When I was six years old I started school on May 1, 1934. There were nine of us children in our family. The youngest was 1 ½ years old and my oldest brother was 12 and started grade 7. There were seven grades at that time so one of us was in every class except grade 5. The only thing I remember from day one is that we had to memorize a psalm verse which was very difficult.

When my brother Adam went to school, he attended the Christian school in Stolwijk and also Jaap started there, but then a Christian school started up in Berkenwoude by the Netherlands Reformed Congregation. However, there were not enough children to get a government grant so the Netherlands Reformed families in Stolwijk were asked to send their children to the new school in Berkenwoude. In the early years they could hardly get enough students so some were brought in by car. One of the elders who had a large family (17 children) had a large car and could bring eight children to Berkenwoude but by the time I went to school we went by bus. A bus line had opened that came from Gouda over Stolwijk and Berkenwoude to Lekkerkerk and the bus schedule fit nicely with the school hours.

The school started October 1, 1929, with 48 students and stayed at that number for 4 years. When I started in 1934 there were 76 students. It was a small school with 2 classrooms. Most of the time there were 3 teachers. In the first class there was a female teacher, Miss van der Putte, who taught grade 1 & 2, and a male teacher taught grades 3 and 4. The principal taught grades 5, 6 and 7 in the second room. In my class there were 8 children. People seldom moved at that time. When children left because they moved to another place or came in from another place, it was very unusual and special, much like emigrating was later.

Taking the bus was easy for us because there was a bus stop in front of the house and we could see the bus coming while waiting inside and we had plenty of time to walk to the road. That was a big advantage especially in wet or cold weather. Another advantage of going to school by bus is that we never had to stay behind at 3:30 because of being behind with our school work or for bad behaviour as happened to other children occasionally. The next bus came 3 hours later so we were spared having to stay behind as punishment. However, when mother was sick or another baby was born we often stayed with Opa and Oma in Berkenwoude, just about 5 or 10 minutes from school. 

One time I must have misbehaved in some way because the teacher told me to stay in after school. He knew that we were staying at Opa’s so the regular excuse didn’t apply this time. It had never happened before and I didn’t like it at all, so after a couple of minutes I asked permission to go to the toilet, which was granted, but as soon as I was in the hallway I took off. When I arrived at Opa’s it was about time to go milking so we changed clothes in a hurry and went along which we always enjoyed.

The cows were in a field quite far from the farm. First, we went to a halfway point to a connecting canal and then went west under several small bridges. From a distance I had seen somebody fishing on the bridge from Willem Markus’ place (Aunt Pieta and Aunt Corrie’s grandparents), and soon discovered it was the teacher from whom I had taken off not long before. He was boarding there. I was hoping that he would move on before we reached that bridge but that didn’t happen, and we came closer and closer. I tried to hide behind the milk cans and pails but that didn’t help much. When we reached him my uncles stopped for a conversation with the teacher who was about their age, and the teacher, while talking to my uncles, stared at me the whole time. I felt very guilty and very uncomfortable.

We usually wore shoes to school in summer and wooden shoes (klompen) in winter which were warmer. Times were hard in the depression, and we were always on the edge of bankruptcy, and with a large and growing family this was not easy. Quite often we wore clothes that were given to us by relatives or other people or had been worn by our brothers and sisters before us. Nothing was discarded unless it was really worn out. We had to wear hand-me-downs out of necessity, however as children we were not always happy with them as the size, style or colours, or the many patches, were not always to our liking.

When I was in grade 3, I had to wear a pair of girl’s shoes and at first I refused to wear them but I had no choice and I still remember how much I hated those shoes. I was in an especially bad spot for hand-me-downs with three older sisters. I remember dad reading the passage in the Bible where it says not to sew new cloth onto old cloth and I hoped mom was listening and would stop patching our clothes.

I was born left-handed and because of the car accident I had not used my right arm for anything and couldn’t do anything with it. The teachers decided that I should learn to write with my left hand which was against the rules then. At the time they didn’t believe people were born left-handed and that it was just bad behaviour which shouldn’t be allowed. However, the doctor decided otherwise. The wounds had healed but the arm didn’t grow mainly because I never used it. At school when we had writing lessons the teacher tied my left arm behind my back and I was forced to write with my right hand.

What I put down on paper the first two years was almost unreadable but slowly my arm became stronger and the writing improved. At first I thought this was cruel, but now I am very thankful for it. Now I write and eat with my right hand but I do everything else with my left arm. My upper arm still looks quite unusual but because the scar is quite high up most short sleeve shirts cover it.

I was not strong and caught every childhood disease, measles, whooping cough, jaundice, etc. In grade three I missed about 100 schooldays. This absenteeism plus my complete lack of interest in learning resulted in very poor schoolwork and so I failed grade 3. I still remember how astonished I was. My brother Henk who was in grade 2 and was in the same classroom started laughing loudly. He thought it was a big joke. My sister Geertje in grade 4 started crying and I looked from my brother to my sister and didn’t know what to do.

Some of my lack of interest in school was because we didn’t think farmers needed a lot of education, just the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. When I had to repeat grade 3 and realized I was not the lowest in the class anymore, that increased my self-esteem and interest in learning and from then on improved quickly. The first time around most of my grades only earned a 3, but the second time I earned a 7 ½ in one class. I had never had such a high grade and it gave me such a good feeling that after that I started doing my best. There were just three children in my grade so we all tried to outdo one another.

I don’t remember too much of my school years until grade 6 so it must have been quite uneventful. The main difference was that the school year was from May 1 to April 30. The summer holidays consisted of four weeks from mid-July to mid-August, about two weeks at Easter and I believe 1 week at Pentecost, plus 1 day for Ascension Day and 1 ½ or 2 weeks at Christmas, depending on what day of the week Christmas fell. The most important days were February 17, the principal, Mr. Timmerman’s birthday, and there was also an extra holiday on August 31 which was Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday.