MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER 4. BYE HOLLAND! HI SOUTH AFRICA!

 

Luky and grandparents on Holy Communion Day

CHAPTER FOUR

 BYE HOLLAND!   HI SOUTH AFRICA!

My parents, sisters, brother and I might never have come to South Africa but for the kind offices of a Dutch Reformed dominee and his wife, Aneke.

Both of them died several decades ago as did many of the people in the earlier chapters of these dappled reminiscences.  The last I saw of the dominee was when, now an old man, he was on television, speaking about his work which was to provide bibles for the masses.

He allowed his wife to assist us in our plans to emigrate to South Africa.  He was studying in Amsterdam at the time for his doctorate in divinity or theology and he and his lovely wife stayed in digs close to our shop in the Scheldestraat.

Aneke was a lonely girl, newly married and hyper-slim with long glorious blonde hair.  She wore the most wonderful clothes which she made herself with great skill.

It didn’t take her long to clean up the few rooms they rented, and as her husband was mostly either at Amsterdam university or studying at home, she had to learn to be quiet and content with her own company, creeping around like a child on her stockinged feet.

She was bitterly homesick for her mother, for the vast Fauresmith farm where she had grown up and for the sheltering beams of the South African sun.

Shyly, she’d come into our shop for her half loaf of bread, a couple of rolls, a pie or some biscuits, but my mother lost her heart to her and loved the way she tried to speak Dutch in her Afrikaans way.  Come to think of it, she had some of the graceful appeal and dignity of my Hogenhout aunts and this too may have drawn my mother to her.

They began by having short conversations and soon my mother was telling her how much my father longed to emigrate to South Africa.  I was too young to grasp all the details, but I think for us all to come to South Africa together my father had to have a job and a house awaiting him.

“Don’t you worry,” Aneke said.  “I’ll get my mother on the job.  She’s a formidable organiser.”  Aneke’s mother made our family her mission.  Within a few months my father had his South African job, his work permit and a house promised to go with it.  He and my mother sold the business which had brought them out of the red and made a tidy profit, enabling them to buy tickets for the six of us without State aid and to crate all our furniture, linen and crockery in a huge wooden container, in addition to ensuring our financial survival until it was time for the six of us to leave.

The dominee on his return to South Africa from Amsterdam became a chaplain. In the meantime in Amsterdam, my mother and Aneke continued meeting.

In the month October of the year 1952 a taxi drove through the centre of Amsterdam en route to the harbour where the emigration ship Zuiderkruis (Southern Cross) awaited the most recent crop of emigrants to South Africa who were about to embark and leave the Netherlands for South Africa later that day.  My father sat beside the taxi driver, Miekie on his lap, while Jos, Elly and I were pressed up close to my mother in the back seat.

I was the only one who shed a tear.  Among the rest of the family a euphoric sense of anticipation reigned.  My paternal grandfather had supported us enthusiastically.  He was very cross with the government for making him pay a great deal of money in income tax for social services.  Having always been self-employed, he frowned on the idea of state pensions for everyone and he had no intention of paying the pension of others, particularly when this would affect his own frugal savings for the future after a lifetime of self-employment and the employment of others.  When he could no longer pay the massive taxes required from him, he posted the key of his smithy in a registered envelope to the Receiver of Revenue. 

“They know now what I think of them and of their whole regime, Kunegonde,” he told me proudly.  Frankly I didn’t know what he meant by that.  He always over-estimated me.

Although I was a child, however, I realized that beyond a possible shrug very little attention would be paid to Opa’s bold gesture in the Revenue office.  When my father spoke to him about hoping to emigrate, Opa yelled:

“Long live liberty!”

“I leave this cold country without shedding a tear,” my mother was saying to my dad. “I’m just sad about my mom and dad and feel sorry for you about your mother.”  My maternal grandfather was already dead by that time.  Tante Talitha’s husband had taken her to Indonesia. For a long time when she returned she sat all day beside Oma’s fire, white to the gills, shaking with cold and yearning for the blazing sun. 

My mother enjoyed serving rice, for she thought rice was where it was at. Trying to find our feet financially the first two years in South Africa we would practically subsist on rice and bananas, a cheap, if fattening, diet.

On our way to the harbour, we passed the Dam and the Kalverstraat.  On Sundays my father had often taken us along to a church in the Kalverstraat, hidden among the shops that were frequented by tourists.  They called the church De Papegaai (The Parrot).  During the war when petrol was unobtainable we went there once in a cart with horses.  I had never forgotten that.

As the taxi irrevocably left the beautiful, familiar old parts of Amsterdam, I started asking myself how I could bear to leave this city of my heart.  When the taxi entered a hitherto unknown section I sobbed sorrowfully.  We were a down-to-earth family.  When you cried at home you were told to wipe away those crocodile tears.  

“For if you’ve got time to waste you can come and wash the dishes.” 

But this time my mother stroked my hair and my father made soothing sounds from the front seat.

“Don’t cry honey, you’ll see that you’ll find South Africa beautiful,” my mother said.  “They sell pineapples there for a sixpence.  That’s only a kwartje in our money.  And you know how you love pineapple.”

I stopped sniffling.  “With whipped cream?” I asked hopefully, Aneke having introduced us to this splendid dessert.

“Well I can’t be sure about that.  Only the future will tell.”

I was in the seventh grade at school.  Our school year had started in September and it was now the end of October.  Since there was no place for Elly and me in the digs my parents, Jos and Miekie occupied when the house and the shop had been taken over by the new shop-owners, we had been sent to a girls’ home run by nuns for the couple of months since I had finished grade six.  We felt somewhat cramped in those surroundings after running around unfettered in Amsterdam for so long but we soon came to heel.  Elly went back for a few weeks to school but later stayed on with the sisters who were teaching her sewing the way the nuns had taught my mother twenty-five years earlier. 

My academic good fortune had held and there had been talk of letting me skip the rest of grade seven and promoting me to grade eight.  This intention came to naught when suddenly our papers for South Africa arrived and we were told to pack our cases and take a very early train back to Amsterdam on the morning of our proposed trip to South Africa. 

In our compartment on the way from Amersfoort to Amsterdam were two ladies speaking together.  With our knowledge of Dutch diction, Elly and I both realised that the one hailed from Amsterdam.  The ladies in the compartment were being complimentary and one told the other she came from the Hague.

“And you, where do you come from?” she asked the other. 

“Where would you say?” the other asked. 

“I couldn’t possibly guess.”    

“From Amsterdam,” the other replied. 

The Amsterdammer and the The Haguer beamed benevolently while Elly and I smiled at one another.  With a flash of insight I realized at that moment that one day I would be writing about this and here I am, sixty-one years later.

My parents were waiting at Centraal Station with Jos and Miekie and after our excited hugs and greetings my father had hailed the taxi.  It was now turning into the quay of Amsterdam harbour and my father paid off the driver who bade us all a bon voyage. With the back of my sleeve I wiped off my last tears.    

“Out you get,” my father told us enthusiastically.  He had little idea that this was the last time he would ever see the beloved city of his birth and how desperately homesick for Amsterdam he would be during the seventeen years of life that remained to him.

Absently I watched groups of emigrants, some busy and nervous, others sorrowful and weeping, taking leave of their families.  My parents had said goodbye to their families at a party at my grandparents the previous evening and asked that nobody come to say goodbye.   Then another taxi drove up along the quay and Aneke stepped out.

There she stood, with her long blonde hair waving in the winter breeze, wearing her amusing short green jacket with felt figures all over it  She carried two coats over her arm.  One my mother shrugged into and the other went to Elly.

“When you give these to my mother and my aunt in Jagersfontein, please give them my love,” Aneke requested.  “Only three more months till we go home.  Tell my mother I can’t wait to see her and the family!”

 “Look over there!” my father called.

A massive wooden chest was being hoisted upwards to the deck of the Zuiderkruis.  It bore the legend: G J Nooij, Jagersfontein, South Africa.

“I wonder whom that belongs to,” a lady, standing near us, said.  “They must have taken everything but the kitchen sink.”  And that was the truth, and a good thing it was too, because my father and mother were never again to become wealthy.  And yet in the Scheldestraat so briefly they had come so close to attaining material wealth.  I can think of no better application of the expression “Man proposes, God disposes.”  They went to make money and they ended up losing it.  How ironic was that.

”We’re really on the way now,” my father said.   A BBC radio man approached us and asked my mother in English why she wanted to emigrate to South Africa. 

“To give my children a better future,” she said, although there had been nothing wrong with our future in Amsterdam.  But perhaps our good fortune had arrived just a little too late.

Our hand luggage was collected and we followed in its wake into the boat. Aneke stood in the bracing wind, waving and coughing.  She had difficulty in handling the weather.  She looked extremely sad to see us go.  Nobody could have been more hospitable to Aneke in Holland than my mother was.

“Child, go home, you’ll catch your death,” my mother called and Aneke nodded dutifully.  One last wave and she was gone.  Slightly overawed, we let go of the boat rails and went downstairs to find our cabins, impressed by the relative air of luxury exuded by the good ship Zuiderkruis.

For my mother, the ship journey to South Africa would be a seventeen-day-long nightmare during most of which she was sea sick and survived on salty biscuits, black tea and an occasional apple.  My father and Jos slept in a massive men’s dormitory and my mother and we girls shared a cabin with a lady and her two-year-old daughter.  Though the lady was perfectly polite as was my mother, they were reserved. Beyond a courteous greeting from both sides each morning, the lady and my mother never shared a single conversation.  Although we could not understand one another’s languages, I made friends with a little Danish girl whose mother was a reporter for a Danish newspaper and she and I took part in all the shipboard games.

Miekie turned seven on board ship and the captain sent her a huge cake in celebration.  When we spent an afternoon on the island of Las Palmas, my parents bought her a huge doll, almost as tall as herself (she was very little), that could walk.

We were up before daybreak the day we reached Cape Town and I have not seen as beautiful a one since.  All the colours of the rainbow from pink and blue to gold lit up the sky as the sun rose.  I thought I had died and gone to heaven. 

Some Salvation Army ladies with whom my mother had made friends on board gave us a card with the address of their Cape Town headquarters and after spending a fortune on morning tea we decided to swallow our pride and made it to the headquarters where we met a lot of our shipboard friends.  My father started playing some songs at the piano and we ate the most divine cakes and sandwiches.  We had been spoiled by the copious meals on board and for a while after we were forever hungry until normal life set in once again.

A Dutch Salvation Army lady, clad in mufti, took us to the station that evening and bought each of us children an ice cream on the platform.  When she waved and left us, we looked as night fell on Cape Town and the city turned into a massive Christmas tree, full of twinkling lights.

We were three days and nights on that train, with some lengthy waits between.  Most of the time we survived on bananas which were sold at every station.  Ever since, I have needed to be pretty hungry to eat another banana.  My mother kept us ready in case we arrived but at times we thought it would never happen. 

One night in a place called Springbok (or Springfontein – I’m not sure) we waited for hours for a connecting train.  We children lay down on the wooden benches as my parents were waving towels around us to discourage the droves of mosquitoes.  My father said to my mother:

“I have always wondered how St Joseph felt when he accompanied Our Lady into Bethlehem.  Now I know.  Can you forgive me for bringing you here?”

But by now truly the die was cast.

On the third day we arrived at our destination at last.  The only taxi on the Jagersfontein station took us off in a cloud of dust to the little town which owed its existence to diamond mining.  A greater contrast than that between Amsterdam and Jagersfontein it would be hard to imagine and we were homesick from that day.  And yet I realise today that there must have been a strong link between that tiny dusty mining town and Amsterdam’s vast diamond industry.

We entered to the butchery of Mr Nel, my father’s new employer, who also ran a bakery and my parents went into his office.  I looked at the butchery’s interior, so vastly different from the cheery shop in Amsterdam with its bunch of flowers on the counter.  Peering through the window outside onto the dirt road, I sighed. 

Mr and Mrs Nel took us to their house where we eventually sat down to a typical South African dinner.  Then a massive American car stopped outside, driven by Aneke’s mother.  She had brought an almost equally stately sister or sister-in-law along and they took delivery of the two coats my mom and Elly regretfully surrendered.

There was a good outcome, however, at least for Jos.  Aneke’s brother Jan came to visit us from the farm he had inherited from their father.  He brought his wife Maria who was a beautiful young woman.  Jan took us to his farm, telling us how green his lands were but they looked pretty brown to me compared to Dutch meadows.  But by now I was beginning to learn to keep my mouth shut.  I wasn’t at home any more.

For many years afterwards Jos spent his holidays with Jan and Maria and their children.  He became fluent in Afrikaans and ended up getting an honours degree in Afrikaans-Nederlands at Witwatersrand University.

Jan taught Jos horseriding and gave him a horse and some lambs which he took care of with his own flock.  One lamb Jos liked particularly and he brought it home where it grazed on the huge space around our house.  At first Jos fed it with a bottle and later we took it around Jagersfontein on a leash.  

My parents were unsure where the Catholic Church was.  One day they saw a little church and went knocking at the presbytery door.  It was opened by a Belgian priest who called his Belgian confrère.  We became friendly with them .

My mother got a lift from the priest who took her to the Belgian Father in Bloemfontein.  He took them to the Sister who was the secondary school principal. 

When my mother returned to Jagersfontein that evening, carrying bags of school uniforms – there had never been anything like that in Holland – she said that Elly had been enrolled for grade nine and I for grade seven.  In South Africa it takes twelve years of school before a scholar can write matric.  “I said they must do better than that,” my mother commented, “so they decided that Elly should go to grade ten and Luky to grade eight.  That gives Elly three and Luky five years to go until matric. ”

And so when the new South African school year started in January 1953, Elly and I presented ourselves in our green uniform dresses with their white collars and cuffs, our striped blazers and our white panama hats with the hatband in school colours with the badge in front.  

One week after we had started school and having been given a number of class tests, Elly and I were called in by our teachers, who had decided to promote Elly to grade eleven and me to grade nine.  That meant she had two more years until matric and I four.

I am proud to report that less than two years later Elly distinguished herself by passing her matric with English as her medium. She must have picked up a great deal of education in the university of life in Amsterdam.  My parents had by then moved to Springs on the Eastern Witwatersrand and Elly got an excellent job as a typist-clerk, while I stayed on for a further two years until I too matriculated. 

Back in Jagersfontein, Miekie and Jos grew very close to one another and my parents.  My mother was very homesick for us and one day she managed to get a lift with three businessmen and came to visit us.  

But first something happened that my mother told me about years later and makes me chuckle every time I recall it.  The three businessmen put up in a hotel and my mother also got a room there.  She said:

“After supper at about seven I excused myself and went to my room.  A little while later, a knock came to my door from the three gentlemen.  They told me through the door that they had come to have a drink with me.  I said I was sorry but that I was in bed already.  One said: “But we brought you a bottle of gin.”  “Oh well, in that case …” I said.  I opened the door a few inches, put my foot against the door and held my hand out, took delivery of the gin and locked the door again.  I had quite a few drinks from that bottle that night before going to sleep.”

Those were the days when I learned that it is possible for a person to feel lonely in a crowd.  The Pro-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart was next to our school and between study sessions we would be given time off for recreation.  I took to praying in the chapel and I built up a very strong relationship with God.  There were Catholic Truth pamphlets on a wooden stand which I read from cover to cover and I learned a great deal about my religion.  I soon found that God is never outdone in generosity,  The more time I spent with him, the closer I felt to God.

I quickly learned to speak English as I had a brilliant English teacher, who made us learn reams of Shakespeare and other poetry off by heart and we also had to know our Scripture direct speech texts word perfect.  I could always learn parrot fashion.

She had the gift of making her lessons amusing and interesting at the same time.  She started a question box for the seniors at our school and a popular event it became.  You put your question – unsigned – into the box and she gave her answers.

Teenage girls being what they are, this gave rise to a lot of fun, but it was impossible to put her to the blush.  On the contrary.

“Is it all right to kiss a boy when you’ve only been out with him once?” she read out on one occasion.  Benignly she looked up, her eye unerringly pinpointing the anonymous author of this daring request.

“Perfectly all right, Anne,” she acquiesced, “provided you don’t make a meal of it.”

After that, Mother Superior wasted no time in putting the lid back on our question box and our questions remained unanswered.

I used to labour over my English comprehensions in order to impress her, for I greatly valued her advice with regard to my writing.

“And here we have Lookie’s little attempt at an essay,” she said once, holding my beloved composition book between a forefinger and thumb.  “For her I predict a golden future … as reporter to the Sacred Heart Messenger.”

Who knows, it might have been this remark which eventually led me into sending my first attempts at writing to the Catholic newspaper The Southern Cross and her teaching which made them receptive to it.  She actually wrote me a letter thirty years later to tell me how much she enjoyed my essays in the paper, saying she never missed them.

I had red hair and the Amsterdam streetboys used to come after me, chanting: “Rooie, ga naar huis toe, d’r komt ‘n stier an.”   (Red one, go home, a bull is on its way).  My father had told me that English people loved red hair and my English teacher was no exception.

“Look at Lookie’s hair in the sun,” she told my classmates, “it looks like ripe wheat.”

“Not veet,” I said.  ‘stroh!’

I would probably have made more friends if I had only been better at games but all my life I was a zero at gymnastics and sport.  But the academic side of life was not an insurmountable problem to me.  They never let me take maths, only arithmetic, but I easily managed the English, Latin, Afrikaans, History and Religious Instruction, though I couldn’t handle Biology.

 I tried to be polite to everyone in the hope of making friends and I was so homesick for Holland and my parents that my life seemed to be one long misery.  One day in my first year during evening study I asked to be allowed to go to the cloakroom.  It was exam time and I just couldn’t understand the biology.

Standing, washing my hands at the basin, I heard someone crying loudly.  I looked around me but I was the only one in there.  It took a while before I realised I was the one weeping.  It’s the strangest feeling.  I went back to the study room and the study Sister packed me off to the dormitory.  Nobody ever mentioned my weeping to me again. 

My parents were having a dreadful battle financially.  My father had worked in Jagersfontein, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and finally got a job in Springs when Elly was in matric.  Unfortunately, he had paid the deposit on a house in Pretoria, so my mother, Jos and Miekie had remained back there until the house could be sold and they never did get their money back, but were lucky to get the house sold to other people.  My mother was working as an alteration hand in a dress shop in town.  My dad visited the family every second weekend by train from Springs.

One weekend when he was not there and Elly and I were home on holiday, we were sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for our supper.  There was no money in the house and my mother only had oats and sugar in the kitchen cupboard.  She was hoping to get her monthly salary a couple of days later. 

Annie was always at her best in an emergency and we were laughing and chatting as if we were attending a banquet.

“I think I’ll put the sugar into the porridge immediately,” my mother said, “because then I can get away with using less.”  She added the action to the word.  We prayed and as we brought our spoons to our mouths we put them down more quickly than we had picked them up.  To our horror, the white stuff she had believed to be sugar, turned out to be salt.

 “Now what do we eat?” my mother asked, perplexed.  I had spent a lot of lonely afternoons and weekends becoming ever closer to Our Lord and I knew his power. 

“Leave it with me,” I said and left the house.  I walked to the café and spoke to the owner.  I had prayed Hail Marys all along the way.  I knew he gave no credit.

“My mother will be paid on Monday but there is no money in our house at present,” I said to the man.  He gave me a serious but sweet look. 

“Buy what you need,” he said.  “I know your mother.  She always gets her food here.”

Fifteen minutes later I arrived home with tea, coffee, sugar, milk, Oros,  bread, butter, jam, cheese, apples, chocolates and biscuits and we had a feast. People who say that when poverty enters the door, love leaves out of the window, get it wrong.  The time I loved my family most was that Saturday. 

At the end of that year Elly passed her matric and joined the family now living in Springs.  They were staying in a rented house next to the bakery where my father worked.

My mother worked her magic in that house.  She got a married couple in to help her.  The lady scrubbed and polished the floor while her husband painted the walls.  My mother sewed curtains and bought some flowers.  In the tiny front yard we planted canna lilies and I was happier in that house during the holidays than in any of the other places in which I had lived. And at the last count, I have stayed in twenty different houses – most of them far more beautiful than that house.  That is the place where my Dutch mother taught me that a house which may look shabby outside may be beautiful and cosy within.

The library was less than ten minutes walk away and town and the cinema were just around the corner.  We had a very happy time there but Annie and my dad were able to put a deposit on an economy house, so we moved. 

Finally the day came when my school years came to a close. I went to the Pro-Cathedral and thanked God for the peace and joy I had always found there. That night I got on the Bloemfontein train and I knew somewhere deep inside that – provided I had passed biology which was always a doubtful prospect – I was on my way to a new future. 

I was only sixteen and I would probably soon be holding a matric certificate from one of the most highly respected schools in the country which would open many doors to me in the future.  It had all been worth it, I decided.  All that was left to me to do was to find a good job in Springs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER THREE. MY PRIMARY SCHOOL YEARS

The Nooij family. Luky is seated in the front row next to Oma Annie Nooij

CHAPTER THREE

MY PRIMARY SCHOOL YEARS

“Our children speak so grandly,” Mrs Bakker often said, “and they always speak with two words.”  That meant that you ended your sentence by saying the name of the person you were addressing.

Mrs Bakker had been working for my mother for over ten years when Mr Bakker got a better paying job and told his wife to stay at home.  Afterwards, she came in crying one day as she sat down in one of my mother’s easy chairs. 

“He doesn’t need to know I've come back here as long as we don’t tell him,” she said to my mother, who, despite her own heartbreak was adamant in her refusal, saying:

“He’d be bound to find out sooner or later and then the fat would be in the fire.”

I felt as if we had just had a death in the family.  And that’s how it was.  Beyond bumping into her in the shop when she came to buy bread or getting an occasional smile and a wave from her in the street, I had lost Mrs Bakker forever.  

If you lived among the street boys of my generation in your youth, you received a baptism of fire that would toughen you up and cause a lot of fear to be taken out of living among street boys anywhere else afterwards.  “They’re a dreadful nuisance and a pain in the neck but surely they wouldn’t kill me,” you tended to conclude.

As I have said already, one naughty boy in our street was a lean youngster who used to give me prikkeldraad (barbed wire) on my arm.  This means you grab a piece of arm with both hands and turn the skin simultaneously into two opposite directions.  He was extremely popular and a trendsetter in the street and it was all right if he liked you.  He was quite fond of Elly but I tended to give him a wide berth.

I couldn’t tell his mother about my dislike for her cherished lastborn.  She and I loved one another very much – she had no daughters of her own and spoiled me instead.  In later years, when her sons married, her daughters-in-law became her daughters.  But if you touched one of her five sons, even with your tongue, a cold look came into her eyes. 

The time my father fell off his pedestal in my estimation was when I told him that four boys (of course including this lady's ewe lamb) had jeered at me when I fell into the spokes of the bicycle of one of them and the skin of my knee parted in a cross shape.

 “I can’t help you,” my dad said that time.  “So stop playing outside.  Stay inside and read a book.  If I fight with the boys their mothers will start getting their bread at Jongejans and we need their custom to stay in business.”  I felt he was cowardly – yet he taught me that unless you learn to avoid trouble you will have to face the consequences. Seventy years on I still have the scar on my knee to remind me, all because I made the mistake of trying to inflict my unwanted presence on their gathering.

It was a proud day, the day I first went to school.  I very quickly learned to read but my little fingers battled to write, particularly when we had to write with pen and ink.  The pen would hook into the coarse post-war paper and its two points parted in the middle, and presto! Another ink blot.  I regret to report that my first grade teacher, a tall woman who taught me to read in record time, smacked her little pupils each time they  made an ink blot.

In reaction to my complaints at home, my mother sent us to another school, much further away but situated opposite her parents’ home.  Though I was fond of my peers and quite a good pupil, coming among the top students of the middle achiever section of the class, I never considered myself popular among the children of the school.  Yet I was not entirely unhappy there because the teachers were lovely unmarried Dutch women, far too civilised, all of them, ever to lift their hand against one of their charges. 

The constant presence of Oma and Opa just across the road was a great consolation.  Between twelve and two I often went across the road and had lunch with them.  On Wednesdays and Saturdays we only had school until twelve o’clock and on Saturday afternoons Elly and I went to Cantare, our Catholic operetta group.

Tante Nel, one of my aunts, used to wash the windows of Oma’s fourth floor flat, standing on the window sill.  When she looked into our class and saw my classmates and me and even our teacher gaping at her, she grabbed with one hand onto the top of the window and cheerfully waved at us with the other.  But Oma must have called her in because she vanished inside a moment later.

Tante Nel was lovely, very clever with a beautiful singing voice.  She never married (though not for lack of admirers) and always lived with my grandparents until Opa died first and Oma died a few years later.  After their deaths she herself died with Oma’s little pink and blue statue of the Blessed Virgin clutched in her hands. She had wished her ashes to be buried at sea. Rest in peace, my lovely Tante Nel.

I was a diligent student and always did my homework in the attic.  Elly hated the very sight of school books.  Being very clever, she coasted along to grade six without opening one of them.  Outside the attic window there was the parapet covered with gravel; the one on which the butcher had successfully evaded the military in search of him.  Elly and I used to climb out there and harmonise together the songs we were taught at Cantare.

I might have known I was a born loser in the school stakes the moment I set eyes on my classmate Lara in the first grade.  She was one of those beautiful children with curly hair and long eyelashes, born of exemplary front bench Catholics, brilliantly clever, artistically gifted and exuding charisma from every pore.

Our teacher – it was still the tall lady – and we children adored her.  The teacher became tonguetied with awe when Lara’s parents came to school, smiling and bridling.  At break Lara was almost mobbed by her doting friends.  Aching to be admitted to her circle, I hovered around – but in vain.  In my early years I felt - unlike Lara - like a kind of dropout when my pen nib’s centre got stuck in my exercise books, producing large ink blobs as I travelled along the tricky road of education. 

I was in grade three in school on the weg where my grandparents lived when the fact that I did not believe in Santa Claus leaked out.  At that time the entire Dutch system of education hinged on the belief of the nation’s children in this good bishop.

The Saint had a book, we were told, into which all one’s good and bad actions were written.  If you had been good you were given presents and Dutch delicacies such as chocolate letters, pepernoten and speculaas.  (The fifth of December was one of the more prosperous days on the Nooij calendar and it was seldom the flour account was unpaid by the end of that month).  If you were naughty, it was a toss-up between a hiding or, in extreme cases of mischief, a trip to Spain in a sack once it had been emptied of toys and victuals.  Dutch teachers had a peaceful time of it during November and December as a result. 

However, I was scared of sleeping in the attic during those weeks because we were told the Saint depended exclusively on chimneys for their means of access and egress.  So my father had told me the whole thing was a hoax, designed to terrify little children. Thereafter I uncomplainingly betook myself to the attic in the evenings.

At school, however, I was constantly exposed to the threat of blackmail from my classmates.  Finally a girl told and I was accosted by an irate teacher.

“Who says Sinterklaas doesn’t exist?” she demanded.

“My dad,” I stammered.

“Tell your father he hasn’t an ounce of common sense,” she snapped and flung off. 

I couldn’t wait to tell my father, of course, and he was delighted.  He always had an eye for a pretty girl, although he told my mom she was better looking than the rest of womankind put together.

“Which one says I’ve got no common sense?  That little one with the dark curls.  Well well!”

During the war and even for a long time afterwards, my mother gave Elly and me a daily dose of steel comb.  This was an excruciatingly process in which my mother steadily persevered on account of her running battle with the nurse whose job it was to visit schools in Amsterdam randomly to examine the pupil’s hair for nits. The nurse had vowed to see to it that any girl with long hair stood to be scalped even if only one pathetic little nit showed its face on her tresses.

She called girls out at random but the balance shifted if your hair was long.  I got called out most days she appeared, characteristically without notice.  If you had nits, you needed to cool your heels in the passage before being sent home ignominiously with a little letter for your mother to wash your hair in vinegar and to keep you at home until the demise of the lice. My mother seldom came to school but when the nurse arrived you couldn’t keep her away.  Elly and I had the longest hair in school and the nurse’s fingers itched to do the snip snap thing on our plaits. 

My mother had told the nurse in my presence that she was prepared to pay her ten guilders for any nit found on our heads. The nurse, tacitly acknowledging Annie as a foe worthy of her steel, smiled grimly, looking as if her face would crack with the unaccustomed effort, and said:

“I’ll hold you to that!”

“Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” Annie retorted, smiling equally grimly.  Like the nurse she did not scare easily.  “You’ll have to find one first.” 

But down on my knees beside her with the steel comb relentlessly dividing the strands of my long hair and having my hair rinsed in vinegar with its tart odour at every weekly shampoo, I found myself wishing that we could be like the other girls at school and have our hair cut short too.  The fact that we did not end up doing the walk of shame to the corridor was not the nurse’s fault.  She was supposed to select her victims at random but I never missed the roll call.

My mother used to send me to the library.  After I had brought home some anti-Catholic material, we changed to the Catholic library which opened after Benediction at night in the cellar of the Augustinuskerk in the Postjesweg and where my father introduced me to the stories about Tom Playfair by the American Father Finn and translated from English into Dutch.

Many years later I did research for my doctoral thesis in English literature at the Marian Library at the University of Dayton, Ohio.  One of the priests in charge, Father Thomas Thompson, and I were walking in its grounds.

“I keep waiting for Tom Playfair to come running around the corner,” I said, watching the squirrels playing in and out of the trees.

“So you’ve read Father Finn, have you?  An amazing man.  He and my uncle were fellow priests and friends in the same parish.”

Thanks Papa, if it hadn’t been for you I would not have experienced that wonderful moment of recognition so far away from home and family.

The principal of our primary school always countersigned our reports.  She taught sixth grade.  

When the grade three teacher sent me to the principal's class with a note, she accepted it and said:

“Why is one of your shoulders higher than the other?”  It was a question my grandmother and my mom had already asked me.  I think perhaps being teased as much at school as I was may have caused me to shrink inside myself.  Whatever the cause, she told me to carry my leather school case on the side of the raised shoulder.  But my high shoulder, instead of descending, rose even higher.  So my mother decided to send me to Betje, a physiotherapist who lived over the road from us in the Davisstraat.  She taught special exercises to people with physical handicaps.  She had a particularly bad one herself.

“She’s almost blind, so she won’t notice if you stare,” my mother said.  “But please, make no reference to her eyesight.”

Betje was an amazing woman whose professional knowledge enabled me to straighten my shoulders and whose psychological insight changed my mental sense of inferiority for life.  She said I should call her by her name and after my initial shyness, I did so, as did her three nephews.  Betje lived with her mother, Oma, who from then on until we moved away from the Davisstraat made supper for me every Wednesday and Friday.  On Wednesdays, two of the nephews came to play.  After the physiotherapist finished her lesson with me, she and I held a sing-song. The boys stayed for supper and we’d walk them home.  Afterwards the physiotherapist taught me to play the recorder while she herself was a cellist of merit.

I can only be grateful for all Betje taught me in the line of music, art, literature and for her generosity, her gracious dignity, her stoical acceptance of her handicap and her delightful good manners. 

Betje made it her mission to introduce me to the works of famous painters.  Her favourite was Van Gogh whose work she loved because her ten percent vision easily distinguished his bold colours.  She gave me good books to read.  I saw somewhere that Anne Frank’s diary was first published in 1948 and that was the year Betje gave it to me to read.  Betje taught me to appreciate good music and when my shoulder had gone back to its correct position, she stopped her lessons but remained my beloved friend.  When Sean and I were married, Betje wrote to him that I was the daughter she had never had which shook me because I had only known Betje to be an extremely lovable but nevertheless impersonal woman.

The last time I spoke to Betje, I was spending the day at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, more than thirty years after we had last met, although much of that time we had corresponded. 

She answered and I told her I was on my way to Dayton, Ohio, in the USA to do research for a Ph D in English literature.  She answered me, the old familiar laughter in her voice:

“Let me get this absolutely straight, Luke.  Are you telling me that you are working on a doctorate in English and that you are going to America for your research?” 

“Bingo,” I said. 

At that moment even over the telephone wire I felt the emotion aflame in her and I realised that she was thinking back fifty years when a little girl with a distorted shoulder arrived at her house, and her sustained efforts to heal me.  The fact that I was now about to get my Ph D was due in no small way to her belief in me when I had none in myself, though we had never mentioned this between us before.

“I needed to share this with you, Betje,” I said, “because I believe the way you took care of me at my lowest ebb has everything to do with the fact that I’m in the good place I am now.” 

One day after school, school children had gathered in the field which my brother Jos and I crossed each day on our way home.  They had stones in their hand and started pelting me.  We had learnt in religion class about the fight between David and Goliath and I wondered if perhaps a stone might hit my temple.

Suddenly Jos, eight years old, grabbed my leather school bag stuffed with books and rushed amid the girls like a whirling dervish, smacking anyone that got in his way with the heavy bag. 

“Now we’re for it,” I thought with a feeling that was now beyond afraid and almost philosophical.  “Forty against two.  They won’t only kill me but Jos as well.” 

To my astonishment, that is not what happened.  Sanity seemed to return to those girls and they looked visibly ashamed of themselves as they ducked to avoid my seething little brother.  They disappeared swiftly in the direction of their various homes and life actually seemed to become less of a persecution afterwards.  

By the time I was ten years old, my parents started talking about emigrating.  Post-war Holland was introducing social renewal and business owners were going to be in the front ranks of those who would bear the financial brunt of the new Utopia.   My mom and dad felt they had had enough.  They sold the business in the Davisstraat. 

We lived for fifteen months in a rented house and it was a good time to be alive.  They invested the little sum that was left.

My mother obtained employment as an alteration hand and saleslady in a woman’s clothing store in the city and my father worked in a rusk factory.  But as popular he had been as an employer, so unable was he to cope with being one of the work force.  After a few months he was handed back his papers.

Elly had left school and worked as a clerk in a business to do with opinion polls.  At night she went to the Schoevers Business Institute to learn shorthand and typing.

Friday night was a red letter night when the delivery man from The Spar delivered groceries to our house.  The days of unlimited biscuits, pies and custard slices from the shop were over and the pound of sweets and the massive sprits biscuits provided a welcome weekly release from enforced fasting.  Then the front door bell would ring.  “Mrs Nooij, may Elly and Luky come with us to Benediction?”  the son of the druggist next door, would call out.  He was to serve at the altar that evening and my highly edified mother gladly gave her consent.  We would grab our books for the Catholic library which opened in the church cellar after the service, and run downstairs.  Along with Gerard, three or four other saintly altar boys would be waiting. 

I always enjoyed Benediction, a service of adoration that was kept regularly in all Catholic churches. The first time Elly had taken me to Rosary and Benediction I had been four.  We prayed Hail Marys until I thought they would never stop. 

“How did you enjoy Benediction, Luke?” my parents asked. 

“It was very nice. Lots of flowers.  Nice smell (of incense), many candles.  But they said four hundred Hail Marys.”

My parents laughed.  “Only fifty-three,” my mother said.  “That’s what you think,” I responded.  “You weren’t there.”

Our parents were trying to obtain papers to emigrate overseas.  The options had dwindled to Australia or South Africa.  We read all the promotional material and were getting ready mentally to cross the ocean.  But though no replies were forthcoming from the powers that organised emigrations, my mother kept needing to draw a little from the capital which was disappearing like snow before the sun.  In a bid to stop its total dissipation, my parents bought a run-down little confectionery shop.

This time we lived on the ground floor behind the shop and Elly and I slept downstairs in the basement.  There was a swing hanging there.  When I sat on it, it broke and I slammed onto the floor whereafter my head moved backwards and hit the wall with a thud.  Seeing sheets of red and silver stars in front of my eyes, I ran upstairs screaming away and my mother couldn’t get me out of the shop fast enough because the customers were looking surprised.

It happened to be the beginning of the sixth grade.  Jos went to a new school, while  Elly had handed in her notice at work and joined my mother in the shop where a miracle was taking place.  From the moment my mother took over, the shop became unprecedentedly prosperous and showed an ever-increasing profit.  After making barely enough to survive previously, we were now able to start putting money away.

My mother and Elly were doing extremely well in the confectionery shop which had been repainted and cleaned to a high gloss. A  brand new carpet was laid on the customers’ side of the counter behind which she and Elly were cheerfully serving the public. 

A retired teacher came into the shop and offered her services to me for private arithmetic classes, which I attended and my marks shot up.

The emigration bug had bitten deep and my parents' minds were straining towards the world beyond our country.  But first they needed employment and a work permit and this is where Aneke came in.