Double-Barrel Read Free Page B

burgomaster – and generous state funds – had infected the whole withered place with new seeds and spores. Rebirth.
    The local people, and with them a swelling tide of strangers from congested metropolitan Holland, took with enthusiasm to easy work in sunny, canteen-and-canned-music factories. Pleasant change from trying to dig a living out of wet, black, stinking ground. Population had doubled and redoubled in ten years, and now blocks of flats and streets of tiny balconied brick houses – very Dutch, with extraordinarily large windows – surrounded and hid the surviving nineteenth-century cottages. But a few were still lived in, tiny, sad, depressing; witness still to the meanness, the bitterness and the pathos of life here for over a thousand years.
    I saw quite a lot of this the first visit. Not the hour with the burgomaster – I spent the day strolling. Coffee in one café, a beer in another, and a greasy pork-chop lunch in the town’s biggest, between a billiardtable and six commercial travellers, all with green Opel station wagons stuffed with samples and catalogues, all bolting their filthy chops with enthusiastic expense-account appetites.
    It was wonderful winter weather, that first day. Windless, bright sun, and the canals frozen. The children stormed out whooping at four, and there instantly was the classic Dutch painting: a sun sinking redly behind the stepped gable and tiny spire of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and a thousand four-year-olds buttoned up to the eyes shrieking and tumbling on the old-fashioned, long wooden skates. My eyes were all on the houses, where the oblique beam of sun streamed in through a thousand enormous over-polished windows and lit up the interiors.
    They looked like all the other Dutch interiors. Here a lumpy old coal stove, polished brilliant black, and ‘gothic’wooden furniture upholstered in olive-green plush. There the streamlined grey oilburner, and ‘contemporary’ mushrooms of chairs with knitting-needle legs and pink or mauve ‘moquette’. Either the old walnut veneer dresser, with a tiny diamond-pane window showing souvenir German wine glasses (bulbous green, with Loreleis painted on them) and turned chess-queen legs, or the flat slab of imitation teak. All proudly oiled and spotlessly dusted. Everywhere, of course, crammed with climbing plants, far too many lamps and at least three too many tables. Since Pieter de Hooch, Dutch interiors have gone downhill.
    None of this told me much about the people who lived there. Were they too just like the ones in metroland? Had a thousand years in the ‘Veen’ ground produced a local type? There were local names – I saw several ‘Van Veen’ and ‘Van der Veen’ nameplates on doors.
    I found a local weekly paper to take home, and seized on it with joy. And once at home again, I nearly wore it out. The cheap grey newsprint with its smudgy blunt press frayed at the folds and then disintegrated under the well-known heavy police hand and burning police eye of our brilliant officer. It told me a lot. Just for a start, births, deaths and marriages. And a real invention of ‘the little province’ – a careful column telling one who has arrived in our midst, with full details. Address he’s come to, and come from. His name and his profession. All compiled from the careful indexing and filing of our industriously nosy functionaries in that damned town hall.
    Here, in these columns, one could recognize the local people easily. If Piet Jansen the bricklayer from Zaandam had settled in the Dahlia Street, and Ria Bakker the secretary from Maassluis was now filling the Widow Pump’s back room in the Vondel Street, it was doubtless fascinating to the locals, but not to me. Luckily, one could always tell.
    The locals had ludicrous names. Ook and Goop and Unk.Surnames as bad, and clans of course – generations of intermarriage no doubt.
    â€˜Cold