That summer (1954) our parents had started to look for a farm of our own. Dad was itching to be his own man again, had occasional differences with boss Jerry and disputes with colleague Albert. By late summer several places were visited and then one became a serious candidate. It was in Middlesex County, north of London about 30 km, on the south side of highway 7 near a small town five km north from there called Granton. Either through the farm real estate agent or through the current owner, Mom and Dad were introduced to the Knips, a farmer’s family in Granton who had emigrated a year before us and were from Oude Pekela, only 10 km from Wedderveer. They belonged to the same church denomination, spoke the same dialect, except for some amusing local deviations, were friendly and enthusiastic. I speculate that this proximity in every sense of the word made a big difference to our parents. The Knips had a look at the farm that was for sale and approved of it. It was a 200 acre (80 hectares) rectangular piece of good land, about twice as deep as it was wide, sloping ever so slightly towards the creek that ran parallel to the highway through the whole property only 50 meters behind house and barn.

The house was a well-built yellow sandstone structure of typical Ontario design: front door in the middle, with a kind of decorative portico/balcony above it, that had a door with glass of its own. Bay windows were symmetrically placed each side of the front door. Behind the front door a hallway with a straight staircase leading to the wide upstairs hall that had four doors to so many bedrooms. Downstairs the master bedroom on one side of the hallway, the living room on the other side. Behind the master bedroom another small room, behind and attached to this whole square house a one story, narrower building which on the east (barn) side had a veranda or porch and which contained a large kitchen with the bathroom and laundry room side by side at the rear. The kitchen had a door to the living room and an outside door to the porch. Under the house was an unfinished basement less than two meters high, which contained an oil furnace and the water pump installation. The barn, some thirty meters from the house on the east side, was of the standard variety one finds all over Ontario and the mid-western United States, but badly in need of repairs. Often such barns are painted red, this one had not seen any paint yet, it was weathered wood. The whole place seemed close to what we were looking for.

The savings of our parents could be transferred from Holland -the regulations had been relaxed- to their account with the Bank of Montreal; it took time, a bridging loan had to be arranged at Stiny’s bank in Aylmer; together with our joint savings the funds would make a good down payment and means for buying equipment. The sale was uncertain for a week or so as Dad haggled, but then seller and buyer came together and the deal was clinched. We children had little say in the matter, but I soon found out that there was a good high school within reach by school bus and the University of Western Ontario only 30 km away. For Stiny it did not matter much: she and Herman had wedding plans for summer ’55 and would stay in Aylmer to start with. For Henk it would not matter much either, his job with the local farmer was always thought of as very temporary. Co would have to go to high school, Rika had a few years to go in primary school. Last but not least, there were several CRC congregations for us to choose a church home from. We chose the Talbot Street CRC in the city of London, some 30 km from the farm.

A modest mortgage was arranged with the Bank of Montreal in St Mary’s, a substantial town less than 20 km east on highway 7. With the owner of the farm it was agreed that after he had harvested all of his crops, we would come and plough the fields. In the spring, which in Southern Ontario may not come till April, we would start working the land and be planting/sowing the next season’s crops. We were to move on 1 March, 1955.

In October, after my eighteenth birthday, we bought a new Allis Chalmers tractor with a hydraulically lifted attachable plough. Advised by the Knips, we took over the fuel tank with hand pump and filled it with gasoline. We were ready for ploughing our ‘Even Acres’ as we called our new place. The crops that had been there were corn, oats and some beets. Not all fields seemed equally easy to plough, especially the beet field was very uneven. Since I had no steady job at the time, had a driver’s license and a vehicle, it was evident that I would be the one to do the ploughing. I was to have board and lodging with the Knips. So after we took delivery of the equipment, Dad and I agreed on a ploughing pattern, we tried the depth settings of the plough, the power of the tractor in various gear combinations and began. Now ploughing 80 hectares all in one go is really a tall order. It took me two days before I could make a reliable estimate of the total time required, roughly twenty days, presuming no equipment or driver failure and dry weather. My three-shear swath was one meter in width, my speed was about five km per hour, so I would have to drive forty km per day to do four hectares. With fueling time, lunch break etc this would need between nine and ten hours. So I resolved to work from eight till eighteen hours, so I could have both breakfast and dinner with the Knip family, who lived only a ten minute drive away. Mom and I agreed I should come home on Saturday afternoon and return on Monday morning. That way I would have two evenings a week at home, with some social life among peers at the Aylmer church.

My days on that new and very good tractor seemed long but not unpleasant. I had fine weather the whole time, mild Indian summer days. I prided myself in ploughing absolutely straight furrows and set the plough so it would turn over the soil completely, leaving as few green tops in view as possible. These ploughman ideals both are amusing, they are not agricultural but cultural, actually aesthetic requirements but I took them from my horse- drawn ploughing youth in Wedderveer and wanted to maintain them. Behind my plough there were always birds, mostly gulls and crows but also colourful birds of song I could not always name. But for the birds, I was alone the entire day.

Above the steady sound of the engine I must have sung every hymn, psalm, folk song and Dutch patriotic song I every learned, several times over. Also I thought about Eika a lot, went through all my youth- and school memories, dreamed of my future and had fantasies about space-time eternity. Mrs. Knip always gave me an ample sandwich lunch with bottles of water and milk to drink. I did not find time dragged, was pleased with my progress and noted after the first week that I was at nearly one-third of my assignment. Every evening before driving to Granton, I serviced the plough’s few grease points, fuelled the tractor and checked the oil- and water levels.

One day in the second week I came early morning and saw to my dismay that the left rear tire of the tractor was flat. I carefully drove the crippled vehicle to a level part of the yard, found concrete blocks and pieces of two-by-fours to put under the axle, used the hydraulic jack of my pickup truck to raise the left wheel just enough and lowered the axle onto the beams. It was not so hard to undo the wheel nuts and when they were all gone I wiggled the wheel off the bolts. Then came the surprise, the wheel leaned towards me and I could not hold it up, had to jump out of the way as it crashed to the ground. I had overlooked that the huge tire was filled with water for more traction. So how was I to get that wheel onto my pickup truck’s loading platform? With the tailgate down it was still quite a height, really a job more for two men than one boy. But there was nobody in the house. I found two longer two-by-fours in the barn and managed with their leverage to get the wheel upright and lean against the tail of the truck. It was still a big struggle, accompanied by prayers and curses, to get the whole wheel into the load space. With pounding heart and sweat all over I closed the tailgate.

My Mercury truck was also sagging under the load as I carefully drove to St Mary’s, found a garage where the cause of the leak, a piece of steel wire, was found and removed, the leak sealed, the tire’s pressure restored. All this without moving the wheel off the truck; smart guys. Then back to the farm and finding a way of getting that wheel back onto the tractor. By positioning the truck just right I could slide the wheel onto the two two-by-fours I used earlier, push it upright against the tractor; with great effort, always ensuring the wheel did not tilt but kept balance, guide one bolt into a hole, then jack the whole axle up bit by bit till the other holes came within reach. I managed to get one nut to take hold, then finally get all bolts in place, screw down the nuts securely, remove the beams and the blocks. The tractor was mobile once more. It cost me half a day, five dollars and a whole lot of both physical and spiritual energy. In spite of my little triumph over gravity, I felt depressed that ploughing afternoon.

The evenings at the Knips were full of laughter. They were with the six of them, the parents, two sons, Victor and Harm,  in their twenties, a daughter Tally in her late teens and a young woman, called Jeltje to whom the eldest son was engaged to be married. We played games, told riddles and stories, talked of the old country, all in our native dialect with its special humour and ribald anecdotes. When I told them of my tire struggle they became solemn, scolded me for taking such risks, consoled me when they noted the emotion the telling evoked: it had been just too much for the boy who pretended to be a grown man.

In the middle of the fourth week I finished, the whole two hundred acres were flawlessly ploughed, ready for winter weathering. I felt a deep satisfaction as I surveyed the scene. Dad could have a good start here next year. Goodbye and see you soon to the Knips, off to Aylmer, the Van Patter farm and a normal family life again. I had managed very little by way of studies those weeks, would have to work hard at it to reach my targets by Christmas. And I would have to try and earn some money that winter. But first at home celebrate completion of a daunting job, our start of farming in Canada.

In Aylmer there was a factory of the Imperial Tobacco Company, of Players cigarettes, where much of Ontario’s tobacco yield was processed. I applied for a job there and was hired in the leaves section, at the starvation pay rate of 37 cents per hour. But this was no time to be choosy, with a 45-hour week it would give me sixteen dollars a week and for the three months employment foreseen, it all added up to two hundred dollars. Moreover it seemed preferable to work with other people in a warm dry place rather than mope at home. I took the job. It was not good, I was all day standing next to a conveyor belt where half a dozen of us took bales of cured tobacco, ripped off the binding strings and spread the tobacco bundles, as they had been made at the kilns near the fields, thinly on the belt. Further down that belt others would take each bundle, undo it and shake the leaves so they spread out to their natural width and length. The belt then fed these leaves into a cascade of cutting machines.

We would regularly trade places so each got his fair share of bad work and worse. The work was dirty, the leaves were sticky, the sand on them filled nose, ears and hair. When working with sand leaves, one had to shake out the sand vigorously next to the belt. After a week or two I got a tummy ache that would not go away. It got worse by the day, then one hour, after a half day of sand leaves, I cried out in pain and could not go on. A doctor was called to the factory’s first aid room, who diagnosed acute appendicitis. An ambulance took me to St Thomas General Hospital and that same evening I was operated. ‘Just in time’ said the surgeon cheerfully the next day, ‘I made a generous opening so I could help you faster’. The scar I have ever since, is testimony to that ‘generosity’.

I did not return to that tobacco workplace, instead did odd jobs and studied by correspondence the rest of the winter, helped in the Van Patter barn. I looked forward to our move to Granton, to the next phase of our immigrant life and to my continued formal education. I badly wanted to go back to school.