Authors: Carla Van Raay
I NEVER STOPPED
longing for my mama’s understanding, for her to know how I felt. She was like a mirage, close but impossibly far away, and I became convinced that I had lost the battle to be loved and approved of in the way I wanted.
I developed scarlet fever. My mama didn’t know what it was that made me so feverish. She kept me home from school, putting me on the couch in the living room for convenience, because my bed upstairs was too far away. This room, next to the kitchen, was unheated. The couch was filled with horsehair and very hard. The kitchen had wood and gas stoves which warmed up the whole room, and there was a big table to sit at for meals, to do homework on, and for Dad to cut out patterns for leather shoes after dinner. The horsehair couch was next to a draughty window and the cold winter wind pushed itself through the cracks under the sill like an unwelcome visitor. The cuckoo clock on the wall hammered its merciless ticking into my head. The autumn-leaf-patterned wallpaper made my head and stomach spin every time I opened my eyes and tried to focus.
Next door in the kitchen, my mama was busy all day with her three pre-school children. It was towards evening that she noticed I was delirious, became alarmed and called the doctor. When my papa came home from work in the dark of the evening, I heard my mama’s anxious words, telling him about me. In a touching, gentle voice she asked, ‘Shall we carry her up to her own bed?’ She was clearly aware of the cold hardness of the horsehair sofa I was on. There was a discussion about how difficult that would be, as my bed was upstairs. The discussion ended with, ‘It’s best not to be too soft on her, that’ll ruin her.’ My papa’s voice. I cried inside. There was nothing to show on the outside except the fever.
The doctor came in through the front door, bringing a gust of fresh air with him. He was dressed in black and carried a case. He was not an unusual sight, but to me it was remarkable because a doctor hardly ever visited us; we always went to visit
him
. I had only been to his surgery once, to have him look at the great number of warts covering my thighs. He had asked me to lift up my skirt so he could see them. This request put me into a panic of shame, because it reminded me of Papa, so I lifted my skirt reluctantly to just above knee level, blushing heavily and breathing very shallowly, studying the doctor’s face intently. He seemed nonplussed about my hesitation; the doctor seemed to have no idea that the disgusting trail of warts on my thighs might have been the legacy of a penis leaving disgusting trails; that a small wart, stable on adult genitals, can go rampant on the tender skin of a child. The doctor said he couldn’t do anything about the warts, and eventually they went away by themselves.
Now the doctor had come to see me. I knew everything that went on because my conscious self was out of my body; it sat on the end of the sofa and watched what the doctor did to my body. He took my temperature and looked into my throat. Then he turned a reproachful face to my mama, who was standing there with her hands twisted inside one another, biting her bottom lip, which was her habit when she didn’t know what to do.
When he said, ‘You should have called me earlier; it’s scarlet fever, you know,’ and added, ‘She could have died,’ I watched her intently. I could choose to die, if I wanted to. I would die, even risk hell, if she did not show she loved me. I saw the sudden blush of guilt that came over her face at the doctor’s words. She seemed close to tears. I decided it was enough. She had shown such concern! Yes, my mama loved
me. I knew that then. And surely she would show it more now? She would notice me more, after I’d come so close to death to test her.
The doctor recommended I be moved to my own bed. My mama took in a quick embarrassed breath at this. Another signal of love: she was sorry she had neglected me and now she wanted me to be well. I returned to my body and responded to the medicines and the warmth of the cosy bed upstairs. My mother brought me hot soup and fed it to me. It was all worth the crisis. I felt nurtured and got better.
WAR ACTIVITIES RESUMED
in 1944 in an all-out effort to oust the Germans from occupying Holland. On many a night, with our papa gone out with his truck, Mama kept me and my little sister Liesbet up, sitting with her in the dimly lit kitchen. There was only one candle, alight in its holder on the floor. She knitted non-stop on those nights, her head down, not looking at us as she mopped up the tears that rolled down her cheeks with a big hanky. I was so little when the war started, and only six when it ended. I felt helpless to see her in such distress. But we were kept busy. In the soft dimness of the candlelight, we made balls from skeins of wool and cotton. We wrapped the skeins around the back of a chair, walking around it as we wound each ball. We would soon learn how to knit, so we could add to her stock of knitted cotton socks, underpants and singlets.
Sunday was a special day of the week, war or no war. We were not allowed to do any work on a Sunday and the dishes piled up beside the sink. Sunday really was a day of rest and relaxation, and the specialness of that day is with me still—a pleasure for which I thank my Catholic upbringing.
During the week we worked very hard. I grew up in the days before washing machines and my hands were in hot
sudsy water made soft by washing soda from as soon as I was old enough to stand on a chair to reach a washboard. My mama was house-proud, which meant that every week the windows had to be cleaned. That was my job too, and whether it froze or snowed or rained didn’t seem to matter to her. When my hands turned blue and stiff in the winter cold, she would add some hot water to the vinegar bucket.
It was during wartime, with money still short, that I began to desperately want a rubber ball. I had seen one in a shop window in the square where I walked to deliver my completed crossword puzzles from the weekly newspaper. There was a cake to be won for the first correct entry, but mine was never drawn, worse luck. The ball cost much more than a few weeks’ pocket money and my requests for it met with steady refusals.
It was then that I asked my papa whether the toys he had made for me were all mine,
really mine
? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And can I do what I want with them?’ I didn’t tell him my intention, and he said yes again, almost absentmindedly. He should have known better, but it wasn’t until almost all of the toys had been sold to the neighbourhood children that he noticed and became very angry, demanding that I get them all back.
Get them back? Weren’t the toys mine to do with as I pleased? He wasn’t in a mood to reason. I was to go to all the children and tell them that I was not allowed to sell those toys and they had to give them back. The indignity of it! That day, I had the first and worst headache of my life, burning with humiliation and anger at the knowledge that
my
toys belonged to my papa and not to me at all. The children were unimpressed, but gave me back every one of my toys. Some of them had expressed great surprise at the unbelievably low prices I’d been asking for them anyway. I
didn’t know the value of things, and hadn’t wanted to quote a price that might get a rejection.
I did get that rubber ball all the same. I used my savings from every possible source, including gifts from my beloved Uncle Kees, and the occasional leftover coins that were supposed to be dropped dutifully into my tin on the mantelpiece above the kitchen stove, for important purchases such as books. My mama and papa were not amused when they found out that my tin no longer rattled—they merely looked at each other when they noticed me playing with my ball, as if to say, ‘What have we got here?!’
I continued to eat charcoal into the seventh year of my life, no matter the threats. Then I overheard a conversation I was meant to hear, which stopped my breath for a while and my coal-eating habit for ever.
‘Is she a child of the devil, since she loves that black stuff so much?’ my mama asked my papa peevishly. ‘Tch!’ he responded derisively, ‘she sure looks like she could be.’
Child of the devil! As it was nearing Christmas, my parents simultaneously hit upon the idea of telling me that Black Pete reported naughty behaviour such as coal-eating to Saint Nicholas. Thankfully, my Uncle Kees came to visit just then, making light of the whole thing, but I was cured of the addiction for ever.
Our diet improved when an American soldier was billeted with us. We had been warned to expect billeting. My mama and I came home from shopping one day and found that a big man had fallen asleep in my bed. His bootlaced feet stuck out over the low white-painted wooden end of the slatted bed and kapok mattress. I remember it well, because it produced a rare moment of intimacy with my mama. She was as surprised as I was and, as our eyes met briefly, I read curiosity and amusement there too, not to
mention her concern that the house was wide open to strangers just walking in. My mama didn’t say a word to wake up the soldier and I marvelled at her self-control. Her breath came in quick shallow spurts, her mouth was sort of twisted out of shape, and she bit her bottom lip as she contemplated this new addition to her busy life. She smiled at me, and the delicious conspiracy of mama and daughter beholding an unsuspecting sleeping soldier was a heartwarming moment for me.
Ted, the soldier, turned out to be a good guy and stayed our friend for years after the war, until we left Holland in 1950 and lost contact. ‘Here,’ said Ted, ‘try this!’ and so we were introduced to chewing gum. He brought food back from the mess, where he had his meals. We were particularly rich in oats for porridge while he lived with us. I pleaded with him, ‘Ted, can you bring us butter,
please
?’, but that was always chronically short. When I complained, ‘Pa, these sandwiches are too dry to eat!’, instead of scolding me, my papa made a promise that after the war I’d have butter a whole centimetre thick on my bread. I reminded him after the war, but alas he didn’t keep his promise. He wasn’t to know that for three years I had clung to his word, imagining the slabs of butter as I dipped my bread into my tea or milk.
ZEELAND, THE PROVINCE
to the west of us, had been mercilessly and cruelly bombarded. It was time for our little town to accept the possibility that we too could be in the firing line. The neighbourhood decided to construct an underground shelter, big enough for everyone to huddle in during an air raid.
Every day after school I made a beeline for the dig, where a fantastic hole was forming under the ground. The
entrance was only big enough for people to go down one at a time, or for chairs to be handed down singly. The earth was taken elsewhere so that the shelter’s position would not be given away. You could never be sure of who would bomb you; many a Dutch person died from Allied action.
I went down into the shelter by myself one day, when all the diggers were huddled outside in an animated discussion. They’d had a gutful of this hard digging work. Most of them were older people, not fit to go to war. Naturally, it was very dark in the shelter, and rather damp. The light fell on a corner and I saw to my horror that a puddle of water had gathered there. I had just learned at school that the planet was composed of a thin layer of earth, and underneath that thin layer was a great depth of water, and under that there was fire and molten rocks.
My chest heaved in panic. The men had dug down to the water level and it was already seeping through! Suddenly, I felt that the earth had become very insecure under my feet, like the time when I was standing on melting ice in the canal last winter and people on the shore warned me to inch myself back carefully.
Luckily we never used that shelter. During air raids people fled to their cellars—sturdy structures deep under their houses, usually covered by a staircase, which was also a resistive structure. ‘If there’s a direct hit, the earth shelter would be useless anyway,’ argued a wise old man. The shelter was used as a store for vegetables, and after the war it was filled in again.
As I grew up, new children kept arriving, as they did in all the Catholic families in the south of Holland. You were talked about if no children arrived for a while:
Why is God not blessing that marriage?
The oldest girl in the family was expected to become a surrogate mother, and this was a role that I accepted
without a murmur. It was my job to take the children off my mama’s hands, especially after school and in the holidays. It was my special favour to take them for long walks, particularly to the railway overpass, which was through the town square, past all the houses and little shops in-between, past a farm and the church.
Churches and chapels held a fascination for me, and on our walks I would urge my little brood to come with me to investigate the places we never visited otherwise. One such place may not have been intended for such small visitors: it was an exquisitely gentle and intimate chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. At her feet knelt huge statues of angels, with wings wide open, bowing in adoration. Small candles lit up twin blue glass bulbs on either side of the tiny space.
We knelt at the communion rail right at the front, to be close to the wonder of the beautiful statues and the smell of the madonna lilies in large crystal vases. In tiny vases near her feet there were blue forget-me-nots and white wispy flowers, so sweet that they filled our hearts with devotion to the Mother of Jesus, who deserved this beauty around her.
Right there on the railing was a small angel on a heavy wooden box with a slot for donations. The angel’s head bobbed in thanks when you dropped a coin in. Fascinating! My brothers and sisters all wanted to have my few coins to drop in, and there was a bit of hushed commotion until we suddenly noticed a smiling nun nearby. To our complete surprise, she held out a plate of biscuits and little cakes for us to eat! She didn’t speak, but it wasn’t necessary—we felt welcomed and appreciated, and decided that this chapel was definitely on our permanent list of places to visit!
If there was time we would go on to the railway overpass, little hands dragging along on both my arms until we finally got there. It was a wooden structure spanning four lines of
rail, and every few minutes a train would pass underneath. Traffic—mostly horse-drawn except for the odd car, and people on bicycles—was stopped at the wooden gates operated by the keeper of the crossing who spent all day in the box at the side of the rails. We clambered up the two broad sets of wooden steps, keeping pace with bicycle-riders who didn’t want to wait and instead pushed their machines up the narrow track near the railing. Once on top it was a matter of guessing not only which direction the next train would be coming from, but of judging exactly where we needed to be on the bridge so that the steam would hit our faces full on, wetting them with a delicious hot stream of sooty mystery, and threatening to engulf us in its wild confusion and carry us off. We had the solid wooden rails to hang on to and always survived wonderfully. We all returned home hours later with blackened faces. We were never scolded for that, because Saturday was bath day when everyone had a turn in the tub.