for people who have known the freedom that comes with living on a houseboat. Compared to most other people who got married during or just after the war, when there was a serious shortage of housing because nothing had been built during the years of German occupation, we had always lived in exceptional circumstances that would appear to others as sheer luxury. We have never experienced what it was like to live in a small apartment in the city and the people who had were the lucky ones who had their own place. Lots of just-married couples undoubtedly had to share accommodation with relatives or friends. The housing shortage in Holland lasted for years, long after we had moved to Canada. Pieter de Lange, who built our Victoria house, moved back to Holland shortly after he had finished working for us, because his wife wasn’t happy in her new environment. He found work right away, got a slip that would give him preferential status when a housing unit would become available, and lived with his brother in an Amsterdam apartment until he would have found something suitable. He soon met dozens of people who had received the same preferential slip of paper and who had been looking in vain for a house ever since, sometimes for years. It was not a happy message, and his wife, comparing how they lived at present to how they had lived in Victoria, changed her mind quickly. They returned in a hurry, before their belongings had been sold in an auction. There were no more rumblings of discontent after that…..

Moving into our brand-new house in Park Arenberg was the clearest illustration of the incredible advantage we had over a lot of other people, because we had rich relatives. It should have made us, me especially, humble and sharply conscious of the fact that fate had provided us with that privileged status, and of course we were very deeply grateful to tante Miek and oom Ru. But there is the nagging thought lingering in my mind that I accepted it much as if it was the natural solution to our problem of not having enough living space. Nothing is easier in life than to accept being born in a privileged environment without ever thinking of how it could have been if the dice had rolled in different ways.

The new house was comfortable, not luxurious. One of the changes we had made was that the partition-cum-sliding-doors that separated the front room from what could have been the dining room had been omitted. That dividing wall is a most common arrangement in Dutch houses. In fact, there are only a few houses I remember where it was not used, “De Vier Winden” and the neighbouring house of the family van Hasselt. The resulting space was wonderful. The kitchen was modern but not large, the entry functional, small, with a floor of ceramic tiles. A straight staircase led to the second story where the Havrdas had the two largest rooms (they were not large, just good-sized bedrooms). Our bedroom was a small one between the two rooms where the Havrdas lived and two of the children slept in a little room above the front door.

The bathroom had a large “granito” bathtub/shower basin in one of the corners, an arrangement that we have used again in our house in Terrace, but there it was made out of galvanized sheet metal. It allowed us to have all four children in the tub together. The hot water supply was typical for Holland at that time. It consisted of a large tank, I guess at least sixty gallons, where the water was heated electrically, but on “night current”, which means that there was a special low tariff for electricity that was used between let’s say eleven at night and six in the morning. An electric clock switched it on and off, both the water and the electricity. It was inexpensive to use. The draw-back was of course that there was no more hot water once you had used up the heated contents of the tank, and since the tank would not be filled again until eleven o’clock, there was no pressure. The tank therefore had to be mounted in a sufficiently high location to let gravity supply hot water to the bathrooms and the kitchen during the day. Notwithstanding these problems it was so much cheaper than any of the other possibilities that it was widely used at that time. There were two more little rooms in the attic; one was used for the other two children and the other one we rented out to Frans Orthel when he came to Utrecht to study. In the small space that was left I had my work bench, where I made both the doll buggy for Lies and the wooden truck. Both proved to be strong; they are now among the toys on the loft.

The house had a garden on three sides, but it was difficult to do much with that space, for a high brick wall separated our property from the one next-doors to the south, and therefore that part of the garden was much of the time in the shade. I tried, without success, too grow grass. Very useful ( and much brighter) was an area just outside the living room that was paved with large concrete tiles. Oom Charles used it to wash his car, a small Fiat, fondly called the “molehill” in Holland because of its peculiar rounded shape. Since it was not possible to get it around the corner of the house without putting tire marks in my precious “grass” the two of us, oom Charles and I, grabbed the rear bumper and moved it sideways by lifting it until it was around. The story was told that a student who owned one of these little cars tried to drive away from a visit with friends and was mystified when the engine roared, but the car didn’t move, mystified until he happened to look in the rear view mirror and saw two of his dear friends who had the rear end…..

The wall I mentioned was subject to what could have been a typical Dutch argument about property lines. One day two surveyors appeared at our door to inform us that a mistake had been made during a previous survey, which resulted in the wall being built in the wrong location: a wedge of our property, 6 cm at its widest, really belonged to the neighbours. If neither party objected the problem could be solved by a simple comment on the official plan, but if our neighbours insisted that they wanted those six centimeters the wall would have to come down and be re-built at our cost. The neighbours proved to be nice and reasonable and told the surveyors (and us) that we could keep the space…. all six cm.

Park Arenberg was a fairly safe place for kids to play, but once in a while a car would come through. We had made a rule: no playing on the street, ever. One day Moekie, looking out of the window above the front door, saw Lies, four years old, standing in the middle of the road, She called to her to come back on our property, immediately. Lies’s reaction was that she remained where she was and shrieked in fury, so that her mother had to run down the stairs, pick her up and carry her in, shrieking all the way.

It was in that house that we learned a useful lesson about straight stairs. Lies, with John on her lap, fell down the stairs, from the top to the bottom, landing on the hard ceramic tiles. It didn’t do any worse damage than that she had a bump on her head the size of a chicken egg, the result of hitting her head on the floor. John, landing on top of his sister, was unhurt. It could have been a very nasty accident. We have had reason to consider our spiral stairs a lot safer and not one of the grandchildren or visiting little kids has ever fallen down that marvel of our interior decor, not even when it was used to perform frightening gymnastics.

Justus was five at the time of our move to Park Arenberg and when we heard that there was a private kindergarten/play school every morning in a house across the street, we enlisted him. We did not know that the owners of the house were devout Roman Catholics, but had we known we might have investigated a little more closely, for Roman Catholics were strong in spreading the message of the one true church, theirs. We found out when Moekie took the children on a walk to the near-by park and had to pass the Roman Catholic church. To her horrified amazement she saw that Justus was crossing himself when he passed the church, and showed clear signs of real anxiety. She asked him of course why he did that and if he was afraid of something. She learned that all the children in his group had been instructed to do that, because the church was “the house of God”. The term “the house of” meant to him naturally that God himself lived there, and what he had learned about the divine presence made Justus dread the place. We stopped the indoctrination by removing him from the class immediately.

Our eldest had to go to the real school the following September. We had found that there was a Montessori school in Bilthoven, and decided to enroll him. The problem was that he had to take a bus to get there and to get to the bus stop he had to cross the four lane highway. On his way home the bus stopped on our side of the highway, but Moekie not only took him across in the morning but was there also to meet him when he came back. I don’t know whether we have caused any psychological trauma by sending him off like that, but if we did it didn’t show later.

He confessed to us recently that the two things that had been “terrifying” about his first year in school were the bus ride and the fact that there was a “kazerne”, (barracks) somewhere beyond the school grounds. The idea of a place occupied by soldiers meant to him the presence near-by of uniformed men who had rifles and did violent things. The bus ride itself was apparently not too bad, but somewhere along the bus route there was a plywood or cardboard cut-out of a policeman in uniform and a real policeman patrolled the place where he had to board the bus in the afternoon. I wonder if it could have been the uniform that he identified with violent behaviour? The thing he liked was his lunch once a week with my aunt Bets, who had moved to Bilthoven and was living close to the school.

The Van der Woudes came to visit shortly after we had moved in. He said to Moekie that she would be happy to have so much more room than the “Janneke Jans” had offered. Moekie was furious, and told him that one of the main reasons to move to De Bilt had been to be close to my work, and that was now no longer necessary, because the ties with the N.V.. de Haan had just been severed. I hope he got the message, but sensitivity to other people’s feelings was not his strong point.

I was totally at a loss what to do after the N.V.. Havelaar was cut adrift. Oom Simon mentioned that van Saane, the publisher of the architectural monthly publication to which he subscribed, might offer a solution, because he wanted to get into book publishing, but did not have a diploma that would allow him to be “recognized” so that his publications could be sold in the bookstores. It might be a good idea to have a talk with him. I did, and liked the man. He was middle aged and told me that at his age he had no desire to “go back to school to pass an exam he didn’t need”. At this point I should maybe have pointed out to him that he needed it if he wanted to expand his market into the regular bookstores, but I was only too happy that he obviously needed me and didn’t say it. I thought that he had interesting plans for books, and was easily convinced that here was a very real opportunity to save my business. The “Architectural Forum” was a good magazine that had an excellent reputation and a large readers’ circle. It would offer a more or less stable basis from which to build, and apart from that there was the store part where he sold magazines and books about architecture. It seemed to fill a need, for as far as I know he was the only place in Amsterdam that was dealing solely with architecture. It seemed that there was a chance. Van Saane obviously enjoyed a good reputation in the circle of local architects. I joined him.

I was hoping that we would make some headway towards the realization of the books he had planned, but nothing happened. He, not I, had the necessary contacts with architects and the people who wrote about architecture and until he went ahead there was nothing I could do for him. It was my potential for selling the books we produced in all the major bookstores in the country that would have made my contribution important. Without books, without even the slightest indication that we were going ahead with any planned title, I could do nothing that made my place in his business worth-while. The only positive thing that I could do was to introduce Lootje to him when he needed a job and van Saane needed somebody to keep his books. Lootje had to learn the ropes, but proved, once he knew what to do, to be reliable and precise, more or less just what van Saane needed.

At this crucial point I made several critically important mistakes, due to my inexperience in business transactions and my trust in Van Saane. I was with my back against the wall and desperate to find a solution, any solution. Van Saane proved to be one of those small business operators for whom the struggle to survive has made questions of ethics a matter of remote importance. The details don’t really matter; suffice it that he walked away with a fair bit of the N.V.. Havelaar’s money. It was not only the end of our co-operation, but of my career as a publisher. That became quite clear after I had had a frank talk with oom Ru, who explained to me that I had reached the end of what he could do to help me financially. It was clear that I had reached the end of the road as an independent business man, and that it had in my case proven to be a “NO-EXIT” road. I was not a business man. We had to look for “other solutions”.

Memories of childhood

HOUSE

 

 

I grew up in Amersfoort. It is an old city; it had city-rights around 1300. Like most medieval cities it had been surrounded by a city wall and a moat, but the walls had been taken down when the city outgrew its by then useless defensive girdle and where the walls had been there was in my time (and I hope there still is) a series of narrow parks with lovely trees. The moat was still there, and so were three of the old gates.

The city is situated on the spot where a couple of fairly wide creeks combine to create a short river, the Eems, which emptied in the Zuiderzee, (now mostly changed into farmland), an important body of water during the Middle Ages, because it was the natural place for international commerce to develop. As an inland sea it provided good anchorage and several good harbours, whereas the North Sea coast had hardly any. Its location at this spot was ideal to control the traffic by land between the coast and the north-eastern regions.

The main street, running through the centre of the city, became outside the city walls the main highway, connecting Amersfoort with Zwolle to the north and with Utrecht to the south. The city is built in a low area, and the highway climbed a long, gentle hill, “de Berg” (the Mountain) as it was known, before it reached the seemingly endless heaths that held the city in a kind of a wild embrace. It was on that hill that the first large suburban developments started to appear.

Our first house in Amersfoort was located on the main road to Utrecht. It was the northerly half of a double house, quite large I believe. There must have been four bedrooms, I imagine, for besides the bedroom of our parents there was the room where Piet and I slept, plus Lieske’s room and Charles’s, but on top of that there was my father’s study. On the attic there was an extra room for the maid, the normal arrangement. Downstairs we had a dining room at the back, which looked out over the garden through a glassed-in porch, the “serre” as these things were called. They were quite common. The sitting room was next to it, separated from the dining room by a double width sliding door. Upon entering the house you stood in a long corridor with a marble floor, that led to the kitchen at the back of the house. The two rooms were on the right hand side of the corridor. Next to the front door, to the left, there was a small room where my parents kept their bicycles. I remember that marble floor so well because the fish-man had delivered a flat basket with live small, flat fish. It was standing close to the front door and I was watching while one by one these little fish jumped out of the basket and landed on the white marble with a “splat!” sound that fascinated me.

One of my very first memories goes back to that house: I remember sitting on my mother’s arm and standing in front of the house while she was looking at it. I wonder if that could have been the first time she saw it after my father had found it, and if, maybe, my father’s decision to buy or not to buy depended on her reaction. I can not think of any reason why that moment should be so firmly embedded in my mind, but it is. I guess I must have been three or four years old.

I have quite a few memories that are related to that place. One other one that is very old: I was sitting on the floor in front of the cabinet where my mother kept the syrup and I was licking my fist that I had obviously dipped in the sweet liquid. I even remember my mother’s remedy for my strong liking for sweet stuff (it goes, as you can see, back an awfully long time !) She had been making caramels or something . In any case she had a number of metal sheets that were covered with the sticky mess and she had given them to me to clean while I was sitting at the kitchen table. I can even remember that, at the end, I could not stand to look at another one any more. An effective method…..

My father’s study was for us of course a place where we rarely came, but I remember that he had on his desk a small but heavy, curved bronze dragon that had resting in its curves a thick soft brush. The explanation was that it was the kind of brush the Chinese used to draw their letters. My father must have shown me some Chinese characters, because I remember not believing that those signs could have been made with a brush that thick; the characters looked delicate, the brush did not.

Piet and I slept in a room at the back of the house. We used to talk after we were tucked in to go to sleep, and then my father, who treasured his evenings with my mother, would come to the bottom of the stairs and call to us to be quiet and go to sleep. We usually did, but not always. It was on one of those occasions that my father got so mad that he spanked us….. the only spanking I can remember. Usually it didn’t get any worse than that he would come thundering up the stairs to tell us in a manner that could not be misunderstood that this had to be the end. After that he would leave, but stand behind the door to listen. We knew he was there, because the door had four little yellow windows in it and a curl of his hair would be visible as long as he stood there, as a shadow on the glass. After a while he would sneak down the stairs without making a sound. It was for us very difficult to decide that he had left, so we kept quiet and went to sleep.

The house had a large attic and we used to play there often. One of the main attractions was the machine that was used to press sharp creases in sheets and tablecloths, a mangle. It consisted of two heavy wooden rollers, which were operated by means of an iron handle with a fair swing. You could increase the pressure by adjusting the top roller with a heavy screw that had a handle on top of the machine. When not in use the pressure was of course taken off. We loved to turn the handle fast, so that the two rollers produced a dull roar, but we also used to climb on top and from there to the little loft above the maid’s bedroom.

Once we were there we were out of reach of the German girl who had been hired by my parents to look after us. In those days, shortly after W.W. 1, many people in Germany suffered from malnutrition and awful poverty as a result of the inhuman conditions imposed on the Germans in the peace treaty. It was quite common in Holland to hire German girls as maids or, as in our case, to look after the children. Although I think we liked our “Fraulein” she didn’t command a lot of respect and we gave her a rough time, I’m afraid. I can still see her desperate face, standing next to the mangle and looking up at her two little torturers on top of the loft, out of her reach, while she had come to the attic to get us down for lunch or something. She tried, I think, to buy our affection with chocolate bars which she put on our pillows after she had been out on her night off. One morning I saw that brother Piet had found his and was eating it while I couldn’t find anything, until Fraulein discovered it: a chocolate skullcap on the back of my head. The mess I didn’t mind, but that I couldn’t eat it…..She had a very sweet tooth apparently, for once, while our parents were gone for a couple of days, we suddenly had fine pastries with the tea. Tante Lieske describes the same incident and her feeling of discomfort and shame: we never had anything like that except on birthdays.

The living room is associated with one very strong memory: St. Nicholas celebrations.

It was always the same: we would sit all together, waiting for the good Saint to appear, (never doubting that he would !) when my father would suddenly get up, feel in all his pockets and said to my mother in a desperate voice that he had no cigars….. and he had to have some. He would quickly go and buy them, but it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes…… We would plead with him not to leave, because Sinterklaas could be here any minute, but he felt that he could easily be back in time if he left now, and with that he left, and shortly thereafter we heard the front door slam closed, indicating his departure. We sang some songs to pass the time, but then, suddenly, there would be a loud, urgent doorbell. My mother would get up to see who that visitor was, so late and in the dark, and we could hear her voice: “Oh, Sinterklaas , how very kind of you to come by……. It is too bad that my husband had to leave to get something from the store, ….I hope he will be back in time to meet you. Won’t you come in?” And Sinterklaas’ deep, soft voice answering before the door opened and he would stride in, tall, magnificent, majestic in his wide red mantle with gold trim over a white robe, with a beautiful tall mitre on his head, his face hidden in a white beard and mustache and his staff with the curved head in his left hand, while carrying a white bag in the right. He would be led to my father’s chair and, after some kind preliminary remarks, call all four of us in turn to come and stand before him, to start with Piet, the youngest. Amazing: he knew everything, even the smallest detail, both good and bad. My mother would gently come to our defence once in a while. When he had convinced himself that, on the whole, we had been “good” he would grab a present from his bag and hand it to us. And after we had sung something for him he would rise, explaining that he had still so many homes to visit and therefore couldn’t stay any longer, and then my mother would accompany him to the door, thanking him profusely, and to shut the front door after he had left with a most definite “click”. Then she came back and shared in the general excitement. Not long after the Saint had gone there would be the sound of my father’s key in the door, and he would come in, smoking his precious cigar. His disappointment over having missed Sinterklaas was genuine and clear to all of us. My father must have been a good actor, for we (that is Piet and I) didn’t suspect a thing. And Charles and Lies must have played their parts very convincingly as well, to keep the obvious truth hidden for so long. I have “believed in Sinterklaas” long after most children have learned the truth; it was in gr. three, I believe, that I was exposed to the coarse jokular comments of some school friends and deeply shocked. I ran back to our house and straight up to my mother’s bedroom (she was ill already for quite some time then) to tell her, and I remember her calming, reassuring voice when she told me how and why we had been fooled. No psychological trauma resulted.

I don’t know for what reason, but at one point my parents bought the koepel for my father as his study, and I remember that it was put together in the back of our garden. It could be, I have thought later, that Charles and Lieske had shared a bedroom up till then, but that my parents decided that Charles should have his own room. Anyway, the koepel came with us when we moved to “De Vier Winden”.

There was in Amersfoort no sewage collection system in those days, at least not ” op de Berg” where we lived. Each house had its own septic tank. Ours was lined with brick. I remember that because the thing must have had some problem, for it was opened for a “cleaning”. I have not witnessed what happened, only seen the open tank, but according to the story there was a man coming out to do the cleaning, whatever that entailed, who stepped on one of the bricks, apparently sticking out from the wall maybe placed there to allow climbing down. The brick crumbled, so that the man went down and stood up to well over his knees in the contents of the tank. I don’t know how he got out, but we were told that the poor man had to walk back to town in his stinking, dripping clothes……

One more memory stands out clearly. Bicycles did not have electric lights and generators driven by the front wheel tire, which was the usual arrangement that everybody used later ( and perhaps it still is…), but lanterns that had a candle for light. It was a feeble light, certainly not good enough to see clearly where you were going, and it was meant, I suppose, in the first place to be seen in the dark. The candle was stuck in a long tube on the bottom of the lantern, and rested on a coil spring to push it up. Brother Charles had been playing with one of those lanterns (they were kept in the little room next to the front door where the bicycles were), had opened it up and taken out that spring. Somehow he had stuck his finger in the spring and could not get it out. He went to see my mother for help, but she could not free his finger either, so that the two of them went down the hill to where our doctor lived and had her practice, a female doctor, Dr. Duyvis. She must have been one of the very few woman-doctors in the country in those days. She managed to extract the finger. The episode has left a very clear memory….. I must have worried that Charles would never get rid of that spring.

My mother must have developed cancer during the last year of our stay in that house, for it was for her that my father started to look for another place to live, a brighter, sunnier place. “The Vier Winden” was the result of his search. He could not have done better: the windows of the living room followed the sun exactly. The original, fitting name of the house was “Tournesol” and it had stylized sunflowers painted on all the blinds. My father bought the house, I believe, in an auction. It had been unoccupied for quite a while and the garden was totally neglected. I liked the original name and was sorry to see the sunflowers being painted over. The “garden” was grass, wild grass, on all sides, with here and there double rows of tilted bricks where there had been paths at one time.

The Koningin Sophia Laan where the house was located had at the time when we moved in only four houses, all on one side of the street. The other side consisted of fields of grass with in the background thickets of shrub oak. The environment was ideal for us as a safe, half-wild area where we could play. The house next to us and the three houses on the opposite side of the road were all built at a later date, and while they were being built they provided us with exciting possibilities for climbing through the half finished buildings. The two opposite from us were built at the same time, I suppose by the same outfit, for there was one man on duty after the carpenters and what have you had left whose task it was to make sure that nothing was done to those buildings. He was a small, older fellow and he had a hopeless task, something like Sisyphus: he could only be in one spot at the time, and we were gone by the time he arrived, to play in the other one, the one he had just left. Swearing and cursing us, all the time chewing the tobacco wad in his mouth, all he could do was follow us from one house to the next, always too late to catch anybody and thrash him, and always turning around again when he could hear us at his back. It was a rather cruel game. We didn’t ever consider it that way. We didn’t do any damage, and the watchman was probably not needed, but I am afraid that the builders had to have him there in order to avoid costly court cases if there ever should be an accident. Having a supervisor on the site would be proof that they were aware of the possibility of accidents and trying to prevent anything from happening. Why Mem didn’t ever stop us, I don’t know. I hope, but doubt, that the contractor paid the old fellow well.

Street lighting was originally provided by a few (very few!) gas lanterns on cast iron poles, about fourteen feet high. They had a short cross bar just under the lantern, and once in a month or so a municipal worker would come and walk from pole to pole carrying a little light ladder that had hooks to fit over that bar. We didn’t understand what he did there, but I am sure that each of those lanterns had an automatic lighting device that was operated by a wind-up clock and it was his task to do the winding and to set the clock to suit the season. I do remember the very special, greenish light that the lanterns cast over a painfully limited area. There was really no thought ever that the streets in our neighbourhood were “unsafe” at night, not in those days.

I have loved our house, from the moment I saw it. I believe, in retrospect, that it was fitting almost exactly my mental image of what the ideal house should look like, an image that was probably closely related to, if not based upon, a children’s book that made a very deep impression on me. It described a doctor’s family, an ordinary but loving and wonderful family, living in a rural environment in a house with a thatch roof, as had “De Vier Winden”. The house was built in a period (shortly after W.W.1, I suppose) when romantic notions, like thatch roofs, that were in obvious conflict with rational suburban planning and practical considerations, were en vogue. “De Vier Winden” had a high, pointed roof, that came down on both sides of the house to some six or seven feet from the ground, creating an obvious problem when the owner tried to finish, (let alone: make use of) the resulting sloping wall/ceiling in all the bedrooms.

Mem had Dijkhuizen, the carpenter on whose services we relied for all wooden construction, build cabinets to fill that space in two bedrooms. The result was a reduced floor area, but it did create storage space that was much needed–not very practical storage space, because the bottom shelves were very wide, four or five feet, and the top shelf very narrow. The problem of the bottom shelf was reduced by using a deep bin on casters that could be pulled out, but that solution created its own problems, for the bins were too big, and, when filled, too heavy to be moved easily. I don’t think they were used very often.

To me that high pointed roof, that covered the house like a woolen toque, was beautiful, a feature that made the house nearly perfect. I had no patience with people who wondered what the fire-related risks would be. We had been told that the reed thatch was impregnated with a fire-retarding substance. In retrospect I am very thankful that this feature was never put to the test, for I am convinced that the thatch would have burned like paper. That risk seems even larger when I think of the two tall, free-standing chimneys, neither one as high as the rooftop, on each side of the house. One must have had a double flue, for it served both the central heating furnace, a coke burning unit with a water jacket, as well as the fireplace in my father’s study. The second chimney was for the heater in the living room, which was never used, except, I suppose, when there was a leak in the central heating system. How those two chimneys were ever swept I don’t know.

When we burned the Christmas tree during New Year’s Eve, the sparks would fly from the top of the chimney like a glowing fountain. My father and Charles used to go outside once in a while to see if “everything was still all right”, and I remember that I went outside myself when I was old enough to stay up, and marveled at the fury of that fiery display: magnificent and scary. Some potent force must have protected the house and those living under that lovely thatch roof.

My admiration for the roof used to decline sharply when it was very cold or very warm. Cold winters in Holland come with a sharp, nasty north-easterly wind. On the attic, where my little room was, it moved enough air to make the frozen diapers sway on the clotheslines like large, square, white sheets of stiff plastic. But in the summer there is often no wind at all, and it wouldn’t have helped if there had been, for there were no windows in the attic, other than in the maid’s bedroom and in my own, and my window opening was very small. My parents, apparently and understandably alarmed about the inside winter breeze, had the whole attic sheathed, and that was an enormous improvement, but against the stifling summer heat there was no simple remedy. But then: the heat was easier to take than the cold. We were used to both.

It was generally assumed that 62 Fahrenheit was a comfortable room temperature. Dutch people must have been tough -and cold!- when I was a child. (Sitting at my desk as I wrote this I found the temperature pleasant but none too warm: 72 Fahrenheit) I remember that my father had under his enormous desk a foot bag, lined with rabbit fur. I have no doubt at all about his need for that device. And I remember too, that Mem often used a hot water foot warmer, a round brass container in a wooden box, while she was sitting in her armchair. We were quite familiar with the older type of foot warmer as well, a wooden cube with one side missing and holes in the top, in which a small earthenware or metal bowl, containing a few glowing coals, could be placed. The bottom was protected with sheet metal. They are now to be found only in antique stores.

Of the bedrooms in our house, a “modern” house by the standards of those days, only the master bedroom had a washbasin. It had a cold water tap only; hot water taps on washbasins were virtually unknown. Hot water for bathing was provided by the gas-fired water heater in the bathroom on the second floor, which contained a bath, a toilet and a washbasin. The only gas we knew was coal-gas, a by-product of coke making, (or was it the other way around?) and every city, as well as many of the larger towns, had its own gas plant. The gas was kept in enormous round steel containers, an inverted one fitting as an lid over the other one. The gas pushed the inverted one up, whose weight provided the needed pressure. To light that water heater (only when it was needed for a bath, it had no tank) for our weekly bath we had to call Mem or Charles; you never bothered my father with such trivialities. It was a bit tricky: first the pilot light had to be lit, and once that was burning well the gas valve was opened slowly. The gas ignited with an impressive “whoosh..!” The flames heated the water that ran through a coiled tube. It was years before we got a similar, smaller water heater in the kitchen above the sink; for almost as long as I can remember the water for the dishes had to be heated on the gas stove. We, the family, didn’t wash dishes or dry them, except on weekends; it was the maid’s job to do that.

Those of us kids who slept on the second floor had to wash in the bathroom. The two small unheated bedrooms on the attic had “washstands”, a sort of a table with a marble top on which stood a large china bowl. The water was supplied in a matching china pitcher, that, when not in use, stood in the bowl. There were mornings when I had to break the ice in the pitcher before I could pour water into the bowl. And there were occasions when the water in the pitcher had been changed into a weird mixture of ice-flakes and -needles, slushy and gruesomely cold. After you were through with washing you poured the water into a special pail, standing under the washstand. It had a slightly funneled lid with a large round opening that was kept closed with a flapper valve. To empty and clean those pails, to refill the pitchers and clean the bowls, were some of the many tasks performed by the maid. And then they had to make the beds, all of them, for everybody had to take all sheets and blankets off the bed in the morning, fold them and drape them over a chair. In the winter, when it was freezing, the whole routine, washing, dressing and taking sheets and blankets off the bed, had to be performed in freezing temperatures, and nobody ever complained, for that was the way it was, in almost all families.

I wrote “dressing”, and another image came popping up in my mind. Brother Piet and I, who were usually referred to as “de jochie’s” (a word that is probably impossible to pronounce for Anglophones) which means “the little boys”, dressed summer and winter in shorts. The only difference was that in summer our legs were bare, and in winter we wore knee socks. Our knees were always uncovered, no matter how cold it was. I find it a bit hard to believe now, but I’m quite certain that I didn’t start wearing long pants until I was in gr. 11, and didn’t stop wearing shorts until I was in gr. 8. In the years between the shorts and the long pants I wore “plus-fours”, the baggy pants designed for golfers, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t think that the way we were dressed was different from the way other boys were dressed; I think that we were entirely normal in our appearance. Certainly plus-fours were what boys were wearing after they were out of elementary school. The name, I believe, referred to the number of inches they reached below the knee. They are, in fact, tailored bags with a strap at the bottom to fasten them just below the knee. When a full plus-four was loose, hanging down, both legs reached to just above the ankles. When they were fastened, they reached half way down the calves.

My parents didn’t like them, thought they were too baggy, too sloppy; they preferred a “smart” appearance. My father’s preferred pants were “knickerbockers”, which the dictionary describes as “loose-fitting breeches, gathered in at the knee”, or, in other words, much like plus-fours, but less baggy. I suppose they would have liked me to wear those, but there was no way I would or could consider such nonsense. All boys of my age wore plus-fours; it was plus-fours for me. Which teenage boy wants to be obviously different from the norm, expose himself willingly to peer-ridicule? And so, when it became clear that I had reached the age when shorts would have been too obviously out of line I would get my first plus-fours. I looked much forward to that change; my parents did not. And so Mem made a diplomatic little compromise: she had my pants made to measure, not because that would be less expensive, but because what she envisaged was not available in the stores: my pants would be made of lighter material, and would only reach 1 1/2″ below the knee instead of the normal mid-calf. I hated those pants with a passion, felt ridiculous in them, and “different” in an embarrassing way. What could be worse for a teenage boy, particularly if that boy is not athletic, thin, narrow in the shoulders, not good at school, wears glasses, has trouble with acne, and has a prominent nose that turns every summer beet-red before it peels, followed by another sunburn, and so on?

There was one morning when I walked up the creaky wooden stairs in our very old school building (which had been rejected for any other use) behind the well-built, popular son of a butcher, who was wearing the ideal plus-fours: wide and ample, well down the calf of his strong leg, and made of a rich, deep-brown wool. I was jealous. What would people think who walked behind me…? One of those memories that has burned itself in our consciousness.

How I digress…I wanted to write about the house, but, because the house was the backdrop for most of my memories between ages 6 – 17, writing about it brings immediately a flood of images.

There were rooms in the house where we rarely entered. Bedrooms were private domain, as they are in most families, although I remember that I used to go to my sister’s bedroom to borrow her books; among my favourites: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Avonlea” series, in translation.

The room that was most mysterious to me was my father’s study, because it was a room where we were never allowed to enter except in unusual circumstances (a painful memory, about which more, later) and on special occasions, festive occasions. It was there that we waited while father lit the candles on the Christmas tree in the living room on Christmas Eve, (a solemn act that only he could perform), while Mem lit all the other candles around the room. That wait was not painful or resented; it heightened our anticipation to some sort of a nervous tension before we were ushered into the magic glow that is unique to Christmas. And it was in my father’s study that we celebrated New Year’s Eve… a glorious celebration. The kitchen had been filled with the smell of all kinds of baking the whole day, special stuff, that was never heard of in any other context, like apple turn-overs and deep fried balls of dough with lots of currants. We, the smaller kids, went to bed at our regular time, but were woken up at 11:30… a difficult moment that soon turned to joy as soon as we, shivering, put on our gowns and hurried downstairs. When we entered the room we were met by New Year’s Eve’s unique mixture of smells and sights: blazing fir branches in the fireplace, apple turnovers, “olie bollen”, mulled wine and, above all, the tight group of the family around the fireplace in the corner of the room, reddened by the glow of the fire which my father fed intently with the branches of our Christmas tree: they had to be burned before the start of the New Year. He always seemed to be in the same mad rush to get it all done before midnight, but he always succeeded…. just. And then he pulled his watch from his pocket, announced solemnly how many minutes we would have to wait, a tense wait, during which we opened some windows in order to hear the sounds from outside: the whistles of the many locomotives in the railroad yard, heralding in a shrill cacophony the new year. Unforgettable!

The most important room in the house was of course the living room, a large room, occupying the full depth of the house in order to take full advantage of the sun. (the front of the house was looking West). I don’t remember much about the room or its furnishings in the period of my mother’s illness. We were taken care of by a wonderful woman, who had looked after the children of my aunt Bets Wierdsma in Nijmegen. When my mother could no longer look after us she came and took care of us. We were very fond of “Steinka” as she was known in our family (her real name was “Miss Kastein”; by turning the syllables around we got rid of the “miss” and in doing so we got much closer to her, made her part of “us”. She was a thoroughly decent, loving person with a strong sense of duty, but totally devoid of originality or sparkle. I cried my heart out when she told us she was going to leave because we would get a second mother.

There is that vivid, awful memory that has persisted like the memory of a nightmare, of my mother being carried down the stairs in a special chair with handles fore and aft, so that it could be carried by two people, during the last stages of the disease. She was so thin and fragile that Charles and my father, neither of whom could boast of a muscular build, had no trouble at all carrying her down, Charles, bent over almost double, in the rear, and my father in the front, walking backwards so as to keep her more or less level. Once downstairs she was carefully carried to her chair in the living room, where my father helped her in the transfer to her easy chair where she would sit, supported by cushions and wrapped in shawls. She was very white and tired easily, but for those short, precious moments she was back in the family. There is that haunting photograph, taken outside, on the little terrace where later our “playroom” would be built, that shows both her and Mem, Piet sitting on the armrest of Mem’s chair and I standing next to my mother. A strangely prophetic picture…..

With Mem’s arrival the living room soon took on a new look. They bought a new comfortable chair; Mem got her own modern little mahogany desk in the living room where she kept track of and organised all the family’s financial matters; above all: we got a new handwoven carpet, made to our specifications by a Dutch carpet factory, “Het Paapje”, a very modern, woolen carpet in a gorgeous, warm reddish colour, that did wonders to the whole room. We were very proud of it; it seemed to me the kind of luxurious carpet that one would find in the homes of our rich relatives, and there it was, in our living room ! We showed our visitors how our initials (the children’s) were woven into the total design. The living room became truly the centre of family life.

You entered the room from the hall, a smallish, square space whose only function was to provide access to all the rooms downstairs. Right opposite the front door was the straight staircase to the second floor and underneath that was the slightly lowered space, three steps down, that took on the function of a cellar. It was only marginally cooler than the rest of the house. To the left of the front door was the toilet. It had one narrow window that was by necessity located next to the front door. It had coloured pebbled glass in it, but when opened you looked, standing in front of the door, straight inside…. a bit of an embarrassment. My father was known to open the window after he was through with his business and greet the people who might be standing there with a cheerful “Good morning!” The real embarrassment was naturally the possibility of escaping smells. To minimize that hazard we didn’t ever use it for anything big, but went for that purpose to the bathroom upstairs. In order to make it clear to guests that such was one of the house rules my parents commissioned a young writer, a witty man, to write a hilarious little poem that was mounted in a prominent place on the inside of the door, complete with a more or less appropriate illustration. I don’t remember how well it worked, but we loved it. Unfortunately it loses all its charm in translation, because it played cleverly with the language. For those who can understand Dutch here it is:

 

O Mens, die hier vol moet

uw hoop wilt zien verdwijnen:

‘k aanvaard uw offers graag,

doch prefereer de kleine.

Wilt gij mij niettemin

toch een groot offer plengen

wees dan zo vriendelijk

dat boven te gaan brengen.

 

The kitchen was the maid’s domain. It had a granite counter that didn’t provide a lot of room to work and a sink of the same material, a table and one straight-backed chair. Once per week she was allowed to receive her boyfriend there (her “Galant” was the way they described that person) How, with that furniture, she made him comfortable, I don’t know, but we never asked such questions. It was there, on the thin coconut mat covering the floor, that Herman, our first maid’s “galant”, made Piet and me do the calisthenic exercises that, we were sure, would make us as strong as he was. Cooking was done, as it was in almost all the houses of that time, on a gas range. There was no refrigerator; they didn’t exist in those days. Restaurants used an “ice chest”, an insulated space that was kept cool by using great big chunks of ice. (There was apparently a lively business in the St. Lawrence region during the winter: cutting the ice in the river and shipping it to Europe) Opposite the door to the hall was an outside door that gave access to a small open-air portal under the roof. It was a practical arrangement, for it allowed the people who delivered the foodstuff to the kitchen, the vegetables, the groceries, the milk, the bread and the meat, to be out of the weather, without the necessity to get them in the kitchen in their wet clothes when it rained. It rains often in Holland.

That little portal had two more doors beside the door to the kitchen: across from that door was the door to the pantry, where Herman sharpened the knives and where things that had to cook a long time on very low heat stood on a small coal oil stove. But there was also, in the corner, an opening that gave access to the coke storage and beside that opening were hanging on the wall the tools that were needed for the firing of the central heating unit: a poker, a pair of tongs and a short, D-handled shovel that had a long, narrow blade that fitted in the opening to the fire box.

The furnace itself was hidden behind the third door. It was a bulky, cast iron monster, like a heavy, squat cone with a more or less flat top. Most of its bulk was necessitated by the water jacket surrounding it. Every morning, right after breakfast, my father, and later Charles, would service it: they opened the fire door, took the long heavy poker, and thrust it hard into the glowing mass of coals, in order to break up the hard crust of klinkers that had formed on the grating during the previous day’s and night’s operation. (One of the problems of burning coke is that those klinkers are an inevitable by-product. Anthracite was much cleaner, but less hot and far too expensive.) Once the crust had been broken the pieces were levered to the surface and lifted out with the tongs and deposited on the tiles of the floor of the little portal to cool down before they were shoveled into the special flat, tapered wooden box (I imagine it was lined with sheet metal) that was used to put them with the other garbage, out on the sidewalk for removal by the municipal garbage collectors. I loved to watch the operation which had for me a mildly heroic character: the struggle to break the klinkers in that dull red, glowing mass, the careful lifting of the chunks, the dying glow once they were lying on the tiles, spreading a peculiar pungent acrid smell, and then the re-loading of the furnace with fresh coke, using that big flat, narrow shovel. After that the draught was opened wide to get the fire going again. The whole process was clearly audible throughout the house because the water carried the sounds.

I believe that central heating system was installed before we moved into the house, to make sure that my mother would be warm and comfortable at all times. There were radiators in all the rooms downstairs, big, heavy things that had fitted, long red clay containers filled with water hanging from them on the backside to prevent the atmosphere from getting too dry. Upstairs only my parents’ bedroom and the bathroom had radiators, the other rooms were all unheated.

The system was based on gravity-caused movement of the water: the warm water would rise slowly, through all the connected radiators, to the attic, where it was cooled down in a large square wooden container that was lined with galvanized sheet metal. Once it was cold it would flow down, back to the water jacket, to start the circuit again. It worked quite well…. until, during long periods of hard frost, the pipes on the attic would sometimes freeze, causing a build-up of pressure that could end in bursting one of the radiators with a sudden loud “Bang !” that reverberated through the house, followed by that ominous little hiss of water escaping under pressure.

The immediate reaction was then to race down to the burning furnace, grab the shovel, and empty the fire box onto the tiled floor of the portal. I still see Charles standing (or so it seemed to this worshiping younger brother) in the midst of the red hot, glowing mass of coke, like a demon, but a heroic one, for sure. The smoke smell was awful. Immediately after the furnace was emptied the water from the whole system had to be drained of course. It meant that we would face a few days of cool temperatures, while the radiator was repaired and we had to rely on the heater in the living room.

Once a year the coke needed for the coming season was delivered, in bags on a flat deck truck, and two burly sooty-faced men would carry the load, sack after sack, on their shoulders to the bin, back and forth, back and forth, without ever stopping or slowing down. After we had been using coke for a few months it was necessary to climb inside that storage space to shovel the coal into the direction of the opening through which it was reached for fueling the furnace. I loved doing that job: it was as if I shared for that short period of time in the heroics of filling the bin and looking after the furnace. Some people are born romantics…..

The attic contained two little bedrooms, one that was first used by our maid and later by Charles, and my own. Mine had a window of a peculiar shape, something like a hood, or a triangle with a rounded apex. It could be opened to the inside, but took up so much space when open, that it was changed into a system that was often used for windows that were too high above the floor to be reached. It only allowed the window to be opened a very limited distance, not really enough to provide ventilation during the summer. Eventually a smaller square window was framed inside the original triangular frame that could be opened in the normal way. I was often hanging out of that window, looking down the slope of the thatch roof and wondering what would happen if you slid down. You would end up in the border, the roof was only about six feet off the ground at that point. Would you break a leg? I never had the nerve to try it, but I am sure that it was not such a bad idea to be able to get out of my room if there was a real emergency, like a fire.

Thatch roofs require regular maintenance, a time consuming and costly affair that was done by specialists. They added bundles of fresh reeds in all the spots where the original reeds had become too damaged. The result was that your house acquired a spotted appearance that made it suddenly very noticeable, but didn’t do anything to make it more attractive: sort of like a negative leopard skin. The special roofers used little platforms that had long, sharp, curved teeth that went right through the thatch. Since my room was plastered, I was alarmed one afternoon while “resting” (I had to do a lot of that and used the time to play all kinds of miniature games) seeing these sharp fangs being thrust into my room right above my bed.

I had certain treasures that were important to me. One was a charcoal sketch of some sort of a fierce eagle-like bird that my father had drawn for me, with the inscription: “For Just, the vulture hunter”. I don’t remember at all what was the story behind that, but I greatly admired the drawing. Then I had the cardboard model of a one-engine Fokker commercial plane that hung from the ceiling, a project Charles had helped me to make from a kit, and standing in a corner, clasping his stump, a stuffed sparrow hawk, my pride and joy. And on the wall opposite my bed the drawing of a young tree Jacob Nieweg made for me at my birth. That is really a beautiful drawing, and it is now hanging on the wall in our bedroom. I don’t remember ever being in my room for any length of time voluntarily, except for sleeping. I did my reading anywhere else but not in my own room and I don’t quite understand any more why I was so attached to that little room.

The attic was the place where the dirty clothes and the linen were gathered in a large pale-blue chest before being sorted to be shipped to the laundry outfit. In order to make sure that nothing would get lost, everything was recorded on long printed forms: so many of this, so many of that. That meant that everything had to be sorted and counted twice, once before it was leaving and again when it all came back. We used to help Mem do the counting after she had put everything in neat little piles all over the floor and I still remember the faintly unpleasant smell that filled the whole attic in the process, but I don’t remember that I thought the whole exercise unpleasant; it gave some kind of satisfaction to have it all orderly sorted and counted. And, by the way, nobody in his right mind (at least nobody we knew) would ever attempt to do the laundry at home. In fact, one of the first things Moekie arranged after we were married and lived on the “Janneke Jans” was to find a laundry that would accept us at customers. That was during the war a not insignificant favour on their part, which was a fundamental change as compared to the situation from before that time. The first time the laundry was done at home in our family was in Terrace, and it was a real blessing when we got our little Hoover back after it had been rewired so that it would work on 110 W. power. (In Holland all domestic power is 220 W.) The Hoover had a hand operated wringer, and it was another blessing when we got our first real washing machine with twice the capacity and an electric wringer. Some things in life have to be experienced before they can be truly appreciated.

The “Vier Winden” had a garage, but we had no car and used it to store our bicycles, to do woodwork, to store garden tools, etc. Charles had a corner sheathed in for a darkroom and I remember the little red light that made things sort of mysterious and interesting. Once in a while I was allowed to “help” him. I loved to see the negative image gradually appear on the glass, but didn’t understand at all what was happening, although Charles undoubtedly tried to explain the process. After the negative had been developed and the fixation was completed the negative was placed on a piece of photographic paper and the two together, clamped in a wooden frame, were then put in the sun to produce the actual image, which was brown and likely to fade if I am not mistaken.

The garage had two small windows facing the road, one on either side of the double door. The glass in those windows consisted of diamond shaped little panes fitted in lead. We used them to practise our skills with slingshots, and time and again these were confiscated after Mem discovered another pair of the little panes missing, but somehow new slingshots appeared mysteriously, and the little panes got harder and harder to hit, for there were so few left.

Usually we had a dog. The first one I remember was a mongrel German shepherd, a very large dog that jumped at my father’s back once and made him fall flat on his face. That dog did not last long in our family. That was in the old house. In the “Vier Winden” we got another one, if I am not mistaken via the (very sentimental) lady where Lieske went to get religious instruction. It was a real mongrel, pale blonde, almost the colour of sandy mud, overweight because it had been fed eggs, I believe, and ugly. A stupid animal as well. But it had one interesting, although terrifying, distinguishing trait: it used to find open septic tanks or manure piles in the neighbourhood and jump in with relish before returning home. I can still see Charles, dressed in an old pale rain coat, almost the same colour as the dog’s before her immersion, carry the thing in his arms up the stairs to the bathroom to clean it. I hope he used the garden hose before tackling the job……but that detail is beyond my memory’s reach. Then we had at one time a miniature dachshund, Masha, who had a speech defect, so that she not only looked but sounded like a rocket when she got excited and raced off on her pathetic crooked little legs. She caused some anxious moments during walks with Gerard and me on the moor, for she found everywhere rabbit holes and insisted to get in. On at least one occasion we had to dig her out. By far the nicest of the lot was a beautiful boxer, Jan Dop, of whom we even have a picture while he jumps up to reach a stick that Moekie holds high.

Piet and I had pigeons that lived in a nest box nailed to the garage wall. They did produce young ones, and I remember the disgust I felt when I saw those poor little naked caricatures of birds with beaks that were way too large for their small heads. Fortunately they grew fast. And I had a guinea pig that died under mysterious circumstances, probably as the result of having been fed something that was definitely unhealthy for it. I was genuinely sorry about it and missed the stupid rotund creature apparently sufficiently that my mother must have written about it to her brother, oom Jaap, who was one of the directors of the Rotterdam zoo and had access to all kinds of weird and wonderful animals. One day a parcel arrived by mail, addressed to me personally, that carried the unfortunate inscription that it contained a “monster without value” (“Monster’ in Dutch has two meanings, one the same as in English, but the other indicating a “sample”. Samples were shipped at a lower postal rate) I was delighted to get the animal, but furious about the way it had been packaged, until my mother explained to me what had happened.

 

 

 

 

 

SCHOOL

 

I went to school, of course, when I was six, or almost six, because of my birthday, Sept.11. It was a very ordinary school that must have had a population of nice, middle class kids because such was the area where we lived; there were no blue collar workers in our neighbourhood. Most parents must have had aspirations for their offspring that were based on the usual twelve-year schooling with the possibility to continue at university and that was what the school prepared us for. A drill-school, in other words.

I don’t remember much about that school, except that I learned to read and enjoyed it, using a system that was used throughout the elementary schools: a flat wooden board with pictures and shallow grooves below them, and a little metal box that contained letters and letter-combinations, printed on heavy cardboard. The idea was that the student had to find the letters that formed the labels and names of the pictures: a monkey, a nut, a girl, and so on. The labels and names together must have contained all possible letters and letter combinations of the Dutch language. At first the teacher showed an enlargement of the first picture, a monkey, with the label below it, “AAP” in Dutch, using the same letter shapes that we had in our metal box, and we had to find these letters in our collection and put them below the picture in the shallow groove. When everybody had finished that task the teacher went on to the next picture, and so on, until, after several lessons, we had reached the end of the board. Then followed the drill: the teacher pointing at pictures in random order and we finding the letters that formed the label. The people, animals and objects of the pictures matched the people, animals and objects that appeared in our first and subsequent readers, and we got quite familiar with them.

It seems now, in retrospect, a very elaborate and rather clumsy, time-consuming way to learn to read, but it was apparently a vast improvement over the methods used before. It was invented and developed by an education specialist (I believe he was an elementary school principal) and everybody I knew had been taught by the same method. I thought it was rather fun, some sort of a game, and I learned to read without any trouble or pain. I find it interesting that while I was writing this, I tried to remember if there was anybody I knew who could not read at all or only with great difficulty and I could not think of anybody. I don’t believe for a minute that cases of dyslexia didn’t exist in those days; in fact, I know we had a term for it: “word-blindness”. I believe that the school system itself was pretty ruthless in selecting those who would go on and channeling the other ones in different directions, regardless of ambitions or inclinations.

There was no more training in reading skills after the mastery I just described had been achieved. I believe it was generally assumed that, once a person had learned to read, he or she would use the acquired skill and everything like speed, comprehension, finding details, distinction between fact and opinion, and all the things we are so fond of teaching, would come in time with practice. They were never mentioned. Reading as a subject was restricted to the earliest stages of elementary education and not considered worth worrying about after that level. I must assume that there were masses of people in our society who didn’t like reading and who were probably not very good at it, but it was certainly not a topic that seemed to parents, governments or educational institutions to be important enough to discuss it. It is true that there was, quite naturally, a much greater need for reading in a society where “the news” was spread through printed media because there simply were no other means available. Radio was in its infancy. (I remember that Charles put together a very primitive set, operated by means of a crystal, that would allow us to hear, with some luck, one at the time,through headphones, the broadcasts from one radio station: sensational !). T.V. didn’t exist, of course.

I hated school, from the first day, I think. After I had learned to read the “joy of discovery” had no connection in my mind with “school”. It has been, not only from my point of view but also from everybody else’s, a long and painful story: I started a little bit early, but I became 21 in the year of my high school graduation.

A very early memory: we played with marbles on the playground. I was not good at playing marbles and lost until the last handful left contained the most precious marble I possessed. I played and lost again, losing my treasure, of course. I felt cheated, furious, and powerless and ran, crying, to the teacher, who came back with me to the group, where she heard the whole story. She tried to explain to me that I had played and lost and that such were the consequences of playing, and that there was nothing she or anybody could do about it. I know that I didn’t get my marble back. A poor loser….

I was not a very pleasant child, I’m afraid. There is one more memory related to those early years at school, and it doesn’t improve the image. One morning I was determined that I was not going to school and I told my mother that I didn’t feel well. She could apparently see nothing wrong with me and insisted that I had to go. I do not remember what I said or did, but somehow I must have delayed my departure until I could not be on time any more. My mother, convinced that I was not ill, tried to end the struggle by putting me in my school clothes and hoisting me on the back of her bicycle, to take me to school herself. I remember making such a dreadful scene in front of the school building, crying, sobbing and screaming, that I managed to convince her that it was unwise under the circumstances to persist. She took me home and put me in bed…. and I remember being deeply satisfied. Not a nice child, but obviously a child with an enormously strong antagonistic feeling where school was concerned. I do not think that it had anything to do with the kind of school I attended. In other words: I believe that it would probably have been the same had I been at a different type of school. Not that there were many choices. The only real difference was, I suspect, one of parents’ income.

I was at that school for two years. In retrospect it seems now that it might have been wiser if my parents had left me there; at least I would have learned a few basic skills and facts that proved to be very important later. My parents were thoroughly liberal, “modern” people. They were involved, to some extent, in the creation of a different school, a more modern school, and a school that came much closer to their idea of what a school should be. Maria Montessori was in those years the shining star in the world of education. In Holland she made a very deep impression and her influence lasted a long time. My parents were among her staunch admirers. I remember receiving for my birthday (I suppose that would have been when I became four years old) a couple of Montessori toys. You will remember that the basis for her educational philosophy was that, in order to be meaningful, education had to be built upon a foundation of actual experiences. Toys were among the potent tools to provide those experiences. Toys did not have to be regarded as just “fun”; they could be valuable in teaching skills. Some of the toys I received were a textbook example of that philosophy. They consisted of four pieces of finished heavy blue fabric, something like denim, mounted in pairs in sturdy wooden frames and meeting in the middle. Along the meeting edges of one set were rows of neat white metal holes; the other one had white hooks of the kind that you find on boots. With the set came two white laces. The idea was that the child would learn, while playing with the new toys, how to tie shoes. The only problem was, of course, that no child, if he or she was a “normal” child, would ever dream of playing with those frames, for you couldn’t do anything with them. I remember them well, and I remember also that I was totally baffled by them and that I never touched them after the first day. They were also typical for Montessori’s mind: she was strong on theory, and not very good at putting that theory to work. In any case, my parents were interested in her philosophy and so, when a school was planned that would incorporate many of her ideas, they must have been hoping that this might be the salvation as far as their recalcitrant son’s school education was concerned.

It did not work as planned or hoped. The new school, the Pallas Athene School, was operating on a hybrid system, that tried to blend the best elements of Montessori (personal involvement through experiences that were meaningful to the child) with a system that would place more emphasis on the teacher’s role as a supervisor and instructor. It sounded quite marvelous: teacher and student would sit down at the beginning of each week to discuss what had been done and check that the material had in fact been learned, and then determine and write down a “task” for each subject for the coming week. After that weekly conference the student was more or less free to go about reaching the set-down goals in the way and at the speed that best suited the individual, as long as the different subject tasks were completed in time before the next conference. If they were completed early the student had the freedom to follow her or his own inclinations: some studied a special subject in some depth by reading more relevant information, others might spend a whole day doing art work. There was a lot of stress on personal responsibility: since you had been involved in setting the tasks you were supposed to feel naturally responsible for finishing the work required on time.

It must have been that element of “responsibility” that appealed to my parents who knew that their son would rather play than work. The physical environment was very good: bright sunny rooms that didn’t look or feel at all like the classic classroom. We had, in true Montessori style, tables and chairs instead of school desks, a feature that allowed for an endless variety of groupings. But those table tops had to be kept spotlessly clean and were regularly waxed, another Montessori idea, for it taught us very practical lessons about the maintenance of furniture. I remember those sessions vividly.

The class was large, for, as far as I know, there were only two groups of children, the little ones and the older ones or, in our system, the primary and the intermediate classes. There were only two teachers for our group: our principal, Mr. Bolt, and his second in command, Mr. Ram. I liked Mr. Bolt, but didn’t care for Mr. Ram and I believe that I had a great deal more to do with him than with the principal. It was probably unfortunate that the group was so large, and that therefore there was very little time for individualized instruction. It must be my defective memory, but I have no recollection at all of being ever “taught” by either one of the two teachers, although I remember seeing other kids at their tables all the time. Writing this down I suddenly begin to suspect that I may have been written off in their books at a very early stage as a hopeless case, the source of endless trouble and no credit to either one of them or to the school. They preferred to spend their time with the “good students” and one of them was, beyond any doubt, my sister Lieske. I remember her as a leader in that environment; she seemed to be involved in all the things that went on and was widely, maybe totally, accepted in that role. I was too awed to be even faintly jealous. She blossomed in this school where creativity was prized and stimulated, and the same school that was so precisely what she needed proved to be equally precisely what I couldn’t handle at all.

I remember spending quite a lot of time in isolation, in the space next to our classroom, where we worked with clay and wood, probably because I had misbehaved and caused a ruckus of some kind. I didn’t mind being there for I loved to work with clay and there was a lot of it, kept in an enormous wooden box, the size of our freezer, lined with galvanized sheet metal. All creative mishaps landed back in that box, where they were softened by adding copious quantities of water. It always took a long time before the water was sufficiently evaporated to make the clay workable. There was certainly no kiln, so that eventually all projects came back in the box. There was never a shortage of clay as far as I can remember; there was a chronic shortage of clay that was fit to be used. It was either rock hard or sloppy as thick mud. It was used a lot for the making of relief maps for geography, a use that Lieske describes in her memories with enthusiasm. I do not think I have ever made a map that impressed anybody. I do remember making a clay pipe during one of the periods after I had been sent out of the class, and I remember feeling guilty as hell and looking frequently at the door, fearing to be caught. The pipe was not a success; it didn’t turn out to be a pipe at all

The only success I do remember was the sharpening of a little knife used for chip-carving (we used it also for work with paper and cardboard) that had a broken point, on the only sharpening tool available: a whetstone. The broken edge must have been 1/4″wide, which meant that a lot of steel had to be removed. I did succeed and remember Mr.. Bolt’s surprised little grin when I showed him what I had done. Nobody questioned whether the time it took me to do it was justifiable and, now I think about it, that seems just about as strange as the fact that I did it. I wonder if it could be that everybody was happy that I had, for that length of time, not caused any problems? There were always a lot of little knives to sharpen, for we used them on a heavy sheet of zinc, maybe 24″ by 24″, in order to avoid cutting into the table tops. I suppose that there was no other satisfactory solution to the problem; at home we did a lot of cutting with the same kind of knife, always on a sheet of zinc. It dulled the points rather quickly, but of course not the rest. One day I was doing some cutting of cardboard while kneeling on the floor of the playroom. I used a heavy steel ruler to cut a straight edge. One had to put a lot of pressure on those rulers to prevent them slipping sideways. I shall never forget the strange feeling of seeing a little slice of my thumb lying on the cardboard. I had barely felt it. There was a mixed sensation of shock and alarm: there was a piece of me that we would have to thrown away ! It lasted less than a second, for immediately the blood started to flow, a lot of blood, and I have never been able to look at my own blood.

I digress. What I wanted to write was that, because the points dulled so fast, there was a lot of sharpening needed. In retrospect probably a useful practice….In terms of educational goals a bit too far over to the “practical experience” side?

There is suddenly a memory that pops up that I think is a very telling detail as far as my school learning was concerned. You were supposed to start the week with doing the “tasks” that had to be done that week and good students started with those things that were hard or boring, or both, like arithmetic in my case. The idea was that when all necessities were taken care of, and there was time left, you could spend it by doing the things you wanted to do. I did not tackle my job in the approved manner. Every Monday morning I started with what I liked best: writing a composition on some topic that seemed interesting. To do that you had to look up information, of course, in an encyclopedia or wherever. I suspect that it was that aspect of the job that was so appealing, the reading. Not that what I read made much difference to what I wrote, as far as I remember. There was one composition on “The Lion”, an animal I greatly admired. Of course there were illustrations needed, and I liked drawing too, but the lion I drew didn’t, somehow, convincingly look like the lion of my dreams. I wrote a glowing description of this majestic beast, emphasizing that it was far too brave, too heroic, to ever attack its prey from the back, for that was, in our behaviour code, what cowards did. I find it difficult to believe that I got that bit of information from an encyclopedia…. But I don’t remember that anybody ever challenged my description of the royal brute in terms of accuracy. Again: I find that strange, as if nobody ever checked my work, as long as I did not cause trouble.

Two more little telling details: there arrived in the classroom one day a large framed board with black and white squares, some large, some small. Everybody in the room seemed to be keenly interested in this thing that was hung on a wall next to the entrance door. It didn’t mean a single thing to me; it quite baffled me what everybody else found so interesting and it wasn’t until years and years later that the purpose of it suddenly dawned: it must have been a square meter, divided into square decimeters and centimeters, a graphic and logical explanation of what “square” measures meant. All the years I spent at the Pallas Athene School it remained a mystery to me, and nobody bothered to find out or explain.

And history, which should have been in that environment a topic of great interest, (the Dutch history is an absolutely fascinating series of tales of heroes, traitors, struggles and adventures) was nothing more to me, ever, than a stupid memorization of dates of wars, battles and peace treaties signed. My father used to go over these dates with me from time to time, to make sure I knew those that were assigned as homework. He was immensely interested in history, but from a particular angle: culture and art, the area of his vast knowledge, were of course the framework for his insights in periods, developments and historical facts. The little slim volume that contained the dates I had to memorize must have bored him as much as it bored me. But it drove him to despair when I said something like 1456 instead of 1556, which to me was a totally unimportant mistake of one digit, whereas it was to him unbelievable that anybody could place an event that occurred in the sixteenth century in the fifteenth, without blinking an eye. I can still hear his pleading, desperate voice: “But can’t you see that those are TOTALLY different times…?” No, I could not, and didn’t care either, and it was not before I was an adult that my interest in history was awakened, but surely not on the basis of what I had learned in school.

In re-reading what I have written about the Pallas Athene School it strikes me that it comes across like a very negative description; a very unjust description, for I do have many very good memories of that school. In my sister’s memories it stands out as one of the highlights in her school years, a place where almost anything was possible to a creative person, a place where she gained enormously in self-esteem and self-confidence. It was not so for me. To the contrary: I believe that my complete failure to do well at school, or in sport, or in anything that was “important”, must have added to my uncertainties. And it seems possible that it also added to my need for recognition, praise, applause; the need to be liked, to impress people. It is a trait that has never left me. To compensate for the lack of success I developed a tendency to seek attention by any means and to brag about anything that seemed worth bragging about. The whole picture seems typical for kids who are very unsure of themselves; I have had to deal with a lot of them.

Of course it is nonsense to blame a school for such a development; but this was certainly not the right school for me. I wonder why my report cards apparently did not convince my parents that I did not do well at all. It was not until the dismal failure at the entrance exam for the secondary school from which Lieske and Charles both graduated, the “Lyceum” in Baarn (close to Amersfoort; they went back and forth by train, a ride of maybe 10 minutes), that the awful truth could no longer be hidden. Two passing marks out of a total of eight marks required to pass left no doubt. I repeated gr. six in the same drill school where I had spent my first years. It didn’t do much for my self-esteem to see all my former classmates in secondary schools…but the strange thing is that I can’t remember that I have hated that repeat-year. I did reasonably well, managed even a certain pride in being able to parse complicated sentences without much trouble, and, to my own amazement, found that I was not too bad in problem solving. There is not one outstandingly happy or sad memory left of that year. I disliked the principal, Mr.. Krudde, who suffered from problems with his breath and whose speech was moist.

There is one memory that I have to write down before I leave the elementary school. It has nothing to do with the school itself, but it is so vivid, and, I think, so interesting as well as typical for the time I am trying to describe that I have to save it. While at the Pallas Athene School we did P.E. as much as possible outside, by playing games. Only two games come to mind, both weird Dutch adaptations of American classics: baseball, which we played with an old tennis ball and a racket instead of a bat (the distances covered were phenomenal !) the other basketball, featuring a real (bottomless) basket hung from a pole that had its own narrow stand and that was prone to topple; it was terribly unsteady. We played close to the school, on a very large open field, with a gentle slope. It must have been at least 300 by 300 meters. Our school was built close to the edge, as one of the last buildings of the large subdivision where we lived. On the other side you crossed an area of pines and scrub oak before you entered the much newer subdivision where Mr.. Bolt lived. There was (and is) a military airfield close to Amersfoort, Soesterberg, and to see and hear the Fokker biplanes overhead was part of daily life. One morning, as we were playing during a P.E. lesson, there was a low flying plane in the air, and it was clear from the sounds that it had some problem with its engine: it stuttered, roared for a moment, resumed its stuttering and finally stopped. We could not see it at that time, until it suddenly re-appeared, very low, without engine noise, over the bushes close to the school. We were on the other side of the field, close to the pines. As soon as Mr. Bolt saw the plane approach he shouted to us to run for cover under the pines, but the plane was too fast and overtook the group of frightened kids before everyone had reached the safety of the trees. There was nothing for the pilot to do but to pull his plane up instead of landing, which had obviously been his intention. He had enough speed left to gain sufficient height to miss us, but passed so close overhead that you could hear the wind whistle through the wires… a scary sound. And suddenly that plane looked menacing and enormous instead of being a buzzing insect high up. His little jump, that averted a serious accident, ended in the scrub oak close-by, and I can never forget the slow, stately arc of its tail as it went head over heels.

Of course we all wanted to run towards it to see how the pilot was, and of course Mr.. Bolt held us firmly back. But amazingly soon the pilot, removing his goggles from his head, came struggling through the bushes, unharmed. The plane, he said, was somewhat, but not seriously damaged. He would get some help to get it back to where it could be repaired. He was a lucky fellow, for those planes, canvass over a light frame, were not built to survive crashes…or protect the pilot.

To give a little more balanced picture of the Pallas Athene School, which was really a unique educational undertaking in comparison to the “normal” elementary schools in Holland at that time, I would like to give a few translated excerpts from Lieske’s memories.

“To begin with, it was a new building, that had nothing in common with the traditional school building: large, sunny rooms, tables and chairs, bookcases and open storage spaces for other kinds of materials. You were allowed to get up and talk to other children, provided that you could do it quietly.”

“There were times when the teacher taught a large group, but there were many hours when you worked by yourself on your “task”. You learned to make notes and short resumes of what you had read, you learned how to organize your work…. you were allowed to get the books you needed from the bookcases. You learned in geography to make relief maps of clay, something I loved doing. One period per week was devoted to reciting or reading poetry, standing in front of the class, in full view of everybody. Very tense, very difficult emotionally, but… I LOVED it!”

“You were allowed to do almost anything, it seemed, except causing a ruckus or just loafing around. If that happened Mr.. Bolt could suddenly explode…”

“In retrospect I have often thought that the Pallas Athene School was far ahead of its time; my own children have not known such a “modern” school. In every possible way your creativity was stimulated and encouraged…”

 

School 2, Secondary (Gymnasium)

 

If the elementary school years had been bad, the first years of the secondary school were no better. I went to the gymnasium, a type of school that is unknown here. It developed from the Renaissance ideal of the scholar as a person who had studied Latin and Greek, was fluent in both and had a firm grasp of the history and the culture of Greece and Rome. Those attending secondary schools had very little choice in the subjects they were to take. You could choose between four different high schools, each with its own curriculum emphasis. Dutch was taught of course in all. The one with the lowest prestige rating offered basic schooling, including some foreign languages, to gr. 9 or 10. The next one, the one most students chose, offered all three “modern” languages, French, German and English , plus a full program of math and science, preparing students for university. The next one, the gymnasium, was the most prestigious one and the one with the longest history by far, going back to the Renaissance, when a scholar was a person who could read and write, had studied and was fluent in both Latin and Greek. It offered Latin, Greek (from gr. 2), the three modern languages, French (in all grades), German (from gr. 2) and English (from gr. 3), math and science. And the last one, the lyceum, was a hybrid combination of the two just mentioned: it offered its students a choice at the end of gr. 4 (our gr. 10) of two options, the classical one and the math and science one. Students who chose the classical option had to cover in Latin and Greek in two years what the students at the gymnasium had done in six, a heavy load.

It seems odd that any educational system places so much emphasis on the study of two languages which nobody speaks any more. The only explanation is that historic link with a past when the study of the classics was considered the very essence of what education was about, when nobody could consider himself educated if he could not at least speak Latin, which was the universal language of the community of scholars. It allowed the Dutch Erasmus to discuss weighty philosophical problems with Thomas More, or with any of his learned friends, whatever their native tongue. At the time when we went to school that advantage had disappeared and nobody has ever convinced me that the study of the classics was of such great value that it had to be continued at all costs. Educational thinking is very resistant to change. But it has changed, for in gymnasia in Holland these days that part of the curriculum is no longer obligatory apparently, to the chagrin of the true believers and the Classics teachers.

Studying Latin in gr.1 of the gymnasium meant of course a hefty emphasis on grammar, but grammar was also the most important aspect of the three modern languages at school. I hated grammar with a passion. We had a terrible teacher for math, a man who had made a mess, so it was rumored, of his first teaching assignment and had learned his lesson: not what we learned was important, but that we would toe the line. I have never really understood anything about algebra, and my grasp of geometry was as small and weak as my interest. History was boring and geography not much better. In physics, if I remember correctly, we studied something to do with weights, but I never paid much attention there either. That left art, which I liked, as the only subject that held any interest for me.

All that students were required to do to get decent grades was to memorize the material presented to them. Interest, per-se, was not a factor. I suppose there were precious few kids with an interest in grammar, but most could cope with school without problems because they did their homework and memorized the rules of grammar. That required some effort, some work, and neither one appealed to me in the slightest. I am afraid I was terribly immature for my age and wanted to play. I read a lot in those days; I loved reading. My favourite author was Karl May, a German who wrote thick books for children about an American Indian people, the Apaches, and their brave chief Winnetou, whose “blood-brother” was an incredibly strong German, known among the Indians as “Old Shatterhand” because he could fell a man with one blow of his fist. Those books were filled with adventures, in which the Good Guys always, in the end, won. Grammar didn’t have anything to do with adventure.

I must add, although it is not meant as a defense, that the teachers in some subjects did not help. All secondary schools have their share of poor teachers, of course, but in Holland the problem was aggravated by the simple fact that there was no training for them at all: you finished your academic studies in your chosen subject and if there was no better job available you could always try teaching. The gymnasium in Amersfoort had more than its fair share of them: our Latin teacher was hopeless and dull beyond belief, our history teacher was a wonderful person, with an excellent grasp of his subject (so my father told me) but who had not the slightest idea of how to go about maintaining order in his classes. What we did to him and his family was pretty horrible and I am not proud of the role I played in that drama, but it must be stated that he was hopelessly incompetent in that area. Our class was not really a collection of little monsters; they were nice middle class kids. A number of parents were getting concerned about what happened to the man in his work, because they liked him personally. As a result of their talking to their own children there was an initiative taken by a group of the most popular kids in our class that led to a decision to give him a chance and to behave ourselves during the next class. So, when he entered the class room the class was quiet and attentive, quite prepared to co-operate. It was that quiet, quite unnatural in his experience, that unnerved the man and instead of starting with his lesson he stood in front of the class, glaring at us. There were some whispers and finally, in agony, one of the girls who had organized this attempt at change, sensing that everything could be lost in an instant if he didn’t start teaching, asked in quite a desperate voice: “Why don’t you start, sir?” His answer was typical and disastrous: “No, I want absolute silence first….. !”, with a furious look at the poor girl who saw her good intentions go up in smoke in the immediate roar of laughter that followed. And things were back to normal: chaos.

I have already mentioned our math teacher, but then there was the P.E. teacher, who was the joke not only of the school, but of the whole community: a pathetic little man, as far removed from any athletic ability as one could imagine, but on top of that a heavy drinker, who masked his habit by chewing small pieces of licorice, kept in a crumpled little brown bag in his pocket. If one of us had done something very well in his opinion he offered us one of his licorice pieces, and it took a wide range of improbable excuses to refuse without being rude. The standard joke in his classes was to bring “stink bombs”, small glass spheres that contained an unbelievably foul smelling liquid. While some of us distracted his attention, one of us would quickly place one of these under the mat where we landed after a jump. It was a strange way of pestering the teacher, for we all suffered from the inevitable consequences, but to us this was somehow funny. We all know: kids in gr. 7 and 8 are in a difficult phase.

The school was located very near the centre of the city, and had no playground to speak of, let alone a sports field. If we were going to play soccer, which happened fairly often, because the teacher didn’t have to do anything on those occasions, we had to walk about ten minutes each way and cross the old city moat by means of a metal footbridge. It was custom to stamp across that bridge as if we were recruits on the parade ground, not because we wanted to look good, but because that rhythmic stamping of so many feet made the bridge sway. I believe that there was always the unspoken hope that it might collapse. In retrospect I wonder if anybody ever thought what might be the result if that would really happen. The “playing field” was an open space in the industrial part of the city and often used by people to dump refuse. On one occasion there was a mattress lying close-by and to anybody’s utter amazement we watched the teacher as he set fire to it for no reason at all it seemed. I suspect that he was just plain bored and trying to amuse himself. How that man could hang on to his job is still a mystery to me.

And finally there was the little frail looking woman who tried to teach us Greek in the second grade but who lacked any characteristic of what makes a decent, let alone a good, teacher: she was nervous, high strung and suspicious, had no “feel” for kids and didn’t like them (I think she was really scared of them) and had a sharp, unpleasantly cutting voice. She was particularly on edge when dealing with Gerard Hovens Greve, (who became my very close friend) because he was repeating the grade and knew the Greek alphabet she was trying to teach to the rest of us. So, when he corrected another kid in the class before she had an opportunity to do so, she turned to him in a fury, quite out of touch with the occasion, pointed the textbook she was using at him while her hand shook uncontrollably and shrieked something like: “Hovens Greve…..! You are coming back every afternoon….. the whole week….!” and, when the class reacted to the scene with a loud laugh, added in the same breath: “For three weeks…..!” The class collapsed.

Poor woman, she had to be replaced after something like two or three months because she suffered a nervous break-down. I have not the faintest memory of the person who replaced her.

The gymnasium in Amersfoort was housed in an old building. I have no idea what its original purpose had been, but it was quite old and not well suited at all for its use as a secondary school. The stairs were made of wood, but in very poor shape: through the cracks in the treads one saw the blackness of the basement. The halls were so draughty that it was a common sight during the fall and winter to see teachers hurry from class to class in their coats, with hats and scarves. It was said that the building had been offered to the military as a temporary barracks, but had been refused after inspection. For a high school it was good enough.

The class rooms were large and high, with wooden floors and equipped with desks that were possibly interesting from a historic point of view, but pretty hopeless from any other. Their basic design was the same as used in most public schools then: a wooden desk for two students with a fixed seat that could not be adjusted. What made the desks in our school unique was their age and the way they bore testimony to it: their black tops were carved by generations of students who had all found it necessary to add their own initials to those already there. It made the surface awfully rough.

My neighbour and I added to the general destruction by digging deep holes in the lower edge of the desk top with the points of our compasses and at the upper end of those smaller vertical holes to the desk surface. All desks had their own ink well, fitted in holes near the top edge. By joining existing initials we made different channels that joined shallow holes at the top with de vertical holes at the bottom. This made it possible to play games by pouring little bits of ink into the shallow top holes, and watching the ink find its way down until it finally dripped out of the tunnels in the lower edge, onto the floor, I’m afraid. We were never caught….

The rooms at the back of the building offered a splendid view, over the red tiled roofs that covered the old town centre, of the elegant Gothic tower that dominated the city’s silhouette. I was very proud of that tower, fondly called “Long John” by the population. It was the second- highest in the country and had a very good full carillon, on which the city’s blacksmith performed every Friday morning, which was the market day. There was no church any more, because it had been used as a storage space for munitions and there had been an explosion. The much lower tower that could be seen very close to “Long John” belonged to an earlier church standing at the edge of the market space. My neighbour-friend’s father had carved a baptism font for that church that seemed to me more gothic than the building.

One of my very few good memories of the school is associated with that view. Our teacher of Latin had left for some reason I don’t remember at all, but probably we, our class, had had something to do with his departure. It must have been during the last months of the school year, and he had to be replaced. Our principal (“rector” we called him) appeared in our class one morning, accompanied by a woman of ample dimensions, dressed in a flowery dress that was cut rather low in the front. The rector introduced her to us: “Class, this is Mrs. Galeotti, your Latin teacher for the remainder of the school year”, and the woman smiled and nodded her head, but then, while the rector continued to speak to us, turned away and walked calmly to the window, where she stood quietly, clearly enjoying the view of the old town and the tower. The rector tried his best to make his speech threatening, telling us that he would not accept any trouble any more from this class; that he had had enough and would not tolerate any, not even the slightest, misdemeanor. He was obviously trying hard to sound ferocious, which was difficult for him, for he was a pudgy, smallish man, very dry and humourless, a nasty rather than a ferocious character, I thought.

I didn’t pay much attention to him or what he said, for Mrs. Galeotti was standing almost next to my desk and she interested me a lot more than our rector. While the rector made his speech and I was more or less absorbed in my study of this strange lady, who was standing so close that I could have touched her, I suddenly, to my total surprise, heard her softly hum a tune, a lovely melody. She seemed to be as uninterested in the rector’s speech as I was but she obviously admired the view before her. The rector finished and, after a last glowering look at the class, left. Mrs. Galeotti turned away from the window, smiled again her warm smile and, after a friendly: “Good morning, class”, started to teach. There wasn’t a sound; there never was a hint of trouble in her classes.

She introduced us to Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico”. This was a break from grammar, and it was a story, a story with heroes, (the Romans) and villains (the inhabitants of northern France, Belgium and western Germany). The writer was not an early version of Karl May, to be sure, but there were things happening: battles were fought, there were surprise attacks and ambushes, all set in a vast, unknown and dangerous environment with endless wild forests, deep ravines and fast flowing rivers…. Best of all: I discovered that this was something I could do, translating, and for the first time that year I got a decent passing grade from Mrs. Galeotti. She must have liked me, for during the staff meeting at the end of the year where final results for each student were discussed in terms of passing or repeating, she defended me and it was due to her words and the mark she had given me for Latin that the end result was that I got a conditional “pass”. (I heard this later from my French teacher, miss van Teutem, with whom I spent most of the next summer.) That mark for Latin was, of course, very important in this school. The condition was that a certain amount of work in certain subjects had to be done during the holidays, at home. I must have done it, but don’t remember a thing about it. In the long run it didn’t matter, for the next year things went from bad to worse.

It was soon clear to my parents that I didn’t cope very well with my schoolwork and didn’t spend much time doing homework. Therefore, in gr. 7, I had to do my homework under the supervision of the daughter of the principal of the school where I repeated gr. 6, and her husband, in the same room where I had spent the previous year. I didn’t mind her, but disliked her husband, who had very bad breath, something he had in common with his father-in-law. It was not pleasant, these sessions, but what was worse was that it didn’t make any difference: my marks did not improve. And so other strategies had to be used. I imagine that Mem talked with the principal of the gymnasium and got from him the name of a young university student who had graduated at the top of his class the year before and who needed extra money to continue his university study. His name was Bert van der Linden. He lived conveniently close-by, and must have seemed to my parents like a god sent. He was to supervise me doing my homework, every day. I really liked Bert and admired him greatly, and for a while things seemed to take a turn for the better, but it didn’t last. The only things I clearly remember were his heroic attempts to make me learn my Latin grammar, the wonderful stories he could tell, and the books he lent me to read, the epitome of adventurous tales. Poor Bert. He must have felt pretty dreadful when he, too, failed to get me to do what had to be done, especially after a promising start.

It must have been around this time that my parents decided to have me tested at a “Psycho-metric” institution in Amsterdam, to find out, if possible, if I had sufficient ability to continue at the gymnasium, or whether maybe a different course of action would yield better results. The tests were (apparently; I never got to see the results myself) negative. To my father that must have been a blow, but he simply didn’t believe that I didn’t have the brains, and so dismissed the results as faulty. A good thing he followed his own insights. I shudder to think what could have happened.

And so we struggled on. (I am convinced that it was Mem who did the struggling, by the way, for struggling in any form was not my idea of having fun.) My father had died, Mem’s life was difficult enough, having to face all problems by herself on top of her grieving , and this obstreperous son was just too much. If the pressure in the family threatened to become too much, there were several safety valves that could de opened. One of these was that, during holidays, I was shipped off to an retired doctor and his wife, friends of Mem’s, who lived in a remodeled, old farmhouse right on the Rhine in a village called Remmerden, where a wide bend in the river allowed them an incredibly beautiful view over the wide water, with the graceful tower of Rhenen in the background. Because they lived so close to the water on the outer edge of the curve they had to fight a never-ending, heroic struggle against the river they loved so much, for every spring the rising water and the ferocious current threatened to scour away their land ….. and their house.

It was in their house that my father finally recovered from an eczema that covered him from top to toe and for which medical science at the time had no cure. I remember visiting him in the hospital in Utrecht, while he was totally covered in bandages and despairing because there was no progress. The old doctor was one of his great admirers, and after he, too, had visited him he told Mem that he didn’t believe that the disease was caused by physical problems, but that it was his firm belief that my father suffered from mental stress, and that he would like to try to get him over this by removing him immediately from the hospital environment and putting him under his own care care in his house near the river. I don’t know how the medical profession reacted to this, but he left the hospital and came to Remmerden. There the doctor put him to work, heavy, physical work, hauling enormous rocks with a wheelbarrow and dumping them in the river close to the shore as a protection against the current. Every evening he smeared some kind of an ointment over his patient’s whole body before he got into his bed, covered in a wide, long nightshirt. The nightshirt got washed every day. It was as if the good doctor could work miracles, for my father recovered totally and rapidly.

I loved going to Remmerden. First there was the trip itself, by means of a street car, a miniature steam locomotive pulling two or three coaches on a track that ran parallel to the highway. They used to be quite popular, particularly in the eastern part of the country, where they were used even after the war, in competition with the buses.

But it was the river, the water, that exercised its powerful magic on me. I was attracted to water as if I had been injected with fish genes although I was also quite scared of it: it took me longer than anybody else in my family to learn to swim, and I was never better than a very mediocre swimmer. Learning to dive took a lot longer and I never mastered that well: I couldn’t keep my legs straight to my embarrassed annoyance……

Before returning to Remmerden I have to write down how we learned to swim. My first lessons took place while we, Piet, Charles and I, stayed in Dieren with my grandmother. The swimming pool was an enormous wooden construction, something like a box I would think, that was anchored securely in the river, the Ijssel, the arm of the Rhine that flows north and empties in what used to be the Zuiderzee. Because of that system, which was common for all places located on a river or a creek, there was some current in the pool. A wooden bridge connected the two sides halfway down the pool and in Amersfoort a steel cable ran parallel to the bridge, about three feet out and six feet above the bridge deck. The fellow who was responsible for maintenance and safety, the highest authority within the pool structure, was also the swimming teacher. He buckled his students in a five inches wide leather belt that had a shiny big brass eye attached to it, to which he tied a stout rope. It ran through a pulley that rode along the steel cable, and he held the loose end while standing on or walking along the bridge. In Dieren the rope was tied to a skookum pole, about twelve feet long, and the whole arrangement looked like an awkward, heavy fishing pole, the instructor the angler, the student the oversized white frog. The instructor made you go through the motions until you could do them efficiently and to his satisfaction. At that point you could, of course, swim, at least theoretically, and he got up on the bridge, walking slowly and dragging the student through the water while shouting his instructions, until the kid could swim by himself.

When I could swim and had earned the certificate to prove it things became possible that had been impossible so far. One of these was that I was allowed to use the heavy rowboat in Remmerden to venture out by myself on the river, where I learned pretty fast how to go about rowing up-stream, which is of course absolutely necessary in order to row on the river at all.

Because the Dutch rivers are so wide and relatively slow-flowing, and heavily used for international freight traffic, it is necessary to maintain a navigation channel. This is done by building from both shores moles that reach about 100 feet out into the current, thereby effectively narrowing the river and increasing its current, so that most sediment remains suspended and is carried downstream, rather than to be allowed to settle and to form shoals. Where the current hits the head of a mole an eddy is created that runs close to the shore in the opposite direction to the current. When rowing (or kayaking) the trick is to work very hard while rounding the mole heads, but to let the counter current do most of the work until one gets to the next mole. Once that technique has been mastered rowing or paddling up-stream is no longer a problem.

I remember vividly the deep satisfaction I got from the surprise I caused in the old couple when I returned for lunch one day and told them that I had rowed all the way to Rhenen and had actually been under the railway bridge. It was not easy to impress them, but that accomplishment did.

One of the set elements of my stay in Remmerden was that I got a long and stiff lecture on my duties towards “the dear Mem”, whose life I should try to make easier, not more difficult. I dreaded those talks, which were so well meant and so painful for both the doctor and me….. and totally ineffective: nothing I did was aimed at making her life “difficult”.They were not strong in adolescent psychology.

Because they were convinced that my problems were related to a flaw in my character of superficiality, lack of seriousness, they thought of a scheme whereby they would prove to me convincingly that something had to change in my character and in my approach to problems in my life. They knew I liked to read and they gave me a book about Pizarro and his dreadful crew, not a big book. I found it totally uninteresting (everything I read was measured against Karl May) and put it aside after leafing through it. The next day they wanted to know if I had read the book, and because I didn’t have the nerve to tell them that it didn’t interest me at all, I said I had. Whereupon they asked me a number of questions on the contents….. a test I flunked of course totally, not having read the book. Their reaction was immediate and devastating: how could I ever learn anything if I couldn’t even remember what I had read the day before? A good reader had to pay attention to detail….. and on and on. They felt they were right, I felt dreadful, and nothing changed. I admired and loved them both.

They had, of course, a vegetable garden where they also grew decorative gourds, which were dried after harvesting and kept on a flat bowl for colour during the winter. They used to become quite light and hard. One year they had picked a gourd that was the size of a good-sized pumpkin. Nobody in Holland ever thought about eating those things, not in my experience anyway, and therefore this big orange fruit was placed on top of a fine old oak cabinet, where it would nicely dry out to be admired for ever. After a while she discovered a thin, sticky drip-line down the side of the cabinet, that seemed to come from the corner where the large gourd was resting. She pointed it out to her husband, who immediately and without any hesitation climbed on a chair to lift the thing off for inspection. Just as he had it almost exactly over his head, looking at his feet to be able to get down safely, the bottom dropped out and with it the inners, in advanced state of decay. It covered him literally from head to toe. I thought the story, as told by his wife, was hilarious. To the doctor, I’m afraid, it must have been a messy experience.

In the last years of her life she developed cancer, and by the time it was discovered it was already well advanced. Her husband looked after her with all the loving care he had to give her, and when the end came the couple was found peacefully, side by side. Obviously the death of his wife made his life pointless in his own estimation. I am convinced that they had, while she was still well enough to talk about it, decided together that this was the appropriate thing to do. I have always thought of this as an admirable ending to a beautiful life.

There were other safety valves when the pressure on Mem was getting too much, much of the same nature. Once in a while I stayed with the family Nieweg, at that time consisting of only Jacob Nieweg, his wife, and their youngest daughter, Rens, finishing her high school and later studying music. It just occurred to me that at least one of these stays may have had something to do with the fact that Miek was seriously ill on several occasions. It doesn’t matter. All my memories of these stays are pleasant.

Jacob Nieweg was my father’s oldest and closest friend, a life-long friend. They had met as young men when my father and mother lived in the eastern part of the country, in Soeren, where Nieweg was the minister. His hobby was painting, and that is what my father did for a living, so the two of them would frequently set out on local expeditions. But eventually Nieweg decided that the ministry was to him not as fulfilling as his painting, and he switched. My father discovered that his writing was a better way for him to earn a living and gave up painting. I think that he may have had some doubts about his talents and therefore about his future as a painter: competent, but not quite good enough? There never seems to have been any doubt regarding his writing.

They were kindred spirits and had frequent and profound philosophical discussions, in which they could get so involved that on one occasion, so my father writes somewhere, he “took Jacob home” after a long and interesting conversation in Soeren. It was late at night. When they arrived at his home Jacob thought that, since he had something to add to what he had said, he would, in turn, walk back with my father. Whereupon, when they arrived at my parents’ place, my father thought that they could not break off the conversation in mid-stream, so to speak, and decided….. and so on, three times.

The two families moved west at about the same time. My parents settled in Bloemendaal, where both my brother Piet and I were born, and I assume that the “Niewegen” (plural for “Nieweg”; we always referred to them in that fashion) were living there as well, for Jacob gave me at my birth a beautiful, finely detailed large drawing of a little fruit tree. It hangs in our bedroom.

For some reason( I suppose it could have been related to my father’s work, which made a more central location very desirable) we moved to Amersfoort. It wasn’t long before the Niewegen switched too and lived, if I remember correctly, close-by on the other side of the road. Our house was half of a double one, and the other side became vacant. The axis of the building was located east – west; our half was on the north side, which made the house rather dark and lacking in sunshine. The other side was much better, and the Niewegen moved in quickly, so that the two friends lived side by side. It didn’t take long before a connecting door was made on the attic, where his studio was. I don’t know why it was needed or even if it was used, but there it was, certainly a symbol of a very close relationship.

There are a few memories that stand out. In the first place there was the music making with Rens which I liked, sonata number five of the six flute sonatas by Handel, the first sonata I ever played.

Then there was the spring morning when I woke up to the jubilation of a “merel” (the Dutch name for a black cousin of our robin, but a better singer), that was sitting right on top of the dormer window above my head.

Every morning I had to ride my bike to school. The house was built on the highway to Utrecht, at that time paved with bricks, like most roads in Holland were. That highway was the main traffic artery between the city centre and the suburban areas. It had two characteristics: it climbed a gentle hill (known as “de Berg”, in English: the mountain) from the moment it left the city and crossed the railroad, without interruption, until it left the built-up areas. Living in that general area was considered a clear sign to the town’s population that you belonged to a family that had some money, and the general feeling was that there was more money the higher on “de Berg” you lived. It was an exaggerated, even erroneous view, but it was not totally out of touch with the existing realities. The other characteristic was that it was lined with magnificent, big beech trees.

It was a matter of pride to me that I went down that hill as fast as I could possibly go. Both Jacob Nieweg and his wife considered this reckless and idiotic, because there were numerous crossings and, although the traffic was light in those days, there were some cars and buses crossing the highway. At that speed stopping quickly was virtually impossible. They were quite right, no doubt about it, but they might as well not have said anything about it, for going more slowly was never a consideration in my mind or in any of my friends’ minds; it would have been entirely against the unwritten rules by which we lived. It would have been like losing face.

The Niewegen were great plant lovers, and Jacob was, at least in our family, famous for his ability to grow them. Like many Dutch homes from that period our two houses had a “serre”, a glazed-in extension to the house that was used as a sun room and, in many cases, as a sort of a greenhouse. He used it to grow his plants and I remember it as some kind of a miniature jungle, but very tidy and organized. It is there that I saw for the first time a flowering pink camelia, which were quite rare in Holland at that time.

It was customary for our family to go over to the Niewegen for Sunday morning coffee…..not because the coffee they served was so good (it was horrible: made with a chicory extract or burnt sugar or a mixture of both. The chicory became popular during the war as a substitute, when real coffee was not available) but because it was a fixed moment for the two families to meet. After the death of my father those Sunday morning visits remained part of the family tradition. I dreaded those visits, because invariably “school” would come up as a topic, and my lack of success would once again be exposed. But I do remember the feeling of real joy I had when we went for our visit during one of the school holidays in the time when I was in Nijmegen, and brought home a good report. The relief of going to meet the Niewegen and not having to worry about it was so great that I can still feel it as if it happened recently.

It must have been around the time when I was in the first grade of the gymnasium when my father died. His death left Mem facing a very heavy task. After five years of an extremely happy marriage she was now facing life alone and the care of five kids. The instantaneous daily demands made it even impossible for her to go through a period of grieving. She just could not handle the extra strains put on her by this one wayward son. It is, in retrospect, very easily understandable: I took just too much of her energies, her time, her care, and yes, it was very sad, but she looked for ways by which she might be able to relieve the pressure. And so the idea was born that, for her sake as well as for my own, it would be better if I lived with other people for some time.

He had always had trouble with his lungs, already as a child. It was the reason for his removal from the school in Rotterdam, time and again, to spend a period with his mother’s five unmarried sisters (“the Tantes”, as they were known to us) in Ellecom, where “the air was better than in the city”. But he was a heavy smoker, little cigars, each with a little red band around it with “Minimum nicotine” printed on it, as if it was the nicotine that made him cough and get at least once a year an attack of bronchitis that regularly deteriorated into full-blown pneumonia. Little was known in those days about the real dangers of smoking……. It was pneumonia that killed him in January 1930. He would have been fifty the following month.

And so I was placed under the care of the principal of the other high school and went to live with that family. I don’t remember how long it lasted, but quite a long time, maybe half a year. His name was Leopold. He was a nice, gentle man. He and his wife had two children, maybe a little younger than I was, a beautiful, blonde girl and her younger and extraordinarily well-behaved brother. I am inclined to believe that both must have been as close to the ideal of “nice children” as is humanly possible. It seems to me that they may not even have ever been tempted to do anything their parents would have frowned at. I worshiped the girl from a very safe distance and had never any real contact with her brother.

I have mostly unpleasant memories of this stay, made worse in a way because I was allowed to go home for the weekends and therefore was constantly reminded of my own, my family’s environment. The contrast was striking. The most lasting memories related to those months are that I was constantly, sharply aware of the difference in taste obvious in everything in the Leopold house and that I was constantly reminded that my presence was tolerated, not welcomed. Mrs. Leopold did not like me. Of course it was a feeling that was not based on anything she said; she was scrupulously polite. But distant, without any warmth.

I managed to upset her once terribly. My bedroom was a large, bare room on the second floor. It was typical for her attitude towards me: it was immaculately clean and totally impersonal; absolutely nothing had been done to make me feel “at home”. It had a ceiling light only. The only pieces of furniture were a bed , a wash stand and a fake mantel shelf on which stood a large, very ugly, purple pottery vase with a long neck and a round belly. It must have reminded me of the kind of equipment that was sometimes used by people doing rhythmic physical exercises, for one evening I picked it up and swung it as I vaguely remembered having seen those people do: in large circles vertically and horizontally. There was in the emptiness of the room no danger of hitting anything. At that moment mrs.. Leopold entered the room. Her face turned red with indignation and fury when she saw what I was doing with her vase. She gave me a short, withering scolding in a very loud voice before storming out of the room with the vase clutched to her bosom.

She and her husband belonged to the Christian Scientist church. On two occasions their faith shocked me. The first one was when their daughter got scarlet fever, a disease that was considered very dangerous as well as being very contagious so that the families where it had struck were totally isolated: an official notice was attached to the door to warn people not to enter, the children were not allowed outside the house and the parents had to take strict precautions. All written communications had to be disinfected by bleach before being mailed. Of course their son and I could not go to school, which gave the occasion a very special flavour: I loved the holiday but hated the fact that I couldn’t go anywhere. I must have shown my amazement when there was no doctor coming to check, for Mr.. Leopold took time to explain to me that they did not need a doctor, because sickness, any sickness, was a matter of the spirit, not the body, and that what the girl needed was prayer. She recovered. I remember being allowed to use the typewriter to send a letter home, and then watch it being dunked in a pail with a chlorine solution and dried, before it could be finally mailed.

The second occasion was when my sister Miek, who was then three years old, developed appendicitis, and was terribly sick from a sudden complication. ( the surgeon had closed the cut, and neither he nor any of the nurses had noticed that he had left a piece of dressing inside) Our whole family was very, deeply worried; I was very fond of my little sister. The only consolation the Leopolds could give me was to tell me that they would pray for her health. But their belief in the “rightness” of their beliefs about sickness was not a bit shaken: this was, as any other sickness, a matter of the spirit, not the body, and they argued that point with me. Here was a little girl, hovering on the border between death and life as a result of an inexcusable surgical blunder, and it was a matter of the spirit……

The only good memory I have of this period was that I was allowed (heaven only knows why) to use the daughter’s roller skates. I learned to use them pretty fast and became good at it, a matter of enormous pride. I even beat a another boy, who was supposed to be the best on our street, in a straight race. Those roller skates had metal wheels, and it was not difficult to wear them out if you used them as often as I did. Which is what happened: towards the last weeks of my stay with the family Leopold I had to tell them that they were no longer usable…. a difficult moment. Mrs.. Leopold seemed to prepare for a furious outburst and her eyes flamed from behind her glasses, when she caught a warning look from her husband, and controlled her anger. I imagine that he told her later, when they were alone, that she had made enough money by feeding me during those months to make it possible for them to buy another pair for their daughter.

It is not a happy memory, that stay. I think I suffered more than Mem ever realized, but there was little that could be done about it, for at home I had created a situation which she couldn’t manage any more. At the end of the school year I was only allowed to pass into the third grade on condition that I would pass two re-examinations at the end of the holidays, one in French and one in Algebra. It was immediately obvious to everybody concerned (with exception of myself) that, left to my own devices, I would have no hope at all of passing those two tests. Mem had, somehow, made contact with my French teacher, Mademoiselle van Teutem and it so happened that she had a younger sister who would love to get a job for the summer months in order to continue her piano studies during the winter. So it was arranged to everybody’s satisfaction that To van Teutem would spend the summer with her older sister and that I would move in with them to work under her supervision.

The contrast with the situation at the Leopold house was like day and night. I immediately took to van Teutem, and she liked me, so that there was never any dissonant in our daily relationship. Beb, her sister, was deeply involved in the country-wide examinations for people who wanted to teach French at secondary schools but who had no university training, and was rarely at home during the day, except when she had to do a lot of marking, which she did together with an older male French teacher. To and I worked according to a fixed, but somewhat flexible schedule. and I am sure that she discussed our progress every evening with her sister after I had gone to bed. There was always time for long walks with Beb’s gorgeous but somewhat nervous female German shepherd. I loved that dog. We made good progress with the work that had to be done and it turned out to be altogether a good summer.

To had to go back home in Bennekom for some reason in August, and Mem organized it so that I could stay with an unmarried friend of hers who lived there with her mother, so that I could continue to work with To for another week or ten days. The exams were going to be at the end of August. I passed both without any difficulty.

Maybe that led to some vague hope that things would now go smoother, but it was not to be and at the end of the school year (which I had spent at home) I failed to get into the next grade. At that point Mem would have been at her wits’ end and there were signs that my nerves were in rough shape. I don’t have any idea about the nature of those signs; I had always been tense, and there had always been signs that something was wrong: I didn’t bite my nails but pulled them, with the same results exactly, and I was incredibly slow in learning to break off what I was doing to go to the bathroom before it was”too late”. I had a terrible temper and was prone to fly into uncontrollable fits of fury that made me do or say things which I immediately afterwards deeply and sincerely regretted, but then these things had been said or done…..a difficult child.

It must have been around this time that Mem thought it advisable to have me tested again, but this time it was done by a professional who knew what he was doing. He delivered a report that contained all kinds of interesting information, not all of it very useful, but most of it encouraging. No lack of brains, a good insight in things mechanical, plus an ability to go through given data to reach the core of a certain problem quickly. Too bad I never used that ability to analyse my own problems and find a suitable solution. The psychologist who was the head of the testing agency suggested in his report that it was a gift that might be useful if I chose to be an accountant. Nothing has ever been farther from my mind, for bookkeeping is (and always has been) a profound mystery to me, something I would avoid at almost any cost. I had to take it as a subject when I took a course to prepare me for publishing, and it was the only subject I failed miserably. Another suggestion: to give me a certain time frame in which to complete any academic study, because otherwise I would likely waste my time. There was a definite, limited time frame when I went to Amsterdam to attend university, (I knew that, thanks to the generosity of uncle Jacob Mees, I had enough money to complete my degree in five years) but I wasted my first year anyway.

Then Mem discovered signs that there was likely something wrong with my nerves. I have no idea what those new signs were, for there had been signals for a very long time, not so much revealing that anything was wrong with my nerves, but clearly indicating that I was a seriously troubled youth: not only was my school performance dismal, but, although I didn’t bite my nails, I pulled them, with exactly the same results, and it took me a worrisome long period of time to learn to quit whatever I was doing in order to reach the toilet before “it was too late”. And to top it off I was prone to fits of blind fury that scared people around me, fearing that I would hurt somebody seriously.

Together with another uncle, uncle Aad, who was our official guardian after my father’s death, she decided that I would get a “resting period” in his home in Apeldoorn. I was there for maybe a month or so, spending a lot of time lying on a comfortable couch. In retrospect I believe that that was probably the thing I needed least, but it gave Mem and uncle Aad time to plan something different that would be of a more lasting nature. One of my cousins, Jaap Rypperda Wierdsma, had been in more or less the same predicament: poor work habits, poor school performance, causing problems at home, that sort of thing. He had been sent to live with Schwartz, the principal of the gymnasium in Nijmegen, where they lived. It had been a great success. He had finished school and many of the problems seemed to have disappeared. Mem contacted Schwartz, and found out that he and his wife didn’t do that sort of thing any more, but that there was another teacher, who taught biology at the gymnasium as well as at the other high school, the Civic School, who was looking for a student to live with them. His name was Risselada, and Schwartz recommended him and his wife wholeheartedly. It was a family with four kids; the oldest was studying in Delft, the other three were still at home, two of them of my age, attending the gymnasium, the youngest one, a small girl, in elementary school. The family was very musical and sports-minded. It sounded ideal. Mem made contact, visited them, found them to be very nice people, and the deal was closed. Uncle Aad brought me the message: another place to live away from home…. I don’t remember being very shocked or even upset about the news. I had no choice anyway, but I believe that by that time I was probably expecting drastic measures of that nature.

I remember well the day that Uncle Aad took me to Nijmegen to introduce me to the Risselada family and vice versa. It was a sunny fall day and the trip by car (a luxury by itself !) was beautiful. The road from Apeldoorn to Arnhem was hilly, and time and again I was looking, going down one slope, at the steep grade ahead, but when I mentioned it to uncle Aad he laughed and said: “You’ll not even notice that we are climbing. ” I watched the speedometer and it didn’t change. The power of those cars…..

The first impression at the Risselada house was that it was such a nice place (although it was certainly not a beautiful house, architecturally speaking) and that they had good, well-designed and carefully made furniture; an immense difference from the experience with the family Leopold. Mrs.. Risselada showed me my room: a bright pleasant room on the top floor with a hide-away bed and a built-in, enclosed washbasin. I believe that this had been the room of Tjalling, their eldest son. The large window offered a lovely view over many gardens at the distant tower of the medieval church, St Stephen. The window sill was very low, and to make it somewhat safer there were three metal rods across the bottom part to a height of about three feet. Later Thys, the youngest son, who had his room back to back with mine, mounted a small telescope on the top bar so that we could see the time on the clock of the St. Stephen tower. Neither he nor I had a watch of our own; watches were expensive and relatively rare among high school students; a real luxury.

That first visit was most reassuring, I believe on both sides. They showed me their garden with pride: theirs was by far the largest garden of any of the houses around, a deep “L” shape. The far end contained an enormous swing and a play area where Thys and I practiced our grass hockey strokes. The bicycle shed was in that part as well. The whole garden area was enclosed by a 7 feet high brick wall. From the back room of the house you looked through French doors into the flower part of the garden, which was Mrs.. Risselada’s domain. It was lovely and colourful, much nicer, in fact, than our own garden in Amersfoort. At the end, at the joining of the two legs of the “L”, they had built a pond where a couple of goldfish had a good life among the waterlilies. It made me think of the frustrated attempts to build a pond that would hold water in the garden of “The Vier Winden”. I had wanted that pond so much.

The Risseladas had four children: Tjalling, who had left and came home only during the holidays, Frans, who was my age but who was two grades ahead of me at school, Thys, who was three years younger than I but only one grade behind me, and a little girl, Arda, obviously the result of an afterthought or an accident, and the darling of the family, a bright, beautiful blonde girl. All were bright, wonderful people, excellent in their school work, with wide-ranging interests, and musical (Tjalling and Thys played violin, Frans cello).

That first meeting was the beginning of four of the best years, certainly of my school life, but I believe of my life in more general terms. Mr.. Risselada (he was more generally known in school circles as “the Ris”) went over my homework with me every night, to check whether I had done it properly, and for the first time my marks went up instead of down. In retrospect I find it totally amazing that he was sufficiently well-versed in Latin and Greek to be able to check those as well,for his high school years must have ended at least twenty-five years ago. He had no trouble with them; he had trouble staying awake and alert while I was going through my assignments. I can still see his head slump lower and lower….. before he jerked it up again and tried hard to look as if he was interested. I think it was a bit painful for both of us and it came as a real relief when he suggested, some time during the next year, that he didn’t think his checking was necessary any more, because I seemed to be doing all right.

I entered the new school in October in grade 9. It was not a large school, even for Holland where a high school with over 500 students was considered to be a large school. Ours had 250 students in all, I believe. Nijmegen was a thoroughly Roman Catholic city and by far the greater number of boys went to St. Canisius College, or to a school for girls (neither Moekie nor I can remember where that was located, or what its name was) Both were residential schools, like most R.C. educational institutions were then. The class I was in had about 25 students, but the higher the grade, the smaller the classes became and we graduated with a class of 18.

Of course I had some initial trouble adjusting to my new class, where I didn’t know anybody, while a fair number of them had been together as a class since their early days in elementary school. I am afraid I made an awful fool of myself on occasion. A curious little detail was that it has been the only time in my school-going years when I was in the same class with another Justus, Just Heldring.

There were six school days in a week then, but in most schools Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were free. We worked on a slightly different schedule that we liked much better: we went to school on Tuesday afternoons for two hours and on Friday afternoons for one hour, but had the other four to ourselves. To make that possible we started school an hour earlier, at eight o’clock in the summer and at eight-thirty in the winter, and had five instead of four hours every morning, with two breaks, one of fifteen minutes between periods two and three and one of ten minutes between periods four and five. At one o’clock we went home, had lunch and then had a lot of time for sport, for kayaking and swimming, walking, music-making, or whatever we wanted to do. The system was very popular with both teachers and students. Most of us, I believe, did our homework at the end of the afternoon, finishing after supper.

There was a school tennis club and I joined that. We played on a court that we would find hard to imagine these days, and impossible to be played on: it was paved with concrete tiles, squares about 14 X 14 inches, the sides neatly beveled. They were manufactured and widely used as pavement on city sidewalks. There were certain advantages to their use in that application, because they allowed easy access to underground services, like electricity cables, water and gas pipes, and connections to those as well as to the sewers. There were problems, for they required fairly regular maintenance where a level surface was required. Only we, the “junior” grades (grades 7 to and including grade 10), played on that court that had not been maintained since a good many years, and the surface was most definitely not level any more, but on top of that the beveled sides formed neat grooves, about 1/2 inch wide. On an uneven surface the edges of the grooves produced effects on the bouncing of the balls that were weird and unpredictable, making the game sometimes more a game of chance than of skill.

There were always enough people who wanted to play to ensure that the social aspects of the game during the waiting periods were as important as the playing itself and that was in my case a good feature. I remember that there were certain characters who insisted on fooling around at the ends of the court, behind the players, distracting their attention and making a nuisance of themselves. One of them was acting particularly obnoxiously one afternoon, and a boy in my class got really mad. He picked up a ball and fired a hard shot at the fellow, hitting him squarely on the head: the ball bounced over the fence. It was an unlikely precise aim, more a matter of luck than of skill, for sure, but it earned him a loud round of applause. It subdued the trouble maker: he left.

There was also a cultural school club, meeting in the evening once a month in the home of one of the members. The program was rigid (it was printed on cards, with a space for the names of the performers at that meeting) and consisted of readings of selections of both poetry and prose, of music performances, and, most dreaded, impromptu speeches on topics that were chosen by the meeting while the victims were absent. It must be said that these victims were asked beforehand, and most people who were invited declined, politely and firmly. I remember only one of the speech makers: a fellow who would start his study in civil engineering that fall, who told us that the highest goal of civil engineers was to make the surface of the world flat, by scraping away the hills and mountains and filling up the valleys. His bias was somewhat understandable, since Holland is a particularly flat country.

Both Moekie and I were enthusiastic members of that organisation and performed together often at the meetings. She also teamed up at times with another girl in our class to play four-handed piano. There was a lot of music making during those years. The Ris was a good piano player, although not a very sensitive one, Frans produced a lovely warm tone on his instrument, and Thys, who was literally good at anything he touched, be it academics, music, or sport, was a good violinist. In that environment I soon started playing my flute more than I had ever done before and even practiced daily, so that I improved a lot in that period, even though I didn’t have lessons any more, and for the first time in my life enjoyed doing it. There was suddenly a clear purpose to it all. I wanted to play well because there was nobody else playing flute in my immediate environment in Nijmegen, and I felt that there was an open spot that I could fill. There is no stronger stimulus than to be appreciated, at times even needed.

That feeling was made stronger by the fact that there was a small school orchestra, conducted by our rector, who was an excellent pianist. It sounds slightly absurd in our times, where all school bands seem to have more flutes than they know what to do with, but he had never had a flute in the group, nor any other wind instruments, only violins and the odd cello. The piano, played by Moekie, filled in for all the missing sections. To have a flute in addition to all the strings was a real improvement. Usually the main program selection was a Haydn symphony and the flute part was a rewarding one. We practiced once a week in the aula of the school; attendance was 100%, for the enthusiasm for this form of music-making was considerable in our school.

The other regular occasion for playing together with other people was at the home of my cousin, Arnold Wierdsma, a doctor, whose wife, Ine, played violin. She had a friend, Jeanne Nicolai, who played piano. The two of them played often together, but to be able to play trios was a welcome change. I loved it.

I was in their home every week for an evening meal. Just at the time of my arrival in Nijmegen they had bought a large house very close to the hospital, instead of the small house where they had started. It was an older house with quite large rooms and high ceilings, a large basement and not much to make it very attractive. They had hired a well-known interior architect to change the house on the inside. What he did with it was amazing and wonderful, and when he had finished they had one of the nicest, most modern and beautiful houses in the city. The dark basement was changed in a modern, pleasant and bright place for Arnold’s practice. The large and faceless entry hall of the original house had become an impressive open space in which the winding staircase became the dominant element. But the main attraction was the living area, which had originally been two separate rooms but was now one enormous space. The front part was very bright and sunny and had light coloured, upholstered furniture. very comfortable. It had a small L-shaped addition to it that was used for Arnolds’s desk. Two walls were covered with his books, an enormous collection of poetry (his great love) and fiction; the third one had a large window. The architect’s abilities as a designer far exceeded his skill with technical problems. The result was that the bookcase he designed looked very good, and proved very impractical, and even somewhat hazardous: the lower part of it consisted of loose planks supported every four or five feet by a brick wall that served also as steps to reach the highest shelves. The bricks were piled on top of the floor covering, a woven mat, and were cemented together, but because their support was not rock-solid, they broke loose and became just loosely piled bricks….. most unsatisfactory. But the owners’ respect for the architect was such that they never changed that feature for something that might have worked better.

Of the back part of that large room I have no clear recollection, except that the piano was there and that it was used as a music room. The feature that intrigued me most was the enormous folding sliding door between the two parts of the room, that disappeared in the wall when not in use. It was rarely used; only, I believe, when Arnold had a visitor with whom he wanted to be alone, but in less formal surroundings than in his practice room.

Arnold needed a car, of course, and because he depended on it, it had to be a good car, a fairly expensive car. He was proud of the quiet running of the engine and it became a standard joke that at such times when it was suddenly totally quiet outside you could be sure that he had come home.

From the entrance hall a corridor led past the kitchen to he dining room at the back of the house. The kitchen was Doortje’s domain. The “-tje” indicates a diminutive in Dutch, in this case of “Dora”. It seemed misplaced here, for Doortje was anything but “petite”: she was tall and strong, had a ready, warm smile and a cheerful disposition. She was not only an accomplished cook, but a wonderful person, more part of the family, it seemed to me, than “the maid”. She was immensely proud of “her” kitchen, one of the first ones that had an electric stove (of the early model that had the elements all covered, just like our two-element hot plate. It necessitated the use of special aluminum pans with thick bottoms that had been turned precisely flat to ensure a tight fit on the elements. We still use two of those today regularly…..they proved to be indestructible). She stayed until the time came, after Arnold’s death, when the house had become much too large and was sold. Ine moved to an apartment, where Doortje was a regular visitor.

Those dinners with the Wierdsmas were important to me in the years I lived in Nijmegen. I admired and was strongly attracted to Arnold, like most people who met him, for he was a good doctor and a wonderful, very sensitive human being. I have never become very close to Ine. She was very intelligent, academically possibly better equipped than her husband, but she did not go to university and I don’t know why not; she would have done well, I think, and in her family there seemed to be no lack of money. She continued to coach teenagers who had difficulty with Latin and/or Greek long after she had moved to the apartment, well into her eighties. She was not a warm woman, at least not in her reactions to people around her; her emotions rarely showed. Feelings like tenderness and love, or even a more superficial affection, were very well hidden, maybe buried. Spontaneity was (or seemed) totally strange to her. I suspect that she lived by the rules of a behavioral code that made all emotions, and certainly the outward signs of emotion, suspect and not tolerated, because they could be interpreted as a weakness and had best be suppressed. There seemed to be a lot of suppressed feelings in her relationship with Arnold, for I have never seen even the slightest hint of affection, let alone passion, in their behaviour towards each other, and I have known them from the time when they were just married. Nor have I ever seen Ine enthusiastic about anything, except possibly their house, and even there her true feelings were guarded and veiled, more to be guessed than to be shown.

All this sounds rather negative. The fact is that I liked her very much, that she was an important person in my life during those years. The only people who, I think, may have been really close to her and allowed to see, on occasion, the real person under the armour of intellectual coolness, were, besides her husband, possibly Inger, her eldest daughter, and Doortje. Nelleke, Inger’s younger sister, (named, I suppose, after my mother, with whom Arnold had a remarkably close relationship, based on their shared love of poetry) died when she was still very young. Neither Ine nor Arnold seemed to have ever quite gotten over that blow.

For people who liked to be outdoors Nijmegen was in those years a wonderful place to be. I suppose it still is considered to be . There were so many good walks possible close to the city, all through very different terrain, forests, moors, wetlands, meadows, a wide variety. For us there was, above all, the river, at least during the summer months. Access to the river was through the “De Batavier”, a society started as a rowing and sailing club, but in our time almost totally a club for kayakers. The club owned its own fleet of kayaks, mostly singles, but they did have some doubles. They didn’t look even remotely like the kayaks of our time. They were made of thin plywood over a simple frame, and they were sort of box-like, at least the older ones were: not much flare to the sides and therefore practically straight in profile. Not an elegant shape. They were narrow and very “tippy”. The later ones had a more pleasing shape and were easier to paddle.

One of the strongest promoters and most active members was Moekie’s father, whose efforts had helped to start the club and who had worked hard to make it to what it had become. He was still the real heart of the club. He used to have a sailboat, an open hull, I imagine with a centre board, and gaff-rigged, as almost all sailboats were in those days, maybe somewhere between 14 and 16 feet long, judging by the single picture that Moekie has of it. On a river, and especially a very busy river like the Waal, a sailboat is a somewhat doubtful asset. It is virtually impossible to beat to windward against the current, and that problem is very much aggravated by the traffic on the river, consisting mostly of strings of barges being towed. (Nowadays these barges are all being pushed, rather than towed, which makes them a lot more maneuverable) The barges were separated by a fair distance from the tug and each other, but that space was taken up of course by the towing cable, usually submerged, but once in a while snapping taut, and if you were unfortunate (read :”stupid”) enough to be caught you were capsized for sure. The first thing you were told when you ventured out on the river in a kayak was: “NEVER try to cross between two barges”. He sold the boat before Moekie reached an age when she might have learned to sail.

What we did was: swim out to meet the barges being towed upstream, grab the toe rail along the gunwale and let the current wash you on board and catch a ride up-stream before diving off and swimming with the current back to the spot where we had started. It was fun, and most skippers didn’t mind, but once in a while there would be one who came storming out of his wheelhouse, swearing and threatening. That was almost more fun, for just before he reached you you quickly dived overboard and laughed at his fury from the water. What was NO fun was that sometimes a barge had just been tarred, and it was almost impossible to get that stuff off your skin, let alone your swimming gear. And chances were that you would only notice when it was too late…..

Our destination was always some nice, sandy beach where we could lie in the sun on our bath towels, and usually the whole congregation gathered on the same spot. I don’t know why; probably just a built-in herd instinct. Protection against sunburn was provided by copious amounts of olive oil, not very effective, but it gave us a most distinctive summery smell. Even now, as soon as I use olive oil for making salad dressing, the image of the river, the sandy beach, the brown bodies and the kayaks pops into my mind. My body, by the way, which was skinny rather than muscular, never got an acceptable tan, (considered more or less essential for both sexes at that age and desperately desired by me), but stayed reddish the whole summer, to my chagrin.

I wasn’t a member of “de Batavier” and therefore had no access to a kayak, but a friend, Hein VerLoren, who was in the same class in the gymnasium, was, and he and I built a two-person kayak in the workshop attached to their house. The plans were ordered from a water sport magazine. Everything went rather well, until we had to join the bottom and the two sides. In that stage we were not very successful and the inevitable result was that the kayak leaked like a sieve. The problem was eventually solved satisfactorily by the application of a mixture of a red lead paint (usually used to prime steel), case in glue powder, and sawdust, which we called “spul”. It set pretty hard, but didn’t crack, and it could be painted over. The kayak was kept at “de Batavier”, performed quite well and was used a lot.

By that time Moekie and I had become close friends and she invited me to share a kayak with her on occasion. That memory is naturally an integral part of the happy summer memories. She tanned beautifully (as did her father, whose shining bald mahogany head you could distinguish from a great distance on the sun-lit water), and that made up somewhat for my own lack of desirable colour: if she didn’t mind, maybe being pinkish wasn’t the disaster it had seemed.

That casual statement: “….Moekie and I had become close friends” reveals, of course, the most important thing that happened to me during those four eventful years. It didn’t happen overnight, and it most certainly wasn’t “love-at-first-sight”. In fact, she thought during grade nine (my first year in Nijmegen) and maybe thereafter, that I was pretty awful and I am afraid she had a point. I was a mixed-up kid, desperate to find my place in that new environment and making all the wrong moves, trying to draw attention to myself by idiotic schemes like making a collection of hairs from the girls in the class, carefully wrapped and labeled. She was one of the girls whose hair sample was missing in my collection…..

Of course, meeting each other outside the classroom was inevitable: we both played in the school orchestra, we both went regularly to the meetings of the school club. She played tennis with a different group but we both loved kayaking on the river. I knew that she played piano, and played well. Maybe that is what drew us together, the music? Certainly over the years our opinion of each other changed and by the spring of ’35, when we were in grade 11, something happened, a most unusual, a unique school experience, that had profound effects on our relationship.

The rector thought that the regular school hours were not entirely satisfactory from either a teaching or a learning point of view, because the rigid timetable never allowed for a more in-depth study of something interesting that might have turned up during a lesson. Therefore he planned, together with Mr.. Nagel, the math teacher, a bold and novel experience for our class. He wanted to take the whole class for a week during the school year to a conference-resort, owned and run by a cousin of his. The Latin/Greek section of the class (10 students) would read Plato for three hours in the morning and Tacitus for two hours in the afternoon, while the math/science section (eight students) would concentrate on algebra and geometry with the math teacher. During the evening we would together read and talk about some modern short story or listen to a lecture. There would be lots of time for recreation in the afternoons, when we played “handball”, a not-popular but pleasant derivative from soccer. And after our evening discussion we would all go for a walk together (the strictly adhered-to basic rule was “No pairing-off, under any circumstances”). Those evening walks did wonders for us; I believe that we discovered each other.

In September, at the beginning of the next school year, our last, we started walking together around the block during the pauses. Because the window of the staff room was on that side of the building our walks did not go unnoticed and Moekie’s father got to hear quite a lot of comments. My reputation among teachers was somewhat spotted. He was not pleased, I believe, but did not try to interfere. A wise man. We also started walking home together after orchestra repetitions and did not take the shortest way. He didn’t like that either and said so to his daughter, but didn’t do anything to stop it. During the weekends we made longer hikes through the area around the city, a lovely landscape which Moekie knew well because she had often walked there with her father.

That must have hurt him, for he was very close to his daughter, much closer than to his son, and had loved those walks with her. To see that she preferred my company to his must have been painful, but he kept it to himself and did not ever question her about it. He knew his daughter well; they had a lot in common. Not only had she inherited his looks, but also his build and they shared a strong sense of fair play and straightforward honesty. They also shared a certain stubbornness and he must have known that criticisms and the imposition of curbs would have had, in all likelihood, the opposite effect of what he wanted to achieve. He trusted her totally. He was very proud of her, for not only was she a good student, but an excellent athlete and the school’s star female performer in running.

That he could entertain some legitimate doubt, based on what he heard about me in the staff room, about my future didn’t help of course. Had I been a reliable, top-of-the-class student it might have been different, but I was not. There were certain subjects and teachers I didn’t like and if I misbehaved that news inevitably came to his attention. In his classes I never tried anything, not because of my friendship with his daughter, but simply because I liked and respected him; he was that kind of a teacher. There wasn’t any of his students who would even think of stepping out of line but if anybody was a bit slack he was quickly, efficiently (and, I may add: painfully) put in his place by a firm grip with thumb and forefinger around the muscle that runs from neck to shoulder. There was never any sign of resentment.

We made a lot of music together, sometimes preparing for a performance for the school club, or just for fun, always at her house. She tried to help me with my math (not with much success), while I tried to help her with her Latin (she was a better learner and improved some), always under the loving, watchful eye of her mother, of course.

And so the last year ended and the final exam hung over us like a cloud. That exam …….We started off with a written session: the Alphas, the language section, had to translate a short piece of Greek, usually by Plato, and of Latin, usually by Tacitus, while the Betas faced an exam in algebra and geometry. Then both groups combined had to translate from French, German and English. I was dreadfully nervous about the whole thing and totally botched my Plato translation. I didn’t know it at the time, although I did realize that I hadn’t done well at all, but after I had passed I heard that I had scored 4 out of a possible 10. After that the oral exams came, where you met your subject teacher in presence of an outsider-expert, usually somebody connected with one of the universities. When I was preparing for the Greek (you got 20 minutes to study the text before going in) I was literally trembling, for I couldn’t make heads or tails of the text and told the rector so when I was sitting down. He was quietly reassuring, gave me just a few starting hints to get me over the hump and, o wonder, suddenly the whole text became clear and I rolled through it without much trouble. I got a good mark for that one, an 8, and the average was therefore a 6….. sigh of relief for those who knew about my poor start, like the Risseladas. Latin went without any real problems. I didn’t do well in history, but passed, and, miracle of miracles, I scraped through my math as well: 6- and 6-, but in the final count the minuses were eliminated, and a 6 was a pass. The modern languages (translations again) and the Dutch (just an essay on any of a number of given topics, usually a descriptive sort of thing) were all ok. I had looked forward to writing the exam in Dutch, for which I usually got high marks, but Moekie beat me: she got an 8 and I only a 7. The end result: we both passed. I did not do well, but that didn’t seem to matter any more: the hurdle was behind us.

A brief final note: whenever, in later years, we heard other people talk about their experiences in high school there was usually a certain tone, an undercurrent of resentment and boredom to their tale, but we have on the whole very good memories about those last four years, and not only because of our budding relationship. Our principal, the rector, was a key figure in those memories. When we returned for the first time to Holland he was still alive and we visited him. He was by then quite old and moved with difficulty, but .he was mentally as alert as ever. We are happy that we could thank him for the role he had played and the example he had given. He seemed to be pleased that we had chosen to be teachers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

FAMILY

 

I suppose that, by the standards applying at that time, our family would have been considered a “close family”: my parents lived in harmony and parents and children got along fine; up to a point, anyway. We did things together, like going for walks or bicycle rides, we played on occasion family games, we had our meals together, we went on holidays together, my parents were much involved with and interested in our lives, both at school and outside. Compared to family-life as we see it around us here today in many families, the immediate environment in which we grew up was both solid and supportive. It was in no way different from the other families, those of most of our friends; it was, we believed, the way families lived. Marriage break-ups were much rarer, and always a bit tainted with scandal. One of my school friends lived with his mother, a dentist, who was divorced. The fact of that obvious failure in relationships was never discussed and rarely mentioned. There must have existed more families like that, children living with only one of their parents, but I can not recall any other case among the kids of my age, the kids I went to school with. I cannot believe for an instant that married couples were, on the whole, better prepared and more willing to come to terms in areas of their life in which the two partners held deeply different views. Their differences, their disagreements, their fights were certainly more hidden from scrutiny by the outside world, and did not lead almost automatically to split-ups. I suspect that there must have been an awful lot of very private suffering, but it had better remain private, for society had as little sympathy with marriage break-up as it had with bankruptcy. They belonged to the “Things-that-were-not-done”…. and that were not talked about.

Only a few days ago, after I had heard the enthusiastic stories about a family-skiing day, followed the next day by stories of a father-and-son skiing expedition, I caught myself making comparisons with how things were when I was a young child and a teenager, and I could not help thinking that, notwithstanding the very real and enormous difficulties young people face in our society, in our time, the relationships between parents and children has more to offer to both parties now, than our family-life did then. Doing things together with my father, outside our holidays, was unthinkable. To me he was a distant figure, always at his desk, not to be disturbed. We saw him at tea-time and at meals… if he was home, but it seems to me that he was often not home. On Sundays he liked to go for a walk, for he had precious little physical exercise otherwise. He took it upon himself to keep or make our lawn weed-free and I can still see him occupied with that task, bent over, sticking weeds out of the sandy soil with a pointed knife. As exercise goes, it was neither good nor enough. We, the children, hated to go for short walks on Sundays “en family”, walks in the neighbourhood, for we saw other families come by our house, walking slowly, totally bored, it seemed, looking at people’s gardens and houses. We called the scene “Pa, Ma, and the Children” and there was no joy in that comment; it was a total condemnation. Walking, to us, meant that we were going to the heath, and it took twenty minutes to get to the spot where the real heath started.

My father had had a head-start in life: he was born in a prominent, albeit not rich, Rotterdam family. In the society in which we grew up this was still a significant advantage; it opened doors. As a child he was not strong and he spent many months, and I think maybe even years, in Ellecom with his aunts, the five unmarried sisters of my grandmother (“de Tantes” in our family) because the air in that rural community was so much healthier for him than the air in the inner city was. As an adult he was incredibly well-read, a real “erudite” with an enormous knowledge of art history and a formidable grasp of philosophy. But all that education was self-acquired through reading, not the result of formal education. He spoke French fluently, had a good working knowledge of German and English and was familiar with the literature in all three languages, although leaning more towards French than the other two. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was considered during his life as one of the leading cultural thinkers, and that his voice commanded respect.

Together with his friend Dirk Coster, also a writer and a thinker, he had started a magazine, “De Stem” (The Voice) that appeared, I believe, once a month. It was devoted to literature, art and culture-in-general, and contained poetry, fiction and essays. It’s influence in the country was considerable.

Dirk Coster was a regular guest at our house, but my memory of him is not sharp: he was obviously not part of my world directly. What I do remember is that he and his wife lived in a caravan, a large one in that time, but still very small as living accommodation goes, and painfully primitive. I don’t think theirs was a happy marriage; what I remember of her is the image of a small, fragile looking woman with a pale complexion, very shy, who didn’t appear to mind either the isolation or the lack of comfort of their “home”. They had moved the caravan to a location outside the city, near the moors between Amerfoort and Utrecht. Coster himself was more or less the epitome of an intellectual, almost a caricature: thin, non-athletic in the extreme, bony face and a large owlish set of glasses. He obviously didn’t like to work at home, but left rather early in the morning to spend most of his time (or so it seemed to me) in a cafe right at the entrance to the city, where my father used to join him for their meetings. He was an excellent judge of poetry and had written an introduction to a volume of modern poetry that had made him famous. The only other major product of his writing activity that I remember was a collection of aphorisms that he had published under the title “Marginalia”, but I vividly recall a very short description of a group of French soldiers from the remnants of Napoleon’s army struggling in the endless snow of the Russian vastness on their retreat from Moscow. It was published in “de Stem”. It almost literally took my breath away, so precise, so vivid and so “total” in its brevity. It was only half a page long. It must have been a great writer who could produce that image.

Dirk Coster and Jacob Nieweg were the two closest friends in my father’s life, but his relationship to each of them was very different in nature, I think. It seems to me that he loved Jacob Nieweg, and admired Dirk Coster, with whom he had a very close working-relationship. He needed Coster for his work, but he needed Nieweg in his life.

There was not a lot my father and I could have done together; we didn’t share many interests. We both liked reading, but reading is a solitary enjoyment… readers want to be left alone. Mem, thinking that they should try to find something that would interest me and would keep me busy, possibly even thinking that closer ties between father and son might be created, suggested that he could try to give me drawing lessons. I liked the idea but one lesson was enough to convince both of us that it would not be a success: my talent was minimal, and my father was not a very good teacher. During the first lesson he wanted me to draw a single flower, a daffodil. I remember the scene vividly. It was awful… a complete defeat and an embarrassing disappointment for both of us. What I liked to do was doing things with my hands, making things with wood or cardboard. I think that was about as far from his mind as sport was, although he was not at all “unhandy”, clumsy. He had, after all, started his adult life as an artist, a painter.

And so we went on living as we always had, side by side, but distant, and unable to find the bridge that might have brought us together, he the object of my deepest admiration, I a constant, unsolved problem to him, and, I’m afraid, a disappointment.

His study was for us a place where we didn’t enter without a very strong reason. It was to me the very sanctum of intellectual activity; a bit a forbidding place, but very impressive: two walls were totally taken up by books, there were books on the shelves along the remaining walls wherever there was a space for them, there were little piles of books on the table, and his large desk was always covered with papers.

He wrote everything long-hand in school exercise books, piles of thin blue manuscript books, carefully numbered. He wrote only on the right hand pages, and used the left-hand side for alterations, notes and additions There were an awful lot of those, and since his handwriting was unique but difficult to read his manuscripts must have been a nightmare for the typesetters who had to get them ready for the press. When a book was printed and published he didn’t care at all about what happened to the manuscripts. I don’t know how many we, Piet and I, went through, using them for everything except writing. Paper darts were the most common product, I think. We made whole squadrons of those at times…. After his death there were many people who would have loved to lay their hands on one of those manuscripts, but there was hardly anything left. He must have thrown them out himself.

At that time the Dutch language still recognized female and male nouns, that caused different endings to the various articles and adjectives that were used with them. Nobody would ever think of using that language in speaking, but in formal writing it was mandatory; not observing those rules would not have been acceptable to either my father or his readers. The problem was of course that nobody knew for sure any more whether certain nouns were masculine or feminine, because in daily speech you couldn’t hear the difference. For that reason he had a small dictionary on his desk that gave him the information he needed. It was almost completely worn out. Less than ten years after his death the rules had changed, and in grade 11 we had to get used to a different, simplified spelling, together with changed grammatical rules: no more nonsense like the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns.

The study itself was not what one would call a bright place; it had a fairly large window that looked out into the orchard, so that the light was filtered through the green leaves, but the only other windows were low and small. The total effect was an appropriately quiet, subdued light. On top of the largest of the bookcases stood an enormous copy of the bust of an Egyptian pharaoh, whose blind eyes and faint smile seemed to hint at an eternity that should be always remembered, and a small bust of Waldo Emerson whose essays he and my mother had translated together. In a separate space in the other bookcase he had the gypsum copy of a small sculpture, a seated, warped hunchback, whose mischievous and cynical eyes seemed to challenge all the truths my father so frequently stated in his writings, truths that he must have totally accepted, but that needed in my opinion (much, much later) a lot more substantial proof than he ever provided.

The smell of stale tobacco smoke permeated everything, for he was a compulsive smoker of cigars, small, slender cigars with a narrow red band that read: “minimum nicotine”. It was believed that it was the nicotine that might affect his health, which was probably nonsense. As a child he had suffered from weak lungs, and to think that in those days nobody suspected that it was the smoke he inhaled that could kill him is sad to contemplate, for if it is wasn’t the sole cause of his death, I am convinced that it was a major one. Every year he seemed to get either bronchitis or something that was considered to be bronchitis, but the last one developed rapidly into a full-blown pneumonia. In those years pneumonia was much feared, for it was accompanied by a very high temperature and it frequently ended in the death of the patient. There were no drugs that were really effective in fighting it, like antibiotics.

As soon as it was clear that he was seriously ill Mem asked our neighbours, the family van Hasselt, if I could stay with them, to enable her to devote all her energies to her nursing-task. I suppose that Piet went somewhere else. After a few days we were all gathered at his bed and he said good-bye to each individually. It was clear to everybody that this struggle would soon be over. I don’t remember any particular feeling that overpowered me at that moment other than that I thought it was terrifying, but I had a feeling of unreality, as if there was somehow an invisible wall between us.

That night, alone in my bed in the van Hasselt home the whole truth slowly began to penetrate and I was devastated. Mrs. van Hasselt came in the middle of the night and sat at my bed for a while, without speaking. I suppose she had heard me cry. She brought with her a little candle in a tiny glass jar that she placed on a chair next to my bed, and a saucer with some biscuits, : “…something to nibble…” she said before leaving. Her wordless, understanding sharing of my misery and the things she left behind somehow lessened the acute pain and while I looked at the little flame I must have dropped off to sleep. The next morning Mem came to tell me that my father had died during that night, that tante Miek would come to take both Piet and me with her to Rotterdam, because she thought that we were too young to go through the whole cremation ceremony. Long afterwards I felt that it had been a bad mistake, that it would, in fact, have been much better if the whole family had been there together and that it would have removed some of the awful feeling of separation between my father’s death and the daily reality of my life. But as it was we heard from her exactly what had happened and it made not the slightest difference: the fact of his death was never fully integrated into my experience.

Did I love him? Yes, I think so. I believe that admiration and love in this case had common roots. After his death, did I miss him? I don’t know…. and I wonder. How can we miss somebody who has not really been a part of our day-to-day experience?

Was he different from other fathers I knew? Yes, of course: he was famous nationally, while other fathers were, at best, well-known locally. I loved it when people asked me, as often happened, “Are you related to Just Havelaar?” and was proud to answer “He was my father.” It gave me a feeling of pride that was unmatched by anything else in my life, an awareness of reflected glory. I liked that situation as much as I hated the other, more frequent one: people asking me “Are you related to Max Havelaar?” It has even followed me to Canada….

Was he different in his relationships to his children from other fathers? I don’t think so, not in any real sense. There were fathers who did more within their families, with their kids. Moekie’s father loved to be with his daughter; together they went often for long walks or kayaking on the river. Her mother was not much inclined that way, and her brother, oom Henk, would rather play soccer, but she loved it as much as he did. Is it strange then that he had, initially at least, a somewhat reluctant attitude towards the young man who took that pleasure away from him?

What made my father’s position in the family different was not his inclination, but his work. The basis for his income was his function as an art-critic for a newspaper and that job required that he went to all exhibitions of any importance, wherever they were shown in the country, resulting in an awesome lot of traveling. Besides that, he was an excellent lecturer and was frequently invited to talk to various groups and organizations throughout the country: more travel. But his writing, his creative work, was uppermost in his mind, and writing is not only hard work, but lonely. There was simply not enough time in his life to do the things he would have loved to do, like be more with his wife and children. In retrospect it is amazing that he found time to do with us the things he did do, like playing games on Sunday nights.

A favourite of our family was called “sjoelbak”. It was played with flat wooden discs, about 2 inches in diameter, in an open wooden box, 6 feet long and 14 inches wide, that had sides about 3 inches high and one open end. The other end was divided in five compartments, a little wider than the discs, closed at both ends, but the closure facing the players had slots that were just wide and high enough to allow a disc to slide into the compartment. The bottom of the box was smooth and waxed. The players stood at the open end, each with six discs. Each in turn had to slide a disc and attempt to get it into one of the compartments. A slat across the top prevented him or her from leaning far forward; the disc had to be released before your hand slammed against the slat. If you succeeded you got a score: one point for each of the two side compartments, two for the next ones and three for the centre. A score keeper kept the count straight. It was a noisy game, but lots of fun. A real family game.

On special occasions my father brought out his slide projector which he kept in his study and used to illustrate his art lectures. It was a big machine, basically a tube about 6 inches in diameter and about 18 inches long. All slides were of course in black and white only. He had a number of different sets besides his art pictures, but I remember only two: one of a volcanic eruption somewhere, I believe Mont Pelee on Monserrat, that left obviously a significant impression on my mind. The other one was a nonsense tale about some explorers who meet with a tiger and manage to catch it in a barrel and hold it there by putting a knot in its tail protruding through a hole in the bottom of the barrel. To their amazement they find upon their return the next year a whole family of little tigers, all with barrels knotted to their tails…… It was a story that sent us and our friends in hysterics of laughter. Kids were not very sophisticated back then. I assume that it was my father’s telling that made it so awfully funny. At the end of the show we used to make shadow pictures with our hands on the screen, (which was in our case just a sheet pinned to the curtains): faces, rabbits, and such.

And then he loved to read to us, I think on Saturday evenings. The one story that has always stayed with me was a translation of a romantic, somewhat sentimental French novel,”Sans Family”, famous at that time, the story of a foundling who is brought up by a street musician (and his wife, I suppose, although I don’t remember that figure at all) who travels with his adopted father, a traveling harp player, all through France until, by accident, he meets his own birth-mother, who has married a rich man and who gradually comes to understand, while he tells his life story, that he is her son, the one she had been forced to abandon early in her life.

On Sundqy mornings he used to really enjoy the family breakfast; he was relaxed then, talked with us, joked with us, was totally involved with his family. I remember that he was allowed to lick the honey off his knife, a thing that was strictly forbidden to us, obviously for reasons of safety: our knives were sharp, but mostly because it was considered very Bad Manners. He taught us how to do it in such a way that you would avoid cutting yourself. I doubt very much that his wife approved of this instruction. She never failed to repeat emphatically that it was all good and well, but that my father was the only one who was allowed to do it. He loved honey too and ate that from his knife as well. “I must be a relative of the bears,” he used to joke.

I remember also the weekday breakfasts, with a mixture of fun and horror. He loved fried bacon, but neither he nor Mem liked the smell throughout the house. Therefore he did the frying in the kitchen with a closed door, then carried it to the front door by going outside and re-entering using his house key. I loved bacon.

There is a funny story related to the bacon-for-breakfast that dates back to before my time. The family lived in a house that had a huge mailbox built against the inside of the front door. It was big enough apparently to accommodate a small heating unit, I suppose an oil burner. He used to prepare his bacon inside the mailbox, so that the vapours and the smell could escape through the mail slot. There was of course a certain risk involved in the procedure, for you could never guarantee that the mail man would not be early one morning…. with possibly catastrophic results.

But later in life he developed a taste for porridge, the real thing, the way, he explained to us, it was made in England, where it was a much loved national dish. That meant that it was made with oats and water plus a bit of salt, nothing else. Milk and sugar were added on your plate. I loathed his porridge; a stiff, gray substance that had an uneven surface. It was hot, and the sugar melted and collected in little puddles. The first thing I did was spoon the liquid sugar out of the puddles…. but then I had to eat the rest without any more sugar and there were whole family dramas related to that process. As I said: I loathed porridge and have always felt sympathy with certain grandchildren who expressed similar feelings in relation to their father’s form of “porridge”.

Our birthdays were special in our family. I looked forward to my birthday with such anticipation that it almost seemed like a recipe for disaster: no real birthday could ever quite measure up to my expectations. The one whose birthday it was had to stay in his or her room until called. When you entered the room the whole family was lined up to welcome you with a special, very silly, but very traditional birthday song, much like our “Happy birthday to you!”, but not as nice. Then there was the table with flowers and the presents that you had to open, one by one, and the special breakfast…..Then to school with a bag of (preferably chewy) sticky candy, to be shared by all your classmates. And at night a supper with the food that you had chosen, in company of some of your best friends. For desert there was always a coffee pudding (only with substitution of the coffee by something like burned sugar, I believe), served in a horrendously ugly bowl, known in the family as “the golden bowl” , made of glass but in some kind of a basket of gilded metal, accompanied by meringues. My father loved those birthdays.

When I was about fourteen years old I got my first bike, fairly late compared to my friends. It was a bicycle that was assembled from used parts by a man who sold and repaired bikes, a former mental patient of Mem’s. For me the special feature was that it had the handle bar of an authentic Raleigh, the Cadillac of all bicycles in our estimation. I had learned to ride a bicycle by using my mother’s bicycle, standing on the pedal on the left hand side and propelling myself forward by pushing on the road surface with the other. Once you had found the necessary balance it was a natural development to use the other foot on the other pedal.

My first bike was my pride and joy. I had named it the “Black Mustang” (Karl May was never far from my thinking). I had an accident soon after getting it: I saw brother Charles just ahead of me, tried to catch up to him and crashed into an unbelievably small tree trunk in a dead-on head-on collision that deposited me on the ground behind my bike and bent the fore fork into some kind of a figure “five” shape. Mem was not pleased, but the fork could be, and was, straightened out.

Neither she nor my father were good bicycle riders, really. They had both learned later in their life and never became “part of” their bicycles like we were. Each of them had a different, but peculiar way of getting on and – off. My father placed his one foot on a little extension of the rear axle (“the step” it was called) and, after giving himself a sturdy push with the other, rose slowly, almost solemnly, and lowered himself onto the saddle. Mem had her own way, much like I have to do it at the age where I am now, but never learned to stand on the pedal the way I had learned to balance and ride. To get off she could not get her right leg behind her left leg and therefore had to make a little hazardous jump that never ceased to scare us: she could so easily have fallen flat on her face. I must admit: it never happened.

It was Charles who did the things with me that, ideally, a boy should share with his father. He took me camping, he and I skated together, sailed together, and he took enough interest in my wood projects to be always available when I needed advice or help. I admired his skill with wood, which was considerable, especially when one takes into account the very primitive facilities we had to work with: besides a hammer and nails there was a bench with a rather primitive vise, a hand saw, one chisel, one wooden block plane, a brace and bits and one screwdriver. His great strength was his patient accuracy: things he made always seemed to fit, not more or less, but precisely.

Charles had inherited the “koepel”, the small octagonal wooden building that my parents had bought while we were still living in our first house in Amersfoort. It had been smuggled across the border from Germany as “parts for a wooden church”, and had been taken apart and rebuilt in the far corner of the garden of “The Vier Winden, behind the little orchard. He had built a bench along two walls and needed a little table where he and his guests could get rid of their cups, or whatever. It was an ingenious design, something not unlike a miniature in wood of the kind of table that is used near hospital beds: one leg at a short side to support the top. It is not the easiest construction in wood. He showed me the thing before he glued it together… it was made so accurately that it was standing without anything to support it. He was really pleased that it had worked out so well, and I was amazed and intensely proud of my clever brother. The moment is still as clearly embedded in my mind as if it happened only a few months ago, for it has remained with me as a model of quality in woodwork, something to strive for continually, even though you know that you will rarely reach that level of accuracy.

He was a most unlikely hero in the life of a teenage boy: slender, wiry rather than strong, and not at all sports-minded, but a hero he was in my teenage years. I loved going camping with him, using his beautiful “campanula” tent, at that time a “state-of-the-art” tent, one of the first ones that utilized a separate roof, that has served him for an incredible number of years. During one of those trips, I believe on our way to Vierhouten, he introduced me to the world of politics by pointing out, in the course of our conversation, that the workers, they who produce the goods, are the ones who don’t share at all in the profits, which go to the shareholders who don’t do anything but provide the capital. It was, in other words, an elementary lesson in Marxist theory. I have never forgotten it. He was not at all a pure communist, but leaned, as did my father, much to the left. His example has had undoubtedly an enormous influence on me.

Years later, when I lived in the Hague I was introduced to an artist whom I greatly admired, both for his work and for his insights. He heard me express my opinions and was somewhat perturbed by the strongly communist overtones in what I said apparently (he was born and raised, I believe, in an east European country where the threat and the actual fear of communism was much more real than it was in western Europe) When we met the next time he said: “I have here a book that I would like you to read. It will save you several years of political thinking,” and handed me a biography of Stalin. He was quite right: it did. I don’t know whether there was any real danger of my becoming a member of a communist party, but after the reading of this horrendous story that door was closed firmly.

We grew up in a social-democratic milieu; all my father’s friends, the people who visited us and with whom we were more or less familiar, seemed to be inclined that way and to us that was the way intelligent, educated people thought, for we never heard anything else. It was not as if politics was a major topic of discussion in the family; in fact, I don’t remember that it was ever discussed at all. There was a concern for ordinary, working people’s lives and the underlying conviction that their fight to gain a more rewarding, more secure existence was not only justified but essential. I still remember vividly the long line-up of unemployed workers in Amersfoort near the office where they had to get daily stamps on their identification cards, and the sight of dozens of men digging by hand an enormous hole near Apeldoorn as part of a “make work programme”. It had to become an artificial valley in a municipal park….. My father’s support for the “Social Democratic Labour Party” was the logical consequence of his conviction. I don’t think he was ever an active member, but his sympathy and support were unquestionable and unambiguous.

It was an exciting time for Social Democrats. The party grew strong and increased its membership to become one of the major political movements in Holland, but it had not only a political influence. There was a strong undercurrent of “bringing culture to the workers” resulting in the establishment of educational facilities, opening possibilities for the development of music-making, theatre groups, etc. etc. The youth section of the party, the “Red Falcons”, grew by leaps and led to the building of a Centre in Vierhouten, “The Easter Hill”, where conferences were organized and summer camps were held. My father was a more or less regular visitor and lecturer there, and we attended several sessions, although I don’t think any of us were ever there for any length of time. The family’s vacations in Vierhouten originated with that contact, I’m sure, because the place appealed so much to my father: its total quiet, its lack of tourist facilities like hotels or restaurants, and its natural beauty.

And beautiful it was, a region that appeared to have maintained its character of unspoiled, almost untouched wildness: seemingly endless, undulating moors, punctuated with small groups of white birches, bits of scraggly jack pine forests and here and there a small lake. The wildness was not, in fact, untouched at all: there were little farms here and there, where terribly poor people tried to make a precarious living from sheep and the growing of rye, while paying rent to the rich who owned their land and controlled their lives, supported only, or so it seemed, by a strong religious fundamentalism that helped them to accept their poverty with a fatalistic sense of submission. And the pine forests had all been planted, in part as a form of alternative income for the land owners, and in part as a way to prevent the sand dunes that appeared here and there from blowing over to cultivated land and roads.

For him, being in Vierhouten was more than enjoying a holiday; it was an essential part of his life, the only chance he had to unwind, get away from obligations and deadlines, and engage actively in his family life while enjoying some creative activity when he was using his sketchbook. (I suddenly wonder what has happened to those precious sketchbooks?)

It was undoubtedly Mem who encouraged, maybe pushed for, these yearly trips and made them possible by her phenomenal organizational talents. It was no small undertaking, to make sure that there would be sufficient clothes for the whole family for a month, to see that it was shipped in time to be there before we arrived, and to secure, as much as was possible, that he would be untroubled and free to enjoy the all-too-brief period of rest. That involved, among other things, that something had to be found that would keep me happily occupied, away from the rest of the family in order to ensure peace. Organized camping was the obvious answer, but everybody in the family felt that the organization where Lieske and Charles were so happy, the “Vrije Jeugdkerk” camps in Vrouwepolder on Walcheren, were not for me. I was too loud, too much of a braggart, too much in need of showing off, to be at home there, they thought. And so I went to the other camps, those organized by the liberal wing of the Protestant church. It was a mistake, I think, but I may come to that later. I never enjoyed those camps, not really, but made up by a lot of loud singing and shouting.

The rest of the family did not present problems. Piet joined Bronkhorst, the farmer, and worked hard with him. I think it is there that he discovered that he wanted to be a farmer. Lieske kept herself busy and was much involved in the care for her little sister, and Charles read and practiced his flute, by the hour, sitting under a birch tree at a little distance from the house. The sound of his playing in that environment was lovely and fitting, I thought. When I was there I was mostly bored, for there was nothing for me to do: no friends to play with, no projects…. nothing except to join the rest of the family on the almost daily bicycle trips. I’ll come back to all that later, when I deal specifically with holidays.

Mem’s role in my father’s life was of all-encompassing importance. They got married in May, ’24 and on their honeymoon in Switzerland he presented her with a walking cane that had, in letters punched in a thin aluminum strip that was spiraling around the cane, the words: “I support her who stimulates, pushes.”, which lacks in translation the wonderful conciseness of the original in Dutch: “Ik stut de stuwende.” It was, I have always felt, a touching tribute of a man, both deeply in love and sharply, gratefully aware of the essentiality in his life of the woman he loves. My mother had been ill for two years and life for my father must have been terribly difficult. There were relatives and, I suppose, some of his friends, who thought that a new marriage within half a year of my mother’s death was not in good taste, to say the least. It seems to me that this was a harsh judgment, rooted in sterile formalism. Most of those who knew him well understood and embraced Mem wholeheartedly. She was 30 years old, and he 44.

They were very much in love and incredibly happy together. Mem took over the care for the financial aspects of their life and the situation there rapidly improved. The years following their marriage proved to be the most productive in his career. Her task was not an easy one: she suddenly had to look after and care for four children, and in ’25 tante Miek was born. Her housekeeping talents were limited to organisation, but since there was always a maid to do the cleaning and the cooking, and another woman who looked after the sewing, her organizational talent was all that was needed to make things run smoothly. She had excellent relationships with the people who worked for her. Her new children loved her. A model family.

If everything was going so well, what was it that made the relationship between Mem and me so tortuous and often so difficult? I have never been able to give an entirely satisfying answer to that question, but there were, of course, many elements that contributed to that development and some of those I think I can recognize in retrospect, but I would like to try first to sketch her as I remember her.

She had a complex nature. The whole family (there were four kids) had grown up under a heavy cloud: their father, who was a minister, had taken his own life. Suicide has always been a terrifying thing, but suicide by a minister….. unthinkable and certainly in those days unmentionable. I don’t think the fact itself, and the circumstance leading up to it, were ever fully and openly talked about in that family. Everybody knowing, of course, and nobody talking about it ……that is the perfect breeding ground for problems later. The suffering must have been awful. Mem’s mother, Oma Sybolts, was a gentle, wonderful woman, a generous soul without a trace of bitterness. I imagine it was her love that kept them together and allowed them to grow up into “normal” adults, but the depressive streak that must have been one of the reasons for the father’s death ran through his children, stronger in some than in others. Mem knew that she had inherited that trait and fought against it with all her strength. How she managed to carry on after my father’s death is hard to imagine, but the constant awareness of how much he had loved her and how totally he had trusted her must have given her the strength she needed. She was intensely proud to have been his wife, but I am also sure that she has been a constant source of strength and inspiration to him.

She was, I think, ambitious in the sense that she wanted to be regarded as a very “cultural” woman, worthy of his love, and worth-while in her own right, not only in the reflection of his fame. It was important to her to be “Mrs. Havelaar”, which was in the Holland of my younger years socially a considerable asset, but she was an exceptional woman and didn’t need that social crutch to be recognized as such. She was very intelligent and read widely and critically. Her tastes, in literature as well as in appreciation and judgment of the visual arts, were impeccable. Under her management the interior of “De Vier Winden” changed from a rather haphazard collection of incongruous elements into the lovely, tasteful home we were all proud of. The rather useless little terrace at the back of the house was changed into the bright sunny room that was known as the playroom, which has been an asset. Our bedrooms, one after the other, were made into something that reflected our personalities. She loved music and was, on the whole, a keen observer and a good judge of people around her. Had she not been the person she was, she would never have been able to maintain the friendships that my father had developed, particularly the very close ties with the family Nieweg, who became her best friends as they had been my father’s. The only times when her good judgment failed her was in meeting the prospective partners of her children. She never really liked Moekie and continued to underestimate her, but the other husbands and wives had some trouble in establishing a good relationship, let alone a close bond, with their mother-in-law, with one exception: Co van der Kieft, tante Miek’s husband. He had come into the family circle as a flute pupil of oom Charles, but had ended up staying with her and tante Miek during the war. She admired and liked him very much and actively promoted the budding relationship between her daughter and her boarder. With the others it was as if nobody could ever be quite good enough…..I wonder if it had anything to do with the name “Havelaar”? As if only very few people were worthy of that name, and she was the judge of their qualifications?

As far as her relationship with me was concerned, I have no doubt that she loved us, all of us, but it is easier to respond to love that is spontaneously forthcoming than to maintain a loving relationship with an individual who is continuously, if unwittingly, frustrating one’s efforts to come closer.

There was no problem with any of the others: Charles was a trusted and invaluable support, Lieske was close to her and closer after the birth of Miek, but maybe her relationship with both of them was more like a friendship than like the love one does expect between a mother and her children. Piet, however, adopted her as his mother from the moment she entered our lives as my father’s wife. I am afraid that I was just a little too old for that; that I had already too strong bonds with my mother to accept her completely in her place. I have never been conscious of such an emotion, never doubted for a moment the genuineness of her love for me, and I think I was right. But it was a love that was mixed with other emotions, certainly not the unquestioning, giving love of a mother for her own child.

I have desperately tried to impress her all my life, even after we returned for the first time in ’71. We had invited her and Nel van Dis, the friend who lived in the same apartment building and her neighbour, for a lunch in a fancy restaurant, but I had to admit , after a look at the menu and the prices, that this was well above my capabilities….. a painful admission. We made do with mere hors d’oeuvres. I still feel the sting of the waiter’s look and my thorough embarrassment.

That need to impress people has always been with me and it still pops up in little ways, but with few people has that inclination been as strong as it was with Mem. I can not really explain why, but I think it had its roots in an element in our relationship that may or may not be real. It was as if I reminded her in certain ways of my father, but was a constant failure to live up to that image. She was critical of what I did and let me know it. I have always been much aware of her criticisms; they hurt and made me not only resentful but insecure. As a result I tried in my own stupid and ineffectual ways to compensate for it.

I don’t know if that supposition has any truth or value, but I am sure that I created a lot of problems for her, both in the family and at school, problems that made her task that much heavier. There was, if I think about it, very little in my behaviour that would have given her any joy or satisfaction. I am afraid that she was constantly expecting another disappointment or problem to appear around the corner. Piet, who gave her readily and completely his affection, was much easier to deal with, even though she must have had some worries about his performance at school as well. I must have taken up an excessive amount of her time and energies, and that was, I think, why I spent as much time as I did outside our own family: she had to find ways to reduce the burden. I think I know what it is to have been “a difficult child”; I have been there, for a long time.

 

The relationship between brother Piet and me was “normal” in most ways. I was two years older than he, but in the family we were, most of the time, considered together: the “jochies”, (“the little boys”). That bothered me somewhat, but what was far harder to take was the fact that Piet was stronger than I was. We fought endlessly, not viciously (there were very strict rules to our fighting: no kicking, no punching, just wrestling, and no dirty tricks), and usually he won. And what was the most difficult to take: Piet was more popular, better liked by most adults. There was something innocent, straightforward and trusting in his nature that had an immense appeal. And he was considerate; he thought of others, not as a duty, but quite naturally. I was often very jealous of him.

Piet had discovered at a very young age, that he wanted to be a farmer. There was no family-precedent for this, although one of my mother’s brothers, oom Aad, who was after my father’s death our guardian, had been a “gentleman-farmer” at one stage of his life, but the emphasis was on the “gentleman” in his case, whereas for Piet there was nothing but the real thing, hard work and little luxury. Because he wanted to be a farmer he wanted to go to a school where farmers’ kids would go, and not to a city school. My parents thought that was a good idea, and enrolled him in a rural school close to Amersfoort. He went back and forth on his bicycle and fitted admirably in his chosen environment, hiding as much as was possible that his family lived a suburban life. He succeeded to an amazing degree, and was considered one of the class and nothing special. The one situation he feared more than anything was that Mem would come and meet him at or near the school, for that would have blown his cover. So they arranged that she could meet him at a safe distance from the school, where it was unlikely that they would be seen together. Mem respected his wishes scrupulously.

As a student Piet was middling, far from stupid, and equally far from interested. After he had finished elementary school he went to the H.B.S., a school for those who were not necessarily interested in going to university, whereas it was assumed that all those attending the Gymnasium wanted to keep the university option open in all subjects, and would therefore need a solid background in both Latin and Greek. The H.B.S. taught most of the subjects the Gymnasium offered, but not the two classical languages, and placed a somewhat heavier emphasis on math and sciences as required courses. In neither of the two did the students have options: you took what was offered, all of it, and had to pass most of it in order to emerge with a diploma. The H.B.S had 5 grades, the Gymnasium 6.

Piet was not working very hard and showed in gr 9 such a dismal report at Easter that it seemed obvious that he would not make it into the next grade. Mem told him that he could quit after passing gr. 9, and go on to an agricultural school, because that is what he wanted, and he needed gr. 9 for entry. Piet got to work, and passed, not with honours, but solidly. Who said that “motivation is the key to education”? And after finishing that it was to the agricultural school, and on to the farm for practical experience.

For young farmers the big opportunity in those days was the “new land”, the bottom of the former Zuiderzee which was being transformed into polders, pieces of land below sea level, kept dry by pumping the water from inside the dike that surrounds each one to the outside. In order to qualify you had to have practical experience gained by working on one of the farms in the new polders. Piet got a job on a farm in the “Wieringermeer”, the first of the four projected large new polders, and worked there through the whole war. Both he and his boss, Mansveld, were involved in work for the underground .Of course nobody in the family had the slightest indication of his involvement. It was their task to gather the arms that were dropped by the Allied planes and facilitate their transport to Amsterdam. When Piet got married, shortly after the war was over, his bride was dressed in a gown made from the “silk” of a parachute. It was Piet’s efforts in gathering food that got us, the rest of the family, through the last winter of the war.

He was killed in a motorbike accident two weeks after his wedding. He and Fusine, his brand-new wife, were moving to Vollenhove, a village on the edge of the latest of the new polders where the “Zuiderzee” had been. It had just fallen dry, and now entered the stage of initial cultivation. During that process the government preferred, I believe, to hire young farmers to work there. Piet told me that, in order to qualify for a farm, it was a real advantage if you had been part of the team that was involved in that first stage. That was of course why they moved to Vollenhove. After four years experience in the Wieringermeer, he wanted to obtain a farm of his own here and I suppose his chances of getting that were as good as anybody’s.

They had rented a house, and Piet was going on his light motorbike to arrange for the delivery of some furniture that had been shipped to the closest city, Blokzijl. Close to their new house was a crossing of two roads, where he stopped at the same time when a truck stopped at the same crossing on the other road. It seems that both Piet and the truck driver thought that the other was waiting for him to cross, and both started up at the same time. There was a collision and Piet was thrown off his little motorbike and apparently broke the base of his skull…. Helmets were unheard of then, except for racing. It would likely have saved his life.

We were, by that time, well on our way to becoming good friends. My jealousies had evaporated, and a real admiration had come in its place. It was not difficult to admire him: he was an open, genuine, warm person with a keen sense of humour, who had no need of trying to impress people and who hated bragging, both characteristics that I have never been quite able to shed. A rare and wonderful human being.

With my sisters I always had a pleasant, if not particularly close relationship. Interesting to look back, compare with the reality of relations today, and be grateful for the change. Lieske lived a life so different from my own in very aspect that there was little real need for closeness; we had few interests in common. I think that I lived very much in my own world, a world populated with fantastic, larger-than-life heroes and villains, who bore remarkable resemblance to those I found in the books by Karl May, a German who never set foot in America but wrote volume after volume about the great adventures of his two super heroes, Winnetou, Chief of the Apaches, and his white blood brother Old Shatterhand, in their constant struggle to rid the world of the scoundrels who wanted to plunder the riches of the Indians. There were at least half a dozen books in this series, and every one was over 300 pages… I must have read them all. Fortunately Mr. May was prone to wordiness and related in great detail all the conversations that took place, verbatim in fact. There were many conversations….. but those I usually skipped. It made the reading both more interesting and more manageable, since they had no effect on the actions. He left in my impressionable mind a vivid picture of life in the Wildest West, vivid and woefully distorted. Interesting detail: Winnetou had a sister, who was both virtuous and very beautiful, and in love with Old Shatterhand…who could not return her love, because he was white and she was Indian. This was the only stupid mistake the Great One made in the eyes of this devoted reader Lieske lived in her world, which was, by the way, the same world where her parents lived, and her brothers, if and when I could be forced to face reality. She had no use for Karl May. There is in the “Memories” she wrote for her children and grandchildren so much that I simply didn’t know, at least did not remember, that I had time and again a feeling as if we had been living in different families.

She had as a young girl a very developed sense for drama, theatrics. There was the moment when Piet had found a dead caterpillar or something similar, a dead insect anyway. He showed it to his sister whose immediate reaction was that here was an opportunity for a miniature bit of theatre, involving her two younger brothers and the friends who happened to be present. She had Piet find a suitable little container and he returned with an empty matchbox…. It could not have suited the circumstances more perfectly. So the little box was carefully lined with something soft, cotton batten or tissue paper or something like it, before the dead bug was laid down in it with extreme and earnest reverence. The box was then solemnly closed and carried in a little procession to the bit of shrub oak bush next to our house. There we had to dig a hole, under Lieske’s supervision, of course, and then, standing in a tight little circle around it, watch Piet who carefully, lovingly lowered the box with its precious load into the hole and then proceeded putting the dirt back on top, while the circle had to sing an appropriate song. Alas: psalms or even hymns were not in our singing repertoire. No problem: we all knew at least the melody of the national anthem, and Lieske knew the words. So the dead bug was interred in a fitting manner and nobody of those present laughed or thought that it was a bit ridiculous.

Lieske was not prejudiced in her relationships to those around her, and did not suffer in the least from feelings of superiority. She accepted people as she found them, I believe, and either did or did not like them, but that was always based on real personality, not on the family they belonged to. When I was bold enough to introduce Moekie into our family by inviting her to come to Amersfoort, I was soon convinced that Mem had not much faith in our relationship. (Frankly, I think that she found Moekie “plain”, culturally not on her level, not “fitting” very well in the family) Lieske, on the other hand, took quickly to her and between the two there was an immediate contact that has only grown stronger over the years.

I thought my sister was beautiful and talented, living on a higher plane. Wasn’t she one of the most popular students in the years when we both attended the same elementary school? And was she not elected to the highest honour known in the secondary school she attended, a sort of student council, called “Seniors”? It didn’t even surprise me (I believe it surprised her!), for such honours seemed to me to be in line with her charms and skills. But my admiration didn’t translate into a stronger and more personal bond, not at the time when we were both teenagers.

That bond developed much later, after I had moved our houseboat, the “Janneke Jans”, to Nieuwersluis and Lieske took it upon herself to come and do some badly needed cleaning, as “Aal”, the cleaning woman. And then came her marriage to Simon van Woerden, a young and very talented architect who had an office in Amsterdam and was establishing a real reputation. He was a friend of Ton and Bertus Sondaar, where Lieske had met him. He fell, I believe, instantly in love, but Lieske wasn’t so sure and when he finally proposed she told him so. His reaction was priceless, something like “O, but you are totally mistaken….” and continued to work on breaking down her doubt and resulting resistance, until she accepted him. The announcement came on the “Janneke Jans” to our delight. We admired and liked Simon. They lived in a farmhouse fairly close to Nieuwersluis, in Baambrugge, a very small community not far from Amsterdam, so that Simon could easily commute to his work. We saw them often. In front of the farm “ran” (I don’t remember having ever seen any movement in the water) a very small river, the “Angstel”, and you had to cross a real drawbridge to reach the house. We enjoyed those visits enormously. The house was old, unique and beautifully furnished by Simon, but also very damp. Next to the house was a large orchard where we often had tea during the summer, delightfully in the shade.

Miek was so much younger than I was (ten years!) that our relationship could not have been very close. Lieske was immediately very much involved with her baby-sister. I believe that Mem found it very convenient to have Lieske around, for she was an ideal babysitter and took over many of the little daily tasks. Like all members of the family, (like almost everybody who met Miek, who was a beautiful, charming, happy child) I loved her very much, and I suffered like the other ones when she was very dangerously ill at an appallingly young age. She developed appendicitis when she was only fur or five years old. The operation was done in the only hospital available in Amersfoort, a Catholic hospital, run by nuns in their habits. There were suspicions that the sisters were not too keen observers of personal hygiene, but what was worse was that Mem, with her vast experience as a nurse, didn’t like the medical staff, especially the surgeon who operated on Miek. However, the operation went smoothly, and the little patient recovered rapidly until, after a week, her temperature shot up again. She was rushed back to the operating room, where the other surgeon (whose reputation was not much, but a little better than of the first one) operated again, and found that his colleague had left a piece of dressing behind when he closed the incision. As a result the membrane lining the abdominal cavity was infected. For a whole week she hovered on the brink of life, but finally she pulled through. Mem’s worst moment, she said, came when she entered the hospital room and found two sisters, facing each other, kneeling at the bed, praying… If ever there was a reason for suing a medical practitioner for malpractice, and suing the hell out of him or her, this was such a case. But malpractice suits were unheard of in those years. She evidently recovered.

What I remember with real joy is the image of Miek riding in a little seat right in front of my father on his bicycle, and the sound of their constant, happy conversation. My father’s love for the blond, blue-eyed miracle that had entered his overly-busy life so late was boundless. During the four years when I lived in Nijmegen and came only home for the holidays, and after that in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, I was never very much involved in her life. During the last year(s) of the war she got engaged to Co van der Kieft, (originally a flute pupil of Charles’) who boarded with them and whom Mem very much liked and admired.

Co had changed the direction of his life totally during the time he lived in Amersfoort and more or less as a member of the family, from doing a bookkeeper’s job to academic study. In order to do that he had to pass an examination that would give him equal standing with those who had finished the gymnasium. But the Latin and Greek we covered in six years were usually covered by those who worked towards that exam in two, if they worked very hard. Co did it in one….. After that he refused to do military service (that was immediately after the war) as a conscientious objector, was kept in an old fort in Nieuwersluis for some time, but finally got out (I don’t remember how or why) and started his university study in History in Amsterdam, where he eventually succeeded his professor after the man retired.

We have always had a very profound respect for Co’s incredibly hard work and enormous success and liked the man we met when we returned to Holland for our first visit. Their marriage did not work out and they separated, but retained a close relationship. Through all of this Miek and we have really “discovered” each other after we went to Canada and by now the differences caused by age and very different experiences, most of them during and shortly after the war, have of course disappeared.

 

 

 

 

 

SOCIAL

 

The Dutch society of those days divided the population in social layers, far more so than our Canadian society does, in which one’s social “status” is largely determined by the amount of money you have, regardless of your education. In the society where we grew up education was an important, (though not the only), determining factor in placing a person on the social ladder. Male professionals of all kinds were addressed as “Mijnheer such-and-such” and their wives were “Mevrouw”. Basically these words mean the same as our “Mr.” and “Mrs.”, but in English a “Mr.” is simply a male, a “Mrs.” a married female. In Holland, at least at the time when we were children, the words “Mijnheer” and “Mevrouw” were also indications of social status; they were only used for individuals of the “upper middle class”, and money didn’t automatically make a person a member of that class.

People addressed my father as “Mijnheer Havelaar”, but it would have been considered very ill mannered if he had introduced himself in that way, ill mannered and presumptuous. It was, however, quite allright for women to do so. When Mem answered the phone she said “Mevrouw Havelaar” and that was the correct way to identify herself, but had my father picked up the phone and had said “Mijnheer Havelaar” it would have been unacceptable. Strange, how some things linger…When I was a child I learned, of course, how to answer a telephonecall, and that is still the way I do it now, just by giving my last name, to the amusement of Canadian callers. Maybe I should add that all men who were not “Mijnheer” were addressed by just their family name, and therefore I have never known the carpenter I mentioned before by any other name than “Dijkhuizen”. His wife, though, would have been “Juffrouw Dijkhuizen”.

All this is a bit quaint and not very important (I believe that the distinction is probably no longer valid in Holland), but there was an aspect to it that was very important. There was a real distance between the two groups, and it was unthinkable that my father and Dijkhuizen would have been friends, something we wouldn’t think of as strange. Why wouldn’t an author and a carpenter be friends? Maybe they would live side by side and play chess on Thursday nights… But in the world in which we grew up they would not likely have been neighbours and if they had lived side by side they would probably hardly have known each other.

In other words: the layers normally didn’t mix. It was most noticeable in our daily contact with the domestic help, our maid. All families had a maid; I don’t recall any exceptions. The girls who did this work came mostly from the countryside, farmers’ daughters, daughters of tradespeople, usually from large families. Many came from Germany, partcularly shortly after W.W.1, when there was a lot of hunger and misery in Germany after the collapse of their currency.

They didn’t come because they expected to earn a lot of money, or find interesting work. The salaries were scandalous, but there was no “minimum wage” in those days; a girl who wanted to work as domestic help knew what to expect: low wages, long hours, a small room, and little privacy. What made it nevertheless attractive was that room and board were free. They were supposed to do all the cooking as well as the cleaning. They had to bring the food to the table and take out the dirty dishes, and they were warned when the family had finished each course by a bell that was operated from the dinner table. In our home there was a little device hanging from the lampshade by its electric cord, shaped like an acorn with a little white button in the bottom. When the maid was needed to clear things away my mother pressed the button and within seconds there she would be.

The work they were supposed to do was more or less the same in all families, but there were enormous differences in their relationships with their employers and with the members of the family, and these could make their lives either pleasant or terrible. Mem never had any trouble with our maids; they were treated as human beings. We, the kids, were taught to be polite. We liked our maids and developed a personal relationship with them that made them feel appreciated. The two maids I can remember, Els and later Katrien, stayed until they got married. It was not usual, this situation. The lady nextdoors, the mother of my best friend, was a wonderful person to us, and endlessly patient, but she could not hang on to her maids. They came and went with awful frequency, which made it hard on the whole family, for they had to get used to the maid as much as she had to get used to them, and to have to repeat the whole process every two or three months was of course making it harder for both parties. And some didn’t last even two months.

Notwithstanding very good, even warm relationships between family and maid, they lived very separate lives. The maid ate and lived in the kitchen, was never invited or expected to be in the livingroom with us, except to bring in the food or clear the table. She was allowed to have her boyfriend (they referred to this person as their “galant”) visit once a week, if I remember correctly, in the kitchen, of course. Some place for courtship: a smallish, usually old, table and one straight chair.(They must have been allowed to bring in another chair on these occasions, coming to think about it, but I don’t remember that; maybe there were two chairs) And, of course, the kitchen had only one light, a very plain ceiling fixture. A less friendly, less welcoming room was hard to imagine. But that, too, was part of the deal. Their bedroom was just that, in our house a little unheated room on the attic with a bed, a washstand, one chair, and a built-in closet for their clothes. Once a week they had an evening off.

The hours were hard to believe, by our standards. They were up before anybody else to prepare breakfast, and were not really finished before 7:30 or 8 o’clock at night. Not all was hard, physical work, but there was a lot of that, too: scrubbing and mopping and beating the dust out of carpets… an awful job that was, but it happened only at the time of the spring cleaning. And, yes, the tiled path from the gate to the front door had to be scrubbed once in a while; the brass bellknob and the lid of the letterbox had to be polished.

Their cooking skills were, of course, of great importance, certainly in our family, because Mem couldn’t cook at all, couldn’t cook and couldn’t sew. She and the maid would discuss the meals and Mem would order what was needed from the butcher by phoning.

The baker delivered door to door, daily, pushing a heavy closed wooden cart, really an enormous wooden box on wheels. It fascinated me to watch those guys close the lids, that were held open by a articulated metal strap: they would just pull the support so that it folded and let the lid come down with an awesome bang. I was always afraid that it would smash their hand, but they were very good at it and I never witnessed a mishap. On their way back to the bakery two fellows would sometimes walk side by side, one pushing his cart, while the other one pulled his. There were those who used a big dog to help them, the dog in a harness under the cart, which had, for that purpose, an axle with a bend in it to make room for the animal. We thought it was cruel to use dogs in that way. Whether that was true or not, I don’t know; the dogs they used were very big and strong. Maybe there isn’t much difference in effort between pulling a sled, running all the time, and pulling a breadcart at a walking pace. I suppose the treatment the animal received would make the difference between cruelty and just hard work.

All foodstuff was delivered to the house. The grocer came once a week to pick up a little booklet, in which Mem had written what was needed, and delivered it that same day. The vegetable man came also once a week, with a wagon pulled by a horse. Once in a while, I suppose during holidays, I was allowed to go with him a little ways to his next customer, and it was on such an occasion that I tasted my first tomato, a novelty, obviously. All deliveries were made to the kitchendoor where they could be received dry, under the roof.

I don’t remember much about Katrien’s friend, other than that he struck me as a very honest, good fellow, and not very bright, certainly no match for our aggressively intelligent Katrien. She was very good in doing elementary school math problems, that gave me a lot of trouble, and helped me often with that part of my schoolwork. Like almost all kids of her social group, she hadn’t even tried high school. Our society was incredibly short sighted in educational matters, and the human waste must have been atrocious. It was considered normal that all children belonging to our social class would go to secondary school and on to university, if their parents could afford it, but if you did not belong to that privileged group you faced an uphill struggle all the way. The result was, of course, that “streaming” was automatic and not at all based upon intelligence or motivation, but on little more than on class distinction. Parents paid for their children’s highschool, but the fees were adjusted to their income, and sometimes waved if they really could not afford to pay. It was, in other words, maybe not so much financially impossible to give your child a secondary education; what made it unlikely for most of our population was the deeply rooted class system. And if a family broke through that barrier of class prejudice and sent their children to a secondary school, it was more likely to be the H.B.S. than the Gymnasium, for, as I explained before, the latter trained for university entrance, and at that level no exceptions were possible: Dad paid the works and the true nature of class distinction became visible: the best jobs had better stay within the dominant class.

Who knows? maybe Katrien would have made an excellent lawyer, teacher, or what have you, but, instead, her bright mind was kept under a cover… I wonder if her children have broken free? I must mention here the one case of a person who did break out of the class prison,but that case is not totally comparable to the people working for my parents, for he came from a rural environment and his father was a person of considerable status and influence in his community: Moekie’s father, who left home when he was 14, joined the army as a volunteer, got his education while training in military service, went on to become a highly successful professional therapeutic masseur and later one of the most popular teachers at both the Gymnasium and the H.B.S. Such cases were fairly rare and required more than just brains….

Funny: as well as I remember Katrien, so little do I remember her later husband, although he must have been a frequent visitor to our house, but with the person who preceded Katrien it is the other way around: I really have only a hazy memory of Els, a plump, cheerful presence in our familylife, but Herman, her boy-friend, stands out quite clearly. He was a very powerful man, an athlete, and enormously proud of his muscular build. He liked kids and often taught Piet and me callisthenics on the floormat in the kitchen, insisting that we do our push-ups properly, with a straight back, and our sit-ups with our hands behind our head. My father-in-law would have shuddered at this form of training, (he didn’t like push-ups at all) but we thought it was great, the real stuff. Our admiration for Herman was almost boundless; Herman could kick a soccerball straight over the top of our house. When the poor fellow suffered from a nasty boil in his armpit he didn’t go to a doctor, but tried to cure himself by swinging a pail full of water in a circle, just like we used to do with a bag with wet lettuce. It did not work, and the boil eventually had to be lanced.

My strongest memory of Herman is related to his help in trying to fulfill one of my oldest and dearest wishes: to own a model sailboat that would really sail. Herman was not a fancy woodworker, and the result of his efforts looked less like a boat than an odd-sized wooden shoebox with a pointed end. But to me it was my first model sailboat, and I wished it to sail so badly that I believed that it would. When we arrived in our rented house in Noordwijk, a North Sea resort, the black box (black because Herman used alot of good oldfashioned tar to make sure that it wouldn’t leak) was of course with me, and the next morning would bring me the big moment.

The Dutch beaches are wide and flat stretches of white sand. What makes them dangerous in stormy weather are the rows of sandbanks, but in calm weather the same sandbanks form shallow pools at low tide filled with nice warm water, ideal pools for model sailboats. Alas, mine wouldn’t sail at all and just when I had reached the conclusion that it was hopeless, another boy, a bit older than I was, came down to the same pool, with in his arms the ideal model sailboat, as I remember it over two feet long, with a tall mast, adjustable sails, a working rudder and a fine keel… a dream. It was not really blowing, just a gentle breath of warm air. The boy placed his treasure in the water, and then it healed a bit, and took off, so fast that the boy had to jump after it, and got his immaculate white shorts quite wet… splendid! What could possibly have been more convincing? That boat almost got away from him! It was a crushing experience. I have ever since made model sailboats, forever in pursuit of the bright, elusive dream image of that summer beach of long ago.

It was Herman who sharpened our table knives in the “pantry”, where the tools were kept for the central heating furnace. He used a hardwood board, about 4″ wide and 30″ long, that had a small wooden box at one end, containing very fine white sand. By stroking the knives back and forth over this board, thinly covered with sand, they got very sharp…if you knew how to do it. But because the knives were a bit longer than the board was wide, the central portion was wearing more than the ends, and the result was that all our table knives assumed, over a period of time, a peculiar shape: the tip and the base would be wide, but the central portion was very narrow. It made the knives more useful for flipping eggs than for cutting meat: they became too flexible.

Because Mem didn’t sew, but our clothes needed repairs, she employed a woman who came regularly (I don’t remember how often, maybe twice a month?) to take care of that chore. Her name was Mina, and because she walked so fast Mem had, teasingly, called her “Flying Mina”, a nickame she didn’t mind a bit. She would be sitting in what we called the “Playroom” (it was really a sort of a sun-room, a hexagon more or less, with glass in five walls, windows in four, in the fifth a double glass door that gave access to the garden, and a sixth that joined it to the house. That room was heated in fall and winter by means of a gas heater when it was used, but because of the glass and the fact that insulation in house construction was unknown, it was really not usable in cold weather. I do not remember where Mina was doing her job when it was freezing outside, but I suppose on the livingroom table. The most remarkable thing about the family’s relationship with her was that she was eating lunch with us and not in the kitchen with Katrien. I remember her surrounded by unending, incredible piles of clothes, particularly underwear, but also sheets, and shirts, like a woman condemned to fight, not unlike Sisyphus, a battle she could never win. The only, but significant, differences were that she did it more or less voluntarily and was paid for doing it. Sisyphus only suffered.

 

The last person I want to mention as a significant helper was the gardener, who came once a week. Ours was a large garden, and my parents were neither inclined nor physically able to maintain it. Shortly after they were married they had a firm specializing in garden-lay-out design it for them, with all the latest touches, like a wide border surrounding the lawn, from which it was separated by an edge that wove in and out like a garter snake frozen suddenly while attempting to escape. That wavy edge must have been the curse of our gardener’s otherwise peaceful excistence, for it must have taken him about twice as long as it should have to cut that lawn every week, which was the first thing he did after he arrived, with an oldfashioned reel mower. Gasmowers were, of course, quite unknown, not to mention electric ones. The mower made a wonderful clicking sound, a sound I loved to hear when I woke up, the sound of summer.

His struggles in the garden had rarely the glorious results a true gardener must, deep in his heart, long for. It was not his fault, it was his fate: almost all his customers lived in the same general area, and that area was solid sand and gravel, there deposited by an ice-age glacier. It didn’t make much difference how much water and fertilizer you used, both disappeared quickly, without much effect on what you had planted. Improving that soil was an almost hopeless task, and a very expensive one. Our garden looked nice enough, we thought, not very different from our neighbours’ gardens. All tended to turn somewhat brownish in warm summers, but they all regained some colour after it had rained. Nobody ever thought about the posibilities of composting the grassclippings, leaves and whatever else we routinely use, which was, in retrospect, strange, because composting, as a way to turn garbage into soil, was used on a large scale by the garbage collection systems of several cities, and the final product was available and used as a fertilizer-of-sorts. Maybe it was the fact that the stuff was never completely composted, and looked a bit disgusting, that turned people against the idea itself. All metal was removed from the raw garbage by passing it, spread out on a moving belt, under a huge elctric magnet. Plastics were of course unknown, and it must have been possible to turn the rest into a good compost, but somehow it didn’t seem to happen, and the result looked a lot more like garbage, with bits and pieces of all manner of material clearly visible, than like compost.

Our neigbour, Mr. van Hasselt, who was a chemical engineer and owned a little facory, was an enthusiastic gardener and tried to improve the soil by applying a waste product from his operation: the stomachs of calves. Before the stuff was dug in it was dumped in big piles over the lawn, where it remained for several weeks, if my memory is correct, and spread an incredible, a sickening smell, to the alarm of all his neighbours. I don’t remember whether it did any good at all in the end.

Poor gardener: his was an an unrewarding job which he did without ever a murmur, even when the lawn was, once again, devastated by a hyper-active mole. He put his boot on every little mound and went on to other tasks, while the mole invariably returned to his, and rebuilt all the little piles, if not the same day, then the next.

One little story here. One of our maids (I think it was Katrien, but I can’t be sure) had discovered, by close observation from the kitchen window, that the mole who was pestering us at that time made his rounds in a predictable manner, returning to the same spot every, let’s say, two hours. You could tell, she claimed, because you could see the sand of a mound move a bit every time he passed and shoved a little more dirt up and out of his way. She posted herself just before she expected the mole to return next to the chosen mound, with a spade , and waited. Sure enough, while she was watching the dirt moved slightly, she drove in the spade and flung the mole in the air, and before he could dig in again he was dead. She inspected the little animal in his beautiful soft black coat, uttered a little cry and ran inside to find my mother. “I caught the mole” she cried, “and he is married! He is wearing a wedding ring!” Together they went to look at the dead mole, the maid quite a bit more excited than Mem, until she, too, saw what the maid had found: on the mole’s broad right forepaw he was indeed wearing a tiny gold band, on the fourth “finger”.

While writing this highly unlikely tale down I questioned my memories, but all I can come up with is that I saw it myself, after coming home from school.

 

 

 

 

 

FRIENDS

My first friend in Amersfoort was the son of a furniture finisher, specializing in restoring the high-gloss French polish on pianos and the like. Hans Westdorp was his name. He finished at the school where I had started, and so we lost contact for several years, but later we met again in the same class in the gymnasium. I believe it was Hans with whom I shared the same school bench and made the interesting games on its top that I have described in the chapter on schools. I remember very little of him at the early stages, just that I was fascinated watching his father at work and even more fascinated by witnessing his butchering of a chicken in their back yard, fascinated and horrified, for the headless chicken did run about for a little while. And it was his father who taught us that you could sharpen an axe or a hatchet by acting as if you were trying to cut up a sandpile. I don’t know whether the father was ignorant of some basic facts related to supposedly sharp tools or maybe wise enough to feed us that story and in doing so make sure that the hatchet we were using would not do serious damage, but I am inclined to believe the second possibility. _ Later, much later, while were both in the gymnasium, we used to go for long walks in “deTreek”, an estate near Amersfoort that was famous for its landscape and the plants it contained,band open to the general public. I don’t remember why or how that friendship ended, but I have not missed it in later years._

When we moved into our new house we found a family living next doors with five children of ages that were close to our own, the family van Hasselt. There was one boy who was just about my age, and contact was made very quickly. His name was Wolter and we became very close friends, even though we attended different schools, his rather strict, I believe, and mine very free._ I don’t remember why, but it seems to me now that the fact that most of our playing was done in and around his house. It could have been the result of my mother’s illness, or of my father’s work, or, maybe, it was because Wolter had more “stuff” to play with. Wolter’s father was a chemical engineer, I believe, who owned and operated a small factory where the main product, if I am not mistaken, was a substance he had invented, an important and much faster acting substitute for the rennet used in cheese making. He was a most remarkable man, a very gifted woodworker whose specialty was carving: mythical animals and other decorations in the Gothic style. I am afraid that I was much more impressed than my parents, who thought that he was wasting his enormous skills on furniture that didn’t fit our time, but was inspired by his boundless admiration for Gothic architecture. He was not an artist, and didn’t claim to be one, but he was certainly a very fine ncraftsman. There was practically no contact between the two families other than between Wolter and me and, to a lesser extent, between our younger brothers, Hans and Piet. I am thinking now that there were probably few reasons for contact, for the two families were very different, they were every religious and we were not. The parents didn’t share any interests as far as I remember. It seems therefore a bit strange that I always felt welcome in their house. I really liked Wolter’s mother, but had no personal contact with his father at all. I admired him…..from a distance. What did we do during the many hours we spent together? A lot of time and effort went into the construction of what we called our “forts”, which consisted of an excavation, a hole, more or less square, which, after reaching the required depth, (four or five feet) had to be covered by a complicated system of planks, poles, beams (if available) and whatever other stuff was at hand,before the whole thing was carefully made more or less invisible by a layer of sand. The finished product was accessible by means of a small opening; it was a dark, dampish, totally useless space,but it was ours. The ultimate test was always the same: you had to be able to walk across the roof without damaging the walls or the roof itself. The best forts were those you could walk across without noticing that you were not on solid ground. I cannot say what made the activity so appealing to us; it was hard work, and I don’t recall that any one was ever used for any length of time after it was finished. And the rule was: we had to fill in the hole after we were through playing in it, for very good reasons: after a while they became quite dangerous. In fact, I am now quite amazed that we were allowed to dig them at all. There was a fairly deep hole in sand, without cribbing of any kind, and it isn’t hard to imagine what could have happened if any “fort” had collapsed while we were sitting inside. Once it was close. Wolter and his two brothers, Hans and Willem (at least two years older) had dug a super fort. The pit was about ten feet deep. You could only get down by using a ladder. The digging had, of course,taken a long time, and at the end of the day, when I was invited to come and have a look, it was too late to put a roof over it, so that was postponed until the next day. There was no need: when were turned the next morning the walls had caved in and 3/4 of the hole was filled with sand. I believe that experience signaled the end of our forts._

I want to mention one rather awful moment. It was either late in the fall or during the winter (which are often quite mild in Holland, not unlike our winters here: hardly any frost and little snow but lots of rain). During the night there had been some frost and it had snowed a very little bit, just enough to cover the ground, but not enough to have fun. Because it was a Sunday morning, when Wolter and his family were in church, I wandered by myself over to their yard as I often did. In the area where we always played I found a low, roundish dome, covered by snow of course, like the very fancy roof over a magnificent fort, which is precisely what I took it to be. A roof over a fort had to be tested, certainly one that I had not helped to build. Carefully, cautiously, I stepped onto the mound. The surface was unusually soft, but a few inches down it seemed to be quite firm, and so I went on, carefully, to discover that towards the middle my feet went down quite a bit deeper before reaching firm surface. I thought it was strange, but then there was suddenly the very strong smell of fresh manure, and, looking back, I saw my steaming tracks to the centre of a pile of cow manure, there deposited the day before…. Mem was not pleased when I came home, but Wolter and his whole family laughed and laughed._

Notwithstanding his very strongly held belief in authority, in the family as in society-at-large,Wolter’s father gave his sons a lot of leeway, and far more was permitted in that house than in ours when it came to experimentation. Wolter had molds to pour lead soldiers: one marching, one firing a rifle standing, one doing the same kneeling, and perhaps others as well, but these three I remember. There seemed to be always an unending supply of lead, which was melted in a little pot over a heat source, (I don’t remember what it was, likely a small gas stove). We poured whole armies, marching, kneeling, standing. That was fun, but then we wanted to play with those armies, and it is very difficult to get action out of lead soldiers. The centre of our dreamed battle was always a small, square, wooden fort he had, with a drawbridge. The anachronism of a drawbridge in a struggle of soldiers in W.W.1 uniforms never bothered us. It was the lack of action, after the armies were arranged in their formations, which took a lot of time as one can imagine. The only action possible was to mow them down with a field cannon, loaded with a single rubber bullet that was propelled by the strong spring in the gun. At first we had only one gun, Wolter’s, so that both of us had to use it: he a shot, I a shot, until there were no soldiers left standing. But that changed when, one Sinterklaas, I got my own, and the slaughter proceeded more or less non-stop. I hate war toys, but I do not really believe that they automatically teach violent behaviour. I suspect that the adults around us thought the games we played were a bit gruesome, because they remembered the War, but we never thought about the reality of shooting people at all.

And then there was the train set, Wolter’s train set, for which we laid out complicated rails on the attic of his house, where his father did his carving. That was never a problem: he had his corner and we never entered there, but I remember my admiration for the amazingly intertwined ivy runners that decorated the sides, and the gargoyles that peered over the corners of a chest he was making. Because we had never enough rails, we found that we could substitute home-made wooden rails for the long straight stretches. The only difficulties were to keep the tracks exactly parallel and to link them to the metal ones in such a fashion that they wouldn’t separate. The wooden rails,once fastened to the metal ones, worked because Wolter’s locomotive was not an electric one, it had a spring operated motor.

After we had played a whole winter on the attic we wanted some excitement outside when the weather turned warm again. We constructed a bridge across the pond, abridge that was on purpose made so weak that the train was bound to plunge into the water of the pond. Spectacular violence… It was not good for the engine, but it produced a realistic, spectacular splash.__

It was in these years that I got on my birthday the real steam locomotive Piet and I had been playing with whenever we stayed with Aunt Bets. Now… that was something else, even though playing with it meant running it along a straight track, back and forth, from inside the garage to as far outside as the available track would allow, and back again. The problem was that the engine, which was fairly heavy, would build up such a speed that it left the tracks in corners and it was impossible to brake it or slow it down. As soon as it jumped the track it would spill its fuel (methyl hydrate) so that the whole engine was engulfed in flames. And then it was likely that one of the solder-joints would come unstuck. A difficult, but very impressive toy. The way it pulled away, puffing steam from its cylinders, and gained speed was enough to get me screaming with excitement, it was so real. Because of the dangerous nature of the thing I was only allowed to play with it when Charles was there to keep things safe. Charles had usually other things planned, but he did make time available, once in a while._

The end of my most treasured toy was sad and not glorious. We returned one summer after a holiday with the whole family in Vierhouten. The house had been rented out to a family we didn’t know. Before leaving, the steam locomotive had been put on a shelf in the garage, where, we hoped, it would be safe. The kids had found it, played with it and ruined it beyond repair, which was easy to do, with all those tiny copper tubes and solder joints. We also found the house invaded by swarms of fleas. I believe the experience changed my parents’ convictions about “renting out”. It was never tried again._

I want to record two very special memories about Wolter’s family, the first one related to Sunday afternoons. His father used to read to the whole family during tea-time, and they didn’t mind if I attended those occasions. I loved it. He was a very good, a very dramatic reader and Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities” (in translation, naturally) fascinated us from beginning to end, but after that was finished he read “the Scarlet Pimpernel”, and that was even better. _ The other one has to do with winter time. Their sitting room was heated by a big anthracite-fuelled heater, quite high as I remember it. Mrs. van Hasselt gave us apples that we could bake directly on top of the heater. It never occurred to me to ask who would do the cleaning afterwards, but I suspect that was left to the maid. All I remember is the delicious taste of those apples and the fun we had in getting them just right. _

In their house everybody had his or her own room, as we did, but no member of their family slept in a room on the attic, and since they had five children it must have been quite a big house (I believe it was built for them). Wolter’s room was facing mine, so that we could shout to each other. Talking was out of the question, for the distance, across two gardens, was too great. But we connected the two rooms by constructing an aerial link: a double string running over two little pulleys. You could tie a rolled-up piece of paper containing your message to the string and pull it across to the other side. It proved to be a rather clumsy and slow way of communication: it was much faster to run over and make oral contact. It seems to me in retrospect that I went far more often over to their house than vice versa._ One of the great attractions was their playroom, where a large table in the centre was used for an endless number of activities, from pouring lead soldiers to making mountains and valleys from para wax which was available to them in enormous quantities. To have such a playroom seemed to me the epitome of good living: there was little or no supervision, whereas our “playroom” was, in fact, an extension more or less of the living room, that is to say: it was separate, but the door to the living room was glass and always open anyway. We were mostly in the playroom of their house, or on their large attic, or in their garden where a special corner was designated as play area. Our house had such a corner as well, but we spent, as I said before, far more time at the van Hasselt’s place than at ours._

Wolter’s father was the first one in our neighbourhood who bought a car, a Chevrolet sedan, boxy as cars were at that time, but very impressive. He needed it for his work and he took Wolter, Hans and me on one of his trips to Apeldoorn. Imagine the excitement: all the way across a piece of the country where we normally only came during holidays, and back again, in one day! I suppose that brother Piet came along as well, but I don’t remember that at all._ A strange thing: I can’t remember with whom or where Piet was usually playing. He and Hans, knew each other quite well of course, but I don’ remember that they were “friends”. Piet had his own circle of friends, I’m sure of that, but I have no idea who they were. What I do remember is that we both played in the same area around our house, an area with a number grassy fields and bushes of scrub oak. Both groups built their own above-ground “forts”. (Why there always had to be forts is not clear to me at all any more; I find something quite repellent in the idea, but there it was: we had to build forts) My group built one in the open grassy field from branches and rubbish, Piet’s built theirs in the adjacent oak bush and we could not see where exactly it was or how it was constructed. That was a challenge we could not leave unanswered, and we sneaked as surreptitiously as we could manage in the direction of the bush that hid their fort. We entered cautiously, fully expecting an ambush of sorts, but there was nobody to be seen anywhere. Until I spotted my dear brother half hidden behind a bush, with a curiously intent look on his face, as if he was expecting some dramatic development at any time. The look startled me. He didn’t seem to be looking at me, but at something above me, in the trees. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked up to see if I could find out just what was so interesting to him. It was a good thing that I did, for I discovered a good-sized root clump hanging from a line that ran over a branch. The other end of the line was made to act like a trip wire, so that the whole root might have come crashing down on my head if I had not been aware of the danger._

Wolter and I were both heading for the same high school, a school with a very good reputation, located in Baarn, a small community (in those years), ten minutes by train from Amersfoort. Charles had been there and Lieske was still going there. There was an entrance examination; Wolter passed and I failed with only two passing grades out of eight. That dramatic result suddenly made it abundantly clear to Mem what she should have been told years ago by the school: that my progress in the subjects I had to master in order to pass the ubiquitous entrance examination into high school was far too slow, and that I was in no way prepared for it. It must have come as a nasty blow to all concerned, but it was practically the end of my friendship with Wolter, who was now way ahead of me in school, had different interests and a lot of homework. We continued to see each other, but it was never the same and gradually we moved farther apart. _

After spending a whole year in an old fashioned drill-school I passed the entrance examination into the Gymnasium in Amersfoort without trouble, and at that school I met Gerard, whom I knew from Scouts (we shared a passionate dislike for scouting after the first excitement of uniformed games had worn off) He was one year ahead of me, but he failed the second grade, while I passed grade one, albeit by the narrowest of margins, so that we were in the same class the following September. Something clicked between us, and the result was a relationship that was very different from anything I had experienced before. We walked a lot, usually on the vast, undulating heath to the south of the city, an area we both loved. And we talked… _

We raced together on our bikes downhill to school in the morning. His family lived a little higher on the hill than we did and he always followed the same street I had to take. I could hear him coming from quite a distance because his bike had a very large two-tone bell, the first tone five notes higher than the second, and very loud. There were not many bicycle bells like that and since he used it a lot to indicate his coming there was never any doubt. We were always in a terrible hurry, for we knew exactly how much time we needed but there was not a minute to spare. It was probably very dangerous to go as fast as we did down the brick-paved highway, for there were many intersections, and a collision would have resulted in a serious accident at that speed and helmets were unknown. But there was practically no car traffic (there were almost no cars!) and we never had an accident. _

The school was located just inside the moat around the city and the place where the old city wall had been, but the space left by the demolition of the wall was made into a long, narrow park with stately beech trees. We had to make a 90 degree left turn off the highway and into the park. Just at that spot stood that most ridiculous and most famous of Amersfoort’s monuments: the “Amersfoort Rock”, a plain, big chunk of well-worn granite, roughly triangular in silhouette, that had been hauled from the heath, where we so often walked, all the way down the hill to the city entrance, a distance of at least five km, by brute power of horses and men I imagine, for there were at the time it was done no machines that could have handled it. There didn’t ever appear to have been an obvious reason for doing it. It was big, but there were bigger ones than that elsewhere in the country, and more interesting ones, because they were parts of prehistoric grave sites. It is likely that the people of the city, when they found that big rock, around the end of the 19th century, were deeply impressed by its size. One should remember that Holland is essentially a rockless country. Lots of gravel, especially around Amersfoort, and boulders, all deposited by a glacier during the last ice age, as this one was, but not any of that size. Sitting on its base it would be maybe ten feet high, right at the entrance to the park. I have a vivid memory of the countless people that took pictures of each other standing, smiling, in front of that silly rock. _

One of the school’s safety rules was that you had to enter the park on your bike leaving the rock on your left, but if you were in a hurry it was tempting to take a shortcut, leaving the obstacle to your right. That was unwise, for not

only was it possible to get into collisions with cyclists or pedestrians coming out of the park, but our principal held very strong opinions about what was right and wrong and passing the rock on the wrong side was very wrong indeed. He used to hide behind the rock in his long, wide khaki cape, his face half hidden under the wide rim of his enormous hat, (like the hat that was worn by many artists at the end of the 19th century), his walking cane firmly clutched in his fist. As soon as he saw one of his students taking the shortcut he jumped from behind the rock with his cane outstretched, like the sword of a highwayman, risking his life, forcing the cyclist to come to a swerving, screeching stop, for a collision with the “rector” was a fate worse than could be imagined. Being caught was bad enough, for it meant that the culprit would have to come back to school on one of his free afternoons to do -and finish!- a special assignment, handed out by the principal._ Gerard and I missed a few free afternoons in that fashion. We must have had a bad influence on each other, for we got frequently in trouble together. That meant that we were sent out of the class together to stand in the hall until the period would end. Standing in the hall was boring, so we explored the attic, where we found an indoor gutter, conveying water from the roof to a drainpipe on the outside. We amused ourselves by floating bits of wood and paper and organizing races. The loss of an afternoon, inevitable after being “sent out”, was nonetheless a nasty business. The real problem was, of course, that we were both turned off by the school system, not a new problem then or now. Gerard left the Gymnasium after finishing gr.4, I believe, and went on to an agricultural school, specializing in orchards. I failed gr. 3 and ended up in Nijmegen where I graduated, and found the person who has shared my life ever since._

Most friendships at that age would not have survived a separation of that kind for so many years, but ours

thrived by mail. Letters were to both of us an important part of our lives and the exchange has helped on many occasions. During holidays one of the first things I did was to contact Gerard and it was Gerard who brought me to the station when I had to go back. In between lay the walks, the talking, the sharing. It occurred to both of us that we were far more important to each other than brothers could ever be for the simple reason that we could freely talk about all kinds of things we would never have discussed with any member of our families._

On Saturday nights during the holiday visits to the Hovens Greve home we went sometimes with his father, in the car that he needed for his work, to the evening market that was held in the centre of the old city, on the large marketplace that was dominated by the enormous old gothic church for which Wolter’s father had carved a baptism fount. It was a typical regional market, with all the noise of people trying to outshout and outsell each other, a fascinating place to wander around for a hour. We usually returned home with a bunch of small smoked eels, which were eaten on toast with the tea.

The tea was always served in what was called the “library”, a slightly raised section of the living room, separated by two wide, easy steps. A couch was a part of the furniture of that little room, and Gerard’s mother was always lying on the couch. She was not a robust woman, and had to rest a lot. I have often suspected that it was also one of her little tricks to remain in the centre of the family’s attention: everybody had to be constantly aware of her fragile state and be careful to not upset or disturb her. I don’t know whether my suspicions were grounded in fact or not, but it worked like a charm: she was the centre, and everything evolved around her. I liked both Gerard’s father and his mother. When Moeky and I got married Mrs.. Hovens Greve gave us the unusual green antique glasses that were traditionally associated with drinking Rhine wine. Two of the original three have survived so far.

They are sort of special to me; they remind me of the many interesting and stimulating conversations at tea time in the

“library”._

During the time I was in Nijmegen Gerard finished his training at the agricultural college and was called up for military service. Whether or not you were among those that had to serve depended on your luck: there was a lottery to decide who was and who was not, and Gerard had been unlucky. As long as you were involved in some form of education you could get temporary exemption, but as soon as that was finished you were enlisted. He went, reluctantly, and hated every minute of it. The idea of Gerard being drilled on a parade ground still makes me smile. He was one of the least athletic types I have ever known; he never participated in any outdoor sport like tennis or grass hockey, had a serious fear of water (bordering on a phobia) and just following stupid orders was most unlike him. What he was good at was organizational work. During his last year at school he was elected to the board of the student organisation of the gymnasium, where he was one of the most effective members. It was very unusual for a student in his grade to be elected to that office, which was really the domain for students in their last two years.

After a few weeks of suffering the climax came in somewhat dramatic form: the new recruits had to be instructed in the use of the bayonet. You cannot very well practice that skill on humans (it is quite deadly) so they were ordered to attack a row of bags filled with some material. They had to learn to stick their weapon into their victim (the stuffed bag) with all the force they could manage, enthusiastically you might say, before withdrawing it. Gerard could not do it, not only not with any degree of enthusiasm, but not at all. What he was experiencing was the clear understanding that he was being taught to kill in a vicious, barbaric manner, and to him those bags were not just bags, but objects that took the place of human beings. He was quite ready to throw up, but instead he left the field, went straight to commanding officer and told him that he was quitting and would seek exemption under the law for conscientious objectors. He was immediately dismissed and sent home._

He wrote me about his experience and my reaction was that I needed to talk to him and know more. We made an agreement whereby we would meet in Arnhem, he coming on his bike from Amersfoort and I from Nijmegen. I’ll never forget that meeting on a beautiful, sunny day in the early fall, sitting on a hillside overlooking the river and talking, for hours it seems to me now. On my way back to Nijmegen my mind was made up: I, too, would be a conscientious objector._

What happened to those was that you were questioned by a committee whose task it was to find out whether your objections had really to do with your conscience or were inspired by your dislike of the military service. If they were convinced that yours was a true case of conscience they recommended you for “replacing service” in some government agency. It was usually the Central Bureau for Statistics in the Hague, but in Gerard’s case they chose the agency that was responsible for the administration and maintenance of the national forest areas, in Utrecht, because of his agricultural training. You were paid a small salary, just enough to live on, and you were supposed to work there for a period twice as long as you would have served as a recruit. You really had to be pretty convinced to accept those terms. It was no joke, and the service was absolutely deadly dull. Gerard served the full term, eighteen months, but I was sent home early because the German invasion came and after a “war” that lasted I believe four days the armed forces were decommissioned and sent home, and so were we. _

During the years when I was attending the Amersfoort gymnasium I met and befriended another boy, Pim van Amstel. With him I went on a trip by freighter from Rotterdam to Hamburg. It was an opportunity that had presented itself through the help of my uncle Ru Mees, who was a director of the Holland America Line and had different contacts in maritime circles. It was to be a short trip, a bit over a week, and the sea voyage was no more than a day and a half each way . Unfortunately, on the way out it was windy, not really stormy, but certainly uncomfortable on that little steamship and I was sick as a dog; my first experience with sea sickness.

Hamburg was wonderful, a beautiful old city where we visited one of Europe’s most famous zoos, Hagenbeck’s, the first of its kind: there were no nasty fences between the visitors and the animals, but only a wide moat, so that you got the illusion of watching them in their wild environment. On the way back the weather was calm and sunny and the whole trip delightful, enlivened by the crew’s discussion of the success (or the lack of it) of a very thorough effort to reach the gold that had gone down with a steamer during a terrible storm, on the sand banks north of the island of Terschelling.

Nobody had ever been able to reach it, at least that was the story. The crew members were not convinced that it was still there, hidden in the sand; they rather thought that the inhabitants of the near-by island, who were quite famous for their ability to get their share of the bounty that the good Lord deposited on their shore in return for their loss of life during storms, would know a lot more than they were willing to tell…. But it was interesting to see in the distance the conical shape of the structure that housed the huge suction equipment that was being used to reach the wreck, to see it and to speculate, for the story of the S.S.”Lutine” (the boat that had been shipwrecked) and its precious cargo was a romantic one that had occupied the minds of the readers of all Dutch daily papers for weeks. The lure of hidden treasure…..I don’t know that anything more was ever found than a few tantalizing gold coins._

The next summer Pim and I went together to a “sailing camp” on one of the wide lakes close to a most interesting, unique village, where almost all traffic was by boat, where there were no streets, only canals, used by the long, heavy flat bottomed “punters”, that were operated by one person, standing at the stern and pushing with a long pole. It was amazing to see how fast they were, and how efficient: they moved in the straightest possible lines across the lake (which was very shallow) without ever looking backwards or visibly correcting their course, or to see them maneuvre through the narrow canals, under bridges, around curves, without changing the rhythm. We didn’t learn how to do that; those of us who had tried it were amazed to find that what looked so easy was in fact very difficult. Our punters were equipped with sails and lee-boards and were steered by a helmsman at the rudder. We learned to sail, that is, we learned only the very basics; the most elementary tricks of a very complex set of skills, but it was fun and I loved it. But after that the relationship weakened and finally we stopped seeing each other. I have no idea what happened to Pim; we lost sight of each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOLIDAYS

 

My first holiday memories are related to Noordwijk, at that time a small village, where the two important means of making a living were fishing and tourism. What makes me believe that fishing was important was the incredibly strong smell of nets being tarred in a huge round masonry vat in the floor of a building near the bottom end of the main street, a smell that permeated everything. But it is possible that the tarring process was the only industry, serving fishermen in places where they had a harbour, something Noordwijk did not have. The memory is old and probably faded (that is: unreliable), but I used to like that smell and I remember that we had a look in that building and saw the vat and the nets. What fascinated me even more were the tram rails that made a sharp turn near that building. I believe one got to Noordwijk by taking the tram, but I have no idea where you had to get on, nor do I have any recollections of either the tram or the trip.

In Noordwijk we rented a house, which we entered by walking along the side, along a narrow short path between the house wall and a row of small, strong smelling trees, some kind of poplar. I seem to remember that the leaves were always moving, even though there didn’t seem to be any wind and I wonder if they were what we call trembling aspen? I don’t remember the house itself, but I have one memory related to it, and that is as strong as a recent nightmare. I slept on the second floor, in a room that looked out on the main street, which was, looking back, very fortunate. All my life I have had a fascination with fire. The light in the room was provided by a small coal oil lamp and of course I was very interested in the lighting procedure. I imagine that I had to sleep in the afternoon; at any rate I was alone in the room and it was bright daylight. I can’t remember at all where I got the matches, but I know that I tried to do what I had seen other people do with that lamp, and that I must have spilled some coal oil, maybe on a tablecloth or on a piece of clothing, for when I lit the match and tried to light the wick there was suddenly a huge flame, reaching from the table all the way to the ceiling. I remember backing away from that flame in a panic, standing on my bed, but found that I couldn’t go any further back because I was against the wall. I don’t remember screaming, although it is quite likely that I did, but I remember vividly that there were suddenly men’s voices from across the road, shouting something like “Fire!”, followed by thundering steps up the stairs and the door flying open after somebody kicked it (I had locked it with the little bolt that was used instead of a door lock, because I knew that I was doing something that was totally forbidden). Somebody extinguished the flame and there were furious voices shouting at me. On the wooden ceiling there was a big, black, round, circular spot where the flame had licked it. Strange is that I don’t remember that my parents were angry.

When we were on the beach my mother used to sit in what we called a “bath chair”, a large contraption that protected both against the sun and the wind with a huge back, woven like a basket from willow twigs, in the shape of a shell, that more or less isolated the person sitting inside from the world, but left the view of the sea clear. The beach was full of those chairs, which could be rented by the hour. If a person wanted to swim he or she could rent a little closed wagon on wide-rimmed wooden wheels, that enabled the swimmer to change in absolute privacy and close to the water’s edge… most important. It also offered protection against theft of valuables. From her chair my mother could watch us build our sand ramparts against the incoming tide while she could read. Halfway through the morning she called us to her chair and handed out double slices of black rye bread with butter and sugar. We loved that treat even though you could feel, taste and hear the sand with every bite. It didn’t matter; it was part of being on the beach. The one thing that was just as strongly associated with the beach, but that I hated as much as I liked the rye bread, was that we had to wear short pants made of a heavy red material. The colour came out when they were new and got wet, and they itched something awful. I still love black rye bread with sugar, but the red pants are only an unpleasant memory. I wonder if they had anything to do with the need to know at all times where we were; they surely showed up.

There were never many people on the beach and the modern scene of all those bodies glistening in the sun as far as one can see was totally foreign to our experience. I was born too late to have been able to see the big, flat hulls of fishing boats in a row on the sand that one may see on paintings of the late 19th century, but I remember very well the man on his bare feet who scooped shells from the shallow water with a large, long handled net that had a metal rim with one flat side. The shells were used for the production of lime. He emptied each netful in a small high-wheeled cart, drawn by a patient old horse that followed his master without rein, splashing through the water. There was usually one other horse on the beach: a pony you could ride on while the owner led the horse down the beach and back.

It was in Noordwijk that I saw my first luxury car, a two-seater with a body that looked as if it had been made from the same material (split cane) and in the same hexagon pattern used for chair seats. I’m inclined to think that it was a Buick, but I can’t be sure about that.

 

After Mem and my father got married there was a new destination for our summer holidays: Vierhouten. It was almost too small to be a village, in the middle of the dry area east of Amersfoort; what it is now one doesn’t dare to imagine. In the years when we went there it was a little cluster of houses (farms?) and one tiny general store in the middle of endless stretches of heather, some planted forest of scraggy pine, and fields with thin rye. Here and there clumps of silvery birch made lovely accents in the landscape. What made them decide that this was the place where they wanted to spend their precious holidays? I don’t know, but I suppose that my father, who had been there as a guest speaker for a socialist youth camp close to the village, fell in love with the place because of its natural, unspoiled beauty, its relative remoteness (it could only be reached by means of a narrow gravel road that connected it to the nearest railroad station some 10 km away) and the resulting characteristic: its quiet. We rented most of a small farmhouse; the family, parents and two children, moved to the kitchen and one bedroom. It was located on top of a hill, and during the first years we came there we had to carry buckets with water from the pump at the bottom of the hill to the house. Later a new well was drilled on top of the hill and you could lower a sheet metal tube with a check valve in the bottom in the well casing and haul it, full of water, back up with a hand winch. It was a great improvement.

It was a very small farm: a horse, a cow, a pig, a dozen free-ranging chickens. In addition there was a flock of sheep, but whether they were part of the farm or belonged to somebody else, using the barn where they were housed on a lease-basis, I don’t know. The main crop was rye, sown and harvested by hand, as it had been done for centuries. Bronkhorst, the farmer, didn’t own the land; he leased it from the landowner. How he could ever make enough from that farm to pay the rent is a mystery to me. The extra income from the summer months must have been very important to him and his wife. They were intensely religious, a firm, orthodox Calvinism that sustained many farmers. It was a bleak, pessimistic religion that considered life on earth as something to be endured, certainly not enjoyed. It looked on joy, in any form, with deep, hostile suspicion and not only taught the believers to be patient but also to revere authority in the form of their landlord. It was the perfect antidote for secret thoughts of change; in fact the political party that was based on Calvinistic dogma was named the “Anti Revolutionary Party”. No wonder that those who owned the land were also loyal supporters of the church…

The interior decoration of their house reflected their religion: everywhere on the walls one found small framed texts, printed in silver Gothic letters on pieces of black velvet. My father, sitting at his usual place at the breakfast table, looked one morning with a peculiar attention at the wall across the room, as if he couldn’t quite credit the evidence of his eyes. We watched him as he got up from his chair, softly muttering to himself:”No, that is really too much…” before walking around the table to inspect the text on the wall. There was a certain tension in the air, broken by his loud laugh. “I believed I read MAY GOD FORGIVE YOUR MARRIAGE and I thought that was a terrible, an incredible text, even in a home like this, but it says MAY GOD BLESS YOUR MARRIAGE. It’s the lettering….” The two verbs in Dutch appear somewhat similar from a distance.

Personal hygiene in the farmer’s family was not a priority. It wasn’t in many (if not most) farm families at that time, for life was “short, brutish and hard”, certainly on a small, poor farm like this one, where any form of modern convenience, let alone luxury, was unknown. There was no bathroom, no shower, not even a kitchen sink, for there was no running water. Even after the war, in 1949, the large family (10 children!) who lived near the place where we had our houseboat, had to beg their landlord repeatedly to have a shower installed and it took years before their wish was granted, and that was a dairy farm! Before it was installed the whole family used the same water in a sitting tub in the middle of the kitchen floor every Saturday night, for many years. The parents’ turn came last, and I fear that the water was not very warm any more. Mem, appalled by the living conditions of the family Bronkhorst, taught them the basics of hygiene, I believe.

Every year I looked so much forward to the time we would spend in Vierhouten, from the moment Mem started to pack all our clothing in the big willow basket, that was shipped ahead of time, and every year it turned out to be a disappointment. It was always the same thing: nothing to do. Charles read or played his flute, usually under a big birch, about 100 metres from the house, Lieske was busy with Miek or with her own preoccupations, Piet worked with Bronkhorst, who was amazed and delighted that this city boy was such a good, eager and hard worker, and who didn’t hide his praise. Father and Mem were proud of him and encouraged him in every way possible. I am sure that his plan to become a farmer himself dated back to the summers in Vierhouten. Father spent most mornings outside with his sketchbook and pencils and loved every minute of it. In the afternoon we usually went “en famille” on a bicycle trip. For me that was the only part of the day that was bearable, even though I didn’t particularly like the trips: endless, very dusty gravel roads, bordered by weeds and shrubs that were covered with dust: a hideous pale gray, almost white, only occasionally broken by the huge gates that indicated that the tourist was now entering the Royal Wildlife Reserve. It was a large area especially set aside for the pleasure of the Queen’s husband, the not-so-bright and not-so-well- behaved Prince Hendrik, who was often drunk in public, an imported German prince (Germany was the supplier of husbands to most of the remaining Royal Families in Europe, because it had a surplus of idle princes) It had been stocked with wild pigs and a small kind of deer, and there was a constant fear that these precious animals might escape into the surrounding countryside, where they then might be killed by ordinary people. Hence the fences and the gates. I loved those big gates, even if they were a nuisance, because beyond them there was always the -remote- possibility that one might see a wild boar, ferocious, terrible and even dangerous, or so it was said. We never saw anything more than the patches of forest soil they had plowed up with their tusks, searching for mushrooms. But that was evidence enough to keep my romantic mind on edge and hoping…

We did go out one evening , just before dusk, to watch a herd of deer. The memory stands out as a moment of pure, unimaginable joy, a jewel among many memories that are distinctly unpleasant. We left our bikes quite a ways before we came close to the area where we were told that we would have the best chance, and walked in total silence through the slowly descending darkness. I was filled with the keen rapture of anticipation, a sense that something rare and precious might be just ahead. Under the trees to either side of the white sand path the darkness was almost complete when we reached a spot where we could see something like a clearing, for there was more light. On tiptoe we approached the edge where we found a blind of woven willow branches. Peering over the edge…. there they were, a small herd of peacefully grazing deer, really wild deer, the first we had ever seen. There were very few wild animals of that size left in Holland, even in those years. There were very few forests left… and the forests that were there were all so obviously planted, in straight rows, at exactly even distances. One got very soon used to this kind of forests, of course, for it was the only type one ever got to see. We knew that there was actually nothing “natural” about them, but never questioned the system that produced them: that was the way forests looked and that was that.

I must enlarge just a bit here. It bothered me, deep down, but enough to produce a deep seated longing for forests-as-they-once-must-have-been. I remember looking at the reproductions of 17th century paintings (and we saw lots of them!) and marveling at the enormous, heavy trees in those paintings with a feeling that we had lost something of great value. It was not before we arrived in Canada that I saw the forests I had secretly dreamed of. I “recognized” them immediately, if that is the word to use, and the emotional impact of that experience is a memory I will always treasure. Strange: I had no guilt-reaction when I saw those giants cut down; probably for two reasons: in the first place because my job was part of the process (just as it is today for those who work in the forests and who scoff at the “tree huggers”), and in the second place because there were so many that the numbers seemed infinite. That those numbers were in fact very finite has only penetrated my thinking much later, when we heard that the company that employed me, the “Columbia Cellulose Company”, had run out of timber…..

The mental picture of that evening, watching in total silence the peaceful little group on a meadow surrounded by dark forest in the quickly fading light, is still very sharp, a treasure. I must always have been a most romantic character (not to use that other word that I have always hated: “sentimental”) for that memory to be so important. The spot and what made it possible to watch without being seen, the willow blinds, was not romantic at all: those blinds were there for the hunters to hide behind before they did what they paid and came for: shoot the deer. That feature of the evening was tactfully not mentioned before we were going and only briefly explained after we had withdrawn. One of us must have made some sound, for suddenly the buck threw up his head, sniffed, turned and , followed by the rest, bounded noiselessly as a ghost into the protective darkness under the trees.

Piet was always happy as could be, working away as Bronkhorst’s helper, and I was stalking the small pine trees behind the house, armed with a slender dead tree as a spear, imagining dangers and enemies to throw my spear at, and being dreadfully bored.”Nothing to do” ….. became the main theme of the yearly holiday that was anticipated with such joy, every summer again. The only real, but very temporary, relief was that sometimes we had to find the eggs that had been laid by chickens that were getting “broody”and therefore were hiding their eggs. That was a challenge, and finding them between the young pines that covered the slope of the hill on which the house was built was something that was appreciated.

Going to a camp was a most welcome break, but that too left me pretty empty upon my return.

There were in Holland at that time a number of organizations that were responsible for summer camps, but only two of them were large enough to be called national. Both had their roots in and associations with Protestant churches, but the one was orthodox, the other liberal. The orthodox one had a camp near Vierhouten, a short distance from where we stayed; and I thought it was somewhat ironic that the village should have attracted camps of two opposite groups: the socialist youth movement, which was decidedly unreligious, and the orthodox protestant churches.

I went to the liberal camp, several years in a row, because neither my family nor I myself believed that the camps Lieske and Charles loved would be what I would enjoy. Both judgments were wrong.

One of the remembered highlights during my first camp was the afternoon rest, when the leader of our small group read from Edgar Allan Poe: The Black Cat, A Cask Of Amotillado, etc., all in translation of course: fascinating and scary. That was also the camp where, playing “handball” with a wet soccer ball, I caught the thing on my right index finger, which has always retained a little swelling in the middle joint which has made it impossible to bend that finger as far as the other ones. But other than that there are no distinct memories left to any of the camps I went to. There was a lot of shouting, running around and the singing of nonsense songs (“camp songs” was the official term used), but nothing that could make me feel satisfied and happy when it was all over. Riding back on my bicycle from my last camp to Vierhouten to re-join my family, while having to use a map to find my way, was more interesting and more satisfying than the whole camp had been. But I was so hoarse that the family was appalled and I embarrassed. They were not surprised, though, or very interested to find out how I had gotten so hoarse; I think they thought it was “typical”.

Somewhere in here must fit an experience that I want to save because it was important to me, important and not pleasant. Mem had heard about a “holiday home” located on Texel, where a couple owned a large house, which they called “het Mierennest” (“the Anthill”) and which they used as a holiday home for young people who would live there like the members of a large family. It must have been a rather expensive place to send your child to, considering the kind of kids I met there, all very much belonging to upper middle class families-with-money. The reception was very nice, for the woman who met me in the hall asked immediately if I was a son of Just Havelaar…. and seemed very pleased that I was. She was awfully nice, as was her husband, and the rest of the staff. I was put in a room with three other boys, all teen agers, and all slightly older than I was. What do teen age boys talk about when they are left to themselves, as we were? Sex, of course, and sports. I knew nothing much about sports and not a lot more about sex, at least not when I met them. The experience left me feeling guilty, dirty, more unsure than ever, and resentful that I had been sent there. It was a summer I won’t forget, but did not enjoy or remember with pleasure.

Once I found in Vierhouten, close to the sheep barn, a very dark, very hard layer of soil (“hard pan” we called it in Victoria. It forms the walls of Mike Rooksby’s basement) where the sand had been dug away, and I was able to cut out a lump of the nearly black stuff. I carved out something like a human head with the most appallingly crude features, but recognizable as a human head anyway. It reminded me a little of the carvings of primitive African carvers that I had seen in a recent exposition of that art form in Amersfoort and I took it up the hill to show it to my parents, who, to my delighted relief, showed surprised interest.

In the spring of ’35 Charles invited me to accompany him on an exploratory bicycle trip through Flanders, in order to locate campsites for the Vrije Jeugdkerk boys camp that would travel through there for three days before settling in their campsite in Vrouwepolder, in Fort “Den Haak”. We had a wonderful time; the weather was fine and the countryside pleasant, though not spectacular. We had no trouble locating and reserving the needed sites. (One of them proved to be a mistake, for it was located on one of the salt water inlets and they are subject to tidal action. During the night when the camp was using it there happened to be a very high flood tide, and nobody had warned us that under those conditions it might be flooded. In the middle of the night we had to move everybody and everything to higher ground which caused some (unwanted) excitement.) The only negative memory is related to the roads, paved with the kind of granite cubes that in Holland was called “child heads”. It is rough pavement, but it lasts forever; awfully hard on cars but almost impossible for bicycles. It was on that trip that Charles introduced me to beer, and I liked it…. a lot.

Because of the nature of our mission we avoided most larger centres, but we did see Bruges and Antwerp, very superficially, but both nonetheless left a lasting impression, particularly Bruges. It retained so much of its former glory as an important centre for commerce and culture that it created an impression as if you were traveling back into the Middle Ages, more so than any Dutch city I had ever visited, maybe with the exception of Veere’s centre and harbour.

The camps were located in Vrouwepolder, then a tiny village at the northern corner of Walcheren (which has roughly the shape of a diamond, its points on two axis, north-south and east-west). The girls had their camp close to a cabin that belonged to the v.d. Laar Kraffts, “Vreughtduyn”, located just behind the dunes, the boys in an old abandoned fort dating back to Napoleonic times: a square closed in by earthen walls, officially known as “Fort Den Haak”, also just behind the dunes. The trip through Belgium ended there. It was the last summer the old fort was used: with the growing reputation of Vrouwepolder as an ideal place to spend your summer holiday, the fort’s location, at the end of the road that led from the village to the dunes, was becoming a problem, for far too many people were taking time to stand on the earthen wall to see what was going on inside. The boys’ camp was moved to a spot just past the girls’ camp. There was no road, just a sand path leading to “Vreughtduyn” (almost impossible to use if you had a bicycle with a heavy load) and from there the dike. The road from the village to the dunes was paved, except for the last 300 meters where it changed into a sand track.

The camping experience that first summer was somewhat less than a resounding success on both sides: I had trouble adjusting to the style and character of these camps, which were really very different from any I had been to before, and the leadership had some trouble discovering in me a member of the family that had given them two excellent leaders (both Charles and Lieske were much appreciated for their contributions) and a very popular camper, brother Piet, who had made a name for himself as a wonderful guy and a good trumpeter (they were hard to find: brass instruments were not often chosen among the families whose children came to the camps) It was always the same problem: I was too loud, too much an attention seeker. At the ceremony where those who attended for the first time were accepted as “old campers”, by the light of an enormous campfire on the beach on the last evening of the camp, the camp leader, Reverend van der Laar Krafft, expressed that feeling in exactly those words when he remarked that they had had “some trouble recognizing in Just a member of the same family”. That was a pretty harsh judgment. Our relationship has never become closer than a superficial friendliness, although it didn’t cause any obvious friction. I didn’t ever like him very much, although I could admire his qualities and his vision as leader of an organisation that was unique in Holland, where there was no shortage of similar (but vastly different) camping organizations. I think my feelings of “not being attracted to him” were mirrored by his. The camp commandant assigned to me one summer the task of looking after his tent which meant keeping it more or less clean and tidy, and I was appalled by the general mess I found and didn’t quite know how to cope with. It was an experience that didn’t help me in gaining a greater appreciation for the man who slept in that mess, but insisted that the strictest rules of neatness and order were to be maintained everywhere else in the camp.

I nevertheless got thoroughly involved in the camps and loved it. I convinced Moekie to join as well, and both of us share a conviction that “the camps” have meant much more to us than summer fun. We met some of our best friends there: Els and Otto Backer Dirks and Hannah and Jaap Hamaker, to mention only the two most important couples. It was, by the way, quite “normal” that couples met in “the camps” and developed a partnership-for-life. It was true for v.d. Laar and his wife Louk, who will always remain in our memory a beacon of radiant wisdom and unsentimental love. An odd couple they were. The organisation had its roots in Rotterdam, where a number of prominent families, coming together because all of them were disillusioned by the lack of adequate (liberal) religious leadership provided for their children in the churches of their day in Rotterdam. They had invited v.d. Laar to come to their community to fill that vacuum. It was the start of “de Vrije Jeugdkerk” (The Liberal Youth Church). A number of teenage girls, all belonging to that group, had suggested to him to organize for and with them a summer camp. It had been a great success and was repeated the next summer and became a yearly event.. Louk had been one of the girls attending the camp one summer (I don’t think one of the very first ones) She was, in other words, very young while he was an adult, but on top of that he was her minister and camp leader. The distance between them was enormous. When a friend of hers had asked her, several weeks after her wedding, what she called him when addressing him, her answer had been :”I don’t know…. I always say just “Hey” “. That distance was of course gone when Louk took on the leadership of the girls’ camp, but they didn’t ever give the impression of living the life of a happy couple. Both of us were very fond of Louk.

There did not seem to exist much they could share, to form a bond between them, besides their devotion to the camp organisation. They were both romantics at heart, but I found his thinking at times a bit fuzzy whereas Louk was precise and lucid. She was extraordinarily musical, a very good pianist. Music was the main focus of her life, but most certainly not of his. It was undoubtedly her influence that lifted the music element in the camps to a level that was totally unheard of in other summer camps. Singing was important, a shared musical experience that required attention and listening. There were always some instruments to accompany it, usually flutes and recorders, sometimes a violin. Good voices were appreciated and asked to sing solo parts. It was considered an honour and not an unwarranted, painful exposure. Considering that the singers were teenage boys, that by itself says a good deal about the prevailing atmosphere, I think.

I have often wondered, then as well as later, what it was that made the camp experience so important to those who have been in contact with it; important enough to make really old people decide to come back to reunions. I have never found an entirely satisfying answer. It seems likely that it is a different element for different people, but I think it is safe to say that for all of us a heightened sense of “community” was one of the main ingredients.

And a community it was, with its own rules, customs, rituals and ceremonies. The emphasis has been from the earliest beginnings on “nature”, avoiding all manner of things that seemed to be normal to behaviour in the society-at-large but were considered inappropriate in the context of the camp community. So: generally no smoking, and cigarettes were out totally. Leaders were allowed to smoke a pipe once in a while, but usually at night and not too often. One should remember that smoking was much less common in the ‘thirties than it is now, so that the rule caused much less of a hardship, and was more easily observed. All cooking was done on wood-fires. For that purpose simple little ovens were dug out in the kitchen area with iron bars across the top to place heavy cast iron pans over a fire of dry willow branches that were cut to size with an axe. For many campers working in the kitchen and cutting the branches to size for cooking was their first experience handling an axe. Axes were not a common implement among the garden tools in most families: there was simply no wood to cut. The branches we used were sold in bundles, about four feet long and roughly a foot in diameter and were used to heat old-fashioned bakers’ ovens. The camps got large piles of them, both for cooking and for the campfires that were lit every night as the last of the day’s activities. The site for the campfire, a circular shallow hole, stones placed around the outer edge, was the centre of the camp, both symbolically, as the place where the fire was burning (fire was the symbol of the spiritual element of the camp experience) and in actual location; all tents were placed in a semi circle around that spot. For our meals and for all other occasions where we were all together we were sitting in a large circle around that pit.

The tents used were the old-fashioned military style tent: round, made of white canvas with a single centre pole. Each was used by about six boys and a leader, all sleeping with their feet to the pole. Leaders went to bed at the same time as the boys in their charge. Keeping “your” tent neat and tidy at all times was a matter of importance and pride, and to be selected as the neatest tent in the camp during the tent inspection in the morning by van der Laar and the camp commandant was the cause for much friendly rivalry. As it happened the outcome in the ten days of the camp’s duration was rarely slanted towards one tent crew, but pretty well evenly divided over all.

That the emphasis on “naturalness” had little to do with love for nature (although it did have a place) but was in fact a pretty complex cultural artifact that was not always in line with practicalities, was clear to us all, but accepted as an important part of the “camp style”. And it did help to define that special character that we so highly prized. It was that “style” that made our camps unique, supported by a whole array of symbols, like the presence of many flags (one for each province and then some) and the signals that were given on a very special trumpet: straight and about four feet long, that was known as a “bazuin”. It was not a common instrument; its sound was impressive: loud and clear, more brilliant than that of its smaller, folded brother. But the reason for its use in that environment was the visual impact as an element of ritual. A person with a military trumpet assumes almost automatically an air of efficiency: its sole purpose is to give clear signals that convey clear messages. But give the same person a bazuin in his hands and he immediately seems to be transformed into a heroic figure, even though the signals are the same. Its function was never more emphatically underlined than on Sunday morning, when the girls and the boys met halfway between the two camps, each group preceded by all the flag bearers. To see the ritual from a little distance was a treat: the flags stopped at a certain distance from each other, the bazuin player moved a few steps forward, raised his instrument and played a special tune, known to all as “Groot Saluut” (Great Salute). It was difficult to play faultlessly, for it contained twice the highest note of which the instrument was capable, and missing that note was both easy (particularly if the player was nervous) and most painfully obvious. Brother Piet’s fame as a bazuin player was solidly fixed in the camps after his glorious, faultless performance at this occasion. After that the two groups of flag bearers joined and led the campers on their walk to the church in the village. After the short, simple service and the walk back to camp the girls came to the boys’ camp for a special visit. It was the only occasion when they met.

The only persons, besides van der Laar and the camp commandant, who were ever going over were the “adjutants”. They formed a small separate group of slightly older campers who were placed under the camp commandant and used for all menial tasks, like helping out if one of the tents needed attention, fixing bicycles, looking after campfires, and in general: helping out where help was needed, but also for running errands and for more or less regular trips by bicycle to Middelburg for special purchases needed by van der Laar, usually little things he needed for looking after injuries, medicine or ointment or bandages. They slept in their own little tents and were less tied to the general camp routines, as long as they were reliable and available when their services were needed. My best experiences are related to the year when Otto Backer Dirks and I were the only adjutants. We had a wonderful time together, although we worked pretty hard. One time, during lunch hour, it rained and there was of course no sense assembling around the campfire pit. All campers were served in their tents. It was our job to help prepare the sandwiches, carry them around and to distribute them. (A rained-out lunchtime happened only once in my years in the camps, as far as I can remember; maybe the weather pattern then was more reliable than it is now and “summer” meant just that: summer, and warm weather.) We discovered that, in order not to be bothered by the pouring rain, it was easiest to do our job in swimming trunks: after we had finished we could dry ourselves and our clothes had stayed dry. We were proud to set a new record for covering the distance between Vrouwepolder and Middelburg on a tandem. Our friendship dates from that summer. In the following fall I stayed with him in Rotterdam in their home on the Hoogstraat in the centre of the city. During that visit I happened to take one photo from the roof down to the street. During the fire that followed the fire bombing by the Germans the whole centre was destroyed and all their possessions were of course lost, including all pictures. My silly little photo proved to be the only one that showed the location. I had lost the negative; there was only one print.

The camps have been important in my life in several ways, but if they had not given me anything besides that friendship with Otto, they would have been worth going to, for he and Gerard have been my only two close friends until I met Mike Rooksby, whose friendship came fairly late in my life (I was fifty-two when we met) as an unexpected gift.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSIC

 

My family was one where music was loved but not made , that is to say: neither my father nor my mother played an instrument. Maybe my mother played piano, but that can only have been very little, for I have not a single memory of it. She had a sweet singing voice, and she sang for us, I would think almost daily, for I remember not only that she did it, but also some of the songs: one of a young goat that doesn’t want to live in a dark stable, for it loves light and sunshine. A very sad song. Another one was about a flock of chickens that had lost its rooster, until the proud fellow returned, for he had only been walking a little ways. I loved her singing, and apparently it left an indelible impression. We had a piano, an old one, brown, with swinging brass candle holders to light the music. When Mem had come into our lives there was soon a brand-new piano, that was treated with the respect due to an object of great and special value. Mem got lessons and practised daily, but never got very far. But the piano made it possible for Lieske to get lessons, and to her that has been an enormous support in her life. And Miek got lessons when she had reached the age where it was considered appropriate, and she, too, is still playing regularly and with enthusiasm. I suppose that she now owns that piano. I think they got their instruction from a friend of my parents’, Piet Tiggers, an enthusiastic member of the Socialist movement, and a pillar of strength in the cultural branch of the organisation. He was involved in the camps at Vierhouten, and it seems possible, even likely in retrosepect, that my father’s first contacts with Vierhouten came about through him. One peculiar memory I want to record here: somebody was practising a piece by Beethovern, I believe, that had a very lovely returning theme. I was reading at the same time a book of Lieske’s:|”Roswitha”, that dealt with the life of a young girl during the Middle Ages. It fascinated me enormously, particularly the part where the author relates the assault on a castle to Iiberate the girl’s father who was held prisoner by a villainous knight. The music theme and the book were inextricably interwoven in my mind, so that when I hear that music I am instantly back on my stomach on the floor of the “play room”, reading “Roswitha”.

My father liked singing and I have vivid memories of the weekly occasions when we stood around the piano and sang Bach’s “Geistliche Lieder” which never touched me as deeply as they did my father. The whole family liked singing, and when we, the children, did the dishes on Sunday evenings (when the maid had her day-off), we sang rounds, campsongs, what have you. With gusto. It was always very sad for Mem, we thought, that she could not carry a tune to save her life, and loved music.

At the Dutch elementary schools of those days we had a weekly hour devoted to singing, just like we did when I was teaching in South Park school. What was very different was the kind of songs we sang. We were in a system where it was believed that the elementary schools were the best place to teach kids to love their country, and the songs had a strong nationalistic character that strikes me now as being mildly jingoistic. What was far worse was that most of those songs had words that now seem so bizarre and ludicrous that I wonder how I have ever been able to sing them with so much enthusiasm. Not very critical, I suppose. “Where the white tops of the dunes glitter in the sun and the North Sea greets the low coast with a gentle murmur, there is my homeland, Holland’s beloved realm….” One wonders whether the poet of those lines has ever seen the North Sea during a storm, when the breakers stretch right to the horizon because of the treacherous sand banks in front of the coast where literally hundreds of ships were smashed to smithereens. Or: ….”The Batavians lived there once, so simple and so free…. The offspring of those braves are we, and we are full of courage and faith ! ” Holy cow…. and we sang it….! Or: “It is the duty of every boy …….to be ready to fight for his homeland. For Queen and homeland we shall always be ready!” or words to that effect. They did not have the desired effect on me, for I refused to be enlisted in the army. If the song wasn’t patriotic then it was likely sentimental with a Christian tinge. “The Angelus sounds from the distance, the evening’s red colours the fields. Sweet rest we may expect, not yet tortured by cares. Hear how the little bell, with sweet sounds, calls us homeward to rest and to offer a prayer of thanks…Sound on, o little bell, keep on clanging, so that we may sleep well in a little while.” That particular song, which apparently left such an impression that I remember the words, had one word in it that I did not ever understand while singing it (the word “beiden” has two meanings in Dutch, one, as used in the song, “to expect”, a very old and rarely used meaning, while the other and very common one is “two together”. It didn’t make sense), until the meaning dawned here in Canada….. Nobody ever took the trouble of explaining. Some songs carried distinct didactic health messages: “Sleep with open windows, for the fresh air wil chase a hundred ailments away. In your own little bed, warmly tucked in, you can sleep marvellously until the sun awakens you.” Apparently in the Holland of my childhood that message was still considered worth spreading. We sang it all, and nobody ever bothered to ask why we had to spend time singing such nonsense. We must have been nice kids and well behaved.

One memory I must rescue from the dustbin, if only for the sake of sister Lieske. There were two songbooks in our home, both about the same size: the size of piano music. One had a grey binding, and it contained most of the songs with which we were familiar. The other one, in a red binding, had, if I am not mistaken, a rather more historical collection. In that one Lieske and I, sitting at the table, were looking one evening for songs we knew. Heaven only knows what prompted that idyllic scene, which was certainly exceptional. We found a song that came from Flanders and that was probably an old ballad, based on bizqrre historic fact: the song of “Pierlala”. It was a very long song that dealt with the faked death and burial of a character of that name, who had invented the whole drama to get rid of debts or a nasty wife, or something equally important to him. We sang it all, from beginning to end. We both found it terribly funny and I not only had to stop singing because I laughed so hard, but on top of that wetted my pants…..

In many families in Holland it was (and, I believe, still is) an important element in a child’s education to have music lessons. In Holland that meant almost without exception that the child learned to play an instrument that would allow him or her to participate in chamber music when that level of competence was reached. Of course the piano was the favourite one, but other ones were very common as well: violin, cello, flute, and, to a lesser degree, oboe and clarinet. Brass instruments were much rarer, because the schools did not have a music programme that was based on participation in bands. Music as such was not part of the Dutch school curriculum and was not taught at the universities. If you wanted to enter music as a profession you had (and have) to go to a conservatory. Even singing was discontinued beyond elementary school level.

And so, when I was about eleven I got flute lessons. I haven’t the faintest idea who decided that the flute was to be my instrument, but I suppose that I must have made the suggestion myself. I got a new flute, a French instrument that was made in a strange way: the valve seats, which are in a flute usually extruded from the tube that makes up the main body, were in this case soldered on. They did come off. It must be said: I was not particularly careful with my instrument, to say the least. My flute had a little dent in it where it had hit the skull of brother Piet, when I used it as a convenient weapon in one of my bouts of wild fury.

I did not like going to my lessons, which were given in Utrecht, a half hour’s train ride from Amersfoort. It meant, in fact, that my whole afternoon was spent on that lesson, because I had to walk to the station and later take a tram in Utrecht to the house of my teacher, Piet van den Hurk. But what was far worse was the daily practice, half an hour, first “long notes” (for breath control and tone formation) and then always again the same tunes or pieces of music, in order to “get them right”. Nobody listens for his joy to a beginner practising his instrument. I therefore practised in my father’s study after his death, far enough not to bother Mem too much, but close enough for her to hear whether I was practising or not. If I was not I was clearly reading in one of the books that were lying about. I learned to do both: while playing my “long notes” I didn’t have to pay much attention to what I was doing if the object was simply to produce long notes to satisfiy Mem that I was “practising”, while reading a book lying on the table. I remember reading with a mixture of horror and fascination the description of a female mental patient who smears her own excrement all over herself in “Eline Vere”, a novel by a famous Dutch author of that time, Louis Couperus. It was not recommended reading for children and Mem never found out about it.

Piet van den Hurk must have found me a difficult, a frustrating student. Because of my total lack of self-discipline in practising my progress was slow, much slower than it should have been. I think he must have told my parents that I had a natural talent for the instrument, otherwise they would not have insisted that I continue when the signs were clear that I did not like practising and did as little as what I could get away with. He almost certainly never told them that I did not do nearly enough, for in that case they might have agreed that I had better stop playing and he would have lost a student. I liked him and we got along just fine. He was a very good teacher, too, and the basis he laid paid off later.

What I did like was playing together, and I remember that Charles and I, shortly after he had started with flute lessons, played a sentimental Russian (?) folksong, “Der Rote Sarafan”, that had a well-known catchy tune and sounded good with two flutes. I remember even better the times when I was staying with the Niewegen and Rens and I played the fifth sonata by Handel (in F. Major), the first piece of classical music I ever played. There is a vivid memory of Charles and me playing together standing in front of his tent while we were in Domburg together. The thyme grew everywhere and the smell was unbelievable.

It was not until I was in Nijmegen that playing, and even practising, became fun. The first time I played “in public” (that is: in front of maybe twenty or thirty people) was at a monthly meeting of the gymnasium club, accompanied by a grade eleven student, recommended by the Risseladas. For some reason (I don’t remember what it was) we had not practised together. We played that same sonata by Handel, which has a Gigue as last movement that is fast and easy for the flute, but very fast and not easy for the piano. Bert had not spent much time practising and dragged the tempo down to a level where the dance became a dirge, much to his and my embarrassment. I soon found an other person to play with on these occasions and liked playing with her so much that we still played more or less regularly together fifty years later.

By the time I went to Nijmegen my French flute had been changed to a much better wooden instrument. Wooden flutes were then generally used, at least in Holland, both by professionals and amateurs. I had mine for many years and even continued using it after the joint that holds the”foot” (the bottom five inches) had broken off and was glued back in place. The result of that mishap was that the three lowest notes, which I have always found difficult, were even harder to produce. But all that happened much later, I believe after we had moved to Canada .

While staying with the Risselada family we made a lot of music, trios mostly. The Ris” (his popular name at school) played piano, more competent than sensitive, and he enjoyed it. Tjalling, the oldest, played violin, as did Thys, and Frans played cello. It was a stimulating environment, the Risselada family, where music was intensely enjoyed. I remember Frans coming running up the two stairs to tell me that the cello concert of Dvorjak was was being performed on the radio and that Ishould come down to listen, one of the many good memories I have of that period. Furthermore there were the weekly rehearsals with the school orchestra, (which eventually turned out to be more important for the walk home with Moekie afterwards than for the music we made), the playing with Ine Wierdsma and her friend Jeanne Nicolai, once every three weeks, I believe, the playing with de “Rissen”, with Moekie, and all together there were many reasons why the practice sessions in my room became more a pleasant break in the school work than the painful duty they had been. Even without formal lessons I improved and whenever I was home during holidays Charles always found time to get together for a lesson or two in his “koepel”. The lessons with Charles, by the way, continued after I was working in the Hague and Rotterdam, when I travelled once every fourteen days to Amsterdam for a lesson. He was not only a devoted , but also a very stimulating teacher, by far the best one I have had.

He had in Amersfoort in “the koepel” a grammophone of the latest kind. It did not have a metal, but a bamboo stylus, three sided in cross section, with the flat side up. The tip was cut at an angle with a special little tool, and the resulting sharp point acted as the stylus. It was of course much easier on the records (all 78’s), and it produced a much softer, much less harsh sound than the metal stylus did, without the sharp “hiss”. I loved listening to it. It was there that I heard for the first time Debussy’s “Syrinx” and his trio for harp, flute and viola, both of which left a very deep impression; one of the moments that in retrospect was something like a watershed experience. I played “Syrinx” myself later and made a special effort to make it sound good when I played it in the evening, during the summer, standing in front of my open window in my room on the top floor of the Risselada home, and hoping that the sound would carry across the gardens so that Moekie would hear it….. As I wrote before: some people are born romantics.

 

Relatively speaking

RELATIVELY SPEAKING

I was born in 1915 – I must assume as some kind of an accident, because I find it difficult to believe that any couple would plan to have a child during that grim war. My parents must have been either accident-prone or incredibly optimistic, for my younger brother Piet was born two years later, and the war ended in 1918.

They were both from “good families” – if I may use that term, which denotes an inexcusable snobbishness in our world – which means that they were fairly well-to-do and belonged to that group whose family fortunes were recorded in the “Nederlands Patriciaats Boek”. It is understandable why the family Mees would be mentioned there, for they could look back to a long line of successful merchants and professionals, but why the Havelaars were included is a bit of a mystery to me. They came originally from Gorinchem and, according to a distant cousin, Jan Havelaar, the members of that family were more noted for their exploits as poachers than for their fame in the ranks of traders or professionals. It must be said, though, that there was a captain Aert Havelaar who made an apparently daring voyage into polar waters, I believe in the early part of the 17th century. His name Uncle Charles and I used for our sailboat, the “Oude Aert”, while his wife’s name went to our houseboat, the “Janneke Jans”1.

My maternal grandfather was a banker in Rotterdam. I remember him fairly well, but my grandmother, who was French, had died before I was born, or before the time when I could remember her. I do remember her sister, “tante Fie”, who visited us once in a while from Paris, a charming, cheerful little lady. There is a little story about her that I must tell before it slips from my mind. She visited my aunt Bets (short for Elisabeth; aunt Lieske was named after her), who had just acquired her first car, a Model A Ford. She took tante Fie out for a ride to see the beautiful fall colours around Arnhem, where there were extensive stretches of beech forest. Tante Fie was old and quite frail; she walked with difficulty, using a cane, because her back was so bent that she could not straighten it out any more. The car was a real godsend, or so my dear aunt thought, to allow the old lady to enjoy the glorious fall. It was a very beautiful day, and the colours were every bit as brilliant as anticipated, but when my aunt commented on this show of gold and bronze while the car moved slowly along a famous beech-lined section of the road, tante Fie said softly, “Moi, je ne vois que les cimes des arbres…..” She obviously had not been able to look at the road through the windshield at all. On further occasions that problem was alleviated by the use of a lot of cushions.

My grandfather lived in an imposing house on the Mathenesserlaan in Rotterdam, where the youngest daughter, aunt Mien, who was a nurse, looked after him. To me one of the most imposing features of that house was a large, carved dolphin that formed the end of the railing along the staircase. In my memories that dolphin head must have been at least twelve inches across, though I suppose it wasn’t nearly that big in reality. I loved stroking the highly polished mahogany surface, the pursed lips, the scaly back. The rest of the house I remember as solemn, dark, and totally foreign. There was a tiny garden, surrounded by a high wall, behind the house, which could be seen from the dining-room through the French doors. That was where I saw a hellebore in bloom for the first time – with apparently profound admiration, for I can remember vividly the greenish-white flowers against the shiny dark leaves, at a time when nothing else in that garden flowered. My grandfather kept bees on a flat section of the roof at the back of the house and used a special outfit, a white smock, a veiled hat and long gloves, when he went out there to check on their activity. I found it all very impressive.

A frugal, hardworking man, this grandfather, who went to work on a bicycle or using the streetcar, and who worked at an age when most men have retired. I believe he was very well-off but from his life-style you wouldn’t have guessed that. I wonder if that was a characteristic shared by quite a few successful and wealthy business-men in Rotterdam in those days. Tante Miek and oom Ru got their first car only after the war, and ate margarine on their bread, to the annoyed amusement of my father. I suspect that it was really considered to be rather vulgar to show off your wealth, and wonder if oom Jaap’s flashy lifestyle (an expensive car, a large and gorgeous sail yacht, an airplane, later a helicopter,and so on) was one of the reasons for the fact that he was not considered a real asset to the bank. The only luxury of my grandfather’s that I can remember was the fact that he drank wine at the dinner-table – and that could have had something to do with his marriage to a Francaise. I remember the wine, because we were always allowed a sip from his glass. I didn’t like it, but I never showed it, let alone refused. Wine was rare in our house and, I believe, considered a great luxury.

We never felt close to this grandfather, at least I didn’t. I suppose there was in his life little need for a more personal relationship with his grandchildren. There was more distance then between members of different generations, more respect and less love – at least openly expressed – but I shouldn’t make that kind of judgement, for, as I said, I didn’t know him. My cousin Leonoor Mees, born and raised in Rotterdam, whose father was one of the directors of the bank, knew “Opa” Mees (as he was known to us) much better; they maintained a regular contact with him and aunt Mien. She told me that “Oma”, his wife, was not a strong woman. In fact, she believes that she had tuberculosis, which I find hard to believe, because in those days that was a killer. Anyway, every time after a child had been born she was ill for a long time, but no sooner had she recovered than she was pregnant again. If that story is true it reveals something about Opa Mees, or the times in which he lived, or both, that I find repugnant.

There were eight children – the main reason that we had so many aunts and uncles. I remember all of them, but I don’t know their sequence in age. They were evenly divided: four aunts, four uncles. Bets, Nel (my mother), Nora, and Mien were the aunts; Aad, Jaap, Edouard, and Bram, the uncles. I will deal briefly with them here in that order, but skip my mother because I want to write a lot more about her later.

Tante Bets was a figure of great importance in our lives, and most certainly in my life. So many memories come flooding into my thoughts while I start writing about her that I don’t know where to start or how to sort it all out to make sense. She was married to a doctor, Arnold Rypperda-Wierdsma, a big, quiet, wonderful man, and, I believe, an excellent doctor. They lived in a large house on the outskirts of Nijmegen, in a semi-rural environment. Uncle Arnold was the director of a small private hospital, or rest home – or something like that – named “Berkenoord”. Their house, “de Zonnekamp”, was surrounded by an enormous garden that had two prominent features: a large vegetable and fruit section surrounded by a dense, high hedge of scrub beech,2_ which both hid this part of the property from view and protected it against the wind, and a little valley, at the bottom of which you found a swing and a teeter-totter. The rest of the garden was a rather formal arrangement of beautifully kept flower beds, neatly cut and trimmed lawns, and wider and narrower gravel paths covered with a thick layer of the whitest pebbles that crunched as you walked. There was a full-time gardener, I believe, who told me that the goat, large enough to pull a little cart for us, the kids, produced the basic ingredients for dried raisins. I didn’t believe him, but loved the tale, being rather preoccupied at that age with animal and human excrement. I can still see him slowly moving along the paths, pushing a big hoe to remove the weeds – a never-ending job, I’m sure.

We spent a lot of time in the vegetable garden, especially when the berries were ripe: currants, raspberries, gooseberries and what have you. The results of these expeditions, aided by the fact that the hedge made you invisible from the house, were at times disastrous. We were not used to those quantities of fresh fruit – but aunt Bets was both endlessly patient, understanding and forgiving. We also spent a lot of time in the little valley that formed the scene for endless violent and one-sided battles with imagined enemies, in which I represented the victorious hero, the enemies the slain villains. I never stopped to count the corpses my cap-gun created every day, but they were numerous – as well as dangerous when alive, hiding behind bushes and trees everywhere.

The house was large, and by our standards, quite opulently furnished: thick carpets, lots of very comfortable chairs and sofas (we had only two or three armchairs and no sofa), wide staircases and landings, and a large open hall downstairs, I think with a fireplace,3 but I’m not sure of that; I’ve no memory of seeing a fire in it. That hall had a unique, aromatic smell -delicious, and in my mind unalterably linked with pleasant memories. I wasn’t aware of that until, many, many years later, while we were in Terrace, we entered a house that had the same smell, and I was instantly pulled back to the warm memories of “de Zonnekamp”. I realized then that it was the smell of cedar – probably used for panelling.

From the hall a door led into the large dining-room. In my memories the table was enormous, but I don’t really think it was all that large for as far as I can figure out, there were no more than eleven or twelve people around it, and we have frequently seated that many around our extended table in the Denman house. A few vivid images: Uncle Arnold sharpening his big knife before cutting slices off a roast, the beautiful blue glass finger-bowls, my cousin Jan measuring carefully his cheese, meat, bread, and so on, on a balance that was placed on the mantle-shelf over the heater. He was diabetic, and the first patient in Holland who was later treated with insulin.

The second door led to the living-room, a large room with an enormous window on the south, that showed the church tower of Hees, a village close to Nijmegen. Why that tower has occupied such a dominant place in my memories I would like to understand; it was not a significant or impressive church tower, but it fascinated me. Probably it had something to do with another memory: my aunt and I standing at the base of that tower, I touching the brick while looking up, and the sudden panic – I was sure the tower was moving and going to crash on top of us. I wonder now if windblown clouds could have produced that nightmarish impression? The carpet in the living-room was a rich, deep blue and we played endlessly on it – tiddley-winks, pick-up sticks, and I don’t know what all, when it was too cold or too wet to play outside. The living-room and the dining-room were connected by a closed-in sun-porch – a popular space in many houses, especially the older ones. I remember that sun-room as a bright, warm, cheerful place, but I don’t have any memories that associate it with plants, but that is probably due to the fact that plants were not interesting to me at that age.

The bedrooms were on the second floor, where my cousin Arnold, who studied medicine, had his study. I was allowed in there on occasion and got easily lost in the fascinating pictures of human organs in vivid colours. There was also the room where we slept while staying at “de Zonnekamp”, a room that has always occupied a rather secret but very dominant space in my childhood and adult life. The memory is so vague, and on the other hand, so vibrant, that I don’t know anymore whether it represents actual or imagined truth; likely some elements of both. I see a high, bright room, with a single ceiling light, and a small gas heater in one corner. I was in bed. Downstairs there were soft, urgent voices of adults, among which I recognized the voice of my mother, clear and lovely. Then the large door closed, there were steps through the gravel, a car door that was shut, a few more voices, then an engine started, and the tires were crunching through the gravel, slowly moving away from the house with dreadful finality.

Some time later, aunt Bets and I walked together through the sunny garden, through the opening in the beech hedge, and out on the other side, past the rye field along that familiar dark and a bit slippery path to “Berkenoord”. I can still hear our steps, impolitely loud on the marble of the very still hallway, to a room where we found my mother, in an unnaturally high bed. The room was cool and shady. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was, however, a youngish nurse, who brought cocoa in white cups. She seemed awfully nice and didn’t show any signs of annoyance when I spilled all my cocoa over the floor accidentally, but cleaned it up and brought me another cup with the delicious warm and sweet drink. I had no idea, of course, what all this meant, but the memory, although possibly faulty, is strong and vivid. Many years later I learned that my mother’s disease, breast cancer, had been diagnosed by my uncle Arnold while she was for a few days in “Berkenoord” for observation, and he discovered that it was well past the operable stage4. The nurse who impressed me so much was my father’s later second wife, whom you have known as “Grootmoeder”. I have no explanation for the fact that the memory has burned itself so deeply in my mind, for I was certainly too young to understand – I must have been six – but I assume that my fears, though unclear and unreasoned, must have been, somehow, magnified in the months and years to come during my mother’s long illness.

One of the things that made staying with aunt Bets and uncle Arnold so wonderful was that there was always so much to do. Their children were a lot older than we were (I imagine Jan and Arnold and Leonoor were in or near their twenties, for they were all at university. Annetje must have been seventeen or thereabouts, and Jaap fifteen) and well out of the toy age, but their toys, their indoor games and their books were all kept, the toys and the books in the attic in an enormous cabinet. Like many houses the attic had also a loft, and that was the place where the very large rocking-horse was kept, a stuffed foal, I believe, or a rocking-horse covered with horse-hide. At the time I was engrossed in the Karl May books about the Apaches (the heroes) under their wise and valiant chief Winnetou and his equally brave and heroic white friend known as “old Shatterhand” (the “I” of the tales). I rode that rocking-horse by the hour, shooting my gun, hanging to the side of the horse, under his neck – a favourite trick of the Apaches at war. And there was the true steam locomotive that, with its track, came to me as a birthday present in Amersfoort – my pride and joy. But in “de Zonnekamp” we pushed it around the floor, and had fights, Piet and I, about whose turn it was……Some things don’t change. Finally, there was that incredible, large cabinet with the children’s books. You could just lie on your stomach on the wooden floor – my favouite reading position – and forget everything around you, even a call to come for supper. I’m not sure any more, but it could be that the great Winnetou entered my world, to stay for an unreasonably long time.

The stairs in “de Zonnekamp” were wide and easy, and covered with a thick runner. We played often on those stairs, crawling down head-first, feet trailing and using arms and hands only, or riding down on a scatter-rug, with the front part gathered between your legs and held firmly with both hands, sliding down on your behind, a rough ride.

At the bottom of the stairs a largish bronze gong was hanging, the banger, with its soft leather head, beside it. It was used only as a signal that lunch or supper was ready. I loved its wonderful, vibrating sound and could not suppress on one occasion the urge to bang it softly to hear it – with the result that cousin Jan, studying law, stopped working to come down, thinking that it was suppertime. He was not pleased to find his little cousin there, banger in hand – and let it be known beyond a shadow of doubt. It was the only time I sounded that gong, at least without authorization. One of those humiliating moments that a person would have liked to forget and that has burned itself in one’s memory with devasting clarity.

As far as I can recall we were usually at “de Zonnekamp” at Easter, and immediately that is linked to memories of Easter egg hunts – Easter eggs that were decorated by the adults the night before, with faces, Easter bunnies and abstract decorations – exactly like the ones you will remember, and your kids. I have no doubt that our custom goes back in a straight line to the Easter celebrations at “de Zonnekamp”, even including the huge bonfires, which were lit on the property of neighbouring friends of my aunt and uncle’s, the Wiardi Beckmans5 – enormous, blazing fires. I always loved fires – and fires in Holland were rarely allowed and therefore all the more special.

When my mother was still living, we must have been in Nijmegen for a Christmas as well, for there is a vivid memory of my sister Lieske, being carried by uncle Arnold around an enormous Christmas tree in the sunroom, I believe, and bending to have a closer look at an ornament, when suddenly her hair was on fire – panic! Oom Arnold must have extinguished the flames instantly; there is nothing attached to that fiery image that indicated serious injury, just the sudden flame and the shrieks. I must have been very young, for Lieske was small enough to be carried on my uncle’s arm.

I leave “de Zonnekamp” with mentioning that Moekie knew the house and stayed there overnight once, after aunt Bets had sold the property to the family Nolen. Aart Nolen was in Moekie’s class in grade 1.6_

My aunt Nora was another significant figure in my childhood, especially in my early teens. She remained unmarried for reasons totally unknown to me. She was a tall woman and must in her younger days have been beautiful, I imagine, but she was very heavy in the years I am writing about. Her eyesight was poor and she wore very thick-lensed glasses, but even so produced a characteristic strained squint when looking at small objects that I remember vividly. She owned two small houses on adjoining lots near Hattem, a small town in the northern corner of the dry hills that form the triangle between Amersfoort, Zwolle and Arnhem, the Veluwe. The Rhine-arm that borders the area on the eastern side, the Yssel, runs past Hattem, which used to be a small walled city, apparently of some strategic significance still in the 15th and 16th century, for it had a Spanish garrison. The main road from Holland to the four provinces that make up the north-eastern part of the country ran past Hattem, and I suppose that it was the western landing of the ferry to Zwolle, the much larger city on the opposite bank of the Yssel. Many of the stories and legends that were terribly important to my perceptions of Hattem as a romantic and delightful place had their roots in this Spanish period. There was no doubt that the little town was the setting for a pretty bloody and violent chapter in its long history, for the northern part of the country, the part north of the rivers, was Protestant, and the eighty-year war with Spain had two main causes: taxes and religion. The Spanish tried with all means to re-establish Roman Catholicism as the only religion in the whole country. The means were horrendous………..

Stories of ghosts were the most frequent. They were usually related to specific locations and houses, and most I don’t remember, but I do remember the story of “het witte wief” (“the white woman”) who could be seen at a certain crossroads, always hurrying along, and mysteriously disappearing among the trees. And there was the small old castle-like house, “Het Spijker” that was haunted to the point that nobody would live there anymore. The straight road that led to the house was bordered on both sides by a dense beech hedge. It was said that nobody could walk along that road away from the house without looking back at least once. Some of the people I knew in Hattem, neighbours of aunt Nora (tante No to us, an affectionate abbreviation of her real name) mostly, had tried – but failed. The power that forced them to look back was irresistible, they said. I never tried. So strong was the impact of these and similar tales that even now, while writing them down I feel the peculiar sensation that is known to the French as a “frisson” – the delightful little cold shiver that accompanies the supernatural. Looking up the meaning of “frisson” I discover that it means any shiver. But we used it exclusively for the particular shiver related to ghost stories.

The person who was the teller of most of these tales was a one-eyed neighbour of aunt Nora. His house was the meeting place for a loose organization of kids of which I was a member. I don’t remember what we did, but I vividly remember that it was he who taught me never to aim an arrow, or a pebble in a slingshot, or anything you could shoot or throw, at another person -he himself had lost his eye that way. And he taught us to return whatever you borrowed: tools, utensils, equipment, or whatever. I remember him with fondness, as a generous, honest man who had a real liking for kids, and lots of time for them.

Aunt Nora lived in one of two (smallish) houses next to each other; one was called “Heihofje”, the other had a French name I don’t remember.7 I thought they were delightful houses, but remember them only vaguely. “Heihofje” had a large, open living-room with few but beautiful pieces of furniture, very spacious. The floor was covered with a large reed mat. At the back of the house was a large garden gone wild. There were large plants with yellow flowers that had not only survived in the tangle, but seemed to thrive in it.8 We used to pick bouquets daily -they formed the only decoration of the large living-room.

Aunt Nora was a devout woman. She insisted on reading from the Bible every morning before breakfast to get the day’s events under way, and we had to be there, as well as her maid, a local girl. Since her favourite was the Book of Isaiah, and because she read long sections, I didn’t ever understand what she was reading. It made this part of the day a bit hard to take, especially when you were hungry, and there was a smell of fried bacon in the air. I was not the only one who had some trouble with Isaiah; the maid, when asked to come from the kitchen to the living room for the Bible reading, found endless excuses to stay in the kitchen, but to no avail, for aunt Nora did not yield – not on this point. And at the end of the reading there was always that little sigh: “Oh – Isaiah is so beautiful…”

A stay in Hattem was always a wonderful part of the holiday, and in part that was due to the presence of aunt Nora’s dog, a largish German shepherd cross, fiendishly protective of house and property, to the point that he (or she, or it, whatever) had to be kept inside around the time that the mailman could come. I loved going for walks, the dog on a leash. It gave me a feeling of pride and power that could hardly be matched by anything else. I would have loved to have a dog…..a dog of my own.

It was at aunt Nora’s that I enjoyed and really experienced my first orchestral music. She had a grammophone, a wind-up machine that used the “sharpish needles”, and one of her recordings was “Egmont Overture” by Beethoven – it gave me shivers of passionate delight. I believe aunt Nora was more interested in Richard Tauber, the very famous tenor, but I didn’t like what he was singing, though quite prepared to accept my aunt’s opinion that there was not, and never had been, his equal among singers.

What made a stay in Hattem so wonderful? I really couldn’t say for sure, but I think that it was Tante No’s enormous sense of humour and her lively imagination that turned even ordinary things into romantic, delightful and extraordinary ones. And she had a manner of dealing with teenagers: she never talked “down”, but took you seriously. I heard later about her bouts with deep depressions, her manipulative nature, her jealousies, her almost shameless ways of prying money loose from uncle Jaap, and her other generally less pleasant characteristics. But to me she was a favourite aunt, a person of whom I have only very warm memories.

About aunt Mien I can be short; I did not really know her. Although she was my godmother (my “marraine”, in her own words) and tried hard – and, I’m afraid, desperately – to establish a special and close relationship with me, it never worked. I felt rotten about it, but could not force or change affections. I remember the expectation in her tone of voice, and the embarrassment I felt when she told me she was my godmother. She once asked me if there was something that I really wanted to have very much and my choice was a model airplane with a wind-up rubber-band prop. It became one of my favourite toys, but it didn’t last very long; the rubber band broke and proved impossible to replace. And with that memory comes another, not as clear, but very painful: my feelings of acute guilt at not loving aunt Mien, my “marraine”. My father used to say, with a touch of melancholy vehemence in his voice, that she had once been very beautiful, the most beautiful of the four sisters Mees. But her inability to break out of the sort of bondage (which was not uncommon where youngest girls in families were concerned -they were morally more-or-less obliged to stay home and look after aging parents) that tied her to her father until his death denied her any chance to live her own life. What was left was a nervous, shy woman who found it difficult to deal with other people openly and freely, I believe. During later years, after uncle Bram had returned to Holland from Australia, a hopeless alcoholic, it was aunt Mien who took it upon herself to look after him. She was an R.N. and I believe that she had a number of rough years, trying to keep him and the bottle separated. In those years they lived in a modest, un-charming house near Soesterberg, close to Amersfoort, and we visited back and forth. No closeness ever developed between us, and there is still a bitter taste attached to her little efforts to show her affection and my own turning away………

And the uncles: uncle Aad, who married aunt Pleun,_ the radiant, warm, cheerful aunt who turned to Roman Catholicism later in her life, to everybody’s shocked surprise,_ was at heart a romantic.9 I wonder if that is not a Mees characteristic – that tendency. Certainly the four boys seem to have had some trouble to get their feet firmly planted on the ground. Uncle Aad lived in Vaassen, a small farm-village north of Apeldoorn, on an enormous farm, built around a courtyard. The house formed one side, the stables two other sides, and the fourth side was taken up by the shops that used a large waterwheel for their power. I believe it generated power for the house as well. In the centre of the courtyard was a monumental fountain. The house was roomy, bright and cheerful – quite in line with aunt Pleun’s personality. My memories are golden – and hazy. The creek that drove the waterwheel formed, beyond the chute, a large pool, quite overgrown with waterplants along the edges. An old flatbottomed dinghy was hauled, upside-down, on the shore, and I remember vividly that I was allowed to row in it on the pond, but got hopelessly stuck in the plants, so that I had to get out to pull the boat free – the mud was deep and smelly and the satisfaction derived small. (Water has always had a magnetic and irresistible attraction for me, probably because we lived on high ground, surrounded by sand, pebbles, and further out, endless, glorious heather.) Later uncle Aad had a swimming pool dug upstream from the waterwheel, and around that pool grew the biggest, juiciest blackberries I have ever tasted.

There were two impressive animals, the first one a bull that lived in its own stable behind thick oak poles, but that broke out nonetheless on one occasion (I didn’t witness it) when a few little visitors from the city had tickled its large, moist nostrils with a stiff grass-stalk. He caused quite a scare, so I was told, furiously racing around the courtyard until he quieted down and could be captured again. The other one was a slender, beautiful horse on elegant, nervous legs, that had a nasty habit of rolling its eyes, and flattening its ears, but that could run like the wind, especially pulling the light two-wheeled cart back to its stable. Oh, and uncle Aad had gold-pheasants – I was drawing gold-pheasants for weeks after I had seen these extraordinarily rich-looking birds, discovering that in mixing vermilion and yellow crayons you could produce a gold-like effect.