1934. Sight seeing with other passengers in Port
Said. Father extreme right and Mams centre, sister Lien and I in front.
Mams, or mammie as we called our mother, was what some people would call
“petite”. She was a short and slim brunette, wore a “lorgnette” and played the
piano. Born at the turn of the century in Enschede, a town near the Dutch-German
border, she was christened Marie Wevers. Her father, my grandfather, was a
rather stern headmaster of an elementary school whom I hardly remember as I only
saw him when I was about five years old. It was in the early twenties that my
parents met through an amateur musicians’ club as my father played the violin
and mother the piano. Both were teachers so they had some things in common. They
married on the fifth of August 1924 while my sister was born on the eleventh.
But that was a year later. My father used to embarrass my mother with this
little joke of his. Mams learned her cooking skills from my maternal grandmother
who was German, and like Prince Bernhard, the husband of former Queen Juliana,
born in Detmold Germany.
1936 Mother with my brother Eduard in the garden of
our house in Tondano.
After their marriage, because of the bad times for promotion, my parents decided
to go to the colonies and in 1928 they embarked on one of the ocean liners for
the East Indies, now the Republic of Indonesia. Since he was still a junior
government employee, they had to travel third class and their accommodation was
way back on the poop of the ship where one is likely to become very seasick. He
was posted as a teacher at the primary school in Ambon or Amboina, one of the
original Spice Islands in the east of the archipelago. Shortly afterwards I was
born. I still have a birth certificate, beautifully hand written by some staid
Dutch official in very formal old fashioned Dutch. It was 1929, the year that
King Leopold of Belgium and his beautiful wife Astrid visited the island and
Mams often implied that Her Majesty had peeped in my baby carriage.
Understandably, it was quite a culture shock for my parents to get from cosy and
well ordered Holland into the unfamiliar alien surroundings of the tropics.
Especially my mother had a problem acclimatising. The millions of insects, the
unrelenting heat, the dark skinned, to her mysterious people and the strange
odours were hard to accept for her. Once, she had the Kebon (gardener) and the
Kokki (cook) search for a cadaver she suspected to be hidden somewhere in the
garden. The servants were giggling and pretending not to know that the pungent
odour, which permeated the whole house, was nothing else but the leftovers of a
Durian they had consumed earlier that day.
Port Said 1935 On our way to the “End of the World”.
Mams, my sister Lien and I.
She always said that I had been much too heavy when I was born and she never
fully regained her health. Although I don’t think I may be blamed for it, we
children actually hardly ever knew her not to have some sort of complaint.
I don’t remember anything about Ambon and although I travelled all over the
archipelago in later years, I never revisited the island of my birth.
My father was transferred to Java not long afterwards when I was still an infant
and there we lived in several towns until the time was ripe for European leave
after a six year term. My earliest memories were that I almost drowned in a
swimming pool, probably in Salatiga and was barely saved by Pappie (father) and
that I took a pork-chop to bed in a place called Ceribon. Other vague memories
are about snakes, rice fields, geese, mountain trips and the occasion that my
mother almost died of embarrassment when I lifted her skirt to show her petty
coat to a male acquaintance we met in an Indian tailor shop. She was wearing the
one with the lavender flowers I admired so much.
During our sojourn in Europe we took grandma to her birthplace in Germany where
my sister Lien and I posed for a photo on the pedestal of a huge statue of
Herman, the German hero who defeated the Roman legions some 2,000 years ago. My
brother Eduard was also born during my father’s leave. After this intermezzo we
sailed back to the Orient. This time my father was appointed teacher at the high
school of Tondano, a tiny town in the mountains of the northern tip of Sulawesi.
Mams called it the “End of the World”. We stayed there for five years and I have
never regretted it. Mams eventually made peace with the “End of the World”. She
did her gardening and together with Meenah Jawa, our Javanese cook made the most
delicious food in her huge kitchen. When she was annoyed with us she would say
that we were spoiled rotten and deserved a war like the one she went through as
a young girl. Although the rumblings of the impending disaster were already
evident in the late thirties, it was something we thought would never become a
reality for us.
My youngest brother Wim was born in 1939 and in the summer of 1940 after the
German invasion of Holland we moved to Batavia, now called Jakarta. There the
threat of war became more of a reality. On advice of the authorities we dug an
air raid shelter in our garden which was a trench with a thatched roof. We also
bought iron woks to put over our heads in case of a bombardment and wore pieces
of hard rubber on a string around our neck to bite on to prevent the eardrums
from snapping during a raid. Air raid drills were regularly held and we hoarded
rice, flour and sugar as well as masses of kidney beans that took at least a
full day of soaking and cooking to become edible.
Another novelty was a very robust “air raid table” in the middle of my sister’s
bedroom. It was made from sturdy teakwood with heavy rattan screens on the
sides, a contraption which nowadays would cost a small fortune. This was to sit
under during the alarms. It was supposed to protect us from shrapnel and it only
dawned on us much later how useless and absurd it all had been. Meanwhile, my
father had joined the so called “Land Storm”, an auxiliary military division for
which he exercised at the weekends, together with colleagues, bankers,
administrators and other important “Belandas” (Dutch). This gallant amateurish
institution was supposedly a defence against the Japanese Imperial Army. Joining
it eventually cost him his life as a prisoner of war.
