8. Eerbeek

Eerbeek is a village in Gelderland. It borders the Veluwe National Park with the Onzalige Bossen and the Imbos. The place is known as a tourist attraction and there are a few large paper factories. The number of inhabitants is approximately ten thousand.
There are dozens of such places in the Veluwe, but Eerbeek occupies a special place in this story. We spent three fairly long periods there, in the house of a remarkable woman who played an important role in our lives.

Added to this chapter.
Postscript ‘Eerbeek 70 years later’.

Calluna Alba

Calluna Alba – white heather – was the name of the house where we temporarily lived. It was a small villa located some distance from the village centre, on a sandy road at the edge of a vast forest area. It was not completely isolated and deserted; there were a few other houses and a couple of farms in the immediate vicinity.

It was in this area that the Jansen family, laden with luggage, must have alighted at the local station one day in October 1940. There are no family photos of that event, but thanks to the wonderful Internet, I did find a picture of Eerbeek station with a train. It was on the website of a railway enthusiast, where I also learned that the station had been built in 1887. The Eerbeek stop was one of the stations on the Dieren – Apeldoorn line, which carried its last passengers in 1947.

On the way to Eerbeek

The journey from Appelscha to Eerbeek must have been quite an undertaking. Nowadays, it is 168 kilometres by train or bus. It would not have been any less in those days. I can picture us on our way from the holiday home to the slow train that ran along the canal. Carrying heavy suitcases along the soft forest paths. Would my father have been nervous? Probably not during those first few months. From the years that followed, I remember him using bismuth powders because he suffered from stomach problems as a result of the stress he was under.

We boarded the slow train in the centre of Appelscha. We probably went to Assen first and then changed there to the train to Zwolle. Seven people with luggage. I don’t know if there were checks at the stations at that time. I therefore assume that we boarded in two or three separate groups. My mother with the youngest children, Fred with his sisters, and my father alone. In Zwolle, we must have changed to the train to Apeldoorn and then taken the slow train from Apeldoorn to Arnhem.
After three or four hours, the family arrived at the platform in Eerbeek in the afternoon. I wonder how we got to the Calluna Alba villa on Polweg. It’s at least a half-hour walk from the station to that house. With four or five large suitcases, I can’t see that happening very quickly. But then what? In those villages at that time, there were no taxis you could just call.
Somehow we must have arrived at our new temporary residence. We were greeted and welcomed by the owner of the house, Mrs M. Versteeg van Leeuwen.

Mike

She must have been a very special woman, the widow of an architect, who also played a role in a small church she had built a few hundred metres from the house. If I’m not mistaken, it was for the Free Catholic community in the village. We were to call her Aunt Mieke, and so we did. I’ll tell you more about her in a later chapter.

Aunt Mieke was a vegetarian, an animal lover, and had a dog and two or three cats. It may not be nice to say, but I thought that dog was a nasty animal. He was also unmanageable insi , which is why he was kept outside in a kennel next to the house. A large area of land around the kennel was fenced off, where the animal paced restlessly all day long.
My brothers and sisters sometimes had to take him for long walks. I later understood that this was not their favourite chore. Fortunately, during the second period we stayed in the house, the dog had died.
There was also a cat named Griesje.

The Calluna Alba villa was not large but had a very special atmosphere. It was a typical pre-war house with a thatched roof, full of built-in cupboards, alcoves, small dark rooms and a conservatory. It did have electric lighting. Was there a telephone in the house? For one of the leaders of the triumvirate, that was a minimum requirement. We recently (2017) looked this up in the Delpher archive and found that there was indeed a telephone connection in the house. It can be found under Eerbeek K8338 number 233.
There was no running water, which was quite common for remote homes at the time. Farms often had a well. This house had a hand pump in the kitchen that could be used to pump water from the ground.

Cooking was done on bottled gas. The bedrooms had washbasins with a large porcelain bowl and a so-called lampetkan with water. Of course, there was a chamber pot under the bed. The toilet downstairs in the house was flushed with a large jug of water. Please refill after use under the pump.
I wonder if we ever took baths. That must have been in the kitchen. Water from the pump was heated on the gas stove and then poured into a large zinc tub. My brother and I were the first to be washed by my mother. Then came the other members of the family, in water that must have looked increasingly grubby.
We lived there in what you might call the countryside.

Good memories

It may sound strange, but apart from the end, I only remember pleasant things about the time we spent in Eerbeek. I was as free as a bird there, didn’t have to go to school and was allowed to do everything within the limits appropriate for my age. Helping out on Farmer Brink’s farm, playing in the sand pit behind the house, walking in the woods. The latter usually with my brothers.
I even remember the route of two of our favourite walks. One led straight to the Echoberg, from where you could walk for hours towards the heathlands, and the other led past a small waterfall along a stream through a section of forest with thick beech trees. The stream gradually descended into a valley as the terrain rose and eventually disappeared – or began – about thirty metres below. Thanks to information from two readers, I know that it must have been the Gravinnenbeek. The stream has almost disappeared due to insufficient maintenance, but there are plans to restore it.

In my memory, the first walk started at a lane in the extension of the Polweg , opposite the Harderwijker straatweg, which was not yet paved at the time. First, we walked about 500 metres straight ahead through a pine forest, then turned left for a few hundred metres and then right. There were low pine trees on the left and right. Then you walked straight ahead for about a kilometre until you reached a number of sand hills, the highest of which was the Echoberg. If you continued walking and kept slightly to the left, you eventually came to a place in the forest where there were a number of holiday bungalows. There were about ten green-painted wooden holiday homes, which were rented out in the summer. They were simple wooden buildings and nothing like the bungalow park that stands on that spot today. Further on, you came to the heath, which in my memory was endlessly large. At a high point in that plain, quite a long walk away, a wooden log cabin had been built. Nobody lived there, or at least I never saw anyone there.

Surroundings

You never met anyone during those walks. Rabbits, yes, and occasionally a fox, deer and roe deer. Buzzards and sparrowhawks, hovering almost motionless in the air, searching for field mice.
Three or four streams ran through that beautiful area near Eerbeek, hence the presence of a number of paper mills in the town. They needed a lot of clean water. After passing one of those mills, the beauty was gone. Grey and smelly, the stream continued on its way. Fortunately, something has been done about that nowadays. There are still paper mills in the area. I don’t know if they still use the water from the streams, but if they do, they are now obliged to purify the waste water first.

It occurs to me that we sometimes followed a route that ran along the edge of cultivated land with cornfields. In a few fields, they also grew some kind of root vegetable. When those tubers were still small, about the size of a carrot, we often pulled a few out of the ground to eat. They tasted a bit like radishes, but they were tasty.
Beyond that farmland, the road led into the woods. It passed a large, sombre house surrounded by tall trees. There was a large swimming pool next to the house. There was always a somewhat gloomy atmosphere there, as if an Agatha Christie thriller had been set there, with corpses in the pool, shots in the night and other such things.

Only recently, during a week’s holiday in Eerbeek, did we discover that this was a country house on the Groenouwe estate, built with the intention of serving as a family hotel. Later, an open-air swimming pool was added. During the war, the house was confiscated by the Germans to nurse the wounded. Just before the end of the war, it burned down, possibly because a burning cigarette had fallen on the thatched roof.

Back to the walk I just described. If you continued walking, you had to cross another stream, the Loenense stream, via a ford. We sat there many times, playing in the water and building dams to form a small lake. It was also full of blackberry bushes. Have you ever drunk blackberry tea? We made it from dried blackberry leaves. The blend we picked by that stream was particularly tasty.
I have written before about my nostalgic longing for those days. And that certainly plays a role. The peace and quiet and space that were there and the freedom I enjoyed while other children my age had to go to school is something you don’t find very often.

Not going to school

Not going to school. You might conclude from this that I learned nothing at all after the first year. That is to say, in a school setting, but I believe it was Aunt Mieke (her again) who still had old schoolbooks and regularly set me and my youngest brother to work writing, reading and doing arithmetic. The nice thing was that my youngest sister was called in to supervise us in these, let’s say, school activities. I don’t think she was to be envied, and as far as she still had plans to go into teaching, we definitely put her off that idea.

Don’t ask me how often we had lessons or what the results were. In any case, I loved reading, and I think that was the best incentive. My favourite book was the Boek voor de Jeugd (Book for Youth). It was a heavy, thick tome in a beautiful red linen cover, published a few years before the war by Arbeiders Pers. It was full of stories, fairy tales and poems. From Hans Andersen to H.G. Wells and from Anton Coolen to Jack London, Mark Twain, Multatuli and Theo Thijssen. Beautifully illustrated too, and I literally and figuratively read it to pieces. For some reason, it was lost after the war, and as I grew older, I regretted not having it anymore. Imagine my surprise when my eldest son brought it home a few years ago. He had bought it for me at a second-hand bookshop. Although it was a 1947 edition, it was still a precious commodity. Would you believe I still remembered all the stories? Not word for word, but certainly in terms of content, and as I read, I was effortlessly transported back more than 70 years in time.

I could still remember some of the phrases verbatim because they had made such an impression on me due to the subject matter. As I leafed through the book, it opened at a passage that has always stayed with me. It is the story of Saidjah and Adinda, which begins as follows: “Saidjah’s father had a buffalo, which he used to work his land.”

Another favourite of mine was Bruintje Beer, that is, the comic books of that name.
Later, in Deventer, there was a lending library close to our house. It was a godsend for our book-loving family, and a few times a week my brother and sisters would go and get some reading material for a few pennies. I read everything I could get my hands on, but they always brought a boys’ book for me too.
As I already wrote, my little brother and I experienced it as a carefree time. For my older brother and two sisters, it must have been different.
They couldn’t go to school like me, and it wasn’t possible for them to find a job either. Sonja, for example, finished primary school in July. She was a good student and was going to start secondary school in September.

Jos had finished some kind of fashion course and was going to look for a job in September. Fred had passed the MULO in July. From my father’s letters, I understood that he was going to do a technical course.
Going into hiding meant they were more or less doomed to idleness. Both further education and membership of a club were out of the question.

Winter

The winter of 1940-41 was a snowy one, with a few days of frost now and then. One day, Fred and my eldest sister had gone out to buy something with their savings and they came back with shining faces of satisfaction, each with a pair of figure skates. Although they did not have fixed boots, you could clamp them under your regular shoes with a special key.
There was ice on a number of flooded meadows and the two eldest couldn’t rest until they had glided across their ice rink. The rest of the family was allowed to watch. Aunt Mieke had a lot of things, but skates, even simple wooden ones with laces, were not among them.
However, the ice did not last long and was replaced by a thick layer of snow. It was nice to walk through the woods. It made me feel like I was a polar explorer from one of the stories in the Book of Youth.

Well, Eerbeek, have I told you everything about that thatched house, its residents, and the surrounding area?
No, of course not, but I can’t end this chapter without mentioning Cun and Ibel.
Ibel and Cun were two friends, schoolteachers if I’m not mistaken, who occasionally visited Aunt Mieke at the weekend. The relationship between the three women was unclear to me. And I was still too young to recognise the relationship between Cun and Ibel.
Cun was small, a bit sharp-tongued, but not unkind. And Ibel was tall and lanky, with the clumsiness of Uncle Loeks’ horse. Both ladies wore their hair in a grey bun at the back of their heads. I always thought it looked as if they had stuck an onion on the back of their heads.
Of course, they had obvious nicknames in our family. Cain and Abel. But they belonged to the house and should certainly not be forgotten in this story.