MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER TWO

 

Luky and cousin, Amsterdam

CHAPTER TWO 

MY PARENTS’ MARRIAGE AND THE WAR IN HOLLAND

The Nooijs were a musical family.  There is still a letter in existence from my father’s grandfather, another Gerard Nooij, written in the mid-nineteenth century which gives the first indication of the fact that music and art were important to the Nooijs.  The letter which was posted by him from boarding school in a place called Geldrop to his parents in Ilpendam and dated 11 May 1852 (the envelope likewise remains in existence and vouches for the date) reads as follows:

 Worthy Parents

Herewith I take the liberty to communicate a little on paper with you.  As far as my health is concerned, beloved Parents, this leaves nothing to be desired because I always enjoy eating and drinking, also with the learning it is well, at least I continue to do my best.  As you know I am greatly inclined to playing the piano and learning to draw.  In this regard I should very keenly like to receive your approval.  Be then good enough to reply speedily to me in this regard.  Now, beloved Parents, I end, for lack of further news, by requesting you to dedicate this little letter, in addition to yourselves, to the entire family, and call myself herewith with the utmost respect.

Your loving son

G Nooij

It was this boy who later married a deeply spiritual woman who bore him fifteen children before he died, leaving her a widow for many years.  She was a member of the Third Order of St Francis and recited fifteen decades of the rosary daily.  All her life she prayed to God to spare her until her son Nicholaas predeceased her.  Nicholaas had a mental problem.  His brother, my grandfather Jan Nooij, employed him out of love for him and for their widowed mother. Nicholaas yearned to become a priest which was, of course, impossible.  In the end my grandpa had to accept that his brother could no longer operate in a normal society but needed to be sent to a psychiatric institution.  Strangely enough, Opa and Oma Nooij’s son Nicholaas would later become a priest.  Amazing how God answers our prayers.

My father once asked his brother how people discover a call to the priesthood.  “Well you see,” Uncle Nico told him simply, “God comes and asks you and then you say yes.”

Nico was three when Oma sent him to the shoemaker next door.  “Well Nick,” the shoemaker said.  “Are you going to become a rich baker like your dad?”  “No, sir,” Nico replied.  “I’m going to become a poor priest.”

Every year on a day near her son's birthday my great-grandmother hired a cart and horses driven by a coachman and collected each of her fourteen other children to visit their institutionalised brother. She prayed daily for the grace of surviving him. He died at sixty-two and she passed away a year later, aged ninety-three, leaving well over a hundred descendants. I mention these details because they explain why my Catholic faith has always been a source of such great strength to me and why I wanted a large family.

The Nooij children were all taught to play the piano. My dad was ten when the First World War broke out in 1914. His music teacher went off to war and he never had another teacher but give him a piano and a music book and he could entertain any gathering, as could his siblings. They all knew how to make a party go with their love for singing and music making.

My parents were married during the Depression years.  At the time, an uncle of my father’s in Amsterdam led a choir of 160 Catholic fellow-parishioners, all unemployed.  To keep them motivated and off the streets, he spent many hours teaching them choral scores in several parts.  My father used to visit his uncle’s parish and marvel at the beauty of the voices of the choir members.

Shortly before my parents’ wedding, my father’s uncle called to see my dad.  “Gerard,” he said, “how would you like my boys to sing at your wedding?” 

“Good grief, Uncle,” my father said.  “I couldn’t possibly pay them all.”

“Well, could you afford to buy 160 cigars?”

“Of course,” my father, who himself smoked fifty cigarettes a day, replied.  Those were the days when nobody realised the dangers of lung cancer involved in the habit of smoking.

The 160 cigars were bought and the choir sang a Mass in five parts like the heavenly host.  My dad told me about the Magnificat.  I knew it, having heard it sung at Lourdes.  It would melt a heart of stone.  The choir sang the Ave Maria as my mother laid her bouquet in front of the altar of the Blessed Virgin.

My parents moved to a flat in the Bos-en-Lommerweg in Amsterdam, where my uncle Simon Nooij and his wife Annie Munnik had a bakery.  My parents had their first baby daughter, Elly, on 11 July 1936.  Then my paternal grandparents lent them twelve thousand guilders interest-free for the purchase of a bakery of their choice.  They found one situated on a double stand in Davis Street on the corner of Marco Polo Street in Amsterdam West, also known as De Baarsjes. 

The bakery never became a money-spinner in the twelve years we lived there. My parents bought only the goodwill and the bakery and shop furniture and fittings and paid rent for the four floors on the stand.  On the ground floor were the bakery, the shop and a small office.  We lived on the first floor and Jos, Miekie and I were born there.  My mother let rooms to students on the second floor and Elly and I slept in the attic.  After the twelve years my parents worked themselves to a standstill in that place, they still had not paid back the loan but in rent they had paid every cent of the full purchase value of all four floors of the building.

The idea of the debt, although this was never mentioned by my grandparents, rested heavily on my mother’s mind.  Being incapable of compromise, my perfectionist mom took care of a husband and four children, a spotless bakery and shop (actually my dad and his staff mostly cleaned those) and another three floors of house.  She also served behind the shop counter for much of the day. 

She made all our clothes on the Singer sewing machine she had opted for as one of her wedding presents from my dad’s mother.  Actually Oma had offered to pay for a wedding trip to Paris for the two of them but my mother preferred the more prosaic gift of the then ultra-modern electrical sewing machine.  Afterwards, my parents were never able to go on holiday together so my mom took us to the seaside in summer while my dad kept the shop going.  She was thirty years married before she bought the only other sewing machine she ever owned.  I don’t think there were many days in any year when the hood was not taken off her sewing machine.  I’m sure if the thread used on that Singer was laid from end to end it would easily have circled the entire globe several times.

In my teens I went to boarding school where we were taught mending.  One school holiday when my mother was out at work, I was ironing some of our linen and came upon a tiny hole in a tablecloth.  When next I was home from school on holiday, my mother called me, smiling.  She was holding the table cloth. 

“Did you darn this for me?” she asked. 

“Yes Ma, why?” 

She smiled some more. 

“Would you believe that this is the first time anyone in the whole wide world has ever done any mending for me?   Until now I’ve always had to do everyone else’s.”

With the amount of hard work she performed, her nerves sometimes got the better of her.  My father’s phlegmatic personality, so opposed to her own more colourful one, sometimes frustrated her.  One evening when we were visiting her parents for supper, I heard her let off steam.

“Mother, Father, speak to Gerard”, she said.  “I’m so angry!” and she launched into a story about something my father had done that had annoyed her. When she stopped, my dad looked embarrassed.  But my grandparents, no doubt to both his and my mother’s surprise, took their son-in-law’s part.

My grandmother picked up the massive enamel teapot which was the only receptacle sufficiently capacious to serve all the members of her huge family at one sitting and carried it around to my dad's chair.

“Does she give you a rough time, Gerard?” she asked my father gently. 

"No, no, not at all, Mother!" my father denied. "No man could ask for a more hardworking, devoted wife!" My mother looked half annoyed, half amused. "That's right. Take his part against that of your own flesh and blood!" But she looked more tickled than cross - I think she basked in the fact that her family appreciated her lovable husband. But, how could they fail to do so?

My mother was the undisputed boss of the house.  I watched her buckle under burdens my dad might have assumed with far less upheaval.  Even when I was little I believed that he would have managed them with far less emotional stress to either himself or us, so I often wondered why my mother flogged herself so.  She wouldn’t read a book because it made her feel guilty.  Her duty came first, second and last.  Even when she went out, she was networking.  It was no use, however, trying to argue with her and with her impossibly high standards which I never managed to emulate, try though I might. She was a strong leader who was able to control staff and they worked diligently for her but she believed that only she could give any project a glossy finishing touch.  I used to watch my mother and marvel at her high standards.  I was the total opposite to her in my approach to housework, for example, and still I always had my hands full.  How she managed to wash those windows inside and outside week after week I am still at a loss to explain but she was driven by her thirst for perfection.

After the Depression years of the Thirties, Holland entered the war on 15 May 1940. I was born six days later. My mother said that I was very much overdue and that I weighed over twelve pounds when I was born and weight has been an issue for me ever since.  If you had seen my mother’s short little body, you would wonder where she put me. 

When my brother Jos arrived eighteen months after me, it was Christmas Eve, the busiest day of the year for the bakery and my father had been glued to the oven for almost twenty-four hours. 

Standing behind the counter at about two in the afternoon, Annie realised her child was coming.  She sent for some of her sisters and a sister-in-law to help out in the shop and went upstairs where the midwife was already present.  Two hours later my only brother Jos was born.  My mother kissed him, handed him back to the midwife and swung sideways from the bed, her feet feeling for the high heeled shoes she always wore because she was so short.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the doctor asked.

“Downstairs, to help my husband.  It’s his busiest day of the year,” she said.

“He’ll manage fine,” the doctor said.  “You just stay in bed and enjoy your new baby.” 

My brother Jos was the most self-reliant and undemanding man I have ever met and I always think one reason for this was because from the very beginning of his life he had to share his mother with her work.  But if he ever felt neglected emotionally, he never showed it.  He shared an amazingly caring friendship with her in addition to their mother-son relationship.

He and Miekie also shared a unique relationship because they were alone together after school in the afternoons for years while both my parents worked and Elly and I were at boarding school.  

Miekie still talks to me as though I were four years older than her – which actually I am, although the age difference  decreases annually.  

When Miekie herself was born in 1944, she lay at death’s door for a very long time.  She was one of the first children in Holland ever to be given penicillin, since my father’s youngest brother, a doctor, managed to obtain it from America almost before many people in our country were even aware of its existence.

My dad loved and respected everyone and tended to extend credit which he could not really afford to do.  He did so behind my mother’s back but she knew she was married to a saint and pretended most of the time she wasn’t aware of his perfidy.  My mother had but few friends all of whom would have died for her and she kept her staff for decades.

Our charlady Mrs Bakker had a very quiet husband and five sons.  I particularly liked her son Jimmie who attended a special school.  He was a placid, lovable young man.  When he had lost his milk teeth, he experienced difficulties once his permanent teeth grew.

Mrs Bakker told my mother one day that she had decided to have Jimmie's teeth extracted and to get him some dentures. My mother suggested to her rather to leave some of the better teeth and fill in the gaps with crowns; a new departure in dentistry at the time.  She agreed.

When Jimmie became nervous in the chair, the dentist took pity on him.  He showed him a set of dentures that had been returned by a dissatisfied patient. 

“This is Jane,” he said, pointing out a false tooth, “and those others are called Deborah, Angela and Gladys.”

 Jimmie was fascinated and kept repeating the names, so the dentist kindly added:

“You can keep these teeth my boy, and come back next week for your next appointment.”

At home Mrs Bakker patiently sat with Jimmie, repeating the names of the teeth.  He rattled them off to the dentist on his return. 

“Clever boy,” the dentist praised.  “Why don’t you come and work for me during your school holidays?”

When the holidays started, Mrs Bakker had forgotten the invitation but Jimmie had not.  He dressed with care, shone his shoes, slicked down his hair with water and made his way to the dentist’s rooms.  My mother said Mrs Bakker, normally a human dynamo, could barely do a stitch of work, worried as she was what the day would bring.  The upshot was that Jimmie became assistant to the dentist’s mechanic and under his guidance became a brilliant worker who never overbaked an artificial tooth in his career.  He earned money and gained in self-respect.  It’s a lovely story and a true one.  God bless that dentist who changed not only Jimmie’s life but also that of Mrs Bakker.

A mishap that might have changed the relationship between my mother and Mrs Bakker turned out very differently.  My mother had a porcelain dinner service with twelve of everything, another gift from my father’s mother for their wedding.  After a family party, all the porcelain was washed by my mother and Mrs Bakker and stacked on a tea trolley.  Mrs Bakker bumped into the trolley and the entire contents crashed to the floor.  I remember only a platter and the gravy boat survived and we would even bring them to South Africa.  The charlady burst out crying:

“I can never replace this.  Never!” she wept. 

My mother laughed. 

“Have you never heard that smithereens bring luck?” she asked.  “I never liked that pattern anyway.  Wish the trolley had fallen before we spent all that time washing those dishes, though.  Let’s have coffee first.  Then we’ll sweep up these shards.”  My mom could strain at a gnat but swallow a camel.

My parents used to dread the arrival of de meelrekening (the flour account).  I remember at the age of four, kneeling in front of one of the easy chairs in the living room, praying rows of Hail Marys that they might find the money for the flour account.  Flour became ever scarcer and our shop was closed more often than it was open.  My mother got onto the train and went to The Hague to speak to the official in charge. 

It was one of the few times in life she was ever unnerved. She was standing inside a massive hall, and in marched the official. ‘My husband is a baker and he wants to bake but he can’t because there is no flour to be had,’ Annie told him.  ‘How can you help us?  Funny, you know, he was quite nice about it.'

The official replied that it was the desire of the authorities to make its people happy and if they could supply flour they would but they were also having a hard time. Annie just nodded yes, yes. All she wanted to do by then was just get out of there.

I was seriously ill for a long time during the war.  I contracted diphtheria and got a spot on my lung and had to lie in front of an open window in hospital for almost six months.  I forgot how to walk and they had to take me by the hand and teach me all over again.  Maybe I almost made it to heaven that time and perhaps that is the reason why I have always loved God so much.

My love for Our Lord goes hand in hand with my respect for my Catholic religion.  I taught catechism at my parish church and there are certain things I told all my pupils.  The first two Sean, my husband, taught me:

“When we stand before Almighty God after death, we’ll be alone with Him.”

“Unless we actually ask God to send us his many graces, we hamper him.”

Some of the other things I think about with regard to catechism or told the children about, represent my own reflections.

“It’s less important what people think of you than what God knows of you.”

“God asks not how others treat you but how you treat others.”

“You’d have attended Sunday Mass had there been a million rand waiting. Our Lord is worth infinitely more than a million.”

“Don’t miss Sunday Mass, even if it is just yourself and the priest there.”

“If you should be the last Catholic alive, make sure you’re the best.”

The maxim I repeat to myself whenever I feel unworthy and stunted in my efforts to teach catechism is:

”Don’t ever underestimate either the intelligence of a child or the power of the Holy Spirit.”

From the age of three I attended a little kindergarten run in a converted shop where they taught us our Catholic faith.  In those days the Jansenists in Holland taught about purgatory and flames and going to hell if you missed Mass on a Sunday.  I would still be terrified to miss Sunday Mass and always marvel at the empty pews in my parish church. Unlike many modern Catholics I have never questioned the showing of hell by Our Lady to the little shepherds of Fatima.  That’s the way Catholic teachers taught you, even in the kindergarten, where I started going at the age of three because my mother was so busy in the shop.

I remember my teachers never spoke down to us and yet I understood and remembered very much of what they were teaching us.  However, the people in those days were sometimes cruel and psychological insight was not included in the teacher training syllabi.  My teacher had a cupboard with a stuffed grey pillow slip inside.  She said it was a rat.  When you were naughty she’d lock you in there until you screamed yourself into a hysterical fit.  When I told my mother about it she took me out of the school and even after my very long illness I never went back to the kindergarten, preferring to attend a school further away.

Living in fear of during the war for the first five years of my life, surrounded by others who feared, I developed a great sense of reality of the possibility of hell.  People who don’t believe in hell don’t feel the need to worry.  But I do fear hell though I believe Christ has opened the way for all of us to heaven.  As the catechism says, to me to love God calls for me to know Him, love Him and serve Him with every fibre of my being in this life already - though regrettably there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.  When things go awry in my life I think of the words in “Amazing Grace”:

“‘Was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” 

I see people taking God for granted and am astonished at the casual way some treat Him.  It is as if they feel God is hard up for them, instead of the other way around.  I try to depend on His Mercy but I don’t take it for granted.  I try to tell people about God but don’t want to be a bore about it in case I put them off.  I have found in South Africa that many people tend to have a strong personal relationship with God but on my trips elsewhere I found that this had changed very much in some countries.

Death and rumours about it were all around us during the war.  One night when I was still little, I woke up crying from a nightmare, and groped my way down the long passage into my parents’ bedroom.  Still sobbing, I touched my father’s shoulder. 

“You tell me what’s wrong,” he said soothingly as he lifted me to put me between himself and my mother.

“I dreamt you and Mommy were dead,” I wailed.

Rubbing my icy feet my father snorted contemptuously. 

“Your mother and I die?  Never!  We’re going to live forever.” 

In the dark I frowned.  I hated breaking it to him that all people died.  Now how could I put it nicely?

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but everyone is going to die one day, even you.  My teacher said so during catechism.”

My father lay still for a while, thinking, I suppose, unkind thoughts about my catechism teacher.  Then he said: “Well I suppose she ought to know but in any case your mother and I will only die after we turn 97 or 103.”  That seemed a good way off so I slept more peacefully after that.

How full the Dutch churches were during the war.  It was estimated at the time that 92 percent of the Catholic population attended Mass each Sunday.  The Catholic seminaries and convents were crammed with young vocations to the religious life and for several years after, Holland sent the largest number of missionaries abroad of any country in the world.

You have no idea how the people sang:

“Aan U O Koning der Eeuwen, aan u zij de zegenkroon! 

Onsterfelijk schittert uw glorie door alle haat en hoon.

De volken verdwijnen maar luider klinkt het lied

De Wereldzon blijft schijnen – haar glanzen sterven niet.”  (To Thee O King of Ages, to Thee belongs the crown of blessing.  Immortally Thy glory radiates through all hatred and derision.  The nations disappear but ever more loudly the song resounds, the World Sun keeps shining – her rays do not die.)

Catholics expressed a profound veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary:

“Maria mild en machtig, vereerd door God en mens,

weest Moeder mij indachtig, die mij te beteren wens.

Ik heb mijn schone dagen verroek’loosd en verdaan

En kom O Moeder klagen bij u voortaan.”  (Mary mild and powerful, honoured by God and humankind, be thou Mother mindful of me, who wish to improve myself.  I have recklessly wasted my beautiful days and will come to complain to thee, O Mother, henceforth).  Accompanied by massive pipe organs, that singing must have brought solace to many.  It made me love the Church with a passion that has never left me.

One Sunday near the end of the war we came out of Mass when we saw a lot of soldiers on the church square, around which their vans were parked.  They sprang on the many young men who had come to Mass though they were probably in hiding and dragged them off to the vans.  I heard such shrieking from the girlfriends who were walking arm in arm with the young men that I have since thought that this must have been the way the women wailed in Bethlehem when the Holy Innocents were slaughtered.

During the war we sometimes went to church in a pony tax, a small carriage drawn by a white pony.  After the war we might go by taxi.

The street where we lived was a fun neighbourhood to grow up in.  Elly was madly popular among her peers because she had the gift of quick repartee which is peculiar to the Amsterdammer.   I used to lumber on in her wake.  I couldn’t skip properly, dropped my ball in the ballgames and lost all my marbles to other children minutes after my parents had bought me new ones. 

Across the road from the side of our house was the druggist, diagonally across from the grocery store, run by the Misses Gans who measured and weighed every pound of salt or sugar we bought on their scale.  There was no such thing as pre-packing.  Straight across from one side of our house was the shoemaker.  At the end of the street block was the butchery of Braam and Margo Raad and across from them, the dairy.  Here we bought fresh milk which the milkman put into our containers from litre-sized enamel measuring jugs dipped into his buckets.  On a corner in the opposite block was a little post office and the greengrocers around the corner faced the massive sandpit and playground where all the children of the neighbourhood gathered. 

My mother had a standing weekly appointment with Mr Packman, the hairdresser, who swayed the sceptre in the street facing the opposite side of the sandpit. He waved Elly’s and my long hair for our family feasts with tongs which sometimes burned our necks.  He employed a hairdresser on his staff named Carl.  Carl died young and left his widow Ella who then rented a room from my parents and later married a man named Pieter.  They had a little daughter, also Ella, the cutest little thing ever, who was my mother’s godchild.  I remember Tante Ella best because on the feast of Sinterklaas on 5 December 1948 she bought me a Dutch translation of the book Heidi by Johanna Spyri.  I read it many times and loved it very much.

Elly, being four years older than myself, made me get on my knees every morning and evening and say prayers with her when I became old enough to join her in the attic.  Because the room was narrow, the double bed we shared was stood up into a wooden frame against the wall during the day, and covered by curtains, top half white and the bottom of a pinkish floral material.  At night we pulled the bed down.  Mixing and matching was the order of the day when fabric was at such a premium but in the case of our bed curtains which were repeated at the window it worked very well. 

When the war ended and peace shone on us as the radiant sun did throughout that perfect month of May 1945, one of my Hogenhout uncles caught a parcel dropped from an aeroplane down on our country.  He invited the family and brought the parcel to our house:

 “Nou jongens!  Smakelijk eten!”  (Well folks, enjoy the grub!)  I remember waiting for everyone to say grace because we always did that in all our families but it didin't happen this particular day.

“Gosh,” I thought, “how ungrateful after God sent us this party.” 

“Aren’t you eating, Luke?” my father asked.  “Doesn’t the food look nice?” 

“It does,” I answered, “but aren’t we going to say thanks to God for giving us this lovely parcel?”  Everyone got very quiet and grace was said with deep gratitude.

The fact that at age twelve I would go to a convent in South Africa, run by Irish nuns who demanded unattainable heights of perfection in our behaviour has left me with a kind of dual personality which gives me much respect for courageous frankness as expressed by the Dutch as for ladylike reticence taught to me by the Irish. I seldom manage to achieve a perfect balance.

In later years, whenever I spoke English to my children as I generally did, my comportment could seldom be faulted.  But, as my Irish husband would one day say to my children: “I don’t know what she’s shouting about when she reverts to that language (Dutch) but I advise you to run when she does.”

It was Easter in the year of 1945, a matter of weeks before the war ended in Holland.  My parents had taken us to Mass.  When they came back a man was waiting outside.  He spoke to our parents who invited him in.  My mother went into the kitchen to make coffee.  She was still busy when my dad joined her in the kitchen. 

“That man inside is so and so,” he said.  “He is offering me twenty five thousand guilders and not in paper money if we let him intercept our quota of flour for the area to feed his people until the end of the war which we all know is around the corner.  I wanted to turn his offer down but you work so hard that I felt you needed to have a say in the matter. That money is more than twice what we still owe my parents.  A financial injection like this would be such a boost that it would probably put us on a winning wicket for the rest of our lives.  But I know it wouldn’t be the proper thing to do.  How do you feel?”

My mother only received Communion around Easter because she belonged to a generation with a Jansenist outlook that always felt unworthy in the face of Almighty God and whose members believed they did not deserve to go to Communion for that reason.  They did not realise that people do not go to Communion because they deserve to, but despite the fact that they don’t, thanks to God’s mercy.  Ten years of depression and five of war where they existed on a tightrope over a yawning abyss merely confirmed their anxiety. 

However, she was an obedient Catholic and because the Church teaches that one should receive Holy Communion at least once a year on or around Easter, my mother had been to Confession the previous day and received Communion that morning to honour what she always called het Hoogfeest van Pasen (the high feast of Easter).

Annie replied that she would be sorely tempted if it weren't for the fact that by rights the flour belonged to the people of the neighbourhood, who needed it. Annie continued, "If we were to accept a black market price for the flour which morally belongs to them I could never receive Holy Communion so happily again.”  They both went into the main room and told the stranger of their decision which he calmly accepted. 

When my father died twenty-three years later, Annie was speaking about this incident at the funeral. 

“How happy I am that we didn’t yield,” she said quietly.  “If we had done such a dishonourable thing, how afraid for the repose of my husband’s soul I would be now.”  My parents did not need to preach integrity – they  lived it.  

 I remember when I was still four in March 1945, my mother gave us some very good news.  “We’re going to have a special treat, bread and sugar, on my birthday on the eighteenth of this month.”

Elly and I cheered but Jos, who had recently celebrated his third birthday, asked:

“What’s sugar?” 

“You stupid boy,” I said patronisingly.  ‘Don’t you know it’s white stuff with a lovely sweet taste?”

 On the morning of 5 May 1945, three weeks before my fifth birthday, Elly woke me, brimming with excitement.  I must have woken up with earache that night because I was sleeping in my parents’ bed.

“The war is over!  Peace is here!”

“Peace?” I asked unbelievingly.

Like people who cannot understand that God had no beginning because all earthly creatures have a beginning, I, never having known peace, could not believe in its existence.

Elly laughed.  “Look outside!”  She drew up the sash window and when I looked out I saw all the flags, red, white and blue, some orange in honour of the royal house.  Where had they come from in that impoverished country where we had believed that every spare centimetre of fabric had been used to cover its inhabitants over the past five years and the very trees in the street had been chopped up for firewood by fathers of children with bronchitis, pneumonia or even tuberculosis, moving out stealthily at night?

What a day that was!  Young though I was, I can still remember the naked joy on people’s faces.  Even my mother, generally so reserved with outsiders, stood on the customers’ side of the counter, laughing and joking with people who had always preferred to ignore her before and whose dislike she cordially reciprocated.  It’s probably the only time I saw her let her hair down in public, except when she was entertaining or being visited by family and friends.  The joy continued with street feasts when many of the men came back from the war and rejoined their families, though in some of the families, of course, the fathers never returned.

My tall, handsome dad and my short, pretty mother made an attractive couple as they walked down the street towards the tram stop.  In summer, a  queue of street boys would follow the two of them, ridiculing my mother’s headgear by chanting: “A’k ‘n hoed koop, dan koop’k er zo een.” (If ever I buy a hat, I’ll buy one just like that).  According to a previous arrangement, at the street corner my parents would turn around to wave to us and our child minder as we watched them through the window, walking off.  Both Amsterdammers, born and bred, they laughed heartily at the antics of the street boys which disconcerted the followers more than a little and caused them to disperse because all the fun had gone out of their persecution.

After the initial euphoria brought on by the end of the war, things went back to normal surprisingly swiftly.  But till this day, the very absence of war to me remains a cause for gratitude and rejoicing.

When she could manage to get hold of material after the war was over and fabrics started trickling back into the shops, my mother always made a special effort to make us look pretty and at one time Elly and I went to church in beige coats with widebrimmed hats in a deep pinky brown, looking like two dolls.  Unfortunately, the street boys used to jeer at us and pull the hats off our heads and roll them down the street in the wind with Elly and me chasing after them to the cheers of the boys.  One or two streets further the same thing would happen with a different group of boys.

We complained to my mother who sewed elastic onto the hats which she secured under our plaits.  The boys looked foolish the next Sunday when they plucked off the hats which then flew back onto our heads.  Not that the pretty ribbons at the end of our plaits often made it home.  That is until my mother learned the trick of plaiting the ribbons into the last bit of plait.  Then the boys merely pulled our hair that bit harder but Elly and I were a tough twosome.  Born and bred in our neighbourhood, you had to be.

My dad did not care about personal success – only about doing his duty.  In his later days he read and re-read “The Imitation of Christ” by the medieval monk Thomas à Kempis.  When he died I started reading it myself. Only then did I realise that habits of my father’s which I might earlier have ascribed to weakness or lack of ambition were in effect the fruits of profound personal training to discard the sophistication he had built up during the life he had led until he married my mother at the age of thirty-one.  He had travelled to several European countries long before this was fashion and seen personal appearances of most of the actors and actresses of his day.  He had a season ticket to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and rode a Harley Davidson motorbike.

My mother, who had given up her chance on a bursary to head a domestic college and who until her marriage had given every cent of her earnings to her mother while still making all her mother’s and sisters’ clothes as well as mending those of the men in the family, had a different outlook in life.  For her it was a matter of keeping body and soul together and sacrificing her personal desires as witness her choice of a sewing machine above a honeymoon in Paris.  Yet oddly she demanded more from life than my father did.

It was not that she wanted much for herself.  However, the women of her generation were dynasty builders who found peace in their hearts because they regarded personal success as short-lived and ephemeral and instead looked to their children to ensure their immortality.  For this they would sacrifice all they owned.  Annie’s happiness was ensured if we succeeded in life.  She believed the answer to all our problems was education.  This was the only way she could think of to lift us beyond the difficulties of our early years.  Countless Dutch women of her generation thought likewise and, like her, sacrificed everything to achieve their dreams for their children at the expense of their own prosperity.

I understood a great deal about my dad’s gentle philosophy the day a neighbour who felt my father was hard done by by my mother, expressed her feelings.  She said:

“Annie always talks about everything as hers – ‘my house, my furniture, my children’.  She seems to think that everything the two of you possess belongs exclusively to her.  Surely it belongs to you just as much?” 

My father smiled and looked at my mother with love.

“This family, this house and everything in it belong to Annie,” he said, “and Annie belongs to me.” 

I can’t explain my parents’ unusual but nevertheless successful marriage any better than that.  But my mother’s obsession with education explains why it has always been one of my own ideals to go as far as I could in the academic field within the scope of my limitations.

And three months after I turned six, I was able to take the first step towards education, being finally allowed to go to the Big School.

*Many names have been changed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER ONE

 

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 Haarlem, which Tante Luce, who by this time had six children herself, couldn’t manage on her own. Oma and Opa adopted Tante Luces’s eldest son, Dicky, who was a couple of years older than Elly.  The other five children remained in Haarlem.  Not a soul but Oma and Tante Luce knew that Tante Leen had quietly paid her widowed sister’s rent for ten years. Oma and Tante Nel frequently visited Tante Luce, always bearing baskets with little luxuries she could not afford herself.  My mother said at one party my Oma refused to eat cake. 

“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 Australia.  Then one day she wrote to say that they had put a deposit on a house and had moved into it.  Later Oma received news that Tante Leen was pregnant again and that she and Oom Gerard were saving up to add an extra room to their house.  They did not have to wait long for the funds, for by return mail Oma sent back every cent she had received from them and which she had saved up until they might need it themselves.  Those were the people at whose knees and from whose example I learned to prize integrity far above money.

 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 Holland a week before I was born and ended three weeks before my fifth birthday.