Relatively speaking
RELATIVELY SPEAKING
I was born in 1915 – I must assume as some kind of an accident, because I find it difficult to believe that any couple would plan to have a child during that grim war. My parents must have been either accident-prone or incredibly optimistic, for my younger brother Piet was born two years later, and the war ended in 1918.
They were both from “good families” – if I may use that term, which denotes an inexcusable snobbishness in our world – which means that they were fairly well-to-do and belonged to that group whose family fortunes were recorded in the “Nederlands Patriciaats Boek”. It is understandable why the family Mees would be mentioned there, for they could look back to a long line of successful merchants and professionals, but why the Havelaars were included is a bit of a mystery to me. They came originally from Gorinchem and, according to a distant cousin, Jan Havelaar, the members of that family were more noted for their exploits as poachers than for their fame in the ranks of traders or professionals. It must be said, though, that there was a captain Aert Havelaar who made an apparently daring voyage into polar waters, I believe in the early part of the 17th century. His name Uncle Charles and I used for our sailboat, the “Oude Aert”, while his wife’s name went to our houseboat, the “Janneke Jans”1.
My maternal grandfather was a banker in Rotterdam. I remember him fairly well, but my grandmother, who was French, had died before I was born, or before the time when I could remember her. I do remember her sister, “tante Fie”, who visited us once in a while from Paris, a charming, cheerful little lady. There is a little story about her that I must tell before it slips from my mind. She visited my aunt Bets (short for Elisabeth; aunt Lieske was named after her), who had just acquired her first car, a Model A Ford. She took tante Fie out for a ride to see the beautiful fall colours around Arnhem, where there were extensive stretches of beech forest. Tante Fie was old and quite frail; she walked with difficulty, using a cane, because her back was so bent that she could not straighten it out any more. The car was a real godsend, or so my dear aunt thought, to allow the old lady to enjoy the glorious fall. It was a very beautiful day, and the colours were every bit as brilliant as anticipated, but when my aunt commented on this show of gold and bronze while the car moved slowly along a famous beech-lined section of the road, tante Fie said softly, “Moi, je ne vois que les cimes des arbres…..” She obviously had not been able to look at the road through the windshield at all. On further occasions that problem was alleviated by the use of a lot of cushions.
My grandfather lived in an imposing house on the Mathenesserlaan in Rotterdam, where the youngest daughter, aunt Mien, who was a nurse, looked after him. To me one of the most imposing features of that house was a large, carved dolphin that formed the end of the railing along the staircase. In my memories that dolphin head must have been at least twelve inches across, though I suppose it wasn’t nearly that big in reality. I loved stroking the highly polished mahogany surface, the pursed lips, the scaly back. The rest of the house I remember as solemn, dark, and totally foreign. There was a tiny garden, surrounded by a high wall, behind the house, which could be seen from the dining-room through the French doors. That was where I saw a hellebore in bloom for the first time – with apparently profound admiration, for I can remember vividly the greenish-white flowers against the shiny dark leaves, at a time when nothing else in that garden flowered. My grandfather kept bees on a flat section of the roof at the back of the house and used a special outfit, a white smock, a veiled hat and long gloves, when he went out there to check on their activity. I found it all very impressive.
A frugal, hardworking man, this grandfather, who went to work on a bicycle or using the streetcar, and who worked at an age when most men have retired. I believe he was very well-off but from his life-style you wouldn’t have guessed that. I wonder if that was a characteristic shared by quite a few successful and wealthy business-men in Rotterdam in those days. Tante Miek and oom Ru got their first car only after the war, and ate margarine on their bread, to the annoyed amusement of my father. I suspect that it was really considered to be rather vulgar to show off your wealth, and wonder if oom Jaap’s flashy lifestyle (an expensive car, a large and gorgeous sail yacht, an airplane, later a helicopter,and so on) was one of the reasons for the fact that he was not considered a real asset to the bank. The only luxury of my grandfather’s that I can remember was the fact that he drank wine at the dinner-table – and that could have had something to do with his marriage to a Francaise. I remember the wine, because we were always allowed a sip from his glass. I didn’t like it, but I never showed it, let alone refused. Wine was rare in our house and, I believe, considered a great luxury.
We never felt close to this grandfather, at least I didn’t. I suppose there was in his life little need for a more personal relationship with his grandchildren. There was more distance then between members of different generations, more respect and less love – at least openly expressed – but I shouldn’t make that kind of judgement, for, as I said, I didn’t know him. My cousin Leonoor Mees, born and raised in Rotterdam, whose father was one of the directors of the bank, knew “Opa” Mees (as he was known to us) much better; they maintained a regular contact with him and aunt Mien. She told me that “Oma”, his wife, was not a strong woman. In fact, she believes that she had tuberculosis, which I find hard to believe, because in those days that was a killer. Anyway, every time after a child had been born she was ill for a long time, but no sooner had she recovered than she was pregnant again. If that story is true it reveals something about Opa Mees, or the times in which he lived, or both, that I find repugnant.
There were eight children – the main reason that we had so many aunts and uncles. I remember all of them, but I don’t know their sequence in age. They were evenly divided: four aunts, four uncles. Bets, Nel (my mother), Nora, and Mien were the aunts; Aad, Jaap, Edouard, and Bram, the uncles. I will deal briefly with them here in that order, but skip my mother because I want to write a lot more about her later.
Tante Bets was a figure of great importance in our lives, and most certainly in my life. So many memories come flooding into my thoughts while I start writing about her that I don’t know where to start or how to sort it all out to make sense. She was married to a doctor, Arnold Rypperda-Wierdsma, a big, quiet, wonderful man, and, I believe, an excellent doctor. They lived in a large house on the outskirts of Nijmegen, in a semi-rural environment. Uncle Arnold was the director of a small private hospital, or rest home – or something like that – named “Berkenoord”. Their house, “de Zonnekamp”, was surrounded by an enormous garden that had two prominent features: a large vegetable and fruit section surrounded by a dense, high hedge of scrub beech,2_ which both hid this part of the property from view and protected it against the wind, and a little valley, at the bottom of which you found a swing and a teeter-totter. The rest of the garden was a rather formal arrangement of beautifully kept flower beds, neatly cut and trimmed lawns, and wider and narrower gravel paths covered with a thick layer of the whitest pebbles that crunched as you walked. There was a full-time gardener, I believe, who told me that the goat, large enough to pull a little cart for us, the kids, produced the basic ingredients for dried raisins. I didn’t believe him, but loved the tale, being rather preoccupied at that age with animal and human excrement. I can still see him slowly moving along the paths, pushing a big hoe to remove the weeds – a never-ending job, I’m sure.
We spent a lot of time in the vegetable garden, especially when the berries were ripe: currants, raspberries, gooseberries and what have you. The results of these expeditions, aided by the fact that the hedge made you invisible from the house, were at times disastrous. We were not used to those quantities of fresh fruit – but aunt Bets was both endlessly patient, understanding and forgiving. We also spent a lot of time in the little valley that formed the scene for endless violent and one-sided battles with imagined enemies, in which I represented the victorious hero, the enemies the slain villains. I never stopped to count the corpses my cap-gun created every day, but they were numerous – as well as dangerous when alive, hiding behind bushes and trees everywhere.
The house was large, and by our standards, quite opulently furnished: thick carpets, lots of very comfortable chairs and sofas (we had only two or three armchairs and no sofa), wide staircases and landings, and a large open hall downstairs, I think with a fireplace,3 but I’m not sure of that; I’ve no memory of seeing a fire in it. That hall had a unique, aromatic smell -delicious, and in my mind unalterably linked with pleasant memories. I wasn’t aware of that until, many, many years later, while we were in Terrace, we entered a house that had the same smell, and I was instantly pulled back to the warm memories of “de Zonnekamp”. I realized then that it was the smell of cedar – probably used for panelling.
From the hall a door led into the large dining-room. In my memories the table was enormous, but I don’t really think it was all that large for as far as I can figure out, there were no more than eleven or twelve people around it, and we have frequently seated that many around our extended table in the Denman house. A few vivid images: Uncle Arnold sharpening his big knife before cutting slices off a roast, the beautiful blue glass finger-bowls, my cousin Jan measuring carefully his cheese, meat, bread, and so on, on a balance that was placed on the mantle-shelf over the heater. He was diabetic, and the first patient in Holland who was later treated with insulin.
The second door led to the living-room, a large room with an enormous window on the south, that showed the church tower of Hees, a village close to Nijmegen. Why that tower has occupied such a dominant place in my memories I would like to understand; it was not a significant or impressive church tower, but it fascinated me. Probably it had something to do with another memory: my aunt and I standing at the base of that tower, I touching the brick while looking up, and the sudden panic – I was sure the tower was moving and going to crash on top of us. I wonder now if windblown clouds could have produced that nightmarish impression? The carpet in the living-room was a rich, deep blue and we played endlessly on it – tiddley-winks, pick-up sticks, and I don’t know what all, when it was too cold or too wet to play outside. The living-room and the dining-room were connected by a closed-in sun-porch – a popular space in many houses, especially the older ones. I remember that sun-room as a bright, warm, cheerful place, but I don’t have any memories that associate it with plants, but that is probably due to the fact that plants were not interesting to me at that age.
The bedrooms were on the second floor, where my cousin Arnold, who studied medicine, had his study. I was allowed in there on occasion and got easily lost in the fascinating pictures of human organs in vivid colours. There was also the room where we slept while staying at “de Zonnekamp”, a room that has always occupied a rather secret but very dominant space in my childhood and adult life. The memory is so vague, and on the other hand, so vibrant, that I don’t know anymore whether it represents actual or imagined truth; likely some elements of both. I see a high, bright room, with a single ceiling light, and a small gas heater in one corner. I was in bed. Downstairs there were soft, urgent voices of adults, among which I recognized the voice of my mother, clear and lovely. Then the large door closed, there were steps through the gravel, a car door that was shut, a few more voices, then an engine started, and the tires were crunching through the gravel, slowly moving away from the house with dreadful finality.
Some time later, aunt Bets and I walked together through the sunny garden, through the opening in the beech hedge, and out on the other side, past the rye field along that familiar dark and a bit slippery path to “Berkenoord”. I can still hear our steps, impolitely loud on the marble of the very still hallway, to a room where we found my mother, in an unnaturally high bed. The room was cool and shady. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was, however, a youngish nurse, who brought cocoa in white cups. She seemed awfully nice and didn’t show any signs of annoyance when I spilled all my cocoa over the floor accidentally, but cleaned it up and brought me another cup with the delicious warm and sweet drink. I had no idea, of course, what all this meant, but the memory, although possibly faulty, is strong and vivid. Many years later I learned that my mother’s disease, breast cancer, had been diagnosed by my uncle Arnold while she was for a few days in “Berkenoord” for observation, and he discovered that it was well past the operable stage4. The nurse who impressed me so much was my father’s later second wife, whom you have known as “Grootmoeder”. I have no explanation for the fact that the memory has burned itself so deeply in my mind, for I was certainly too young to understand – I must have been six – but I assume that my fears, though unclear and unreasoned, must have been, somehow, magnified in the months and years to come during my mother’s long illness.
One of the things that made staying with aunt Bets and uncle Arnold so wonderful was that there was always so much to do. Their children were a lot older than we were (I imagine Jan and Arnold and Leonoor were in or near their twenties, for they were all at university. Annetje must have been seventeen or thereabouts, and Jaap fifteen) and well out of the toy age, but their toys, their indoor games and their books were all kept, the toys and the books in the attic in an enormous cabinet. Like many houses the attic had also a loft, and that was the place where the very large rocking-horse was kept, a stuffed foal, I believe, or a rocking-horse covered with horse-hide. At the time I was engrossed in the Karl May books about the Apaches (the heroes) under their wise and valiant chief Winnetou and his equally brave and heroic white friend known as “old Shatterhand” (the “I” of the tales). I rode that rocking-horse by the hour, shooting my gun, hanging to the side of the horse, under his neck – a favourite trick of the Apaches at war. And there was the true steam locomotive that, with its track, came to me as a birthday present in Amersfoort – my pride and joy. But in “de Zonnekamp” we pushed it around the floor, and had fights, Piet and I, about whose turn it was……Some things don’t change. Finally, there was that incredible, large cabinet with the children’s books. You could just lie on your stomach on the wooden floor – my favouite reading position – and forget everything around you, even a call to come for supper. I’m not sure any more, but it could be that the great Winnetou entered my world, to stay for an unreasonably long time.
The stairs in “de Zonnekamp” were wide and easy, and covered with a thick runner. We played often on those stairs, crawling down head-first, feet trailing and using arms and hands only, or riding down on a scatter-rug, with the front part gathered between your legs and held firmly with both hands, sliding down on your behind, a rough ride.
At the bottom of the stairs a largish bronze gong was hanging, the banger, with its soft leather head, beside it. It was used only as a signal that lunch or supper was ready. I loved its wonderful, vibrating sound and could not suppress on one occasion the urge to bang it softly to hear it – with the result that cousin Jan, studying law, stopped working to come down, thinking that it was suppertime. He was not pleased to find his little cousin there, banger in hand – and let it be known beyond a shadow of doubt. It was the only time I sounded that gong, at least without authorization. One of those humiliating moments that a person would have liked to forget and that has burned itself in one’s memory with devasting clarity.
As far as I can recall we were usually at “de Zonnekamp” at Easter, and immediately that is linked to memories of Easter egg hunts – Easter eggs that were decorated by the adults the night before, with faces, Easter bunnies and abstract decorations – exactly like the ones you will remember, and your kids. I have no doubt that our custom goes back in a straight line to the Easter celebrations at “de Zonnekamp”, even including the huge bonfires, which were lit on the property of neighbouring friends of my aunt and uncle’s, the Wiardi Beckmans5 – enormous, blazing fires. I always loved fires – and fires in Holland were rarely allowed and therefore all the more special.
When my mother was still living, we must have been in Nijmegen for a Christmas as well, for there is a vivid memory of my sister Lieske, being carried by uncle Arnold around an enormous Christmas tree in the sunroom, I believe, and bending to have a closer look at an ornament, when suddenly her hair was on fire – panic! Oom Arnold must have extinguished the flames instantly; there is nothing attached to that fiery image that indicated serious injury, just the sudden flame and the shrieks. I must have been very young, for Lieske was small enough to be carried on my uncle’s arm.
I leave “de Zonnekamp” with mentioning that Moekie knew the house and stayed there overnight once, after aunt Bets had sold the property to the family Nolen. Aart Nolen was in Moekie’s class in grade 1.6_
My aunt Nora was another significant figure in my childhood, especially in my early teens. She remained unmarried for reasons totally unknown to me. She was a tall woman and must in her younger days have been beautiful, I imagine, but she was very heavy in the years I am writing about. Her eyesight was poor and she wore very thick-lensed glasses, but even so produced a characteristic strained squint when looking at small objects that I remember vividly. She owned two small houses on adjoining lots near Hattem, a small town in the northern corner of the dry hills that form the triangle between Amersfoort, Zwolle and Arnhem, the Veluwe. The Rhine-arm that borders the area on the eastern side, the Yssel, runs past Hattem, which used to be a small walled city, apparently of some strategic significance still in the 15th and 16th century, for it had a Spanish garrison. The main road from Holland to the four provinces that make up the north-eastern part of the country ran past Hattem, and I suppose that it was the western landing of the ferry to Zwolle, the much larger city on the opposite bank of the Yssel. Many of the stories and legends that were terribly important to my perceptions of Hattem as a romantic and delightful place had their roots in this Spanish period. There was no doubt that the little town was the setting for a pretty bloody and violent chapter in its long history, for the northern part of the country, the part north of the rivers, was Protestant, and the eighty-year war with Spain had two main causes: taxes and religion. The Spanish tried with all means to re-establish Roman Catholicism as the only religion in the whole country. The means were horrendous………..
Stories of ghosts were the most frequent. They were usually related to specific locations and houses, and most I don’t remember, but I do remember the story of “het witte wief” (“the white woman”) who could be seen at a certain crossroads, always hurrying along, and mysteriously disappearing among the trees. And there was the small old castle-like house, “Het Spijker” that was haunted to the point that nobody would live there anymore. The straight road that led to the house was bordered on both sides by a dense beech hedge. It was said that nobody could walk along that road away from the house without looking back at least once. Some of the people I knew in Hattem, neighbours of aunt Nora (tante No to us, an affectionate abbreviation of her real name) mostly, had tried – but failed. The power that forced them to look back was irresistible, they said. I never tried. So strong was the impact of these and similar tales that even now, while writing them down I feel the peculiar sensation that is known to the French as a “frisson” – the delightful little cold shiver that accompanies the supernatural. Looking up the meaning of “frisson” I discover that it means any shiver. But we used it exclusively for the particular shiver related to ghost stories.
The person who was the teller of most of these tales was a one-eyed neighbour of aunt Nora. His house was the meeting place for a loose organization of kids of which I was a member. I don’t remember what we did, but I vividly remember that it was he who taught me never to aim an arrow, or a pebble in a slingshot, or anything you could shoot or throw, at another person -he himself had lost his eye that way. And he taught us to return whatever you borrowed: tools, utensils, equipment, or whatever. I remember him with fondness, as a generous, honest man who had a real liking for kids, and lots of time for them.
Aunt Nora lived in one of two (smallish) houses next to each other; one was called “Heihofje”, the other had a French name I don’t remember.7 I thought they were delightful houses, but remember them only vaguely. “Heihofje” had a large, open living-room with few but beautiful pieces of furniture, very spacious. The floor was covered with a large reed mat. At the back of the house was a large garden gone wild. There were large plants with yellow flowers that had not only survived in the tangle, but seemed to thrive in it.8 We used to pick bouquets daily -they formed the only decoration of the large living-room.
Aunt Nora was a devout woman. She insisted on reading from the Bible every morning before breakfast to get the day’s events under way, and we had to be there, as well as her maid, a local girl. Since her favourite was the Book of Isaiah, and because she read long sections, I didn’t ever understand what she was reading. It made this part of the day a bit hard to take, especially when you were hungry, and there was a smell of fried bacon in the air. I was not the only one who had some trouble with Isaiah; the maid, when asked to come from the kitchen to the living room for the Bible reading, found endless excuses to stay in the kitchen, but to no avail, for aunt Nora did not yield – not on this point. And at the end of the reading there was always that little sigh: “Oh – Isaiah is so beautiful…”
A stay in Hattem was always a wonderful part of the holiday, and in part that was due to the presence of aunt Nora’s dog, a largish German shepherd cross, fiendishly protective of house and property, to the point that he (or she, or it, whatever) had to be kept inside around the time that the mailman could come. I loved going for walks, the dog on a leash. It gave me a feeling of pride and power that could hardly be matched by anything else. I would have loved to have a dog…..a dog of my own.
It was at aunt Nora’s that I enjoyed and really experienced my first orchestral music. She had a grammophone, a wind-up machine that used the “sharpish needles”, and one of her recordings was “Egmont Overture” by Beethoven – it gave me shivers of passionate delight. I believe aunt Nora was more interested in Richard Tauber, the very famous tenor, but I didn’t like what he was singing, though quite prepared to accept my aunt’s opinion that there was not, and never had been, his equal among singers.
What made a stay in Hattem so wonderful? I really couldn’t say for sure, but I think that it was Tante No’s enormous sense of humour and her lively imagination that turned even ordinary things into romantic, delightful and extraordinary ones. And she had a manner of dealing with teenagers: she never talked “down”, but took you seriously. I heard later about her bouts with deep depressions, her manipulative nature, her jealousies, her almost shameless ways of prying money loose from uncle Jaap, and her other generally less pleasant characteristics. But to me she was a favourite aunt, a person of whom I have only very warm memories.
About aunt Mien I can be short; I did not really know her. Although she was my godmother (my “marraine”, in her own words) and tried hard – and, I’m afraid, desperately – to establish a special and close relationship with me, it never worked. I felt rotten about it, but could not force or change affections. I remember the expectation in her tone of voice, and the embarrassment I felt when she told me she was my godmother. She once asked me if there was something that I really wanted to have very much and my choice was a model airplane with a wind-up rubber-band prop. It became one of my favourite toys, but it didn’t last very long; the rubber band broke and proved impossible to replace. And with that memory comes another, not as clear, but very painful: my feelings of acute guilt at not loving aunt Mien, my “marraine”. My father used to say, with a touch of melancholy vehemence in his voice, that she had once been very beautiful, the most beautiful of the four sisters Mees. But her inability to break out of the sort of bondage (which was not uncommon where youngest girls in families were concerned -they were morally more-or-less obliged to stay home and look after aging parents) that tied her to her father until his death denied her any chance to live her own life. What was left was a nervous, shy woman who found it difficult to deal with other people openly and freely, I believe. During later years, after uncle Bram had returned to Holland from Australia, a hopeless alcoholic, it was aunt Mien who took it upon herself to look after him. She was an R.N. and I believe that she had a number of rough years, trying to keep him and the bottle separated. In those years they lived in a modest, un-charming house near Soesterberg, close to Amersfoort, and we visited back and forth. No closeness ever developed between us, and there is still a bitter taste attached to her little efforts to show her affection and my own turning away………
And the uncles: uncle Aad, who married aunt Pleun,_ the radiant, warm, cheerful aunt who turned to Roman Catholicism later in her life, to everybody’s shocked surprise,_ was at heart a romantic.9 I wonder if that is not a Mees characteristic – that tendency. Certainly the four boys seem to have had some trouble to get their feet firmly planted on the ground. Uncle Aad lived in Vaassen, a small farm-village north of Apeldoorn, on an enormous farm, built around a courtyard. The house formed one side, the stables two other sides, and the fourth side was taken up by the shops that used a large waterwheel for their power. I believe it generated power for the house as well. In the centre of the courtyard was a monumental fountain. The house was roomy, bright and cheerful – quite in line with aunt Pleun’s personality. My memories are golden – and hazy. The creek that drove the waterwheel formed, beyond the chute, a large pool, quite overgrown with waterplants along the edges. An old flatbottomed dinghy was hauled, upside-down, on the shore, and I remember vividly that I was allowed to row in it on the pond, but got hopelessly stuck in the plants, so that I had to get out to pull the boat free – the mud was deep and smelly and the satisfaction derived small. (Water has always had a magnetic and irresistible attraction for me, probably because we lived on high ground, surrounded by sand, pebbles, and further out, endless, glorious heather.) Later uncle Aad had a swimming pool dug upstream from the waterwheel, and around that pool grew the biggest, juiciest blackberries I have ever tasted.
There were two impressive animals, the first one a bull that lived in its own stable behind thick oak poles, but that broke out nonetheless on one occasion (I didn’t witness it) when a few little visitors from the city had tickled its large, moist nostrils with a stiff grass-stalk. He caused quite a scare, so I was told, furiously racing around the courtyard until he quieted down and could be captured again. The other one was a slender, beautiful horse on elegant, nervous legs, that had a nasty habit of rolling its eyes, and flattening its ears, but that could run like the wind, especially pulling the light two-wheeled cart back to its stable. Oh, and uncle Aad had gold-pheasants – I was drawing gold-pheasants for weeks after I had seen these extraordinarily rich-looking birds, discovering that in mixing vermilion and yellow crayons you could produce a gold-like effect.
justhavelaar 