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
