What can we still remember from our early years? In which year do your first memories begin?
I have discussed this with peers. What they still remember from their childhood. For most of them, the beginning of their fourth year seemed to be the limit of their preserved memories. My experience is no different, although I often find it difficult to determine in which year certain events took place.
So let me start with something that must have made a big impression. My first day at school. Strangely enough, I don’t remember anything about it.
Except that at the St. Nicholas party in first grade, there was a magician who pulled a rabbit out of his hat. “A real live rabbit, Mum,” I said later at home. “And ten pigeons that flew around the gym.” My mother was wise and let me believe that they were real live animals. There would be plenty of time in the years to come to tell me it was a magician’s trick.
Flashes of other events then. Some I can recall without difficulty. That I got a candy cane at the fair and that my tongue became completely rough from sucking on it. That I went to the beach with the whole family for a day. That on Sundays there was always a man walking down the street selling doughnuts. That he sang a song, “Doughnut, doughnut, with your coffee, with your tea, grab a tasty doughnut, doughnut, doughnut!” That my father always brought home Droste chocolate flakes on Fridays.
That my oldest brother taught me how to draw an aeroplane when my little brother was born. I was almost three years old at the time. Yes, I know. Normally, your memories only start at the age of four.
On the other hand, I have absolutely no idea what our house on Mercatorstraat looked like. How many rooms it had, whether there was a bathroom, whether I had my own room or had to share with my little brother? No idea. But I do remember the view from the street side over the market garden, which was separated from the street by a wide ditch. I could draw it for you, so to speak. In any case, we lived in a rented flat on the second floor of an apartment building. I read in the spring that there was another one for sale with three rooms for 350,000 euros.
Photographs
Photographs from that time can sometimes help, but there aren’t many in my family.
There are two of me as a baby with my mother. Still without hair. And also one where I have long curly blond hair.
I was about four years old and standing next to the pram in which my little brother was lying.
When asked whether the memories mentioned above are all equally accurate, I have to admit that I don’t know. Like everyone else, I colour my experiences with my own interpretation.
Take, for example, the subject of this story, the world war of 1940-1945. It is almost impossible that my memories of this period have not been influenced. They have been supplemented by the knowledge of others, by what I have heard and read about it. The same applies to the years preceding the war. I was almost seven when the violence broke out. Could I remember things that made me aware that a war was coming, for example? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Did I even know what war was at the time? I doubt that too.
The writer, aged 5 or 6.
But actually, that doesn’t really matter. In any case, I can try to write down those events, all those incidents in the family that I still remember. Before I forget them completely.
Omens
Let’s start with the threat of war. On reflection, I can only remember three events that, in hindsight, I can count as omens of a coming war.
These are the mobilisation of the Dutch army, the pleasure of German day trippers on the beach and the taping of the windows. And then I almost forget to mention the fourth and most important point, the enemy. After all, a war requires an opponent. Who was the enemy, what was the situation?
I have vague memories of discussions at home about the NSB and ‘fascists’. Were they the enemy? They were certainly not friends, that much I understood. Then, of course, there was Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Officially, Germans belonged to a friendly nation, but I can still remember the times when my mother was angry with a neighbour who lived next door to us. She came from Germany, had probably come to the Netherlands to work as a maid and then stayed because she married a Dutchman. The two women did not get along at all, mainly because the neighbour was German and therefore no good. That is to say, in my mother’s view, she could not be good.
My first class and the Mobilisation
I mentioned the mobilisation of the national army as my second topic. That was quite an event, but before I start talking about that, I need to say something about my school, because it played a role in it.
For convenience, I will therefore go back in time to the spring of 1940. I was six, almost seven years old at the time and was in the first class of the Jan Maijenschool in Amsterdam West with a teacher whose name I no longer remember.
My school was a regular public primary school, built in the typical Amsterdam architectural style of the time. Classrooms were located at both the front and back of the building. I sat at the back, where you could look out onto the playground. Once, in the heat of a game of tag, I collided with a blonde girl. We both fell, she a little more unlucky than I, and a bump like a devil’s egg grew on her forehead. What followed was obvious. She cried, the teacher was angry with me, her mother, also blonde, was even angrier. From that moment on, I knew that as a boy you had to be careful with blonde girls.
The daily routine in the classroom was different then than it is in today’s education system. It was mainly characterised by order and regularity. For example, the classroom walls were not decorated with the pupils’ drawings and crafts, but with large prints by Jetses and Isings, well-known artists who depicted scenes from Dutch history and everyday life on the farm.
A school day lasted from nine to twelve in the morning and from two to four in the afternoon. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, I had the afternoon off and only had school in the morning from nine to twelve. Five minutes before classes started, I had to line up with my class in front of the school building, and then we walked to our classroom led by the teacher. In the morning, lessons lasted until a quarter to ten. Then the bell rang, signalling that playtime could begin. Again, we walked neatly in line to the playground. Discipline was instilled early on. This included, for example, addressing the schoolteacher as ‘Miss’ or ‘Teacher’.
In the classroom, we sat on wooden benches with a desk. These were arranged in three rows. If I remember correctly, you could fold up the desk and store your pens and notebooks in the cupboard underneath. There was also an inkwell that you could cover with a sliding lid. Each bench had room for two pupils sitting next to each other.
In that first class, I learned to read and write using the famous Aap-Noot-Mies-Wim reading board and the books by Zus, Wim and Jet. And arithmetic, of course; after all, we are a nation of accountants. There must have been norms and values as well. In any case, good behaviour was rewarded with privileges such as watering the plants or collecting the notebooks.
You weren’t allowed to talk during class unless the teacher asked you a question. But fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded, and even then there were quiet ones and chatterboxes. ‘Go stand in the corner,’ sang the pop group Doe Maar almost thirty years ago. I don’t remember anything like that happening in that first class. At least, not that I was punished. But maybe I was a good boy. Not a quiet one, at least, but a reader.
All in all, I don’t have bad memories of that first year. The teacher was a nice person, and I loved that after a few months I could already read and write a little. Highlights such as the Sinterklaas celebration at school, the competition to see who could grow the most beautiful flower bulbs, and the school trip left an indelible impression on me.
At that time, it wasn’t necessary for my mother or an older brother or sister to take me to school. There was hardly any traffic and it took me ten minutes to walk to Jan Maijenstraat, which was close to Jan Evertsenstraat. I walked alone or with some friends who lived nearby.
Close to the school was a mini shop where you could buy sweets for a penny. Liquorice sticks, sour sticks and, for two pence, a toverbal.
In this quiet and orderly society, soldiers were suddenly quartered in my school in the spring of 1940. The Dutch Army mobilised and the reserves were called up. In the middle of the week, two or three classrooms had to be cleared because the defenders of the queen and the nation had to be temporarily accommodated.
This meant that camp beds, straw mattresses and lots of other military equipment were brought in amid much noise and laughter. A number of classes had to be merged and put together in one classroom. What an event, we were completely absorbed by it.
I don’t remember how long this visit lasted. A few days or a few weeks perhaps, but I loved it and couldn’t believe my eyes. Sometimes I got a piece of chocolate from the soldiers, for whom life was, in my eyes, one big party.
And after that short period, where did all those men go? Then they disappeared again, and don’t ask me wher . Perhaps to the Grebbeberg or Kornwedderzand? In any case, they had come from somewhere, from a village or town in the Netherlands, called up to do their duty, and after the brief interlude at my school, they left for another place in the Netherlands to defend it against a possible enemy. In preparation for a war that lasted only five days. I looked up how many men were killed in action. It’s more than I thought. Two thousand three hundred and thirty lost their lives in the unequal battle against the Germans. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were boys among them who had had such fun during their quartering in the Jan Maijenschool.
Plastering
That mobilisation was one of the preparations for war, which has become clear to me in hindsight. Covering the windows was a second preparation, although in that case I’m not entirely sure whether it had to be done before 10 May. It’s also possible that war had already broken out by then.
What did that covering actually entail? I think that at some point, on the instructions of the local council or perhaps the government, all windows, including those of private homes, had to be covered on the inside with strips of paper arranged in a criss-cross pattern, creating a lot of small squares, as it were.
The intention was that in the event of explosions and bombings, the glass in the windows would not shatter into flying shards but would be held together by the tape. Not such a bad idea in itself.
I already mentioned that I could remember very little about our house on Mercatorstraat. Did my father and mother welcome this taping? I don’t think so, but I can still picture those taped windows in my mind.
I also cannot recall whether the implementation was monitored, but the government was not so lenient in its measures, so I think it was. In any case, it was a successful attempt to seal off the Netherlands even further.
A day at the beach
What remains as a possible omen for a six- or seven-year-old boy is the story about the Germans in Zandvoort. A story about a trip, to the beach in this case, and what that entailed.
In that respect, there was of course little difference with today. First of all, you needed transport. The choice in those days was simple; if you wanted to go to the beach, you took the train, the tram, the bus or the bicycle.
What about the car? Weren’t there cars in those days? Yes, there were, but in very limited numbers. In fact, a trip by car was only possible for a small minority. A car was a luxury.
Be that as it may, a day out had to be well prepared. An important point was that there weren’t that many destinations to choose from. A traditional outing in my family was a day trip to Zandvoort. I believe we did that once a year.
I can still remember that we took the Haarlem tram (discontinued forty years ago) and got on at a stop on Haarlemmerweg, opposite the Coca-Cola factory. (also gone, demolished years ago). We may have also taken the train sometimes and, according to family stories, sometimes a car, but those memories have been erased from my mind.
Anyway, a day out by train or tram seems to be quite similar to a normal day out nowadays. A nice trip by tram.
There is one important point to realise here. You only did something like that if the weather was nice. And, of course, it was inevitable that half of Amsterdam would have the same idea on that Sunday, resulting in long queues for the tram and a hot tram in which you had to stand all the way to Zandvoort. Squeezed between all those hot, sweaty bodies. “Are we there yet, Mum?” But after an hour or an hour and a half, salvation arrived: the terminus at Zandvoort.
But you weren’t there yet. Trudging through the heat, the whole crowd moved through the main street of the village of Zandvoort to the boulevard and the beach. There, at last, came the reward: the sea with its typical salty air and the beach glistening in the sun. With smiling people dressed in the frumpy swimsuits of the time. Most of them were not tanned but pale white, comparable to English tourists on a French beach who immediately lie down in the sun after arrival and keep it up for the rest of the day. Burnt cherry red, they then disappear into their tents or caravans and don’t come out for a few days.
But this story takes place in 1939, and the English had very different concerns on their minds. It was, of course, very busy at the entrance to the beach, where you could rent chairs, parasols and other beach accessories. That’s why the vast majority of the human caravan trudged along the waterfront to the so-called free beach. It was still quite a long walk, but once we finally found a spot and Mum and Dad had settled in, I could get started. Building sandcastles, digging holes with a wooden spade bought in the village and playing in the water, but not too far out to sea. Not many people could swim, so you just had to wait and see if you would be rescued if the worst came to the worst.
Does all this have anything to do with war? Of course not, but I am trying to convey something of the atmosphere in those days. With the lemonade we had brought with us and the sandwiches that crunched so deliciously between my teeth because of the sand on my hands; not to mention all those Dutch people who were enjoying their annual day out so carefree.
A large group of German youngsters, about twenty-five of them, were also enjoying themselves. In accordance with a German custom that was already in place at the time, they had marked out a section of the beach. Like the Dutch, they spent the day swimming and sunbathing, but in the afternoon the group gathered and did gymnastic exercises.
In my opinion, Germans always take this to extremes, but after half an hour of acrobatics, they had finished and it was time for singing. Probably about their homeland and how Deutschland was still über alles.
During the gymnastics, I had already found a place in the large circle of spectators. This was somewhat against my father and mother’s wishes, and when the singing started, it became too much for them— —and I was taken away. With some argument or other, the essence of which I have unfortunately forgotten. But although it is vague, I still remember clearly that they were not the only ones grumbling about those ‘Moffen’, whose singing was particularly annoying. An unpleasant, quarrelsome atmosphere arose, which I clearly sensed at the time without knowing exactly what was going on.
The journey home that evening was not easy. We were all hot, tired, sweaty, sticky from the salt water and sunburnt. We did eat ice cream in the village. Then we had to wait a long time for the tram, again in a long queue.
But I had enjoyed that day and I can still hear myself saying to my mother as I went to bed:
“We’ll go again next year, won’t we, Mum?”
“Yes, son,” said my mother, who must have been exhausted after such a day. “We’ll go again next year.”
Fathers and mothers did not have it easy in those days.
Final thought
Is this really all I can remember about the years before the war? No, the nice thing about writing down your memories is that more and more details come to mind as you go along. About my oldest brother, about home, about that quiet life on the island that was the Netherlands.
So I’ll add a sequel and tell you a little more about that time in a chapter with an obvious title. PRELUDE TO THE WAR.