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.

 

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