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.