Читать книгу Every Day of My Life - Beeb Birtles - Страница 11

One

AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND

Beeb in Sloterdijk, Amsterdam

1945, the end of World War 2 and the citizens of Amsterdam were dancing in the streets celebrating their freedom from Nazi German occupation. It was there that my parents met. I don’t know how long they dated or what set off the spark between them but I do know they were married on January 7, 1948. I was born later that same year on November 28.

My parents gave me exactly the same name as my father: Gerard Bertelkamp. No middle name, just my first name and surname. During my younger years they called me Gerardje, the je tagged on the end of one’s name in Holland meaning ‘little’ or ‘small’, similar to the English meaning of junior.

Dad was a man of few words but I remember him telling me that the Nazis had singled him out on the streets of Amsterdam, as they did with many young Dutch men, and put him on a train to Germany to work as forced labour. However, somewhere between Amsterdam and the German border he jumped off the train at night, so he wouldn’t be seen, and walked back to Amsterdam.

For a short time, my parents lived on a small boat on one of Amsterdam’s canals. I remember being on it maybe once or twice and going through the canal lock system. More than likely, my parents decided that a boat was not the ideal place to live when starting their family. I have a photo of me in a rowing boat on a farm somewhere when I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. From that moment on I felt an instant love for being on the water because it gave me a great feeling of peace.

The sound of Sunday mornings in Amsterdam were of church bells ringing, tram wheels screeching and the ring-a-ling of bicycle bells from people coming up behind you, warning of their approach. I had a wonderful extended family and it was not unusual for us to go for Sunday walks and visit Tante (Aunt) Riek and Oom (Uncle) Jan. After a few hours visiting them I would be treated to a snack from the street vendors. Carts were set up with big pump jars of mayonnaise and mustard and I was allowed to buy hot and crispy patate frite (French fries) to eat on the way home. They were served in paper bags, open and round at the top, tapering down to a point at the bottom. It made them easy to hold for small hands. The fries at the top of the bag were smothered in either mayonnaise or mustard, whatever your choice.

For New Year’s Eve celebrations family and friends gathered at someone’s house, usually drinking more than they should, until midnight struck. With church bells ringing, fireworks going off and horns and whistles blowing, everyone stopped what they were doing and hugged, kissed and wished each other a Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! Happy New Year. When the festivities were over, we went home by taxi. More than a few times I can remember being carried, half asleep and half awake, by my father into a Mercedes taxi. Mercedes taxis were always my favourite.

We were closer to my grandparents on my mother’s side. We didn’t have a lot to do with Dad’s parents as my grandfather was an alcoholic. When my dad was a young man my grandmother made him go get my grandfather from the local cafés and bring him home for dinner, sometimes having to support him along the way because he was so inebriated. Of course, I never saw any of this but I imagine it was humiliating for my father.

Dad was fourteen when he left school to help support his family and he worked as an apprentice carpenter. He was taught his trade by the older Master carpenters and he turned out to be an excellent wood craftsman; he could build anything with his hands.

No matter where we lived in Amsterdam Dad always made improvements to our dwellings. He provided well for us, and his work became his life. He never owned a car in Holland but drove to work on his BMW motorbike.

My parents loved to sing and were involved in performing in amateur operettas. When I was still very young, Oma Deubel (my grandma on my mother’s side) took me to see an operetta in which my parents were performing. On recognising my mother up on stage I yelled out, “Mama!” Oma’s hand over my mouth quickly shut me up. This is my earliest recollection of seeing a live performance of any description.

Our first home was on the Wittenkade 93, overlooking one of Amsterdam’s canals. Looking out the window one winter morning, I watched a daredevil kid trying to be the first one to cross the frozen canal. It was rare to see someone fall in, but it did happen. Once the canals froze over, scarf-wrapped skaters took to the ice and skated for hours on end. Some people even used the canals to skate to work in the mornings and back home again at night.

It was here on the Wittenkade that my sister was born on September 17, 1952. My parents named her after my mother, Elisabeth Hendrika Bertelkamp. Why on earth did they repeat their names with their offspring? I don’t get it! My sister’s name was quickly shortened to Elly.

My mother’s parents also lived on the Wittenkade a little further down from where we lived but because of their age, they lived on street level. We visited them regularly, and sometimes Elly and I would stay overnight if my parents went out for a late night.

I really loved my Opa (grandpa) Strunk. He was Oma’s second husband as her first husband had deserted her and left her with five children, starting a new life for himself in Belgium. It was a very admirable thing that Opa Strunk did to take up with a woman who already had five children.

From the Wittenkade we moved to Balistraat, into an apartment on the ground floor that was very cold and damp. It was close to a railway line that ran along the top of a dike. When it snowed in winter, kids in the neighbourhood pulled their sleds up to the top and slid back down.

We were living in that damp ground floor apartment when Dad took me shopping one Christmas to buy my first real watch. In Holland they call it a horloge which is a French word that means ‘timepiece’. It was a particularly cold winter that year and I almost couldn’t feel my toes in my rubber boots but the excitement of looking at all the different watches in the shop windows made me forget about my frozen toes. We didn’t live in that damp and cold apartment very long before moving to Amsterdam East. My fondest memories of growing up in Amsterdam remain at Eikenweg, probably because I was a bit older and remember more about it. Once again we lived on the third floor with an attic on the floor above.

Dad had a workbench set up in the attic. More than likely it was here that he measured and cut all the timber for a modular beach house he assembled every summer on a rented plot at Bloemendaal aan Zee near Zandvoort. When summer was over, beach houses had to be disassembled and stored for the winter. The fierce North Sea beat against the sand dunes, or dikes as they call them, throughout the winter, and made it impossible to leave beach houses up all year ’round.

We spent quite a few summers at Bloemendaal, living at the beach for our entire summer holiday. Dad drove me down first on the back of his BMW motorbike and instructed me to sit tight and wait while he rode back to Amsterdam to get my mother and sister. Elly was still small enough to fit between Mum and Dad on his motorbike.

They were great summers: swimming in the North Sea, playing in the sand, building sandcastles and making kites with long trailing tails. There was always a strong sea breeze so I could fly my kite along the beach. Elly and I were very fortunate to have these experiences.

Living on Eikenweg was where I first became aware of listening to the radio. Two songs stand out from that time. In 1954, when I was five, I heard ‘Mr Sandman’ by girl group The Chordettes. It was the number one song in America and it became one of my favourites. Hearing the blend of their voices, their close harmonies, stirred something inside me.

The other song was an instrumental on a 78 vinyl record that my grandparents owned. They had one of those old-fashioned record players that you had to wind up before every song. The record was called ‘La Mer’, meaning the sea. It is by French composer Charles Trenet, and American composer Jack Lawrence wrote lyrics to the melody. It became known as ‘Beyond The Sea’ and was the title of a movie about the life of Bobby Darin, starring Kevin Spacey. I played that record over and over. To my ears it was, and still is, an incredibly beautiful melody.

When I was eight we received the news that Opa Bertelkamp had died of a heart attack. He fell down the stairs where my grandparents lived. I went to the funeral with my dad and will never forget the sight of that closed coffin slowly being lowered into the ground on a cold winter day. I didn’t really understand what was happening and as I stood there holding Dad’s hand I became overwhelmed with emotion and burst into tears.

When I looked up at Dad’s face it was expressionless, no emotion, not one ounce of sadness. Perhaps the thoughts of those humiliating days when he had to bring his father home drunk were running through his mind. We never talked about his father’s funeral and it was to be the only family burial I would ever attend in Holland.

So what do you give a typical Dutch kid for his eighth birthday? Why, that favourite instrument of all Europeans of course, the piano accordion! My parents arranged lessons for me and I can vaguely picture my teacher in my mind. The piano accordion was not my choice of instrument, even though I became somewhat of an average player and learned to read music.

One day when I was bored and playing by myself in my room, I lit some matches and started burning some crumpled pieces of paper in a small rubbish bin. I wasn’t careful enough though because the curtains caught on fire and smoke started billowing out from under my bedroom door.

My parents were entertaining some friends in the living room at the time. One of them noticed the smoke and they all came running into my bedroom and quickly extinguished the fire. Oh boy, I knew I was in deep shit and when my punishment was dealt out to me it was something that I detested doing. I was ordered to practise my piano accordion for two hours straight every day for two weeks!

VOYAGE TO AUSTRALIA

Bertelkamp family on the Willem Ruys

My father became disgruntled with the way everything was so controlled by the government in the Netherlands. He began thinking about a new life for his family in a country that offered more opportunities. He didn’t agree with the socialistic form of government taking care of its citizens from the day they were born to the day they died, all for a percentage of their wages of course. He wanted to have control of his own money. I think he felt he wasn’t getting ahead fast enough and those bitterly cold winters wouldn’t have helped. I admire his pioneering spirit.

The Dutch government encouraged emigration because of over-population. In the late ’50s Holland’s population was already around twelve million, which was a lot of people for such a small country. The government sponsored special film nights where citizens could get an idea of what it was like to live in other countries around the world.

My parents attended a few of these nights and saw films on what life was like in the Belgian Congo, Rhodesia, South Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. I think they quickly ruled out the African countries because of racial concerns. Over the course of a few months they became more impressed with what Australia had to offer and it wasn’t long before they made their decision that this was where they wanted to immigrate. They prepared to sell some of their belongings because there was limited space on the ship.

My parents had befriended two brothers, Jan and Ary van Tielen, on one of the orientation nights and they also signed up for Australia. We departed from Rotterdam on August 7, 1959; the trip would take about four weeks. I remember the excitement surrounding our departure. Some of our extended family made the trip from Amsterdam to see us off. I had only attended school for three years before we migrated to Australia. By then, I had friends and a wonderful Indonesian teacher who was kind enough to take slides of my classmates for me to take to Australia, so I wouldn’t forget them. We sailed on a ship called the Willem Ruys that was named after the founder of Rotterdamsche Lloyd, a Dutch shipping company. The four of us stood clinging to the guardrails waving goodbye to our family standing on the docks, as the boarding ramps were pulled away from the ship. People on the docks threw multi-coloured streamers up at us, as the ship slowly pulled away.

I was ten years old and Elly was five when we migrated to Australia. I don’t remember much about the trip because most of the time Elly and I were in a crèche. We sailed to Southampton, England, catching sight of the White Cliffs of Dover, before heading down to the Mediterranean Sea. When we reached Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal, passengers were allowed to go ashore and sightsee. Our mother was a bit paranoid about kids being kidnapped so we weren’t allowed to leave the ship.

The ship sailed at a very slow speed through the Suez Canal. It wasn’t very wide and only so many ships could sail through, convoy style, until we reached the middle lakes where we parked for a few hours to allow ships travelling north to pass by. The most exciting thing I remember is when Elly and I were allowed to drink a Coke — something that didn’t happen every day!

From the Suez Canal we sailed to Colombo, the capital of Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, where we spent a day. Once again, Elly and I weren’t allowed off the ship. Singapore was the only place where we went sightseeing as a family. It was world renowned for great deals on jewellery, cameras such as Leica and Nikon, and various brands of transistor radios.

We departed Singapore for our final destination of Melbourne, Australia. The route took us through the Strait of Singapore, the Java Sea, Strait Sunda and finally into the Indian Ocean. In the Java Sea we crossed the equator. The following night we sailed through Strait Sunda and reached the Great Australian Bight. After a couple of days of closely following the south coast of Australia we sailed into Port Phillip Bay. It was early in the morning when we arrived in Melbourne on September 4, 1959.

The Port of Melbourne lies directly behind Spencer Street Station. My parents had already made up their minds to settle in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia so after disembarking from the ship we caught the train to Adelaide. We had to sit the whole way on hard, uncomfortable wooden benches.

My new life had begun.