Mom and Dad involved us older children in the deliberations about the future. We agreed that if we were to emigrate, it would not be Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or Brazil; the first two too far from Europe, the latter too different from us. The USA seemed too populous, too mighty and rich for us, so we settled soon that, if at all, we would emigrate to Canada. Canadians had liberated us, our royal family had enjoyed the warm and well publicized hospitality of Canada during the war, every one liked Canada and a hundred thousand or more had gone there from Holland and sent back positive reports since 1947.

Dad was 51, Mom four years and a month younger, not exactly ideal ages for uprooting yourself and starting life all over in another country with another language and another culture. Especially Dad saw huge difficulties for his life as a farmer and as a citizen, kept mustering arguments against this leap into the unknown. But no alternative became credible and slowly but surely Mom’s quiet resolve and the loud enthusiasm of us children made the choice for going to Canada seem the only feasible way ahead.

Our parents went to information meetings where both Dutch and Canadian government were represented. We focused our attention on the province of Ontario, specifically far south, great lakes, a lot of Dutch immigrants from previous waves in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century. There was an organization of fieldmen in Ontario to prepare for first employment and lodging. One could register for that and know beforehand which region would be the destination. During the winter Mom and Dad went to an introductory English course. Stiny and I looked at their text- and workbook. ‘Simple stuff, we can help, had all that in school’. Very first example where we were superior to our parents. Only later did I realize that this was painful from the beginning.

The decision to emigrate to Canada was not a discrete one, did not really take place at a specific space-time point. It took itself more or less, like a route in the undergrowth of a forest, lacking better alternatives, avoiding new obstacles, seeing openings and even an occasional perspective. By late summer 1952 we said to others: ‘We are going to Canada’, just to test reactions. These reactions varied from ‘Wow, wish I were’ via indifference to ‘Rather you than I!’ The decision then hardened in a matter of weeks, became a resolve as Dad’s resistance crumbled and he began inquiring about farms in Southern Ontario, because the official emigration information agency had indicated that this would be the best region for us, given Dad’s experience and ambitions. These ambitions really boiled down to ‘a good family farm to begin with and then, as the boys become young adults, a farm for each of them’.

We started looking at maps, were astounded by the immensity of Ontario, one province, larger than all of Western Europe and with this pointed shape, far south at the latitude of Rome and New York City, between lakes Georgian Bay, Huron, Erie and Ontario, called Southern Ontario. ‘Mom, Dad, when are we leaving?’ Of course there are rhythms to farm life and to school life. Early summer seemed a good time: the crops would be on the fields, well developed for assessment but before any harvest; they would have to be sold to the next occupant of the farm to harvest. Schools would have finished the year’s curriculum though perhaps not the final tests. Is there an emigrant ship in early June? It seemed there was one in the planning and via the emigration bureau we registered, an act that had a scary finality to it. I think each of us had some second thoughts.

In the early fifties, to emigrate to Canada involved a strict admissions procedure directed from the Canadian Embassy in The Hague. Our parents were informed about this at one of the information events of the emigration bureau, taking home a sheaf of forms to fill in. The most memorable part was a whole family visit to the embassy for interviews and medical checkups. I recall two unusual things of the day:

 Stiny and I were in a waiting room with many others and saw a working man in his forties pace the room impatiently. Then to our disgust we saw him take out his upper dentures, lick them ‘clean’ and put them in again. Stiny looked at me with a mixture of revulsion and mischief as she spoke a phrase which one often read in newspapers those days about the wave of emigrants: ‘De besten gaan weg!’ which means ‘The best are the ones to go!’ We thought the man had just disqualified himself from leaving …

 When Dad emerged from the doctor’s office after his medical, he had an ambiguous smirk on his face. He told us the doctor thought Dad’s lower back showed skeletal deformations indicating chronic pain. But Dad told him honestly that he had no back pain and was working on the farm day after day. The doctor was amazed but believed him, giving the green light.

Most formalities out of the way by the end of February 1953, each of us had to prepare for our personal uprooting. For Mom this was first and foremost leaving her seven siblings (she was the second eldest) and their families as well as her aged mother behind. In 1953 there was as yet no founded expectation of periodic return visits to ‘the old country’; departing meant pretty much: farewell, God bless, hope to meet again in Paradise. With only three months to go, this reality hit Mom very hard, she had warm relations with her sibling families and was close to her widowed mother. From then on she biked each week to spend a day with her Mom, our opu Beekhuis in Vlagtwedde, some 10 km away.

For Dad that aspect was different; his parents had already died, in fact his father died in 1914, of pneumonia. That traumatic event changed Dad’s life, he had to leave the agricultural secondary school immediately, to work on the family farm. He did that till he was married nearly twenty years later and then lived there still his first year of married life, including Stiny’s birth on 31 December 1934. Soon thereafter his siblings, four sisters and one brother, insisted they needed their fraction of the inheritance and forced the sale of Renneborg, the family farm Dad had worked on for them all, and for no wage, those many years. This family action was for Dad the most hurtful experience of his life, one he never fully put behind him. It was Mom’s mediation that restored family relations to some degree, but they were never as warm as among Mom’s siblings. So leaving for Canada in this respect was easier for Dad.

Other things were not easier for him. He was a member of the church consistory, just then working hard to get a new church building in Blyham, so people there need not travel to Winschoten each Sunday (consistory saw to it that most every adult member of the congregation went to church twice …). He was a member of the school board, a member of the council of the regional Christian Farmers Union, active in several commercial bodies, dealing with grain- and with straw sales. I do not know whether Dad thought this through explicitly, but he was a prominent member of local and regional civil society, a prominence no emigrant his age could ever hope to regain.

Stiny was probably our most enthusiastic emigrant-in-spé. She loved adventures, knew her English from four years in high school and was bored already with her job in Blyham. A complication in her life that year was a new and now very serious love relation. She and a young man called Herman de Jong from Winschoten, just finishing his teacher training, fell for each other and in a very short time the love was deep and public. Luckily for Stiny, Herman was himself already entertaining thoughts of emigrating to Ontario, to follow his eldest sister and her family who had settled in Port Dalhousie, near Niagara Falls the year before. Stiny’s plan and Herman’s thus dovetailed perfectly and the only question was who would go first and where would we live with respect to the Niagara Peninsula. Stiny did have many friends but she spoke lightly about leaving and keeping in touch by letters and, eventually, visits back and forth?! My impression was that Stiny of all of us was the first ready to leave.

Henk had just turned fifteen, had no particular attachments other than his local friends. I do not remember whether anyone paid much attention to his worries or to his willingness at the time … Co and Rika were eleven and seven years old at the time and I am unaware of their feelings about the continental drift we were in by spring ’53. In retrospect I confess to a bland insensitivity to their needs, hopes and fears. I just hope our parents were more caringly aware!

As for myself, I was tremendously excited by this awesome prospect of moving to another continent. With Stiny I speculated about what lay ahead and was full of unfounded optimism. Of course, I would miss my friends and especially my girlfriend Eika. Our relation had off and on existed since we were both four years old and met at a church Christmas party. We were in the same class of elementary school for six years and her brothers, all seven of them, were my friends, especially the three eldest. At high school (Eika had gone to a home- keepers training school elsewhere) I felt strongly attracted to three other girls in the course of four years, but in the end I always returned to Eika who lived just these 500m away and whose life and family I was so familiar with.

We cried together as we kissed when the big decision was more or less irreversible and promised lots of letters and a reunion when she would be over eighteen and follow us. When finally convinced of our earnestness, my parents spoke with Eika’s widowed mother. They agreed that if during the next three years our relationship would hold, the possibility of Eika’s departure to Canada was not excluded. To me it was clear the adults did not believe for a moment it would come to this. But to me it made our departure bearable.

The last two months went by in a rush. On the farm, cattle was sold first, then, when all crops were in the ground, rye and oats, wheat and barley, potatoes and beets, preparations were made for a big auction at the end of May. The tractor, the horses, the harvester, all kinds of smaller farm implements and tools, they would all be on the auctioneer’s block. In addition some furniture, some bicycles but not my Locomotief. I am sure our parents had a lot of administrative matters, taxes, banking and municipal registrations, passports, etc. to tend to, but we kids were largely free of such worries.

Dad sold the Skoda and bought a 1949 Oldsmobile, six cylinders, a big black sedan. It was to be shipped to Canada so we would not need money for a car right away. In retrospect this was probably an outrageously expensive decision, but normal economics were distorted by regulations: there was no free currency transfer those days, we could take only two or three thousand dollars out of the country and smuggle a few hundreds more. This restriction was lifted less than two years later. Had this been done before our departure, I think we would have brought neither a car nor much of the furniture that was packed into a huge container-like wooden crate. That would have saved piles of money and weeks of work.

We made a round of one day family visits. The one to our Grandma -we called her Opu in our dialect- in her neat little house with the pointed roof built for her just before grandpa Beekhuis died early in 1937, was especially moving. Her kitchen forever smelled of the little petroleum stove she used for one course meals; she had a vegetable garden and next door was a sawmill and wood merchant, the Smit family who were always very helpful to her. Opu wore only black and dark grey clothes, apparently to signify her grief for losing her husband sixteen years earlier. Opu had a very special way of speaking with us, softly and intensely, often moralizing gently but not dogmatically, never chastising. Once, when Mom and Dad had their first ever holiday, spring 1952, on a Rhine cruise, with oom Ekke Bousema and Mom’s sister tante Tryn, opu came to look after us. That week Stiny, Henk and I fought a lot and opu could not constrain us, till she started crying. We stopped and I felt ashamed, stupid fifteen-year-old I was. Opu cried too when we departed; Mom returned to her alone one last time a week later and was never to see her again. I was lucky, stayed with her in 1958, on my first trip back to Europe to see the Brussels World Fair. Opu died in April 1960, eighty-two years old.

We had all bought some new clothes in early May. I got some fancy shirts, a fine pair of pants and a very adult-looking jacket. I was to wear that on the boat at dinner time and on deck too. Nowadays we would wear a T-shirt and a pair of jeans with a sweater, but back then one ‘dressed properly’ when socializing in public spaces. And there were no jeans! I also wore these clothes when a final family picture was taken in front of the farmhouse where we -at least we children- spent seven very happy years. It would take the reader too far afield to tell of all the visits and farewell meetings we went through. Although the emigration wave was then at full crest, in our immediate circle there were no others taking the emigration leap. I remember looking at my numerous cousins in three or four families and feeling some pity for them. Here they were, stuck in mostly farmer towns, not much going on, life dragging on predictably and here we were, ready to cross the ocean to a whole new and exciting life. But I kept these thoughts to myself, it would be unfair to rub it in, really.

Finally, in the last week of May, the big day arrived. I vaguely remember us riding on a bus to Rotterdam, one uncle with us, ending on the quay of the Rotterdam Lloyd. Two other uncle/aunt couples had brought the Oldsmobile to Rotterdam to have it put on a freighter. They were all on the quay. Moored there was our ‘Victory ship’ the ZUIDERKRUIS that we had already heard about. There was a huge crowd there, we had to say goodbye to our dear family, queue up for passport- and other controls, get our cabin numbers, check our luggage. Then, yes we came to a gangplank. I had a lump in my throat, felt that plank took me away from Holland to an unknown future. I could see Dad struggling with his emotions as he took the younger ones by the hand and went up that plank to an intermediate deck. Mom gave us our cabin number and let us go. We bounded up to the upper deck where we could see much of Rotterdam, its harbours, factories and endless rows of houses. It seemed everybody went to this upper deck on land side and I wondered whether the ship could tip as a result. A rough and quick calculation- one thousand people with luggage weigh about 100 000 kg = 100 tons. The ship weighs about ten thousand tons, hence people weigh less than 1%, so not to worry. This sort of rational approach to uncertain circumstances is one of my character traits, one not much appreciated by many people, I found.

We peered to see our uncles and aunts in the crowd and waved as all did. There came a heart-stopping moment when the steam horn gave three blasts, the mooring ropes were cast off, the ship stirred as two tugs tightened their cables and we were moving from the moorings into mid-harbour towards the Nieuwe Waterweg and off to the North Sea. It took a long time as we waved to people on shore, many running, biking or driving parallel to us. Then we reached Hoek van Holland, the open sea. The ship’s engines kicked in, the big screw churned to produce a huge maelstrom, the tugs swerved aside, the lowlands receded, the people were very quiet, full of emotions. Doubts?

We were on the way to the ocean through the English Channel. There were announcements over a loud P.A. system about mealtimes. We went to look for our cabins deep within the vessel, where Mom was arranging our pajamas. Suddenly our world was incredibly small, all relationships severed it seemed, as communicating with land was impossible. Just us and nearly one thousand strangers on a converted US military troop transporter heading for Halifax. Six days to transform from emigrant to immigrant.

The ship had just over 600 passengers on our journey and a crew of several hundred. The technical part of the crew and the officers were mostly Dutch, but the service crew was strikingly different, consisted almost entirely of young men from Java, Indonesia. They to us seemed small and slim, with very black neat haircuts and dressed to a T in white uniforms, blue vests with gold insignia. They were very friendly without being servile; agile and efficient, smiling a lot and joking among themselves. We were all treated as though we were passengers on an expensive cruise.

This week on the boat was a perfect transition to the new world, much better than a six-hour flight. Mom and Dad had an extremely busy, stressful half year behind them with awfully hectic final weeks. Now there was nothing they must, indeed could do. Every meal was served in a spacious dining room where we had assigned seats. There were no chores, nothing to clean or repair, no shopping, no visits, no haggling over selling this item or that animal, only walks on deck, talks in the lounge, long siestas and leisurely dinners. What a change for our parents, stress to be blown away by Atlantic wind.

For us children the ship was big enough to play, to wander about, to watch movies, to make friends and to dream away at the stern, high above the screw at the end of the upper deck. Stiny, Henk and I met Mr. Green, a sailor in his forties, from New York City. He had brought a ship to Europe and was on his way home now, without a care and with time for us. Nearly all week Stiny and I practised our English on him and Mr. Green just smiled, corrected us and told us sailor’s stories. We also met a very good looking African American man and he was for us the first man of another race with whom we struck up a friendship.

After two days the ocean became rough, with high, long waves moving east. Our ship was shorter than one wavelength and therefore, traveling Westward, tried to climb one crest, riding it, going down past it and then climbing the next one. It had no stabilizers but moved as the waters commanded. The effect was most impressive either in the movie theater or on the upper deck bow. As you sat in the theater you saw the screen go down and heard and felt the shudder of the screw as it rose above water. Then the screen would rise up and a bit later come down again with the crashing sound of the bow slamming the start of the next wave. I had heard the ship was welded, not riveted and wondered if it could break. I missed the data for any calculation but thought of the statistics of eight years at sea and was reassured. Most people were seasick for a time, but by staying outside on deck till the worst was over we avoided this. On the fifth of June we docked at Pier 21 in Halifax. We had completed our emigration leap, we stepped ashore, Dutch Canadian immigrants.