MY
DAPPLED LIFE
a quilt
of memories
by
Luky Whittle
INTRODUCTION
Jacinta,
my fifth child, has been asking me to write my life’s story.
“You’ve
had such an interesting life Ma, and you’ve seen so many places and done so
many things. I’m sure you could write a
lovely book about them. Otherwise all
your interesting memories will cease with you. Besides, it cannot be good to
lie down so often after the frenetic life you’ve led!”
I cannot
hide my sloth from Jacinta, because I stay in a flat in the grounds of her
house in South Africa. Besides, I find
myself regretful that the characters who will people the pages ahead, the
majority of whom have died, did not leave us with a record of their reminiscences.
Emboldened
by Jacinta’s confidence I am embarking on my memoires. They aren’t going to comprise a well-planned
treatise of cause and effect – more like a crazy chronological multi-coloured
quilt which my children can mentally wrap around them when they feel cold one
day, after I’ve caught Altzheimer’s. This is an ailment which has plagued both
sides of my family. Even if I still seem
to have it together now, however barely, that’s no guarantee for the
future. So let me see what I can still
remember.
When I
stood in the shade of an apple tree in my native Holland as a child, the ground
beneath my feet looked dappled, mixing shade with light. My life has been dappled by sunshine and
shade. I cried a lot of tears. Yet there was always something to laugh about
too. Hence the title.
What
about the quilt part of the book’s name?
To my mind, life and all its concerns comprise a massive patchwork
quilt. Quilting is not exclusively the
province of superannuated crones with nothing better to do - like the author
who is a crone though not a quilter. It
is an expert mixing and matching of various shapes and sizes of material patches. Only by keeping the sizes and colours in
proportion to one another can the quilter hope to achieve a harmonious
whole. Life, health, family, work,
education, humour, sorrow, music, art, literature, caring and being cared are
represented by patches.
When the
quilting pieces have been connected, the whole is backed up by a single sheet
before the ticking is placed inside to turn a harmonious quilt into a warm and
snug counterpane, designed to withstand the cold of a winter’s night and life’s
vagaries. The backing sheet represents
our love of God, in whatever way we experience him, which needs to be behind
all our concerns, in order to bring sense, proportion and purpose to our lives.
In many
ways I was a failure as a mother and grandma by not excelling at cleaning,
sewing, knitting, cooking, baking, dieting, supervising homework and by
preferring to read novels to doing my duty to my family. As for crocheting, I can’t even do that at
all – and not for want of trying to learn it.
I
dedicate this book to my children and grandchildren with love. May it rekindle their good memories of me and
lay to rest the bad ones.
Luky
Whittle – Kroonstad – Lent 2014
CHAPTER
ONE
GERARD
AND ANNIE - MY DUTCH PARENTS
I was born in Amsterdam, Holland,
on 21 May 1940 to Gerard Nooij, a baker, and his wife Annie (neé Hogenhout), a
seamstress. They had been married since
1935 and I had an older sister, Elly, born on ll July 1936. My brother Jos was born on 24 December 1942
and my sister Miekie on 7 November 1944. Having a child during the Depression and three
more during World War II meant that my parents were no strangers to hardship.
My father and mother were
baptised in the same Catholic church in Amsterdam – I don’t know which one it
was. On Internet I think I once saw
something about a church titled Het Allerheiligst Hart van Jezus. If I remember this correctly, maybe that’s
the reason why both my parents prayed daily to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Otherwise, but perhaps less likely, it might
have been the St Nicholaas Church near the Centraal Station. In this church my mother’s father, a
blacksmith, had done some beautiful iron work which I haven’t seen but I took
Elly’s word for it. She had seen
it. But like the others who might have
remembered it, she has died. So has
Jos.
My mother was the second child in
a family of ten. She had three brothers
and six sisters – one more attractive and talented than the next. My maternal grandmother was one of those
women who suffered from maternity blues and often had to have a cure in a rest
home because her perfectionist standards sometimes fell apart in those
pre-washing machine days. To make her
life easier, my grandfather sent my mother and some of her sisters to a boarding
school run by nuns in a place called Bussum.
This is where she met the sisters Annie, Marie and Bep Nooij whose
brother would one day become her husband.
They discovered they all came from the same parish.
I shall sometimes call my dad
Gerard for the purposes of this quilt although he once asked me not to in his
characteristic humble fashion (“Luke, we need to talk. I know I’m a fool and so do you. But when you call me Gerard in front of
others they know it too, and this I would like to avoid. So, do you think you could manage to call me
Papa when they’re around?” “Right Papa
as long as you feel so strongly about it.”)
Somehow I never called him by his name again. My dad knew how to get his point across
without humiliating you. Mama I shall
sometimes call Annie though I would never have dared to do so when she was
alive.
Annie was eleven but she was no
taller than a child of seven when she first met her husband. When Gerard’s sisters went to meet him on the
Sunday afternoon when he arrived from Amsterdam with their parents Jan and Neeltje
Nooij to visit them at boarding school, he himself was seventeen but he looked
twenty-one because he had been working in his father’s bakery since he was
fourteen, doing a man’s job.
My grandpa, Opa, had made his
money in property by the time he was forty when he retired very early in life
to live in a semi-detached villa in Amstelveen with my grandmother and
unmarried aunt Annie until he died. Oma
was a quiet lady who as a young girl had worn Dutch traditional dress, living
in a farming town called Ilpendam. Like
her husband’s family, her own had also been deeply involved in the baking
trade.
She was eleven when her mother
died and the eldest of nine children.
She left school and took care of them.
Then she married and raised eight children of her own, three girls and
five boys. Two of her daughters married
bakers. Three of her sons became
bakers. One son became a Catholic priest
and the youngest was a doctor. Oma
seldom spoke much when I knew her but Papa adored her.
Opa made his money in a way he
had never planned. He was renting a
bakery which he had built up into a flourishing business in the
Hogendorpstraat, in Amsterdam which was surrounded by a block of houses. A bakery conglomerate offered to buy up the
business but Opa refused. Then he
discovered that his lease had only six more years more to run, and that the
conglomerate intended to buy up the block and swallow up his bakery in the
process. Opa got in first. He managed to obtain a loan and bought up the
part of the block containing the bakery and his tenants paid it off for
him. This is how he could afford to
retire at forty.
He spent the rest of his life
tending his garden with the pansies and the gnome, taking care of his birds,
all called Piet, taking a daily walk to the park and he even made a massive
carpet for my grandma’s sitting room.
With his silver-rimmed glasses and his gold watch chain, always dressed
in a suit with shirt and tie as men did in his day, he reminded me of a little
storm cloud, contained with difficulty in a cracklingly clean pillow slip. Oma was the gentle one.
“You remind me so much of my
mother,” my father told me one day when we were having coffee together in the
kitchen. I was flattered.
“Why Pops?” I asked, angling for
a compliment.
“Well, she used to make the two
of us coffee and sit beside me. Then she
would talk to me for an hour without really saying anything.”
I felt offended until I saw his
warm sideways smile in memory.
“I found it very restful,” he
added softly.
By the time I knew Oma she was no
longer talkative and in her latter days she contracted Altzheimer’s disease
which was then known as the second childhood.
I think she must have been a wonderful lady, judging by my dad’s love for
her.
Before Oma contracted Altzheimer’s
I once asked her if she had liked my dad when he was a boy in her house. “Only if you promise not to tell anyone,”
this usually reserved woman said, “I’ll tell you how much I loved him.” I promised and she said: “I always loved him
best of all my children because he was never nasty or cruel or unkind. He always smiled or laughed and he always did
whatever I asked him without arguing or strife.
He was always gentle and easy to be with.” That’s the way I experienced him too. And when I went to Holland many years later I
met two of my cousins, children of two of his brothers. Both of them said, without reference to one
another:
“You were Uncle Gerard’s
daughter. That was such a kind
uncle.”
“He was a kind father too,” I
told them both. They say that people who
had loving fathers find it easy to love God.
That must be why I have always loved God so much.
Papa was as honest and fair as
the day is long. When he was a little
boy, there was a young girl working at their house. At table one day, the family was running her
down. Gerard went out to the kitchen and
brought her in.
“You must come and listen to
them,” he said as she entered the diningroom.
“They’re telling horrible stories about you.”
“Oh, the shame!” his sisters
recalled.
His father and he did not get
on. My dad had his mother’s calm nature
but he must have inherited some of his father’s quick temper too. For some reason Opa wanted him to be a
solicitor but he refused, preferring to become a baker. He always regretted it.
“Are you going to be a fool like me?” he asked when we brought home a bad report. That was a difficult question to answer. If you said no you’d be contradicting him. If you said yes you’d be calling him a fool and I’ve never known a person who was less of one.
My Oma may have spoiled him. On Saturday nights he went out with his
friends. “Ma,” he said to her one day,
“my friends when they pay for their drinks always take out these wads of notes
and I always seem to have just enough money on me. I have so little in my pocket compared to
them. I wish I could flash banknotes
around the way they do.”
My grandmother took out her money
box which contained three hundred guilders; a fortune during the Depression
days of the 1930s.
“Here you are son, knock yourself
out. But I need it back.”
That night my dad came home very
late and Oma was in a dreadful quandary.
How would she explain the situation to my irascible grandpa if the money
was gone? But when my dad eventually
came home, he gave her back every cent.
“Thanks, Ma, the guys’ eyes nearly popped out. They were so impressed!”
There was a story about Annie I
always loved which was quite similar.
The second-eldest of ten children, she was used to sharing everything
she had. Even when I grew up you never
knew whose dress was whose because the Hogenhout sisters shared their frocks so
that they could be seen at work as having a larger wardrobe than they did. Seated at the lengthy dining room table one
day at lunch, my mother sighed to the family at large:
“Oh, how I wish I could have one
of those little round Edam cheeses to eat all by myself and not to have to
share it with anybody!”
The next day at lunch, everybody
got their usual meal but on my mother’s plate reposed a fresh, round little
Edam cheese.
“Did you share it with the
others?” I asked when she told me this tale.
“Of course! How could I be so selfish otherwise?”
But the point had been made – to
both their mothers, Gerard and Annie, both second to be born in the family,
were very, very special. And both their
mothers must have been good psychologists.
“Annie come with us and meet our parents and our big brother Gerard,” the Nooij girls said that Sunday afternoon at the Bussum convent.
My father would always watch his
tongue, especially in the presence of children.
His dad, in order to stress a point, could use an expression blistering
enough to extinguish all the candles on a Christmas tree.
My father was terrified of Our
Lord. His dad had a certain admiration
for his Creator, which he proved inter
alia by privately financing his priest son’s entire seminary
education. He certainly was not scared
of God, although my mother once said that her parents-in-law were both very
prayerful people.
“He who lives in fear, will die
in fear,” Opa would snort. My mother,
who seemed to be much fonder of him than my dad was, because she too was a
little keg of dynamite, blossomed when she told us about her visit to him on
the afternoon of the day he died.
“Look at that silly girl,” he
spluttered, pointing at my Tante Annie Nooij who was weeping bitterly. "If only she’d wipe those tears and pull
herself together, we’d all be better off!”
He died in the evening, no doubt
approaching the Judgement Seat with a calm confidence born from his belief in noblesse oblige. He felt that if you did your duty by your
wife, children, staff members, Church and the poor, God could not in all
fairness deny you a place in heaven.
The way he did his stint for the
poor was a story my parents told amid chuckles. These were the depression years
and many poor people were on the dole and being helped by the St Vincent de
Paul Society. They would be sent with
vouchers for bread, to Opa who never encashed the vouchers.
At ten o’clock every Friday
morning he took the vouchers exchanged for bread that week and burned them in
the flames of his bakery oven. Just as
lunch was served on the stroke of one in his house and supper at six exactly,
so he had an exact day and time set for the weekly burning of the SVP vouchers.
When my parents told me that
story I felt irritable. Why did the poor
need to go through the humiliation of bringing in the vouchers, I
wondered. Could they not just have come to
him quietly and could he not tactfully have given them a loaf of bread free?
But it was his unyielding belief in organisation which was the reason why my
grandfather made all the money he did and which enabled him to retire from the
bakery at the youthful age of forty.
“The difficulty does not lie in making money,” he told my dad, “but in
keeping it.”
In the first place, he did not
work in his shop, but in the bakery, so he had little access to the poor people
who brought the vouchers. In the second,
one will never become financially sound enough to be able to support the poor
by going about charity in a haphazard way or without laying down set rules.
Forty years after my
grandfather’s death my husband launched a vast charity. He believed in organisation as the only way to run the charity. This belief was borne out by the many years the Free State Soup Kitchens assisted beneficiaries.
By insisting on the SVP vouchers,
my grandfather ensured that the people he helped were truly in need, and he was
giving them a measure of dignity too, because they believed their bread was in
fact being paid for. Later, perhaps,
when their luck turned, they in turn would contribute to the SVP and so find
closure for having needed to accept charity.
It’s always easier to give than to receive. That my grandfather chose to feed the
vouchers to the flames in a characteristically flamboyant gesture was his
affair. He supported the poor without
going broke himself.
Whereas my father grew up in
luxury, my mother’s parents struggled for every cent. Her father was a blacksmith with his own forge
but he never made big money. Yet he was
always giving us pocket money and we adored him. He was so clever and loving. He called me Kunegonde and when we prayed
those long Dutch Catholic prayers before and after meals he would always add:
“St Kunegonde,” looking threateningly at me from under his beetling brows and
over the glasses which had slid down his nose.
I knew better than to laugh and would hastily respond:
“Pray for us.”
When my mother left school, the
priest in charge of their parish offered her a bursary. The diocese was building a domestic science
school for girls in the parish and they wanted her to be its first
principal.
“But my mother couldn’t manage
all those children on my father’s money so I turned them down and went out to
work instead,” Annie said, as if nothing could have been more natural. She seldom mentioned the honour but I think
it must have frustrated her a little to think how easily she might have made it
to the top rather than become a seamstress and alteration hand. However, you can’t keep a good girl down and
she ended up running her own boutique ‘Animo’ until she married.
The action describes my mother’s
attitude to her parents. She loved and
honoured them devotedly and she pitied her perfectionist mother for always
having much so more work to do than she could complete in any given day.
My grandfather Hogenhout
complained bitterly of my grandmother’s spend-thriftiness.
“You have a hole in your hand,
Luce,” he would rave, reducing my Oma to tears.
When my mother tried to help her mom with her accounts, she found that
Oma was receiving thirty-odd Catholic magazines in her post box each month
because she could never refuse a request for a subscription from any appeal
that was either church- or mission-based. My mother sat down, wrote thirty-odd
subscription cancellations and Oma was in the pound seats.
The milkman next door brought her
many bottles of milk each day for her massive family. As her children married one by one, Oma
didn’t have the heart to reduce her milk order.
“He’s got eight young children,
the poor man. What’s he going to
do?” Whenever we walked into her house,
which we did often for she lived across the street from our school, she would
call out:
“Wouldn’t you like a nice glass
of fresh, health-giving milk? No? Are you sure?
It would be so good for you.”
I don’t know at what stage my
Tante Marietje, my mother’s sister one year younger than herself, and my mother
were in Church winking at my father. I
hope it happened while they were still at school. Even so, there would have been no excuse for
their behaviour.
“In our big church, the congregation was seated on rows of loose chairs on either side of the pulpit which was placed midway between the front half of the church and the back,” my mother said. “The men were in the seats nearer to the altar and the women were behind them. When the homily began and the preacher climbed the pulpit for the homily, the men sitting in front all turned their chairs to face the preacher and incidentally us girls. Marietje caught your father’s eye and started winking at him and when he glared back at her I joined in. Then we laughed so much we nearly fell off our chairs. After Mass, your dad came to us. He was outraged. ‘You girls should not behave like this at Mass,’ he said. ‘It’s irreverent.’ But we laughed all the more and winked at him again till he went off cross.”
This may not sound much like my
father when you hear the other stories about him. He rode a Harley Davidson in Amsterdam. But he had a great love and a profound
respect for Our Lord. At night he prayed
for a long, long time and he went to Mass daily when his work permitted, which
was not often because he had to start the oven fires at three each morning.
When Elly made her first
Communion, I was three, sitting between my parents at Mass. When the priest told the Communicants to be
good children and not be cheeky to their parents or nasty to their brothers and
sisters, I pulled my parents towards me:
“What a good time we’re going to
be having from now on,” I said in a loud stage whisper. My mom said all the people started
laughing.
When I made my own first
Communion four years later, I stayed awake with excitement almost until
midnight. The event took place during
the month of May when the sun went down only after ten in the evening. And when my party began, all four levels of
our house were filled with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and great-aunts
and –uncles, all having a good time. I
got so many presents that day. One was a
book of religious poems written by Bertus Aafjes and illustrated by Piet
Wolf. I remember the afterword: “Kindertjes, bid nu heel braafjes, voor Piet
Wolf en Bertus Aafjes.” (Children,
now pray very devoutly for Piet Wolf and Bertus Aafjes).
My mother’s first job after
leaving school was at a warehouse named Brenninkmeijer’s in Amsterdam. She loved her job as a saleslady and
throughout my life I would hear her start speaking about the past, saying:
“When I was working at
Brenninkmeijer’s” with fondness and pride.
Later, the firm became known as C&A with branches throughout the
Netherlands, Europe and Britain.
Mama fell in love with one of her
cousins who visited my grandfather at the forge to ask for his daughter’s hand
in marriage. The story is told that my
grandfather, afraid of harm to the children of a marriage between cousins,
chased him outside. The cousin did not
give up so easily. My mother would get
to Brenninkmeijer’s and there he would be, buying something he didn’t need at
her counter.
He was a journalist who wrote a
column for the Catholic newspaper to which one or two of her colleagues
subscribed. After one visit to her counter, he wrote:
“I have looked into those blue eyes again and feel revitalized.”
My mother said the day after that
article appeared, she was the toast of Brenninkmeijer’s:
“Show us those revitalizing blue
eyes, Annie!” Tragically, her cousin
went missing during the Second World War, believed killed in action.
In the evenings my mother attended classes and obtained a coupeuse diploma. This French word means cutter or designer. Annie did her practical homework, cutting out her patterns on the family diningroom table after her mother and siblings had gone off to bed. My grandfather would stay up with her every evening until she had finished all her work. She said those were precious times shared with her father because they helped her to continue and complete her studies. Later she and a friend rented premises which they turned into their boutique. The friend who was a trained teacher took charge of the bookkeeping, reception and clerical work. In the end six girls worked for them.
My mother worked in her shop
until she was twenty-four. During that
time she had met my father casually on and off, and he had proposed marriage to
her twice; the first time when she was eighteen and the second when she was
twenty-two. She turned him down both
times. He travelled abroad in his holidays, he had season tickets at the
theatre and he was formally engaged twice to other girls, so he was not exactly
pining for her.
The last time he proposed to her
was when they had seen the then Crown Princess Juliana and her mother (or
possibly her fiancé Prince Bernhardt) waving from the balcony of the Amsterdam
palace to the people on the Dam, the square in front of the palace. Amsterdam started early in the second millennium
as a dam built over the river Amstel; hence the name Amstelrodanum, later
changed to its present name. My mom and
dad had made their way there separately.
When they bumped into one another, my dad offered to take my mom
home. He was thirty-one.
“I want to tell you a little
fairytale,” he said to Annie. He told me
about it later and I thought it was most romantic.
“Once there was a beautiful
princess who at the age of eleven met a prince who fell in love with her when
she grew older. When she was eighteen he
asked her to marry him and she refused.
When she was twenty-two, he asked her again and she said no again. And
now that she is twenty-four the prince is going to ask the princess to marry
him for the third time. If she says no
this time he won’t ask her again.”
My mom said yes.
While they were engaged my father went all
dressed up to ask for my mom’s hand in marriage at the Hogenhout home. He must have done this with some panache
since it was already his third engagement although it was only Annie’s
first. In those days men who went to ask
a girl’s parents had to wear special formal clothes. I even think the clothes had to be black. When, all dressed up, he rang the bell, Tante
Trees, still a little girl, opened the door and shouted to her family: “Annie’s
boyfriend is here!”
When he visited them on subsequent Sunday afternoons, he found all the Hogenhout siblings reading their library books, sitting around the lengthy dining room table which easily seated twelve people and ran almost the complete length of the diningroom. Except for the crackle of sweet papers as their hands crept occasionally to the sweets in three or four plates in the middle of the table, you could hear a pin drop.
“Don’t you people play cards?” my father
asked.
My father’s family had sing-songs around the piano and played games at the table and he found the family Sundays at the Hogenhout residence extremely tedious. But the Hogenhouts were readers and my Tante Leen and most of the younger children were still at school. She was a true bluestocking who studied with zest because she was interested in everything. In later life she constantly attended evening school for various courses and always qualified cum laude. Her example would one day be a source of inspiration to me during many years of evening study.
“You know I always read about the Rijksmuseum and the Nachtwacht painting by Rembrandt but I’ve never been there,” she told my father who looked at her clever, bespectacled face and her long plaits and felt his heart melt. You couldn’t resist Tante Leen or any of my six Hogenhout aunts and their three brothers.
“In that case I’ll take all of you there
next Wednesday afternoon when the bakery closes early and you’re free from
school,” he promised.
On the next Wednesday my mother was working in the shop when my dad walked in, smiling from ear to ear.
“Put away those scissors and get your
coat,” he instructed. “We’re off to the
Rijksmuseum.”
“Sorry, I’ve got customers coming in for
fittings this afternoon.”
"Well at least come and greet your brothers and sisters,: he said. My mother followed him outside. My father had rented an open coach, driven by a coachman with a high black hat and her younger brothers and sisters were squeezed inside, as proud as peacocks. Tante Leen smiled from behind her glasses as she lifted her face from the guidebook she had borrowed from the library in order not to miss even the tiniest bit of information.
Tante Leen was artistic, musical. a
linguist and stenographer who did commercial correspondence in Spanish, Dutch,
German, English and French. I’ve been
told she earned an unusually good salary but there was never anything arrogant
about her. I remember being in church at
Christmas Midnight Mass when she sang a solo up high in the choirloft: “Daar
ligt in een kripje life Jezuke zoet” (There in a manger sweet little Jesus
lies). In the church choir was a tailor,
Gerard Bader, whom she married when she was in her late twenties.
The week Tante Leen was married, Annie visited Oma and found her crying.
“Why are you so sad? I thought you’d be happy Leen found someone
with whom to share her life” my mother asked.
“Of course I’m pleased for her, but what
nobody knows is that she has been paying Lucy’s rent for the past ten years and
I don’t know who will do that now,” my grandmother wept.
Tante Luce was my mother’s oldest sister. She had wanted to be a nun but was stopped the day she was leaving for the convent by a priest who told her that she should defer her departure until later since her mother needed her more at the time than the convent did. Tante Luus cancelled the convent and was married about a year later.
Less than ten years later still, her
husband, Jan Nederstigt, died. He owned
a vegetable shop in the city of
“I can’t bear to think of Luce and her
children never getting a treat,” she wept.
“And here we’re just guzzling cake.
That money should go to her. She
needs it far more than we do!”
I think this was one reason why my grandmother never rebelled against her diet when she started suffering from diabetes. She welcomed the sacrifice. Tante Leen and Gerard Bader had four children before emigrating to Adelaide, Australia.
Every week like clockwork Tante Leen popped
the equivalent of ten guilders into an envelope for Oma from
The first impressions of my life were as
much tied up with my parents, siblings and my mother’s family as they were with
the existence of the Second World War which started in
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