The elders of the Reformed church had come to our house on a pastoral visit. With their thick heads and heavy voices, they smoked all the cigars from my father’s own stash before finally leaving. We should go to church more often, the echo lingered. My mother delegated that instruction to my father, but he went anyway, though to the Walloon church in Dordrecht, because the sermons there were in French.
Once the gunpowder fumes had cleared, the contours of their advice became visible. My mother decided that, at the age of eight, I needed to work on my social skills. I saw no need for that. I preferred to be alone on the bank of the Oude Maas, watching heavily laden cargo ships, hoping that one of them might finally sink.
She enrolled me in a boys’ club for ages eight to ten, a spiritually formative craft evening run by the church. Since foster father Joseph had taught his son Jesus the basics of carpentry, there was plenty of sawing and hammering here as well. To make it appealing, we were dressed in imitation knight outfits. I found it childish.
The weekly evenings in the lopsided school building from 1911 were ordeals. At the opening and closing of each session we shouted in unison, “loyal to the king,” fists raised. I thought of a television programme about the Occupation in which an impassioned German politician struck the same pose.
Our group leader was a tall, thin man with a disturbingly serrated face, his nose protruding like a hooked growth. Bead-like eyes lay deep and cruel in hollow sockets. He looked as though he had been cut from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch and forced into a badly fitting 1950s suit. He tried to combat his bad breath by chewing PK chewing gum. Outside his range, I referred to him as PK.
My fret saw blades snapped constantly, so that I rarely got round to any real sawing. PK assigned me the task of making a small coat rack for Mother’s Day, in the shape of two rabbits and a fir tree.
It made no difference how I sawed, the blades kept breaking. Even before the final “loyal to the king,” the club had run out of saw blades altogether. When I tried to explain to PK that you cannot saw straight on the sloping floor of a school built in 1911, he began berating me. He sent me into the corridor. I resisted and burst into tears. From that moment on I excelled in complete mental absence.
“Those rabbits can saw themselves, Mum,” I said at home.
I thought I was done with it. But on the evening before Mother’s Day a boy from the neighbourhood appeared, one who had attended every single craft evening. He had finished my coat rack, the little NSB’er. The paint was still slightly wet. My mother pretended to be pleased.