The forest was just in sight when the sound of sirens filled the air, warning people to take shelter. The Allies frequently flew over Holland to bomb the Germans out of their complacency. The sound of planes came nearer: there we were, in the open, far away from any shelter, and the bombs would fall at any moment! I was five, old enough to associate panic with these sirens, but still felt calm: my big, strong, wise papa would surely know how to protect us both. He was not about to turn tail on account of a siren.
My father walked doggedly on for a while, then made a decision. ‘You wait here for me,’ he said, as he lifted me off the cart and deposited me at the side of the track. ‘I’ll be back soon with the wood.’
My papa was going to leave me there by myself? I might be bombed to death and my papa was leaving me? Oh, no, Papa, no, no, no! I sank to my knees and stretched my arms out to him, screaming with absolute terror, refusing to grasp that he could leave me there. My father, the daredevil, laughed and threw me a few potato bags. ‘Cover yourself with these!’ he shouted.
My panic grew even wilder—how could a couple of jute bags protect me? But he was off already and looked back only once. ‘Get the hell under those bags!’ he yelled. I proceeded to worm myself right inside one of them, sobbing with terror, when I heard a sound from the other side of the track, a soft whistle. When I looked around I saw two soldiers in German uniform hiding under the bushes in a ditch. I recognised them by their helmets. The soldiers, both very young with good intentions obvious in their eyes, were urgently beckoning me to come to them. I did not hesitate, but ran into their arms.
I must have fainted, for the next thing I remember is waking up in my bed at home to the excited voices of my father, mother and the neighbours. I came groggily down the stairs and saw my father displaying a bandage around his thigh from where a bullet had just been extracted. He had been spotted in the forest by an American pilot who thought he was German and had circled until he scored a hit. I sat down bewildered on the lower steps of the stairs, listening to the hullabaloo.
Such incidents were typical of my father. On home leave from his soldiering duties one day, he dared the Germans to do their worst when once again the sirens were blowing. He lit his pipe and stood outside the back door, leaning against the brick wall. He had just inhaled a deep draught when a piece of shrapnel penetrated the bricks right by his left ear, shattering them and leaving a jagged hole in the wall. When he came inside he laughed at my distraught mother, whom he had successfully defied, and who was now weeping from a mixture of anger and relief. I was nearly six when the most shocking event of the war touched our neighbourhood, one which cowed everyone. I tried to make sense of their agitated gestures and hoarsely whispered words. Ten men had been rounded up and made to stand against the brick wall of the cotton mill, just on the edge of town, where they were shot in reprisal for the death of a German patrol soldier. One of the victims belonged to a family in our street. They had dragged his body home, leaving a trail of blood. Fierce hatred flared against the Germans.
PRIMARY INSULTS
BY THE TIME I left the Montessori school at the age of five I was able to read fluently and calculate in thousands. I was a rotund and beamingly happy child. Despite a worryingly prolonged case of whooping cough when I was three, I had come through. There were distressing things in my life that happened at night, but when I woke up these nightmares seemed to vanish. A young child lives in the present moment whenever possible, and I was no exception.
And then came primary school. It was also run by nuns, with the help of a few lay teachers, in a two-storey red-brick building next door to the Montessori school. By the adjoining wall was a mossy grotto sheltering a chipped and faded statue of the Virgin Mary standing on ancient slimy-green rocks. Oh, the terrible boredom of this new school! I could already read fluently so they put me up a grade, but it made hardly any difference. The only new and exciting thing was musical notation. The toilets in this school were horribly dirty, full of nasty words and awfulness. And for the first time in my life I started to seriously live in fear.
The nuns at my primary school in Tilburg were probably typical of teaching nuns in the 1940s worldwide. They preyed on the vulnerability of children. Fear is still used as a motivator in our education systems, but the nuns had it particularly easy. They could use the threats of eternal punishment in hell or being burned alive in purgatory on top of punishment and humiliation in the here-and-now. Sarcasm, ear-pulling, pinching of cheeks and slaps with the ruler were quite enough to intimidate us without us running the added risk of the disapproval of Almighty God. The nuns had God on their side, and they were against us, so we had it tough. Even touching a nun’s habit was a sin punishable in purgatory. We would still furtively lift up the veil or hem of an unsuspecting nun, knowing we were clocking up time in the burning flames. Somehow it was worth it.
The greatest weapon in the nuns’ armoury was the doctrine of God’s omniscience: that is, he knew everything that went on. A huge eye hung on the wall of every classroom, peering into our most private thoughts. If this was designed to make us feel perpetually uncomfortable, it certainly succeeded as far as I was concerned. On hundreds of occasions I wondered what had prevented God from striking me dead. Maybe he would surprise me one day and the school’s brick wall would fall on me as I walked by. From the classroom window I watched the wall of the nuns’ living quarters across the schoolyard; my expectation that it would collapse was compounded by the Biblical story of the end of the world. Yes, God would destroy everything one day, and call his good children to sit on his right side and sort out the others for eternal damnation.
In the heat of a summer afternoon, the wall seemed to shimmer and quake; the end of the world was nearly here and I wasn’t sure if I would be considered good enough to sit at God’s right hand. Did God ever make mistakes? Maybe he would look at me and think I was good, like Saint Nicholas did last December when he brought me toys. Would God get confused, having to sort out everyone on the same crowded day?
Sinful Catholics in my childhood days had three ways of making up for wrongdoing and avoiding punishment. This was just as well, as the negative account would otherwise have been irredeemable.
Firstly there was confession, where—until my grand misunderstanding said otherwise—any sin could be forgiven. Secondly, there were the self-imposed punishments—literally ‘beating God to it’; and thirdly, there were ejaculations. One said ejaculations. They were short prayers, we were told, so short that they went like little arrows (from the Latin, jacula) straight up to heaven and into God’s ear. I saw an image of God’s ears stuck full of little arrows, but I pushed the irreverent picture out of my mind.
Each ejaculation was worth many days’ remission from purgatory—about three hundred days on average. Simply saying ‘Praise be to God’, for instance, could save hundreds of days from the flames! We were told that this was thanks to the accumulated credits earned by Jesus and the saints, which Catholics could draw on, as if on a bank account. The size of this account, and the expected length of purgatory for unconfessed and unatoned sins, was always fuzzy. How many days would you get for a swearword, or for disobedience—not to mention the bad thoughts we had all the time?
My thoughts were so elusive! I squirmed with shame at them. Common ones were wishing people dead, calling them horrible names in my head, and maiming them for life. ‘God sees you’ didn’t just mean that we didn’t have privacy in the toilet, or in our bedroom, or anywhere in the whole wide world; it meant God could read all our thoughts all the time and never miss a single one. I tried transferring my bad thoughts onto my dolls, making them my substitutes. That was no good, I soon realised: God could see through all that. It was invasion complete.
THE SCHOOL GOT partly damaged by a wartime bomb. The students were redirected to makeshift classrooms in the next parish, which was down the street. It was draughty there and cold, but that was par for the course in those days. Sometimes we gathered the still-warm shrapnel fr
om the streets after a bombing raid, out of curiosity, not quite realising how it got there.
A new priest arrived in the parish and began to teach in some classes and walk around the playground. He was young and had a natural affinity with children. I gravitated towards him, and he took to me, which made some of my classmates say that I was his favourite. I liked the way he was full of good humour; he wasn’t crusty and frowning like the old pastor. Sometimes I put my hand in his, and he would swing it or just hold it.
Stutteringly I begged him to enrol me in a junior pathfinder club called the Cubs. The Cubs’ meeting place was at the Montessori school; they had polka-dot mushrooms for seats. Sadly, he refused. I remember him saying that it was only for children from families who did not have both parents, or something like that. But now I looked forward to school to be with Pater Janus at playtime. I felt so safe around him. He really loved children.
After school, it would be a lucky day if my Oome (Uncle) Kees had come to visit. He would lift me onto his big strong knee and talk to me in his gentle sweet voice. He was never cruel, not even to be funny, as adults often were. His eyes were beautiful—warm and shiny—and it felt wonderfully good to lean against his big chest and feel his arm around me. He took no notice of my mother’s scandalised tone whenever she said, ‘You’re spoiling her, Kees!’, which was often. To my constant wondrous surprise, he just smiled at me and jiggled me on his knee. He dared to ignore my mama! He wouldn’t even put me down when my father scoffed, ‘You don’t know much about children, do you, Kees? They need to be disciplined!’
Oome Kees gave me a little doll dressed in traditional Dutch Volendam costume which I treasured for many years after he suddenly disappeared out of my six-year-old life. I thought he had died when he did not come around any more, but discovered only a few years ago that he suffered a brain injury after an accident when he was a sailor, and thereafter began a life of struggle and sad vagrancy until his death at fifty-seven. His true gift had been his undisguised love for me, his first niece. My life would have been different if I had not had an uncle like him. It might also have been different had he not disappeared. As it happened, after that the lights gradually went out in all directions.
I had assumed that my uncle was dead at just about the time when my pet rabbit died. My father had brought home a fluffy white rabbit. It was put in a cage and it was my job to look after him. We didn’t have a cat or a dog, so this rabbit was really special; it wasn’t just pretty and white, but oh so soft. I gave him vegetables from our big garden at the back of our new house, and leaves and weeds from my own little garden. I gathered the choicest treats for the rabbit.
How was I to know that he was being fattened for the pot? One day he was gone, although the cage door was still shut. ‘Mama!’ I cried, and ran to my mother. ‘The rabbit has gone! He’s not in his cage any more!’ But she paid me no attention and the horrible feeling came over me that I was stupid to love this rabbit. What was worse—much worse—was that he was served up for dinner. No one said it was the white rabbit, of course. I watched everyone put some on their plate and some was put on mine.
Years later, when I watched a German war movie about a boy who unwittingly ate his parents in some soup he had found in their deserted house, the memory of that dinner came back. I couldn’t protest at the time—I would have been belted for refusing to eat, and for stirring up feelings no one wanted to know about. Still, when I ate the rabbit—my murdered pet rabbit—somehow I joined that conspiracy, even though I felt sick. I joined in the lie that the feelings of children didn’t matter, that my feelings didn’t matter.
Yet my parents weren’t monsters—far from it. My father and mother were sincere and talented people, with a saving sense of humour. I happened to be one of those children whose sense of justice was easily outraged and who hated having her judgment challenged. This was probably inherited, for my father hated having his judgment challenged too, especially by a little child. Perhaps it was on account of the helpless anger he felt at being criticised and belittled by his perfectionist wife, that he took his frustration out on his children.
It was sinfully wilful for a child to know its own mind, especially a girl child, although nowhere in the Catholic teachings can I find a justification for this. The whole church was, and is, a living example of male domination; the inferiority of women and girls its unspoken message.
As I grew older, we children couldn’t argue without our words being met with indignant outrage. If this didn’t shut us up, a belting from hard hands or worse would follow. Eventually my father dispensed with the time lag and belted us in a rage he was less and less able to control.
As it turned out, my deplored wilfulness was eroded—along with the brimming confidence that went with it—rather suddenly. One day my father decided he’d had more than enough. He made sure I would submit, or die.
LEAF OF A WEED
I WAS ONLY A few months into primary school, when suddenly I lost weight.
‘She’s growing too fast,’ they all said, ‘maybe that’s why she’s become so skinny, and so shy, as well.’ They might have added, ‘So shy that she is scared to look at you, and wants no one to even notice her.’
It wasn’t a growth spurt; it was the terrible secret I now carried. I couldn’t share it with anyone, this dark and sad burden on my soul.
What was it that I could no longer tell anyone, not even the priest, especially not Pater Janus? It wasn’t just the recurrent nightmare, the awful, disgusting nightmare I had been suffering for about three years and could not escape, in which my papa, clad in his nightclothes, would creep to my bed like a thin ghost in the dead of night. While I was groggy with sleep, he would turn the bedclothes back and kiss me and trail his rough hands over my body. My papa would never kiss his little girl in the daytime, with everybody looking, but he put his big wet mouth smelling of tobacco to my face in the night, with hot bad air coming from his nose, and the kiss was hard, and his stubbly face hurt my skin.
It was so confusing! He smelled so horrible that I couldn’t bear it, but I could not escape as he rubbed a smelly slimy thing over my face, and then—oh, horror of horrors—he put the dirty thing in my mouth. Was it his tongue? I couldn’t tell. No, I didn’t think so, but what was it? I longed for total insensibility. I couldn’t turn away; his hand kept my face to his, and anyway, I wouldn’t dare. It was so hard to breathe. My papa panted and groaned, and then a warm thick stream gushed down my throat. Awful stickiness in my mouth. I longed for clean water, but there was none; there was only the merciful mindlessness of instant sleep.
In the mornings, the taste of it was still in my mouth. I thought I’d had an awful dream. In the beginning, when I was only three, I wanted to retch, vomit, get rid of it; then, out of the blue, I developed whooping cough. I coughed and coughed for weeks and months but couldn’t get rid of what was choking me; could never wash my throat clean. But gradually, because I was a tough child and loved my father unquestioningly, I adjusted. A sort of unspoken conspiracy grew between us; I felt an inexplicable bond with him.
My mother might have expected that something had to give when she said no to him and meant it; or when she had a bad period, and he couldn’t sleep because all his attention was on his penis and away from his heart. He left his bed when he thought she was asleep. She needed her reprieve. She had her bad dreams too, and often they turned into another pregnancy. My mother didn’t allow herself to come out of her own fog, to see what was happening and stop it. When I developed cystitis she sewed me a pair of warm trousers to wear to school instead of a skirt, special permission from the principal.
At about this time, we schoolchildren were told the story of how Jesus died. Our teacher described in detail how Jesus was flogged and sweated blood, and how a crown of thorns was pressed into his head.
All these images were so new and vivid and brutal. It was the horror story of all time and I could feel myself starting to faint. ‘After Jesus had suffered this way, he was nail
ed to a cross. A soldier hammered a big nail through each of his hands and each of his feet.’ Bang, bang, bang! went the hammer in my head. ‘Then they lifted the cross upright and, after a while, another soldier took a spear and drove it through Jesus’s heart to make sure that he was dead.’ I felt a stab in my chest, wanted to vomit.
It was impossible to understand these things. My head slumped to the desk, unable to look at the teacher any more. Then the teacher added, almost casually, that Jesus had suffered all that for our sins. We children had caused his death! I had caused his death!
The thick, hot, dark, heavy shame of my sins hit my soul. I felt that I, more than anyone else, had hurt Jesus. Why was this? Because of the dreadful thing that had happened in our coal shed at home.
The coal shed was attached to the kitchen and accessible from the tiny enclosed courtyard which also housed the toilet, called the WC, though there was no water in the closet. I had to pass the coal shed to get to the toilet.
Our toilet was a simple thunderbox, which was emptied into the backyard, which in turn grew magnificent vegetables. The smell of the box was so offensive that I learned to defecate in a big hurry, to get the job over and done with before I had to breathe. When my father was on the toilet it was unbearable even to be out in the open courtyard. Maybe it was his cigar-smoking, or his meat-eating, or the beginnings of the cancer in his bowels—or his frequent bad temper. Whatever the cause, the stench was overwhelming.
The coal shed doubled as a workplace for my father, who made and mended our shoes and created toys for Christmas and birthdays. My father was so good at toy-making; that was his Dr Jekyll side. He made me a go-cart, a wonderful doll’s house and a rocking horse, and he painted them in bright colours. We were told that Black Pete, Saint Nicholas’s helper, also hid in the coal shed, to find out if we were being good children or not. He was only there in the few weeks before 6 December, which is the children’s feast of Saint Nicholas in Holland. But most of the time I felt safe in the coal shed, visiting my papa occasionally to watch him at work.
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