Searching for a farm, searching for a future

If we were without a care, our parents were not. Seven years go by quickly when you have no prospects at their end. From 1950 onwards our next farm became the most frequent topic of dinner table conversation.

It seemed that for Dad farming was very rewarding those days, milk, grain, straw and beets were all at a good price and there was money saved every year. The quarterly rent of our farm, some 55 hectares, was modest, in part due to the special circumstances of an authority renting out farms while their owners were incarcerated. Mind you, we lived sober lives, we never went on holiday, had no luxuries at home, no refrigerator, no television, no car till 1951, no running water but instead a hand pump to a rainwater reservoir. But Dad had three sons and he thought we needed a good farm so the boys could become farmers in due course.

Now in the early fifties the mood in Western Europe was somber, the Communists seemed aggressive, were all the time testing atomic bombs, their mushroom clouds throwing long long shadows. The economies were not flourishing and people’s expectations were depressed. The notion of a European Community was only vaguely aspired to, we were still many years from the Treaty of Rome. During the liberation, America, Canada, Australia had become beacons of freedom and opportunity. So simple but enterprising people in several countries started to think of emigrating to one of these countries. Around 1948 it began with a trickle that by 1952 was a flood. Recent emigrants sent back enthusiastic stories about jobs, more space, plenty of farmland, less bureaucracy, warm summers. They sent pictures of their huge cars and pickup trucks, their clapboard homes, their wooden churches. Of course they did not in their letters complain about the heat and the cold, the mosquitoes and black flies, the poison ivy and the lack of social security, the howling snowstorms and the crop failures, the loneliness and the experience of being at the bottom of the social ladder. That was something each immigrant had to experience for her- or himself and most did …

In 1950 we had no intention to emigrate, we wanted a good farm in The Netherlands. Searching seriously, our parents soon found out that farms had become very expensive: in the face of uncertainty, people were fleeing into real estate and farmland. The hectare price far exceeded the economic value as measured by the annual yield. One had to go deeply into debt to buy fifty hectares plus house and barns. Our parents had a strong aversion to debt, even to a justifiable mortgage. After looking at many a place for sale all over the Northern provinces, they decided such debts would be an insupportable burden. What then?

A major project of land reclamation from the IJsselmeer (the former Zuiderzee which became a fresh water lake after the dike from Noord Holland to Friesland was completed in 1932, a project to which the Leiden physicist and Nobel laureate H.A. Lorentz made important contributions) had started in the mid-thirties but was stopped by the war. In late 1945 the work picked up again apace and oom Albert worked there on what was called the Noord-Oost Polder, a new farming region on the central east side of the Lake, some 46 000 ha in size. A systematic pattern of roads, towns and farms was laid out (at the end of 2008 some 46 000 people live there!) and the government had made a set of rules for first renting out, then selling these farms, which were typically 50 hectares of choice arable land with brand new houses and barns on them, meant largely for cash crops. More than 500 farms were to become available over a period of several years. Mom and Dad had been to one or two information evenings and were enthusiastic. Dad applied.

I remember looking at a map and thinking: great, good for our parents and good for all of us. It was closer to the metropolitan areas of our country and at fourteen I was thinking I would become an engineer to be trained at the technical university of Delft. That would be less than two hours by public transport. It was 1951, Stiny graduated from high school that year and found employment in the office of a liquor wholesale store owned by friends in Blyham, Henk was in an agricultural school, Co was in elementary school in Blyham, Rika was at home still till the end of that year and I was in the academic high school in Winschoten. How would Dad’s application fare? We waited in eager and later very stressful anticipation.

In 1951, we were just used to operate and service the Diesel tractor, Dad bought a car, a two door Skoda of modest size and even more modest horsepower. Dad got his driver’s license and we began to go to church by car, one child on Mom’s lap, four of us piled onto the back seat. No one ever heard of seatbelts … I took the car under my wings, consulting older, knowledgeable friends for the upkeep of sparkplugs, cleaning the carburetor and checking oil levels in engine and gearbox. I also drove it up and down the farm lane going back from our house about a kilometer. After about a year I had the idea that the Skoda’s pep was lessening and I asked Dad if I could give the engine a valve job. Well, Dad was not sure but relented when I persisted, after all I had done a course on combustion engines … So during a spring holiday week in 1952 I spread an old sheet on the barn floor and started to disassemble things. First all the tubing, then the hard part, loosening the bolts of the engine head. On the second day I had a whole array of parts neatly laid out on the sheets and could start the grinding of the valves. Friends came to watch and comment, not without skepticism or downright sarcasm. What course, what theory, and practice? None yet, but you have to start some time! With some help of my girlfriend’s brothers, after buying a new head seal, I put it all together again, – not a bolt or nut left over – filled the crankcase with fresh oil, the radiator with water and took the car for a spin. It left a trail of light blue smoke but seemed to me more responsive to the accelerator. On Sunday we drove to the service in Winschoten as usual and to my relief I noticed the smoke plume was thinning out. I hesitated then whether I wanted to be a car mechanic or an engineer.

At school things went well for me, I only once had a less than satisfactory mark, for geography, on a report card, but was routinely among the top three of the class. Especially in math there was a palpable rivalry with another farm boy for each test. The math teacher, dr Trijssenaar, engaged me as an assistant to help pupils who could not keep up. Everything we learned was interesting and casual cameraderie marked my class of ten girls and twenty boys. My best schoolfriend Dirk ter Arkel lived in Bellingwolde near the border and we regularly spent free time at each other’s places. His parents had a clothing shop, his home life was therefore very different and to me not very exciting. Our farm and our village gave far more scope for adventures.

Not all adventures were positive. One day, she must have been about five, Rika went into a spasm, turned blue and seemed a goner. We had no phone, so I jumped on my bike and raced to Blyham at breakneck speed to fetch doctor Otten. The doctor had a car, a two cycle DKW that poured smoke as he instantly sped the three km to our house. When I got back Rika was conscious again while the doctor examined her. I never found out the cause of this alarming event, it did not recur as far as I know.

Another mishap I recall was Henk, about ten years old, being rolled over by the heavy horse drawn double steel roller we used to compact the fields after they had been ploughed, harrowed and seeded. Henk was on the iron seat mounted on the frame of the rollers and I imagine his legs were too short to firmly plant his feet onto the supports. This meant nothing to stabilize yourself when there was a bump and probably he went too fast, bumped, fell forward and under the rollers. I was not there, but Dad found Henk unconscious, although without external wounds. He breathed with difficulty and nowadays an X-ray and possibly a body scan would be taken. But those days, the doctor and all of us could only hope and pray. Henk recovered fairly quickly and completely; presumably young bones are elastic, young bodies resilient. But what a scare!

In the spring of ’52 Dad was called for an interview before an allocation board in Zwolle. He went by car and I was afraid for his safety, because his driving style I found very nonchalant and imprecise. But he came home without a scratch and seemed optimistic. He found out that the selection took into account quotas for religions (protestant or catholic), age groups and regional origin. The government wanted the NOP to be a fair reflection of the whole country, it seemed. He was also questioned on farming experience and bookkeeping competence and Dad thought he did well on that. About three weeks later there was a letter in the mail. Dad had fully qualified, was considered an excellent candidate for the privilege of having such a fertile new farm provided by public means. But alas, Dad was too old. Born in 1900, he was over fifty and the authority in its wisdom, given the overwhelming interest of good candidates, had now decided that only people born after 1902 would be eligible for allocation. The rules were changed during the game, Dad cried with angry frustration and we all joined him. Formal appeals were denied, a dream evaporated, we were back on square one. Even today, when I drive through those fantastically fertile fields and see the neat farmhouses with still modern barns, I relive the anger and feel the sadness for Dad. What to do now?