The second time we were in Eerbeek, I enjoyed it even more than the first time. That was because my little brother and I became friends with two children my age.
Toontje and Riekie lived a few minutes’ walk from the Calluna Alba villa in a detached house on Harderwijkerweg, which was not yet paved at the time. Their house had a large plot of land with two chicken coops and a pigsty. And of course there was a vegetable garden with fruit and vegetables. Behind that was the forest.
Added to this chapter.
Postscript 1 ‘Visit to Eerbeek in 2012’.
Postscript 2 ‘Eerbeek in reflection. Visit in 2018’.
Postscript 3 ‘Eerbeek won’t let me go. 2018’.
Toontje and Riekie’s parents were not farmers, but like most people in that neighbourhood, they kept a few chickens and a pig for their own use. Their father worked as a driver at one of the paper mills.
During that period, I was introduced to a world that was completely new to me.
Home slaughter
I thought it was quite an event when the pig was slaughtered. Once a year, Toontje’s father bought a young piglet, which was then fattened up with leftovers from daily meals, skimmed milk from the dairy and other food until it was big and fat enough.
When the time came, the village butcher was invited to slaughter the animal according to the rules of the trade. After he had done so, the pig was cut open lengthwise and tied to a ladder leaning against a wall. There it hung in all its glory.
I did not see how the butcher killed the animal early in the morning by shooting an iron pin into its head with a pistol. But later that day, we were of course everywhere with our noses right up close so as not to miss any of the action. There was so much meat on such an animal. But of course, it had to be used for something. I now wonder what they did with it. Freezers didn’t exist in those days.
In any case, part of it was made into sausage, for which they used the animal’s intestines. I can still picture Toontje’s mother and a neighbour working on those metres of bluish intestine, which had to be rinsed out. And how the meat for that sausage had to be minced before it could be stuffed into those intestines.
Of course, there were numerous flies buzzing around. Flies were part of farm life, just like the sticky traps that hung from a lamp or the ceiling to catch them.
If I am not mistaken, the sausage was then smoked. That is why there was always a whole collection of sausages and hams hanging in the mantelpiece.
I don’t know what happened to the rest of the meat. Perhaps it was preserved or pickled. In any case, it took a few days of hard work.
A week later, Toontje’s mother gave us our first thickly spread sandwich with fresh sausage. It tasted fantastic and, in fact, I have never eaten such delicious sausage since.
Working à la campagne
I also became quite familiar with farm life in another way, because across the sand quarry behind our house was farmer Harm Brink’s farm. Brink was a real farmer and he owned cows, pigs, chickens, cornfields and who knows what else. I spent many hours at the Oude Pol, as the farm was called.
I helped Brink’s son feed the animals and do other chores on the farm. He undoubtedly found it easy. Mmm, I can still smell that typical smell of pigs and cows on the farm, I quite liked it.
Farmer Brink had three or four adult pigs and there was always one that had piglets. Usually between ten and fifteen of them, which could be incredibly noisy when they were hungry.
I don’t know what happened to all those little ones. I think they were sold to all the fathers of the local Toontjes to be fattened up.
I earned my first money on the farm. Wood was needed every day for the cooking stove, and Harm soon realised that I enjoyed splitting large logs. Because it was not one of his favourite activities, he often let me do it. But to be fair, he did give me something in return. I earned a lot of pennies this way.
When it came to dealing with animals, things weren’t always gentle on the farm. If the animals didn’t listen, they were quickly hit with a clog or a piece of wood.
The cows were kept in the barn during the winter. They had no room to walk around. In front of them was the feeding trough, behind them the manure gutter. The animals had a rather unenviable existence.
One of the most remarkable things I found was the way a chicken was slaughtered. Brink or his son would catch one without much ado, which protested loudly against this treatment. In vain. On top of a fence post along the field, they would then chop off the frightened animal’s head with an axe in one blow. The decapitated specimen was then released and fluttered/ran around for another twenty metres or so before finally dying.
I don’t know who was most surprised at that moment. Me, because the headless chicken was still running around, or Brink, because I thought it was so strange. In any case, I have seen many times where the expression “running around like a headless chicken” comes from.
In Eerbeek, I was ill for a while, although I don’t think there was anything wrong with me, I just looked a bit pale and was perhaps a little tired. In any case, I had to go to the doctor once, or maybe he came to the house, I don’t remember.
Afterwards, I heard that the doctor thought there was something wrong with my kidneys and I had to rest in bed every afternoon for a while. Lying in bed in one of the bedrooms. Of course, that got boring very quickly. I really couldn’t sleep in the afternoon, so I usually wandered through the other rooms and the attic looking for something to read.
The kidney problem, if there was one, went away on its own after a while.
Looking back on that period, it was a wonderful time in which I became acquainted with life in the countryside. I enjoyed it very much.
POST SCRIPT 1 dated 23.3.2012
During a one-day visit to Eerbeek on a Sunday in early March 2012 to Coldenhove Park, we also visited the Calluna Alba villa again during our walk, that is to say, we walked past it. When we then walked past the Brink farm, we were invited in by the residents of the neighbouring house. Inside, we found a large group of people and after I had explained who we were and the reason for our curiosity, it turned out that we had struck gold. Some of those present were relatives of farmer Brink, who had of course passed away long ago. But they still remembered Aunt Mieke well. They also remembered that people had regularly stayed in hiding there during the war. Of course, a lot had changed in the neighbourhood. The sand pit between Calluna Alba and the farm, for example, had been filled with rubbish after the war and planted with shrubs.
After Aunt Mieke’s death, the little church had served as a youth centre for years, but had burned down for unknown reasons and been demolished.
Brink’s farm had been uninhabited for years and was about to be demolished.
And Toontje? He had passed away several years ago. But Riekie was still alive and living in Brummen.
In short, an hour flew by as we reminisced. Kind people who took us back sixty or seventy years in time with their photographs.
POST SCRIPT 2 dated August 2018
Eerbeek in Reflection
In ‘Before I forget’, I tell my story about the Second World War. About life in the years leading up to it, the German invasion of our country, my father’s resistance, the three years we spent in hiding in various places in the Netherlands, and the outcome.
Two of these hiding places regularly come back to me in my memories: Eerbeek and Deventer.
I often visited Eerbeek after the war. And I always visited the house where we lived and the children’s home where my youngest brother and I spent several months. But I only looked at the outside and the surroundings.
Did you never feel the need to walk around the Calluna Alba villa or the house in Eerbeek again? An obvious question. In a way, I thought it would be nice, but I was afraid that everything would have changed so much that my memories of the past would be reduced to fiction. Last year, however, I finally got the chance. At the beginning of July 2017, during a week we spent at Caldenhove, a campsite/bungalow park near Eerbeek.
It turned out to be a fascinating encounter with the past.
My eldest son, who is researching our family tree, came to visit for a few days. Not only to accompany us on a tour of the aforementioned houses, but also to find a stream that I remembered from the many walks we took during our time in hiding.
The weather was not cooperating on the day we had chosen for our activities. It was cloudy with occasional drizzle.
We had decided to set off a little early and left the campsite at the back at around half past nine. The map I had with me indicated that we had to turn right if we were looking for streams.
The footpath in that direction took us through a hilly area covered with pine trees. Just as we were beginning to doubt the existence of a stream, my son discovered one a few hundred metres to the left of the path.
Could this be the stream that I had never been able to find again later? When we followed it for a few hundred metres and the stream valley became deeper and deeper with ancient beech trees,
I was sure that we had discovered it. As we walked further, the stream valley became deeper and deeper and we arrived at the source, which was barely visible through the thick layer of beech leaves that covered the ground everywhere. But was this also the stream on the walking map? After another few hundred metres, we reached a small lake or pond. This was not on the route we were following at all.
Slowly, it dawned on me. We were in a completely different place than I thought. That lake was indeed on the map, albeit half a kilometre further away.
And that lake must have been the swimming pool I remembered. Only the house that should have been there was missing. Back home, I found the solution via Google. The Groenouwe country house, as it was called, had been requisitioned by the Germans during the war. They used it to nurse wounded soldiers. And the swimming pool was used extensively.
Just before the end of the war, on 24 March 1945, a fire broke out and the house was completely destroyed. I remembered visiting it with my mother and my youngest brother in August 1945.
The ruins were demolished shortly afterwards and what remained was overgrown by nature.
But all in all, it gave me a satisfying feeling to have rediscovered the house and its swimming pool mentioned in Before I Forget.
In the afternoon, we drove around Eerbeek House and Calluna Alba.
The Eerbeek house is also an old country house. At the end of 1942 and beginning of 1943, it was temporarily used as a children’s home. The Christian home De Vluchtheuvel, which originated in Scheveningen.
My brother and I were dropped off there by the SD on 7 April 1943.
After the war, the Eerbeek house served for many years as a study centre for all kinds of groups. Nowadays, it is part of the nearby Eerbeek hotel and has been converted into a centre for large and small corporate seminars.
During our visit, the house appeared to be open, meaning you could have a drink on the terrace or inside. Apart from four other visitors, we were the only ones there. After we had ordered something to drink, I told the man who served us that I remembered the house from the war as a children’s home. He was visibly interested and had no problem with our request to see the inside of the house . Of course we were allowed to do so, and a little later we walked up the wide staircase to the upper floors. There was little left to remind us of the past, although the layout had not changed. But the dormitories had been turned into classrooms and the row of washbasins in the corridor was gone. The attic, however, took me back in time, especially because of the view from the windows, which I felt looked just as it did in 1943. How we played on the large lawns around the house and I taught the boys how to make a bow and arrows. How we sometimes sat in the conservatory at night when the German anti-aircraft guns on the edge of the village fired at passing English and American bombers and our favourite carer, Miss An, gave us a Maria biscuit. How another nurse read to us for fifteen minutes before lunch from Kruimeltje – a boys’ book by Chr. van Abkoude – and we hung on her every word.
And afterwards, I could easily imagine the layout of the ground floor with its dining room, conservatory and living area. Meanwhile, Lia took photos and filmed part of our visit.
Our host asked if we would like to see the basement. I hesitated for a moment, wondering what was in the basement. One glance down was enough. The basement contained the bathtubs in which we were washed once a week.
With a feeling of satisfaction, we finally left the Eerbeek house after first thanking our host profusely.
We set off for the third part of my encounter with the past: a visit to the Calluna Alba villa.
After parking the car there, we walked past the house and back again. A garage or workshop had been added to the side. The thatched roof looked as if it had been recently renovated, but otherwise it looked exactly as I remembered it.
The Polweg, where the house is located, is a quiet road where the number of passers-by in a day can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. One of them, an elderly jogger, asked if we were looking for something or someone. Perhaps he didn’t quite trust our visit, and while the others stood talking to him, I decided on a whim to walk to the entrance of the house and ring the doorbell.
There was no response from inside, but after I rang the bell again, the door was unlocked and opened. A lady of my age looked at me questioningly. In a few words, I told her that I had lived here with my parents as a person in hiding during the war and would like to see the house again.
You might expect some reluctance on her part after my story, but she invited us in without hesitation. She immediately went to make tea and then showed us around the house.
As soon as I entered, I saw that little had changed. Of course, it had been modernised with gas, a water supply, a bathroom, central heating, etc., but the interior had changed very little. Mrs Looman, the current occupant, had bought it years ago with her late husband from a friend of Aunt Mieke’s. Later, I found out that we had known her during the war because she and another friend regularly visited Aunt Mieke. Ibel, for that was her name, had lived there after Mrs Versteeg (Aunt Mieke) died in 1954, until her own death.
Over tea and biscuits, I told her about the time we lived here temporarily, and then we took a tour of the house. The kitchen, modernised but still with the old fireplace, Aunt Mieke’s room, the rooms upstairs, the little room where I slept.
And just like at the Eerbeek house, I saw myself as a ten-year-old boy and remembered all kinds of details about our stay. As if they were a reflection of that time.
What a wonderful welcome. With the promise that I would send her my story as a thank you for this visit, we said goodbye after an hour.
Back home in the bungalow, we spent the first few hours talking about our encounter with the past.
Are you writing it all down, Dad?
I certainly will. I’ll probably add it as an appendix to Before I Forget. An appendix that is now, six months later, ready.
POST SCRIPT 3 dated 31-12-2018
Eerbeek won’t let me go
I thought I had told everything there was to tell about Eerbeek in ‘Eerbeek in Reflection’, but nothing could be further from the truth. In less than a month, I received emails from two people whose content was related to Before I Forget. It led to a pleasant correspondence with Herman B. and Bram de R., and what they told me took me back 75 years in time.
Below is a summary to supplement ‘Before I forget’. In accordance with current privacy legislation, I have not mentioned their full names.
I will begin this story with Herman B. A name that may not mean much to you, but that will change when I tell you that he is a grandson of Harm Brink, the owner/farmer of the Oude Pol. I am referring to the farm that stood about a hundred metres behind the Calluna Alba villa. The latter house was our hiding place twice during the war.
Farmer Harm had three sons, Gerrit, Freek and Wim, with Gerrit taking over the Oude Pol from his father. Herman B. was Gerrit’s son and had lived on the farm as a child.
The Oude Pol was not a large farm, but with cows (which were kept indoors in winter), a number of pigs that produced piglets (which were sold to people in the area) and a barn with chickens, the farm provided enough income for a family.
At a certain point, this was no longer possible, and in 1945 Gerrit started making witch’s brooms in addition to his farming work to supplement their income. In 1966, he stopped farming. With a government subsidy, he focused entirely on making brooms and earned a good income from it. His main customers were local councils, riding schools and farmers from the surrounding area.
Herman took over from his father at some point. Until 1992. The number of orders then declined sharply as a result of cutbacks by the local authorities and the advent of leaf blowers.
He then joined Vitakraft, a company that manufactures animal feed. He worked there until he was 65 and is now enjoying his retirement.
Grandfather Harm passed away many years ago. Gerrit also passed away in 2005. And the farm did not survive either, . It was demolished in 2013 or 2014.
Herman still lives in Eerbeek. He is married, 67 years old and has two sons with his wife Joke.
I was curious to know what Gerrit looked like. I assumed he was the son I often helped on the farm. In a photo from 1943, in which I am sitting on a horse with my youngest brother, one of the sons is holding the horse. Herman wasn’t sure if it was his father, but he thought so. Otherwise, it would have been Freek or Wim.
He told me the following about the stream and the swimming pool in the forest: “The stream we were looking for was the Gravinnenbeek. It had been renovated in early 2018, that is, dug out by hand and all the leaves removed. Until August, the water had reached the Kerstens mill, the waterfall. Due to the extreme drought, the water level had dropped after that. But if it were to rain for a long time, there might be a chance that the water would flow over the waterfall again.
A few months ago, he had been there to take a look, but the water had not reached more than halfway. He remembered that this used to happen regularly in the past.
If we wanted to see the Gravinnenbeek again, we had to take the road to Coldenhove, from the Harderwijkerweg, after about 200 metres at a white house, turn right into the woods. The stream then runs on the right-hand side of the road and after about five minutes’ walk you arrive at Kerstens mill. Continuing further, you finally arrive at the head of the spring (source).
During his childhood, the swimming pool/lake in the woods was a popular place for ice skating in winter. ‘Always fun,’ as he put it, ‘because there were lots of children there.’
Bram R. was not born in Eerbeek. His father, a teacher, moved from Scheveningen to Eerbeek with his wife and children at the end of 1942.
In 1942, Scheveningen was declared a Sperrgebiet (restricted area) by the Germans because the British might try to land there. The residents were then forced to evacuate. This also applied to the Protestant Christian orphanage De Vluchtheuvel. It had to move to Eerbeek and was housed in the Huis te Eerbeek.
For the local Bible school in this town, this meant that space suddenly had to be found for forty extra pupils from De Vluchtheuvel. An extra teacher was also needed, which was solved by bringing a teacher from Scheveningen. Bram’s father.
The de R. family moved in with Mr Jansen, the headmaster of the school.
They also spent a few weeks in the Eerbeek house. Later, they stayed with other people in a house on the Apeldoornsch Canal on the road to Hall.
In mid-1945, after the war ended, they returned to The Hague – Scheveningen. The same was true for the Vluchtheuvel.
Bram has a number of photographs from that time and sent me some of them, including the school teachers and a large school photograph taken in May 1943. It is usually quite an event when such a photograph is taken, but that had been erased from my memory. It was a surprise to discover that both my youngest brother and I were in it.
I cannot remember Bram from that time, however. He was in the third class with a teacher named Miss . I was in the fourth class at the time, which was taught in the same classroom as the fifth class. His father, Mr or Master de R, was in charge of those classes. I recognised him immediately in the photograph. He was a friendly man, a good storyteller, and had those thirty to forty pupils well under control.
The name of the headmistress of the Vluchtheuvel was Sister Bommezij. She was a deaconess and therefore always wore a long robe with a veil.
Deaconesses were women who took care of the sick, poor and needy in the Christian community. In other words, they were Protestant nurses who performed nursing as a labour of love. The government regarded them as holders of a spiritual office.
In the nineteenth century, following Germany’s example, deaconess houses were established in the Netherlands for the nursing and care of the sick. Examples include the Diaconessenhuis in Utrecht, the Diaconessenziekenhuis in Amsterdam, and Bronovo in The Hague. After 1960, their importance declined and they were absorbed into large general hospitals.
Bram’s parents had a good relationship with the director. I remember her as a strict lady who walked silently through the corridors of the Eerbeek house in her long robe and rarely interfered with the children.
As already mentioned, the de R. family had stayed in Eerbeek until mid-1945 and had been through a lot. His mother described this in a book about their family during the war.
He also told me that Mr Jansen had indeed been imprisoned for a few months, probably for possessing a radio, which was forbidden by the Germans. I could still remember him returning to school with his head shaved.
Finally, a few words about the children at the Vluchtheuvel. I had wondered before whether they were all orphans. Bram said that this was not the case. Some of the children had been placed there temporarily because one of their parents was seriously ill.
31-12-2018