The second thing I remember is when I was hit by a car when I was four years old. I believe it was on May 20, 1932. It was mid-afternoon and my dad was going milking, taking Geertje and me along. Henk was 2 ½ then, my sister Ju almost 1 year old and my mother was expecting again. We were standing on the side of the road ready to step into the Schouw (a flat-bottomed boat steered with a long pole that was used for milking). Dad said, “Cor, watch out, there is a car coming.” Cars were not very common then and I was afraid of them so I wanted to run back to the side but it was too late. The car drove over my arm almost severing it completely. My coat was hanging over the bumper so he must have dragged me some distance over the rough gravel road. I was immediately taken to the hospital in Gouda in the same car. My arm, above the elbow, was badly broken and barely holding together.

At first I must have been in shock and felt no pain. In our farm all the cattle were white and black and as we drove to Gouda, we passed a farm where all the cows were red and white. I thought that was so strange. Later mother told me I talked about those red and white cows all the way to the hospital. I still know where that farm was and they had red cows for many years. Later I remember having terrible pain and must have become unconscious.

There were two doctors who thought the arm would have to be amputated and were just about to begin when an older semi-retired doctor, Dr. Montagne, entered. He argued that since I was so young there was a chance the arm could be saved and he then did the surgery. Only the lower muscles were still connected. He put the two bone points together and put the arm in a cast with several openings in it so the wound could be kept clean. Two days later when my parents came in the evening to visit me, they thought they might have to stay because my condition was critical and I had a very high fever. The doctor said that if the fever did not start coming down by 10:00 they would amputate the arm after all. At 10:00 the fever had not come down, but it had not gone up either so the decided to wait two more hours and after midnight the fever slowly came down. At that time there was no penicillin or similar medicines. If my arm had been amputated, I would have lived with a significant handicap the rest of my life. The Lord truly answered the prayers of my parents and I am very thankful for this.

Altogether I was in the hospital for 8 weeks. I came home on my mother’s birthday, July 16. I was kept on the women’s ward because the doctor was afraid that I couldn’t lie still enough on the children’s ward. The wards were quite big then, with 10 or 12 beds in a row with a path down the center. There were moveable partitions that they could put around the beds when they were helping the patients. The nurses were nice with one exception, who was always grumpy and I was afraid of her. I still remember that shortly before going home I had to learn to walk again between two nurses.

Due to the fact that the bone had splintered quite badly, they couldn’t set it straight and it started to grow crooked and the doctor worried that it would become useless later in life. So I was booked for another stay in the hospital to break my arm and reset it. I think that was more than a year after the accident but just before that was to happen, my sisters were playing quite wildly, chasing one another. Mother heard them coming and called, “Cor, get out of the way.” I was standing behind the door but it was too late. They crashed the door open and I fell and broke my arm again. When the doctor came, he said it had broken exactly the way they had planned to do it, and he reset it and put another cast on it, and I did not have to go to the hospital again after all.