The Dutch Hunger Winter
When there was no food left for the cat, we ate the cat.
Leo passed away on 19th June 2021, but his story continues.
I didn't lose my hatred for Germans straight away; it was too deep-rooted for that. Eventually, I stopped hating people though. All I hate now is discrimination. Discrimination of any sort, because sex or religion or whatever else people may discriminate against each other for.'
'Is that why you chose New Zealand, Grandpa? Because we don't hate each other?'
'I'm afraid there is discrimination here too, Gemma. Maybe not as blatant as in Europe, but it's there all right. Just not as bad as in most other countries.'
'You can stand next to your boss in the pub, they say, and nobody thinks anything of it.'
'There are plenty of places where you can't go for dinner without a tie. And that's a mechanism for the better-off people to keep the so-called lower classes out. Isn't that discrimination?'
'I suppose.'
'When I worked at the Auckland Museum [1] I insisted on paying my female staff the identical salary as the male staff, and when one of my female assistants wanted to come to work in slacks I backed her up. I had quite a long, let's call it a discussion, with the director. The official dress code, he insisted, was for the ladies to wear skirts and pantyhose. No exceptions. I told him: 'Then my department is going to be the exception. I pay my staff for the work they do, not for the way they look.'
'Yes but', the director said. I won the argument that time by making him imagine my young attractive assistant working on top of a scaffold in one of the galleries in full view of the public, wearing a miniskirt.
I absolutely refuse to wear a necktie, I even made it a condition before accepting the position at the Auckland Museum.
'It's the code,' the director said. 'All professionals wear ties.'
'This professional will not,' I answered, and he wanted me badly enough to give in.
Fashions are easing up somewhat nowadays, fortunately, but to me, neckties are still a symptom of insidious discrimination.'
[1] 1965
'While we still lived in Bakkum, my brother Arthur was born and later, not all that long after we were moved to Amsterdam, came Nico. In our small apartment in the Eemsstraat, I often sat in front of the window with Arthur on my knees: 'Look, there's a horse. Say horse. See, the horse is pulling that big cart and the man is picking up all the rubbish bags and putting them in his cart. Say cart. Say horse and cart.' '
'Did they collect the rubbish with a horse-drawn cart, Grandpa? Didn't they have ordinary rubbish trucks?'
'They had trucks, but no petrol. All the petrol went to the Germans. So really essential people like doctors, who needed vehicles, had a large rubber bag on top of their car with domestic gas to run the motor on. While we still had domestic gas that is. Or they had a big kind of generator on the back to produce what they called water gas. Those things looked like black boilers and they lit a coal fire in the bottom. When that fire was going properly they put more coal in and once the whole generator was burning hot, they squirted small amounts of water onto the hot coal. Just enough water to produce a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas for the motor to run on. It was the only way they could keep at least some cars on the road. It was a bit crazy. Everything then [1] was crazy.
I'll tell you another crazy thing. It happened early on during the Hunger Winter [2] when the Allies bombed a rapeseed oil factory not far from where we lived. I don't know why, that kind of rapeseed oil was only used in lamps. It wasn't much good for anything else.
The bombing raids were usually at night, but that one was not long before daybreak. Ordinary people didn't have telephones in those days, and as there was no electricity, telephones wouldn't have worked anyway. But the grapevine was very efficient and pretty soon our neighbours told us what had happened: one of the bombs had ruptured an oil tank and the rapeseed oil had run into the narrow canal along the factory.
Great news! Trudi and I took a skillet each and a bucket and went to have a look. The place was easy to find by the smoke, as the main building was still burning. And sure enough, the canal was covered in oil. All we had to do was stand up to our knees in the water and skim off the oil. We got a lot of canal water in our bucket too, so we poured the oil off the top into a skillet, threw the water away and put the oil back into the bucket. We came home with at least two litres of lamp oil.
You could buy little floating wicks then, like candlewicks. All you had to do was half fill a drinking glass with water, pour some oil on top, and float the wick in the oil. A perfect oil lamp. Of course the stuff was not like the modern canola oil, useless for cooking, but it gave us several weeks of light in the evenings.
Those evenings we didn't have to pedal our half pushbike for light, and Dad would sit as close as he could to our lamp and read to us. I vaguely remember one of the stories, about a man who travelled all over the world looking for his shadow, which he had lost somehow. At the end of his life he found it back: it was leaning against the gate to eternity. I don't think us kids understood the story, but that didn't matter. We had no books with children's stories, and sitting there in the dark room, with the one oil lamp on the table, a blanket around my shoulders to keep warm and the cat sleeping in my lap, you could almost feel safe and at peace.
By then we had eaten our pet golden pheasant and the two guinea pigs, but we still had the cat. Only pretty soon we had no food left for the cat to eat, nothing at all, and almost nothing for ourselves. So we had to eat her.
It was even worse for Mum. She was pregnant, and needed more food, but she insisted that everyone would have exactly the same amount of food and made Dad use the kitchen scales to make sure he wouldn't give her more than anyone else. She really insisted. Somehow we all survived.
[1] 1943
[2] 1944