The train ride to Toronto was a two-day affair, at first interesting, then tedious, as we had little priority and were sidetracked for scheduled passenger- and freight trains many times. We did get a feeling for Canada’s extent and for the distance we were putting between us and Holland, between me and my girl. In Toronto it was hot as we waited for our Canadian National train to London, Ontario. I ventured out on the street and was impressed by the huge Royal York Hotel. Amusing how it is now dwarfed by skyscrapers and the CN Tower near Toronto Harbour.

In London we were met by our fieldman, Mr. Vellinga, a prewar Dutch immigrant. There were some complications but after a phone call or two he cheerfully told us he had a house and work for us in Aylmer, a town in the tobacco growing district along highway 3 between St. Thomas and Tillsonburg, about 10 km north of Lake Erie. We loaded all our luggage in his big Ford wagon and piled in. After a good hour we were in Aylmer, turned south onto highway 73 and after a few km west onto a gravel road. The land was fairly flat and green, the tobacco plants quite puny. After two km or so our driver shouted: ‘Here is your home’ and swung his car to the right onto the yard of a big two-story yellow brick house that looked as though no one had lived there for years. The yard was all weeds and tall grass, the windows hardly transparent. Our fieldman helped us unload the luggage, made a date with Mom and Dad and sped away. Complete silence, an eerie feeling of desolation: where are we, how can we live here, is there anybody to ask anything, will there be water, is there a food store? But we have no car.

We started to inspect house and yard, began thinking about making it livable, first about where to sleep tonight. We had been told the house was owned by the Driesman family, old Dutch immigrant stock and sure enough, within the hour a pickup truck arrived and a man somewhat older than Dad came up to us and greeted us in English with some old-fashioned Dutch thrown in. He was gruffly friendly, gave us baskets of food , including fruit and juices and various tips about the house to our parents. Mr. Driesman told us we could stay for the tobacco season; Dad and the two older kids could start work tomorrow with replanting and hoeing in the tobacco fields. His son would collect us at 7:30 in the morning and would provide food and drink. With that Mr Driesman left, not a word about wages, rent or the like. Interesting!

Soon, as we were sweeping some floors and dusting an old table and chairs, dragging luggage inside, a car hooted and out came an older and a younger man. Mr. Broer and his eldest son Dick. ‘Welcome to your new country, we are from Andyk and live down the gravel road on the left, about one kilometer. Never ever has anyone been more welcome, we were lost and found! ‘Come over for coffee and a drink when you are settled and get acquainted’, all this in Andyk-accented Dutch. Happily, we accepted and after an hour or so walked down that dusty roadtill we heard the lusty laughter of young people behind bushes where a clapboard house was hidden. The Broer family, father and mother, several sons and daughters plus Mary, Dick’s young wife. Warm and folksy, what marvelous luck, we could embrace them all and did.

It turned out that there was a church community in Aylmer of the Christian Reformed Church. This CRC, strong in Michigan and the Dakotas since the 1920s, with a college and seminary named after Calvin in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was rapidly establishing new congregations among new Dutch immigrants of our religious persuasion in Ontario. In fact, the Aylmer congregation was several years old already, had a minister from Michigan and a house of worship, white, clapboard, of its own. The Broers would be glad to arrange transportation for us this coming Sunday. And so it was, Mom and Dad visibly glowing in the comfort of kindred spirits in a strange land; the morning service was in English, we and a couple of other new families were welcomed with applause as we stood and bowed. We stayed over for lunch, talked to many people, learned about young people’s groups, catechism lessons. Afternoon service in quaint Dutch. We were not alone and there were many ready with help and advice. Slowly it dawned on us that here church was about community as much as about religion.

The first two weeks were tough, the work was hot and dusty, home was a string of improvisations. But then one afternoon the huge wooden crate we last saw on a truck in Wedderveer was deposited by a crane from another truck. It creaked and was not quite rectangular anymore, but it was whole. We broke it open and started unloading it. It took us many hours but in the end most things had found a place, the living room looked furnished, the kitchen equipped, the bedrooms had more than floors to sleep on, our camping days were over. My bicycle was there and intact, although the gravel road did not provide a smooth ride.

Then came the news that our Oldsmobile would arrive on pier X of Hamilton harbour next week Friday. Oh boy, our car, mobility without having to ask others for favours all the time. Question was: who will drive it from Hamilton to here? Of course I volunteered and incredibly my parents agreed. One little problem: I had no driver’s license. I enquired how to get one and was given the address of the man in Aylmer authorized to take the examination and issue the license. At first opportunity I hitchhiked to Aylmer and found the address: it was a little variety store two blocks from the Main North-South street.

I walked in, introduced myself to the friendly, chubby man behind the counter and showed him my passport. He asked how much experience I had and I told him I had been driving a Model A Ford since I was eleven. That amused him. He suggested Ontario traffic was probably easier than in Holland and that the rules were probably much the same. I affirmed all this willingly. Then he said: ‘let’s step outside, you answer a few questions and we’ll go for a spin’. I answered his questions, satisfactorily it seems, and he looked at me and asked ‘where is your car’. I said: ‘In Hamilton as I said earlier’. He asked how I was then expecting to do the test drive. I said timidly: ‘I thought sir that maybe we could use your car?’ He frowned, then laughed out loud. ‘Alright, alright, why not’. He pointed to a huge grey Chrysler in front of his store. ‘Get in’. He told me how to start it and where the parking brake was. I asked where the gearshift was and he said ‘this car is an automatic’. Now I had heard of automatic gearboxes but had never used one and told him frankly. He told me there was nothing to it, here is Drive, here is Park, here is Reverse. I started the beast, pulled the lever from P to D and we glided away. He told me where to turn and turn again and in about three minutes we were back at the store. I had to drive in reverse along the curb, then forward again into position. I turned off the engine, engaged the Park brake and looked at him. He thoughtfully shook his head and said: ‘Well well, not too bad, I think you’ll learn soon enough’. We went into the store, he took out a little license form, put it into his typewriter, took my passport, asked for my address and in no time signed the thing and asked me to sign a receipt. Then he handed it to me and said: ‘That’ll be five dollars’. I gave him a fiver and could have hugged him. I thanked him with a stutter of joy and he said: ‘Welcome to Canada son and good luck’. I walked on a cloud back to the main street and hitchhiked home. I had just passed the only driving test I have ever done in my life. What an uncomplicated country!

A good week later I took an early Greyhound bus from the Aylmer crossing to Hamilton along highway 3, getting a ride there from Johnny Driesman. The bus made a lot of stops in a series of nondescript towns, but finally we ended up in a regional station in Hamilton. I managed to find a city bus towards the harbour and rode it for a while. When the driver shouted Harbour One I got off and looked around. No clear terminal to go to. I asked a man where harbour X was but he did not know except all harbours are along this road. I started walking and must have walked over an hour, asking several people now and again. It became clear to me I had made a mistake, left the bus much too early, everything in Canada is big, and I was now sweating in high noon sun and dust. Finally I saw the sign I had hoped for, enquired at a porter’s stall and was directed to the Customs Shed. There I found several men in uniform playing cards and taking very little interest in a strange boy.

I had taken my passport and some shipping documents, as well as an ownership paper in Dutch. I took them out, gathered my courage and interrupted the card game. Looking at one of the men, I said: ‘Officer, I am from Holland and have come to get a car’. Play stopped, all looked at me with skeptical frowns. ‘So you have come for a car have you, well that is not so simple’. ‘I have papers sir, could you look please?’ He and a couple of the others stood up and surrounded me. I handed over my documents, trembling. To control my nervousness, I took out a cigarette and fumbled for a match but found none. I looked at a man who was smoking and asked: ‘Could I have a little bit of fire?’ The man roared with laughter and shouted that this guy wants a little bit of fire! I realized I had made a mistake in literally translating the common Dutch phrase ‘Mag ik een vuurtje?‘ The laughter broke the ice, I got my fire, three men looked at my papers, we walked to a freight shed and soon they found our Oldsmobile.

Now it was fortunate that all papers were in Dad’s name, which is identical to mine: Harm van der Laan. So they asked no further questions except whether I had a Canadian driver’s license. I did and waved the new little document at them. They did not scrutinize it to see it was only a few days old, but made me sign a paper for receipt, wished me a good journey and showed me the way off the site. I started the Olds and drove to the road I had walked along for hours, turning in the direction I had come from. Almost immediately I heard the knocks of bearings and I saw the temperature indicator shoot up. I stopped: probably they have drained the radiator! Where is the next service station. As luck would have it, that was only a few hundred meters along the way and I took a chance and drove there. Waiting for the engine to cool, I checked the oil level and found there was no oil in reach of the dipstick; was that drained too?

The station attendant filled the radiator, the gas tank and came with several cans of motor oil; we needed about four to reach the desired level. I had just enough cash. Was I glad I had checked the gauge; I would have ruined the engine in a few minutes, but sensing the bearing noise that one should not normally hear, led to the saving motor oil. My old Winschoten combustion engine course, four and a half years earlier, paid off! I decided not to take highway 3 but highway 2 instead. On the map it passed through fewer towns and the distance, some 190 km, was not so different. I found road signs to London and singing loudly was on my way.

It was mid afternoon. Well away from the harbour I saw a boy hitchhiking and stopped to give him a ride. He was black and about eighteen. He said ‘thanks man’, threw his bag on the back seat and climbed in. After a few minutes he asked where I was from and I said ‘I am from Holland’. He smiled ear to ear: ‘Wow man that’s great, I am goin’ to Zeeland right next door’. I was puzzled, Zeeland next door to Holland, ok, but he was going there? So I repeated I was from Holland, across the Atlantic Ocean. Clearly this did not ring a bell at all. Ocean? It turns out he was from the town of Zeeland, Michigan which is close to the city of Holland, Michigan. His name was Jason and he had visited an uncle and family in Hamilton. We decided he would come along driving westward until I had to turn south. He found us a radio station, country music! We parted near London after I saw the sign, direction St Thomas. As he waved I marveled at Jason’s geographical and historical ignorance, his -for me- very new accent and vocabulary along with his happy disposition.

From London to St Thomas and then east again to Aylmer, I found my way to highway 73, our concession gravel road and then, hooting the horn full blast I came into the yard of our country villa, where the family and some visitors were gathered on the grass and an assortment of chairs. Cheering reception, Mom in tears as she embraced me: thank Heaven, you are safe!

There was tea, there were cookies and there were questions. I enjoyed them all and they laughed incredulously at my customs experience: can I have a little bit of fire. The next Sunday we drove the Olds to church, with Dutch license plates still and many fellow churchgoers shook their heads and whispered about that new family that had an American car from Holland. Soon there would be more to whisper about.

Hoeing tobacco in the hot fields was not Stiny’s thing, but she did not just want to be at home either. One weekday soon, she dressed up, hitchhiked into Aylmer. She was picked up by a man who warned her not to hitchhike alone again. Apparently she told the man she needed a job, and during that ten minute ride the man volunteered to introduce her to the manager of the Bank of Montreal, an imposing building on the NE corner of the E-W and N-S streets’ crossing, the heart of town. He did so immediately and Stiny was led to the office of the manager. The gentleman was doubtful but asked her to sit down and proceeded to question her. Where she was from, how old she was -eighteen-, how long was she in Canada now -ten days-, what education she had -completed high school-, what languages did she speak -Dutch, English, German and French-. The man was increasingly interested, told her about Belgian tobacco farmers who spoke Flemish and needed loans for their growing- and harvesting seasons; about similar German and Dutch farmers. Their English was less than satisfactory and they would come to the bank with documents from the old countries that for the manager were hard to assess. Could Stiny help with that? Of course she could and gladly. She walked out of there with the prospect of a full time job -the appointment needed head office approval-, a salary that, though modest, we all ooh-ed and ah-ed about for its steadiness, and a prestige the whole church community was both proud and jealous of.

Johnny Driesman was about twenty-three or so, athletic, deeply tanned and fast. He drove a big Ford convertible and would exit and enter the driver’s seat by jumping over the door in one swoop. He told Dad, Henk and me what to do and showed us how. We were replanting tobacco at first, replacing plants that had not survived first planting, putting new plants firmly into the ground, with ample water from heavy canisters. Johnny told me he had finished a bachelor degree in liberal arts (I had no idea what the term meant, Johnny did not seem an artist type to me …) at the University of Western Ontario, UWO for short and had just completed the first year of law school. I asked him lots of questions about Ontario schools and universities as best I could formulate them. I told him I would go to university, study engineering or science. Johnny smiled, ‘good idea’ he laughed with so much skepticism spilling over into his laughter, it riled me.

After a few weeks at Driesman’s, we started looking for a place to live and work outside tobacco. Via via -church network- we soon found a farmer looking for a full time farmhand, with a house, albeit a small one, to go with the job. It was a big dairy farm about as far east of highway 73 as our Driesman house was west, but two concession roads closer to Aylmer. Dad applied, had the interview and got the job. We all went to see Jerry Van Patter, his cheerful wife Dorothy and their two small children. They lived in a lovely white house surrounded by big trees, with a veranda, only two hundred yards from a huge red barn and several tool sheds. Jerry already had a junior farmhand, another Dutchman, called Albert, who turned out to be a stocky cheerful young man. We all liked him on sight and Dad saw the immediate advantage of having an interpreter for all the technical farm business he would have to learn.

We finished the work in Driesman’s tobacco fields that needed doing prior to the full growing season and then, early July, moved to the Van Patter farm. The hired hand’s house, sitting in a meadow a hundred yards from the main house, was small but adequate for a time. It had one-bedroom downstairs and three and a bathroom upstairs, all quite small. The living room was pretty full with the solid Dutch furniture, but the place became homey and comfortable very soon. Dad started his work immediately, tending a large herd of cows to be milked twice a day and all the farm work that goes with such a herd, plenty to do for Jerry, Albert and Dad. Every second weekend, Dad had to do the Sunday chores too; the other weekend Jerry and Albert were on. Jerry agreed that Henk and I should help Dad those Sundays and this enabled him to attend church also then.

For Dad it was a new experience in many respects. He had been his own boss all his working life, starting at fourteen. Now he was fifty-two and a farmhand in Ontario. There were many things that were done differently here compared to his old way of working. It was not easy and we all saw Dad chafing in this position. Mom ran the household with her normal calm efficiency and her worries mostly concerned Dad and each one of us children. Co and Rika had to attend elementary school, a country school where they traveled by school bus. I recall their complaints about their clothes being out of whack compared to the fashion of their classmates, a very important aspect of social comfort! I trust this was set right with quick purchases soon …

Stiny had her bank job, Henk soon found a job with a farmer only a km or two away and I had an assistant mechanic’s job with a small garage owned and run by one Mr. Zylstra just east of St Thomas. Since our parents had not been allowed to bring their savings out of Holland, we had all agreed that the eldest three children would, except for a little pocket money, put their wages into a single pot for two years. Dad would learn as much as he could about all aspects of Ontario farming, hope to get his money out of Holland and buy a farm of his own towards the end of those two years. That is exactly what happened already in the late summer of 1954.

Our nearly two years in Aylmer really were happy ones for us youths. In the church community, where in the winter season we participated in the Young Peoples Society modeled on Dutch reformed church patterns, we found friends to go out with and to invite. Also Stiny’s boyfriend Herman came frequently from the St Catharines area where he lived since the autumn of 1953 with his sister. In the second year Herman’s younger brother Stan joined him from Holland and he often came along for the weekend.

In the winter months, Saturday night was special for Henk and myself. We invited ourselves to the Van Patter living room, where we were warmly accommodated. There would be an ice hockey match followed by some fierce wrestling matches. We, Jerry, Albert, Henk and I, got to know the wrestlers, the good boys and the villains and would passionately cheer and boo the meanest of tricks and blows. That this was mostly theater did not seem evident to our naïve loyalties. Dorothy sat in another corner of the living room, sewing or darning and always treating us to hot chocolate, cookies or cake and some ice cream. We surely were lucky to find the Van Patters.

Also on weekends at the Van Patters (we had no TV) we saw the Ed Sullivan show, a very popular US national weekly. Ed Sullivan introduced new music, could make or break magicians and dancers as well as pop stars. It is on this show we got to know a strange boy with gaudy suits and greasy ducktail who tortured his guitar and moved in continuous gyrations as he sang emotional, for us altogether different songs, ballads, rock- and love songs. His name: Elvis Presley, not much older than I, one who was invited by Ed Sullivan again and again. A star was born before our eyes. Little did we know this lad would become a world star whose name became fame that, over fifty years later, looks like lasting forever.

After only a month or so, I left Zylstra’s garage: I had too little technical experience to be productive. There was plenty of work close to home, because the tobacco harvest was about to start. The growing season for tobacco in Ontario was amazingly brief and by early August harvest time was beginning here and there, then in full swing after another week. Now tobacco does not, fortunately, ripen all at once. The leaves, on the plants that are about 2 m in height, start to turn a faint yellow, first those at the very bottom and then gradually further to the top of the plant. Also the soil differences cause time shifts in the ripening as does field orientation of the slopes, and the weather. So the harvest season is spread over about five weeks for the region, over typically three weeks for any single quality farm. Each farmer puts a team together, of which about eight people work in the field with two additional people handling horse-drawn tobacco sleighs. Another eight or so work at the kilns, bundling the leaves, sliding these on sticks and hanging these in the kilns. Each harvest day a kiln has to be filled.

Which farmer you work for can make quite a difference and the best have their teams together early. What does best mean? Three criteria in combination: daily pay; quality and homogeneity of crops; quality of the mid-day meal and coffee breaks. In 1953 the daily pay varied from $10 to $16; the crop quality depended both on the farmer and on the soil: good quality means you can fill a kiln in a shorter time, because you need cover fewer acres to gather the quantity of leaves a kiln takes; the quality of food and drink varies with the skills and generosity of the farmer’s wife! Given all this, the contrasts could be large, even bitter. I first worked at a Dutchman’s for $11, where it took till nine in the evening, with poor food, before the kiln was full. Then you heard of guys who earned fifteen dollars, were finished at 4.30 in the afternoon and ate the best beef and pies you could imagine. There is no justice!

The first day Henk and I went to pluck tobacco stands out, rather the morning of the second day. The first leaves to ripen are, as I said, the ones at the very bottom, the one that hang on the ground, the sand leaves. Imagine you walk between two rows of tobacco, taller than you and you stoop deeply to inspect the sand leaves, then pluck those deemed ripe (we had been taught the colour criterion). You swing these leaves under your left arm as you move on, till your arm can hold no more. You then straighten yourself out, walk to the horse-drawn deep sleigh and deposit your bundle in the prescribed careful arrangement. You go back to your row, if you can find it, and proceed. You do this on the first day to your untrained body until the desperately longed-for signal comes: kiln full. I drove home in a daze, stripped and showered, then collapsed on the sofa. Early to bed, deep sleep with leaves for dreams, then Mom calling at six in the morning and the attempt to get up. ‘No Mom, I am dying, my back is broken, it is impossible to walk, let alone pick more sand leaves, oh Mom this is hell, wish I were in Wedderveer again’. But we went, we did it again, and again and miraculously our young bodies rose to the challenge and as the ripe leaves were a bit higher by the day, the work became lighter, bearable, even fun. At the end of three weeks we had each earned about $200, paid in cash each week, and proudly handed them to Mom for Stiny to deposit in the bank. Two seasons I did this, the second one with no poor Dutch pioneer but with a Canadian farmer whose land was just right and whose wife could really cook and bake!

After the tobacco harvest I found another job, at St Thomas Metal Signs, where sheet metal was turned into a variety of products, huge roadside billboards for Coca – Cola and 7 UP being the main ones. I began in the spot welding department where we made Coca – Cola cool boxes for picnics and things. My instructor was a fat Hungarian man of undetermined age, with greasy hair, bulging eyes, bulging stomach and a very limited English vocabulary. The second afternoon, as I was getting the hang of spot welding, he sniffed and asked: ‘… somebody here fart!?’ I asked him what the word ‘fart’ meant and he grinned, lifted one leg and let noisily go: ‘that is fart’ he shouted as I turned away in disgust. After a week I was transferred to the 7 UP line, to join a team of three women and one man, our supervisor, called Harold.

For the daily drive to St Thomas I needed the Oldsmobile, which meant on workdays Dad or Stiny (Mom never aspired to a driving license) would have no car to go anywhere. The pay was modest and driving there alone every day expensive. I looked for and found two paying passengers who had jobs with similar working hours in St Thomas. One, a middle-aged Canadian woman called Sandra who lived less than one km from us, the other one a young Dutchman called Chris who lived a couple of km on the other, west, side of highway 73.

Before describing the scenes in the Metal Signs factory, I must pause to dwell on another experience, very dramatic even after so many decades.

On a Monday morning just before seven, the sun under the horizon still, I swung the big Olds left onto the gravel road to pick up Sandra. She was ready, got into the back seat as usual, where she always tried to sleep some more. Back to the gravel road, past Van Patter and up to Chris who lived a few km further along the same concession road, on the other side of the highway. It promised to become a fine morning, the sky was crisp and clear, thin misty veils decorated the fields and covered the road now and then. I drove at the usual good clip and as we passed through the next veil I saw the highway, close and sudden. I slammed the brake, saw a car on my left, heard/felt a bang, then silence … for interminable seconds. I shook my head and opened the door, got out, shaking like a leaf. The Olds was steaming, the very front section smashed, the front left tire empty, the wheel oddly bent. Inexplicably the car was standing across the highway and pointing east in the direction where I had come from.

I saw a car a hundred meters or more in the Aylmer direction, in the wide dry ditch across the highway. I walked over, saw two women sitting there, dazed. The one on the passenger side had a boil on her forehead where she hit the dashboard of the big green Ford Mercury, the right front of which was badly damaged. I opened her door, both got out and stood there, shaking. I asked if they were al right, they said they were, I mumbled apologies, how a veil of mist had hidden the highway. They nodded. I walked back to the Olds, now surrounded by several people who had stopped to look. I peered in the back and here was the lady still huddled in the back seat. I opened the door, ‘Sandra are you ok?’ ‘No I’m not ok I’m shakin’ and scared’. She got out and leaned on the car, crying, but she was uninjured, as was I and the Ford driver. The bump on her passenger’s forehead was the only bodily sign of injury. The police came, the Olds was pushed to the side by several men, many questions and forms to fill in and sign. Finally the police cruiser drove both Sandra and myself to our homes.

Mom embraced me when I said, crying, that I had an accident. ‘I heard a loud bang when I was at the clothesline’ she said ‘and I prayed “Lord, let that not be Harry”‘. The car was hauled to Zylstra’s garage and repaired surprisingly quickly. Too bad for the money, we only had third party liability insurance. From the police I did not even get a fine: they had seen the veils too.

Only much much later did I realize how close to fatal this accident had been. The woman driving the big Ford had seen me as I slid to a stop onto the highway halfway into her lane. She instantly swerved left to avoid me and so, instead of smashing into the Olds broadside, she hit the front wheel just in front of the axle. The wheel turned to give way, the very front of the car body, front bumper and underlying structure, crumpled, the Olds lifted and turned around its vertical by over 180 degrees, the Ford Mercury ricocheted to the left and ended in the ditch across the road. Had the full momentum of the big Ford met the total inertia of the heavy Olds, the collision would have caused a huge acceleration spike that would have smashed both my head and Sandra’s through the left windows. Thus shortly after my seventeenth birthday my life very nearly ended catastrophically. Just one wheel radius made the difference between a big scare and total disaster. We are a blessed family, even now, fifty-six years later, no one in our extended family, after driving and flying millions of km, has fatally come to grief.

Now back to my job. We worked from eight am to five pm, using punch cards to confirm entry and exit. Our work consisted of handling large thin sheets of steel, about 120 x 240 cm, in a nine-step process. First we would run each sheet through an acetone bath to degrease it. Two people would then lift the sheet onto a conveyor belt which ran through a blow dryer. Two others would pile the sheets onto a cart and place that in a row. When all available carts were filled, we would go to another line where the sheets were immersed one at a time in a bath of light grey primer, came out from between two rubber rollers, were picked up by two people who skillfully slid the wet sheet into an empty space in a rack on small wheels, the rack consisting of about forty layers of rods, each like the grid in an oven. The racks were about two meters high and the sheets fit them exactly. The skill consisted of taking two corners of the sheet between thumb and index finger, smoothly and synchronously moving them fast enough to prevent sagging in the middle and sliding them in, with only the short sides touching the cart’s rods. You started overhead at the top and worked your way to the bottom. Gymnastics all day! If a sheet was damaged it was marked and removed when the rack was full. The rack was then wheeled into a long push-through oven to bake.

The sheets were sharp, especially the pointed corners, but the movement too delicate to manage while wearing gloves. So we taped and re-taped the relevant fingers. The dry primed sheets were taken to the paint-line next, where printing rolls with the appropriate patterns, one colour at a time, applied the billboard message and logos. Again each run required a faultless handling of the sheet and a mistake at the final run was very expensive: the whole sheet had to be cleaned with paint remover. I expressly dwell on this process because so often we take the multitude of products we use daily, for granted, forgetting that they are made by teams of working people, anonymously and for a modest wage, but with skills and dedication. I look back at this period with pleasure and pride.

While the three women and I handled the sheets, Harold looked after the whole process, filling the machines with paints, applying and changing the paint rolls, and leading the meticulous machine cleaning at the end of the working day. Harold was a modest and friendly man. If the weather was at all good he would take his one hour lunch break outside, at the back of the factory where the Canadian Pacific rails ran alongside the building. I joined Harold because I could not stand the atmosphere in the canteen and could not afford to go to the deli around the corner where the three women had lunch. So there we were, each with our lunch pail and talking. Harold took a serious interest in me and in my hopes for a university training. To my delight he brought a copy of a recent Readers Digest, a magazine I had never heard of, and suggested I try and read it. Well, I found the range of subjects fascinating but was dismayed by the huge fraction of words I did not know. Harold then said: ‘take it home, underline each word you do not know and then we will talk about them’. Eagerly I agreed and the next working day there it was, a magazine full of words underlined in red. Harold laughed and we proceeded to go though the first article. Lunch was too short.

That whole beautiful autumn we went on and on with English vocabulary and steadily the red per page became less. Harold was delighted and then brought copies of TIME magazine. Again a new world opened for me and one that intrigued me no end. Politics, national, American and world- interested me intensely and Harold and I started to talk about contents. I have never had a teacher more patient and kind. Much later I realized Harold was probably gay but at the time I had never heard of, let alone thought about sexual orientation. He never made a pass at me.

There was a family event in the late autumn of 1953 that was eagerly anticipated: oom Albert and tante Tine had decided to emigrate with their three children to Canada, more specifically to us! Their third child, the first and only one of their marriage, was born in the NOP a year earlier. The boy was named Henk Beekhuis after his paternal grandfather. The prospect of having this young family near us was, especially for Mom, a very joyful one. The day they arrived three of us drove in Olds and Mercury to London’s Canadian National station to meet their train from Toronto. We waited and waited, saw streams of passengers leave each train from Toronto but no Beekhuis family. Very frustrating! It finally occurred to one of us that Canada had two national railways and that perhaps they had traveled with Canadian Pacific instead of Canadian National. We drove to the much smaller CP station on Richmond Street and sure enough, there was the distraught family that had waited as long as we had. No one had yet dreamed of mobile phones.

The Beekhuis family settled in the town of Belmont, north of Aylmer, where oom Albert had just the same role at a dairy farm that Dad had at Van Patter’s. With our experience to spare them the awkward ignorance of the early months, they rapidly settled in the job, the house and the church community. They and their offspring have been close family ever since.

There came an order from the 7 UP company too big for our team to handle, so the management decided to start a second shift for our department and, surprise, surprise, asked me to lead it as Harold led the dayshift. We talked about the request at home of course and I proposed to the big boss that, as several people needed to be hired, he appoint brother Henk because then we could afford to buy a car and no longer deprive our parents of their car each working day. We haggled a bit about wages and then they agreed. Henk quit his farm job, we bought an excellent second hand dark blue, eight-cylinder Mercury pickup truck and we were in business. Henk was fifteen going on sixteen, I was seventeen and here we were, working from 5 pm to 2 am, driving our pickup in the depth of Ontario winter. One night as we drove home, we just could not get up the icy slope of the deepest gully in highway 3 between St Thomas and Aylmer. Only after we backed up a long way and took a run for it did we manage. We put several bags of sand over the rear axle after that, for better traction and left them there the whole winter. The Mercury was mostly my vehicle, it could seat three abreast and I had a knob on the steering wheel, which I used to spin the truck on icy gravel roads. I ended up in a ditch a few times, but never turned it over. Our parents had no idea of the games I played or the risks I took. To have my own truck at that age, and a powerful eight cylinder one at that, was a delight for me, made me feel free.

Some time in spring of 1954 the order portfolio at the Metal Signs factory became smaller and smaller and our shift was phased out. Henk lost his job and went back to a farm job in Aylmer; I was consigned to a variety of tasks about the place. This gave me little satisfaction and I soon decided to end my employment there as well. I thanked Harold most warmly for all I had learned from him. I gave him an illustrated book about Holland to remember the boy with the growing vocabulary.

I had in the meantime discovered an English high school teacher in Aylmer who heard me out and tested me, then suggested I subscribe to some correspondence courses with the Ontario Department of Education. With his help I enrolled in mathematics, chemistry and English literature and composition. The math and the chemistry I did not only for their substance, but also to learn English terminology in those subjects.

Soon the stream of big yellow envelopes, with stamped return envelopes included, came up to speed. While I was working at odd jobs, cutting down trees with a chain saw, sawing firewood, cultivating tobacco fields with one horse, hoeing tobacco (again), collecting peaches at fruit farms, I was studying, making math assignments, writing essays, reading and analyzing literary books. All this drastically reduced my free time, but I was determined to get my Ontario senior matriculation, condition for entering university, in the school year 1955-56, after our two-year commitment to contribute to the common savings account would be completed. The book I remember best for all the hard work is R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, a complex novel about an era full of treachery and formal English rituals where only at the very end justice triumphs and love can flourish. To me this strangely different world was fascinating and repulsive at once. I learned to write and earned an A.

While all these things unfolded, there was a steady exchange of letters between Aylmer and Holland. Mom wrote to her mother, our opu, regularly and also to her siblings occasionally. Those days one could not simply multiply a letter and send it to several addresses, but we heard that those letters were shared, read during visits and talked about at family gatherings. As for me, I wrote and received one airmail letter per week on average as I corresponded with my girlfriend Eika. These letters were very important to both of us. We were learning to communicate in this, for each of us very novel, way and in the course of two years it changed our bond to a more mature relationship. We were both determined for her to come to Canada, although the timing was uncertain. Neither of us had any kissing relation with anyone else in this period.

In the late spring and summer of ’54 I worked for a Belgian tobacco farmer, from planting up to harvest time. The fields were stretched along highway 73 somewhere south of us towards Port Bruce on the shore of Lake Erie. It was not a big farm and there were no other employees, so the work was a bit lonely. The boss did the tractor work, I did manual work or harrowing and cultivating with a single horse. I burned badly on nose, ears and forearms those days in Southern Ontario fields, a region where naturally only red skinned people belong … While working near the highway till early evening and on Saturdays, I saw young people from Aylmer go to the beach in convertibles or in luxury cars, shouting and singing, having a great time. It depressed me now and then to be toiling in the heat of Ontario summer days, dusty and sticky, for a very small wage while my peers were out there together enjoying their freedom and relative wealth, as though life were a party. I would soon be eighteen and needed yet another year before I could go back to high school. I had neither the time nor any schoolmates to go to the beach with. Now and then I felt sorry for myself, it was tough to be an immigrant kid.

The Northern shore region of Lake Erie is notorious for its unstable summer weather. Hot and humid, thunderstorms are frequent. The tobacco plant with its large and tender leaves is vulnerable to thunderstorms but even more to hail, a common if brief feature of some such storms. The well-to-do, established tobacco farmers took out hail insurance as a matter of course. But the immigrant farmers, short of cash, with land that was less good or marginal, they agonized over insurance at the dinner table and probably in bed. The premiums were high, amounted to one third the gross value of a mediocre crop. So if you took out hail insurance, the chance for a really profitable margin was gone no matter what. My farmer thought out loud about the possibilities: no insurance, no hail, ample cash to pay off debts; no insurance, a hail storm, big loss, more debts, threat of insolvency; insurance, no hail, modest profit, regrets over the big premiums ‘wasted’; insurance, hail, no income, no loss. It was a hard choice, it depended on the willingness to take a big risk or not, and on the wife’s perceptions and her strength to persuade her husband.

My farmer decided to take the big risk. It affected the mood each day. The weather forecast was on the radio all the time, gathering clouds were anxiously studied, prayers were said when it looked threatening, thanks were given when a hailstorm passed several miles away (the arbitrariness of heaven’s choice was not questioned …). But one late Friday afternoon in July I fled under the barn’s roof extension as the thunderclaps became loud and near, the lightning bolts seemed aimed at us. My boss trembled as big raindrops fell and turned into a downpour. It was sudden but brief. Black clouds remained but the rain stopped. As we peered to that dark sky and looked at the dripping, sagging tobacco leaves nearest to us, we knew they were ok, would dry and rise. Then it happened, a deafening ruffle on the barn’s corrugated roof, hailstones like marbles rolling on the ground before us, hailstones ripping through our fields, tearing tender leaves, stripping the top of the plants to show a bare stalk. I shuddered, my boss swore, shouted in agony, then sobbed like a child. He gambled and lost. It lasted but a minute but the damage from where we stood was total. There was nothing I could do to console him, I mumbled about maybe the south field is ok, got into my pickup truck and drove home, very sad. I never got that week’s wages and did not have the heart to go and ask for it.

I had much earlier found a good tobacco farm for the harvest work and went through the whole sand leaf agony and the ever improving conditions a second and final time We always finished before five and in the evening there was even time and energy for other things, go with John Arnold in his truck to collect firewood or go to Young People’s night at church. That autumn I more consciously enjoyed the vivid colours of the woods in the valleys, colours not known to us from the Low Lands. The weather in early October was fabulous, I had a job harvesting seeds in a happy team where we sang along with country music on the radio at lunchtime in the field. Mom had bought me a flannel shirt I was so fond of, I asked her to wash it as soon as I got home, so it would be dry next morning. John Arnold asked me to help evenings on his truck, collecting fruit, mostly peaches, that had been picked that day and went to market the next. I saw every gravel road and dirt track in the area, was amazed about the lonesome and primitive conditions many people there endured.