Double-Barrel Read Free Page A

six days studying – but on paper, only on paper – the life of Zwinderen, which when I went to school had been an ossified tiny market town away in the wilds, a stone’s throw from Protestant North Germany; but now was become the frontier of the big push at decentralization, decongestion, full employment and Prosperity for All. Boom town. Light industry and housing. Practically Dodge City.
    I was Wyatt Earp, getting sent there as United States Marshal. I had better start polishing my forty-five and practising quick draws.
    The keyword in this north-eastern corner of Holland is ‘Veen’. It occurs as a suffix in place-names. Over to the west are Hoogeveen and Heerenveen – larger towns these, around the twenty thousand mark. To the south, Klazina-veen, Vriezeveen – smaller, hardly more than villages. Second word is ‘Kanaal’ – which means, mostly, a ditch. Stadskanaal, Musselkanaal. ‘Veen’ means turf: the boggy peaty moorland that was cut for fuel in the depression days, before the oil pipelines and the natural gas. The canals drain it – a network of tiny waterways. There are a great many; this country takes a lot of draining. But there is no watershed, and green scummy water dribbles vaguely in all directions – towards the Ems estuary, and down south towards rivers. The biggest of these canals have some mercantile use, and there is quite a lot of plodding barge traffic even now.
    The funny thing is that the country is on the verge of a big upheaval. They found a ‘bubble’ of natural gas up here. To see what is about to happen one need only look at Lacq, in France – and this bubble is ten times the size of Lacq’s. Traditionally, though, it has always been a very poor and barren land. Very little use for agriculture, and none at all for anything else. Penniless. But the government has already altered all that.
    Railways and roads; factories processing milk, scrapmetal, paper. Big trucks with trailers boomed along broad autoways; new diesel railcars linked Groningen and Win-schoten at one end of the province with Emmen and Coevorden at the other; there was a branch line to Assen, with connexions to the main line south.
    More sophisticated industry had been tempted into following. A small but enterprising firm built coach and even aircraft bodies; another directed by a brilliant engineer, was internationally known for electronic equipment – ‘second Philips’ was the local boast. A daughter-firm of a huge combine was making wire and cable; and another, forty-five per cent of the total Dutch output of heat-resisting glassware.
    The sleepy little place hardly knew itself now. For untold generations it had looked like an ingrowing toenail, with much the same way of thinking.
    Tiny shops, dark and smelly – corsets and cough mixture; wooden shoes and flat caps of gaudy cheap tweed; weedkiller and sheepdip; lumps of wet salt pork and margarine-all airy and glassy now, with black and chromium fronts. Outside tumbledown farms with sagging thatched roofs now stood tinny, brightly-painted, brand-new autos. Behind soared concrete cowsheds and haybarns, and fire-engine-colour tractors hauled the swedes and the sugar beets in increasing masses at greater speeds towards ever greedier consumers.
    Smelly canal backwaters, scummy green or inky black, were filled in, and the worn-out wood of collapsing wharves cleared up. Concrete came pouring out of huge striped urns that revolved everywhere like merry-go-rounds; bright pink brick streets ate up the rutted cart-tracks. The workhouse-ward schools were gone and there was an annexe to the hospital and even a swimming bath. True, the county insane asylum still stood gaunt in the sour fields; the prunus and flowering-cherry trees were tiny and the grass verges sickly; the few old stunted oaks looked sad and lonelydespite cheerful additions with golden cypress and Montana pine.
    But the bustle of the