Reflecting on my dad

I need to stop and reflect on my dad a while, lest you think I was only influenced by the women and not my father. In fact my father was extremely present in my life. I adored him and he loved me deeply. We were bound together in a secret pact to circumvent the Hogenkamp women. Our conspiracy started early.

The bonding experience was story-telling, not so much books, more adventure stories we made up as we went along. Long continuing sagas in which my dad and I featured heavily. We were the protagonists and it was wonderful. We sailed dangerous seas, took amazing trains, lived on a farm (always) with all the animals necessary to a great farm. We weren't so much super heroes, as super farmers. There were always horses, not donkeys, although I didn't object to including donkeys. Some horses had magic powers like mind reading, flight and great loyalty. These tall tales went on for many, many years across the ocean and settled in Canada. This was a logical place to end up, because the amazing farm of the stories was always in Canada.

My dad loved Canada. It represented freedom from the stiff formality of (burger) middle class Holland. Freedom from all the little duties and rituals that were inherent in Dutch life. Canada was where he went on the Farm Worker plan in the late 1920s to escape his formidable mother and his over- achieving sisters. He climbed out from under their obsession with "duty and honour". In Canada my father could be the simple farmer he so respected. It must have been a devastating blow when he became so ill in 1931, he was deported back to Holland with nothing to show for his absence but a box of phonograph records. And most of them broke in transit.

He also took back with him the memory of a nurse's sunny smile and her address. He corresponded with that nurse for seven years before he proposed to her. To his utter amazement she accepted his proposal and sailed to Holland to marry him in 1939. He renovated a beautiful spacious apartment to conform to Canadian standards of plumbing and kitchen set up. The lived in Scheveningen, cycled all over the countryside, visited all the great museums and art galleries while my mother was learning Dutch. She needed to lose her Canadian accent as quickly as possible. My dad never stopped loving my mother until his death.

According to my mother, my dad was always chivalrous, very kind, handsome and tall (6' 4").
According to military protocol, he clicked his heels and bowed his head when greeting a lady. My Canadian mom really found such formality a bit too much and persuaded him to stop doing it with her.

Somewhere between biking and bowing my mother became pregnant and my father, my Oma and my Tantes were thrilled and delighted. The clouds of war were darkening the skies over Europe, and my dad was called back into the military. He had been conscripted in his early twenties and served in Her Majesty's Royal Dutch Army before he emigrated to Canada. It was in the army that he learned to train horses and ride competitively, and now with war looming they called him up again.

I was born in March 1940 and the Dutch surrendered to Germany in May 1940. My dad became a prisoner of war with the rest of the Dutch Army. In fact there were so many Dutch prisoners of war, the Germans didn't know what to do with them all. So they were released and sent home. He came back to Den Haag and resumed his position at KLM. He joined a very different army in the early days of the war and became a member of the Dutch Resistance.

Thus began two lives for our family. Normal life - father a KLM young executive with a lovely "Dutch" wife and young child; secret life - resistance soldier, courier and distributor of forged documents for Jews and political prisoners in hiding (Onderduikers). His child grew up in a world of adults, with few opportunities to play with other children. Children innocently blab about their papas not being home when they should be and the to and fro of visitors, so it was safer if these children didn't play outside with other children. I was allowed to play with occasional children who I discovered years later, had parents in the resistance also. In fact, so close was the bond between these special families, we remained friends for the rest of our lives. My friends in Holland today are the children of my father's allies. Paula de Groot, is the daughter of our family doctor de Groot; Ineke Achiles daughter of neighbors who shared the hidden short wave radio; Martien vd Steenhoven, my sister in spirit and daughter of my beloved Oom Steen (Gert vd Steenhoven) my dad's dear friend. We are the descendants of the "secret army".

As a small child I only knew the normal- life father, who was fun and told stories; who took me for donkey rides, and who made life feel right. Much later the parallel story came out.