Lately, I have been giving some thought to my two brothers and to the important role that they have played in my life. This train of thought has led me to ask myself the question: What does it really mean to me to have brothers and how significant were they to me, when I was growing up?
I would like to address these important questions in this blog post and to try to express some of my thoughts and feelings about my brothers as I revisit a few of our many shared experiences. I hope this will be of some interest to my remaining siblings and to their children and grandchildren.
Let me begin by introducing my two brothers, Henk and Max. Sadly, Henk passed away more than 20 years ago, but Max is still with us, a very active octogenarian, living in The Netherlands.
Henk was born just before the start of the Second World War. He was our parents’ third child, arriving after my sister, Ria, and myself. He was only 5 years old when the war finished, so I would guess that his early childhood would have been challenging. When he was 3 years old, our twin sisters were born, which meant that during those war years our parents would have been extremely busy and stressed, looking after 5 young children, as well as coping with food shortages and the Nazi occupation of our country. It would therefore not have been surprising if Henk had, at times, felt lost or overlooked.
As young children, within a large family, Henk and I had to share a double bed, which occasionally led to disputes as to how much of the bed belonged to each of us. The unsurprising “you’re on my side” conflict surfaced if one of us crossed the imaginary centre line, but during the day we happily played together with our young friends, who lived in the streets nearby.
My brother Max was born after the War, at a less stressful time for my parents. He was loved by all of us, a boy who was always ready for adventure. I think he was probably 5 or 6 years old when we went out together for long bike rides (with Max on the backseat), on country roads and paths, to explore the small villages surrounding us. We covered a lot of ground, usually on Sunday mornings.
I have many happy memories of my early years at home, but, later, during my time at sea and during my 2 years of national service, I lost close daily contact with my brothers, although I was kept up to date by our mother via her regular letters. These beautifully written, airmail letters contained a detailed monthly report of all the significant happenings in the lives of my siblings. The letters were kept and preserved by us, and, thanks to my daughter Michelle, who sent them to me, they now enable me to write about some of the events and details in the lives of my brothers.
Let’s first talk about Henk, who did his national service in the Dutch Navy and then signed up for further training, serving a total of 8 years on various ships as a “Carpenter First Class”. He was offered the opportunity of joining further courses, to progress to the rank of Petty Officer, but he declined accepting this offer for promotion because, by then, he already knew that he wanted to leave the service.
Henk met his soulmate, Rina, in his early twenties, when she was working as a private secretary to a company director. They were married in August,1962, prior to Henk leaving on a long voyage to America. According to my mother’s letters, they were married because “as a married man, he would be able to earn a great deal more than as a single man”. He was 23 years old.
The detailed monthly letters from home continued for years. They informed us about Henk’s voyages to the USA and to the West Indies, from where he had returned “with a beard”, and, also about much of the happenings in his early married life with Rina.
Henk left the Navy in 1964 and began working, first as a carpenter and then, later, as a foreman on building sites. However, slumps in the building industry meant that there were periods of unemployment as well. Then, for some years he worked driving big oil tankers and trucks from The Netherlands to Germany and Belgium. Being very adaptable, he also worked as an installer of timber floors, an occupation which he was later forced to give up, due to his health being affected by the glue which was used to lay the floors.
Later, he and Rina became the managers of a large camping site, the “Papillon”, in the village of Denekamp, in the Netherlands. Max has told me that he often visited Henk there and that he soon realised that Henk’s role as manager also included him acting as a “social worker”, to calm down conflicts within the families who were staying there. Together with Rina, he organised activities for the guest campers, to keep them entertained and together. Max noticed that the guests loved Henk and Rina, but that the work took its toll on both of them.
After several years of this, Henk and Rina took charge of a café-restaurant, “Het Witte Peard” (“The White Horse”), in the town of Ootmarsum, on the border with Germany. It was an attractive pub, in a beautiful part of The Netherlands. The restaurant provided simple, but wholesome meals, prepared by Rina.
I once visited them there and I remember the delicious “gehaktballen” (meatballs) Rina offered me. As it was in the Papillon, Henk became the father-confessor to some of the regulars, who used to come to the pub to forget their troubles at home. Max described Henk as being the “good father” to them.
Max told me the story about the “Poaskearls” (“Easter Guys”), who did play, and are still playing, an important role in maintaining some age-old customs and traditions in Ootmarsum during Easter each year. The “Poaskearls” are 8 unmarried men, chosen annually from the inhabitants, who perform a series of rituals over several days, dressed in long beige raincoats, black trousers and hats. One of these rituals is to lead a long line of villagers through the town, while singing traditional, local, Easter songs.
At the conclusion of the procession, the Poaskearls and their followers used to come to Henk’s pub to enjoy some drinks. Max told me that, on one such occasion, at Easter, he and Nel had visited Henk, and had helped him and Rina in the bar.
Both Henk and Rina died relatively young, Henk in 2004, aged 65 and Rina in 2005, when she was 64 years old. They had two children, Anneke and Marieke. I remember Henk and Rina with much affection. They were both hardworking, generous, family-oriented people, who are sadly missed by those of us who remain. Henk was a caring and loyal brother to me and Rina was his beautiful, supportive and much-loved soulmate.
My other brother, Max, was only 8 years old when I left home to join the merchant navy. I have referred to him in earlier stories: numbers 15 (E-bikes & Old Bikes), 43 (Dickens -the Flaneur), 56 (3 October) and 60 (Sint Nikolaas).
I, and all of my brothers and sisters, knew that Max, like our father, loved looking after animals. When Max was 13 years old, he began helping my former father-in-law at his farm, in his own spare time. Even at that age he was very enterprising and successful in buying, breeding, and then selling, rabbits and goats, as well as bigger animals, such as pigs and lambs. He attended the Agricultural Easter Show in the city of Leiden, where he was present in the arena where the animals were being judged, wearing a long white coat, to assist the jury in writing down the verdicts.
After primary school, Max attended a secondary agricultural school as well as the Higher Agricultural College, where he also did very well. His favourite pastime was fishing, and he also excelled in sport. In winter he loved ice skating and when he was 16 years old, he won 2 medals in the 35km “Mill-Tour”. He represented his school at a sports carnival and was running 1500 metres every night to train for this. I learned all this from reading my mother’s letters again.
When Max was 18 years old, and still a student, he lived in the village of Bergambacht. I think that it was there, hat he met his first real girlfriend, “Nellie”, who he introduced to our parents on his birthday.
After graduation Max started work as a Rijksambtenaar (Public Servant) in the Department of Physiology of Animals, at an experimental farm and agricultural college in the town of Wageningen. From there he transferred to Ede, where he played in a football team in a national tournament, where they finished second. Not bad!
What came through in the letters we received from my mother was that Max and Nel were always very busy, working and studying. Both were happy in their jobs. Nel worked as a student nurse and Max was studying (at night) to become a real estate agent. He also had a newspaper run and, on his free Saturdays, he worked at the zoo, where he “was washing dishes”! He also helped Nel’s father, making hay on the weekends.
Max and Nel were married in October 1967, when they were both 21 years old. For some years they lived in a houseboat, which enabled Max to fish, by holding a rod through the boat’s kitchen window. They also had a goat and three sheep, grazing on the grass verge near the water.
Max became a “makelaar en taxateur” (estate agent and property valuer) when he was 22 years old. At the time, he was the youngest person in The Netherlands to be sworn in as a “makelaar” by the Court. He specialised in valuing rural property and, after 50 years of service, was awarded an “oorkonde” (transl: document or deed), and “a bronze statue of the Crown Prince with the King’s coat and golden crown, which symbolised the dignity of his profession”. Three years later, Max retired.
Being retired did not mean being idle. Years earlier, Max and Nel had acquired their own piece of forest, in a beautiful part of the country, where they could spend time away from their busy lives, and where Max was able to enjoy his hobby of working with wood. He used some of the forest’s fallen trees to saw his own planks, and to build a shed to house his tractor. He made benches, a small house for squirrels, and many other things. Sue and I were able to visit this forest, with its large, tall trees, during a family reunion on one of our trips to Holland.
There are so many things that I could tell you about my brother but, to avoid making this post far too long, I will have to restrict myself to selecting only a few, such as his interest in boats and rivers. I well remember a day out with Max and Nel on their boat on a large lake, which was formerly part of the Zuiderzee (“Southern Sea”). It was a windy day which nevertheless turned out to be a very special day in my life, which I will never forget. Not so long ago I also learned that Max has, for the past few years, been volunteering as the skipper of the ferry boat, which crosses the IJssel, a wide river, carrying pedestrians and bicycles.
Max and Nel are frequent travellers. Of great interest to me was a trip which Max made to Iran, together with his son, Max Jr, who is Chief Financial Officer of a large Dutch multinational group. They travelled to more places in Iran than I ever managed to do, and they were well received by most of the Iranian people they were able to meet.
Sue has already written about one of our family reunions at Max and Nel’s beautiful farm in the country (post 94). Another big reunion took place in Canada in 2009 when we all travelled there to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of my sister, Ria and her husband, Bert. I hope to write more about it in the next post.
Max and Nel also visited us in Australia. When our son Greg suddenly died in 1998, Max immediately came over from Holland, together with my sister Liesbeth, to be with us and offer support, and, in 2001, Max and Nel visited us for 10 unforgettable days. In recent years Max and I have become even closer, which I am very happy about.
It has taken me a very long time to write this blog post. It turned out to be more challenging than I had envisaged. There was so much information to absorb, and it was all so very interesting! I searched through boxes of photos and got lost in re-reading many old letters and old documents. It was difficult to choose what to include and even more difficult to decide what to leave out.
What I found however, and what the archives revealed, is the importance of having a close family. Our parents were caring and they loved us all. What we as siblings have in common now is our love and respect for them. In these “disconnected” times, maintaining such close ties within families offers us something very special, a valuable connection to our past and a sanctuary, a place of refuge for our thoughts in times of instability.
How lucky I am to have grown up with Henk and Max and how thankful I am to our parents. So please accept this suggestion from an old man. If you have brothers (or sisters), give them a hug.
O.P.
P.S. The next post, “The Rockies” will be published on 10 May.