No exit road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

PART 2

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

PART 3

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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