Country /province /region /town /hamlet /farmhouse

In 1945 The Netherlands was a maligned country, reeling from five years of enemy occupation and a final brutal season known as the hunger winter. Infrastructure was largely neglected or destroyed, the economy was in tatters, poverty was widespread. Elation swept across the country from south to north, March to May, following liberating troops from Canada, Britain, Poland and the USA. But there was fear for the future, uncertainty about work and the possibility of earning a living, confusion about the stability of post-war Europe, apprehension about the Russians and their intentions.

The urban areas in the west and center of the country, around Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht were of course the worst off. We lived in the North-East, in the province of Groningen, a largely agricultural province that had remained more or less intact. There was plenty of farm produce from the fertile fields and gardens, the majority of people had always been of modest means and the liberty regained spurred entrepreneurial spirits to repair, to expand, to trade and to create a future for their families and communities.

Our parents had moved in 1935 or ’36 from Dad’s small parental farm in a hamlet called Renneborg (also the name of their farm where first child Stiny was born the last day of 1934), a few kilometers from the town of Vlagtwedde in the heart of the county of Westerwolde, to a rented farm near the town of Blyham in a hamlet of seven or eight houses and small farms called the Bouwte, two kilometers from the town. Although the move amounted to only twenty kilometers within Westerwolde, the environment was very new and different, with the small city of Winschoten only five km away as focus for shopping, trading and church life.

Our region, with Winschoten as principal town, bordered on Germany’s Niedersachsen with towns like Meppen and Oldenburg. Occasionally, after 1945, we would go there with Dad to buy tools or materials. We spoke our dialect and they spoke theirs and there was enough affinity to communicate.

Winschoten served two counties, Oldambt and Westerwolde. In my academic high school or grammar school the kids came from these two regions and they were quite distinct. The dialects spoken were noticeably different and so were the mores. Westerwolde, where we lived, was historically poorer because its soil was mostly a sandy loam, ok for potatoes and oats, but not very fertile, in need of expensive fertilizers for good crops. Oldambt soil on the other hand was a rich and heavy clay and traditionally the farms there were larger and wealthier than those in Westerwolde. They yielded enormous cash crops of wheat and sugar beets, lucrative products which enabled their owners to have whole crews of hired hands and to live in palatial houses, joined to huge barns with enormous grain lofts. This economic contrast had social consequences.

The Oldambt farmers’ kids were more confident, not to say arrogant, than the kids from Westerwolde. There were virtually no pupils from the Oldambt farm workers families in our school: grammar school was not an ambition found appropriate for their class… Only children from farmers’ and a few professional families such as the doctor, the notary and the mayor were considered worthy, although not always smart enough. From Westerwolde there was a greater variety, small farmers sent kids like me, but also shopkeepers, cattle- and grain traders and the like sent their children there if their elementary school performance revealed evident academic aptitude. So interesting contrasts appeared: Oldambt was more sophisticated and assertive, but there was less merit-selection than in Westerwolde, so the best in the class were more often than not from our neck of the woods. This was my first exposure to social geography, although I was quite unaware of the concept at the time.

The hamlet called the Bouwte had no real access road, but only two parallel earthen lanes separated by a set of fields, stretching toward the asphalted road from Blyham to Winschoten. When it was wet, which it often was, these lanes became mud tracks alongside a deep ditch, difficult to navigate with two horses and a loaded wagon, let alone with heavy machinery such as the thrasher and baler that came once a year.

Nearly perpendicular to these tracks or lanes there was a foot-and bicycle path crossing the fields straight into the centre of Blyham, ending at a public school, bakeries and other shops, blacksmith workshops, a sawmill and the small town hall. This path crossed the ditches that bordered all fields by means of cement slabs only about 30 cm wide. One needed a steady hand to bike across them, especially rough in hard crosswinds on our baker who delivered bread from a huge basket mounted on his utility bike’s front. That is the path we used to run to school every day from the age of six. Our school, the (protestant) school known as school-with-the-bible, was less than two km along the asphalt road towards Wedde, the next town comparable in size to Blyham.

Our hamlet had one little food store, run by Mrs. Waike, where all staples such as several kinds of sugar, salt, flour, beans and grains, peas and grits, were served with scoops from open barrels. We could run there in one minute and always got a sweet, whatever the purchase. We never paid, it was written on a ledger and our Mom took care of that periodically we presumed. The other houses were occupied by tenant farmers or people who worked in town or were retired. Our parents maintained some distance because it so happened that none of those six families were members of our church. Therefore there could be neighbourly contact, but no visiting from our home into theirs and vice versa: such were the unwritten rules for social interaction then and there. If you could not speak of mutual spiritual interests, could not discuss last Sunday’s sermon or the call for a new minister of the Word, you could not be close friends. Our parents had their social contacts among fellow believers in Blyham and Winschoten … And this pattern apparently was equally true for the social life of Catholics, agnostics -liberals and socialists-, a situation that persisted through much of the country until the late 1960s, when these pillars broke down under the impact of new media, mobility and shared education, a lot of common ground.

Our house in the Bouwte, where I was born as were brothers Henk and Co in respectively 1936, 1938 and 1942, was large but unadorned. Its ground floor was about one meter above ground, that means it had an unfinished low basement or crawl space, a stoop to the front door (in fact a side door) that entered a very long hallway stretching from one side of the house to the other. On that hallway on the left there were two doors accessing two large rooms, first the living room and then the ‘front room’. The latter was very formally furnished and used only on special occasions, for important visitors and in the summers also on Sundays. Although it had a stove, it was normally unheated in the winter. It had closets and two closet-like bedsteads, unused except for occasional overnight visitors. The other end of the hallway had a door leading to the outside again, to a brick laundry shack that had a big wood-stoked pot for boiling water, a brick terrace and a large garden with fruit trees, particularly a huge walnut tree with a horizontal branch for a very long and exciting swing.

The living room was spacious, square with high ceiling and two tall windows each on two sides, which had wooden shutters on the inside, to keep out the cold I suppose. It was furnished with a large dining table surrounded by straight chairs and a few easy chairs around the tall pot stove, stoked with wood, turf (a dried block of peat) and coal. That stove stood towards the middle of the room with a pipe that was first horizontal, then bent upwards and through the ceiling. We children always played under the horizontal pipe, where adults could not walk and where we could leave our toys. The wall between the living- and the upper room was in fact several meters thick, because there were bedsteads in both rooms. In the first bedstead on the right as you entered, the children would spend their time when ill, because that was more pleasant than our boys’ bedroom which was bare, off the kitchen under the sloping roof of the barn.

The hallway, probably fifteen meters or so long, was a pretty cold place in the winter but we played a lot there nevertheless. It had lots of room, had a type of linoleum floor cover which made it nice and slippery for running and for racing our toys on wheels as well as for rolling our marbles. The only light came from small windows in both end doors and, when open, from the kitchen and living room doors. The kitchen was behind the first door on the right in the hallway across from the living room door, but could also be entered from the cattle stables adjacent to it. It was in fact a square space walled off in the barn with one window through which you looked along the gable of the main house. In addition to the doors to hallway and barn, it had a low door to a bedroom with a sloped roof and one tiny window which was where Henk and I slept.

Our bed was a piece of carpentry jammed between kitchen- and outside wall on the stables’ side. The mattress was a huge bag filled with oats straw, which we shook often to redistribute the contents for our comfort. The straw was renewed every once in a while. The blankets were heavy wool. There was a chair and a small closet plus a white pisspot with handle under the bed. Reason for that was that the ‘toilet’ was at the other end of the stables and to go there at night was hazardous, as there was no electricity most of the war. Henk or I were supposed to empty the pot into the toilet in the morning, but boys will be boys and avoid such chores. Our neighbour wife Mrs. Kuper reported to our Mom that from her kitchen window she regularly saw a pot emerging and being tipped from the small bedroom window early mornings. A scolding followed, we would dutifully do our chore a few days, then resume the easier habit.

The kitchen had a large cooking stove, heated with turf, wood and coal, on which Mom boiled water and miraculously cooked meals. There was a granite sink and counter under the window. The rest of the space was occupied by a large wooden table and about ten chairs. The floor was tiled in a diagonal pattern. Cutlery and the like was in a cupboard on the wall of the barn side.

Under the sloping roof behind the kitchen, for the full length of the barn and about one third of its width were a dozen cow stalls, the stalls for three horses and pens for calves and pigs, with the ‘toilet’ at the very end, where the door to the backyard was. There were two internal doors to the main barn space, which had three large lofts for storing grain and hay as well as the side space for wagons, machinery and in the rear corner a workbench. At the rear there was the huge double door that enabled hay- and grain-filled wagons to enter. In the front the most conspicuous object was a wooden stairway that led to the attic above hallway and main rooms.

The farmyard was ample and bordered on the rear by a wide water-filled ditch. In one direction you could go onto the lanes towards the Winschoten-Blyham road, in the other you went to the fields of our farm. On the side of the house there was a vegetable garden enclosed by a thick high hedge and an orchard where our swing was. It was bordered on two sides by ditches where we got to know all manner of flora and fauna and an occasional dunking because we bent over too far or played too wildly.

It was a fine place for boys to grow up, especially during the war, which seemed far away and did not harm children who had plenty of space, plenty to eat, and plenty of loving care.