English
I was five, and my dad spoke to God, who was a Catholic. So we spoke to Him, as did the Protestants, but we did not speak to them. And we never bought in their stores, as they had smashed our altars and stolen our churches.
On Sundays, following High Mass in our gaudy replacement cathedral on the outskirts of town, my dad and I made mixed pleasure trips in and around Haarlem, where we lived, usually, much to my chagrin, also taking my mother, who never went to Mass and only pretended to be a Catholic.
This time we rode the trams – in the late nineteen-forties, large parts of Holland’s regional tramways were still in business- to the scenic village of Schoorl, right behind the Kennemer North Sea Dunes.
It was a hot Summer’s day, and as we walked the village main with its quaint wooden farmhouses, half-hidden behind trees and rose gardens, a cloying odor grew thicker and thicker. Poop with a generous squirt of pee, like a night stool, only much stronger. Was I right?
‘Almost, son’, my fount of all knowledge answered, ‘almost right, but not quite. Now pay attention. In this instance, we don’t call it poop, but beer1 ’. He paused a long moment for me to ingest the learning. ‘Beer. That’s the proper Dutch word for people’s night soil, big business and small business mixed.´
He explained that Schoorl as yet had no sewer system and people used the outhouse. Twice a week, he added, the brimming and sloshing beer barrels were exchanged for clean, or at least empty, ones. Never on Sundays.
‘Now, in England’, my dad laughed heartily, ‘in England, they have a little rhyme for this. He stopped in the middle of the road and assumed a declamatory stance. My mother dissociated herself and ambled on. Not far, this time, for the rhyme, if indeed it was one, was very short:
I peez in ze goatstain , my dad intoned, a smirk on his face, I poop on a pot now, awwentoo on ze ton2. I waited in awe, expecting more. ‘Don’t you think it’s funny?’, my dad said, ‘I think it’s very funny. Well, maybe you’re a mite young for this sort of thing. Anyway, now you speak English!’
We regrouped and went home. In the tram, my mother sat in another compartment, as my guffawing dad and I kept rehearsing the English beer barrel rhyme until I knew it by heart.
*
I was eleven. Times had changed and more change was in the air. Most Catholics, including my dad, now talked to the Protestants if they had to. Our family had grown with two additional boys, intruders for whom I felt absolutely no affection at all. They were my mother’s sons.
We had moved to Enschede, near the German border and my mother hated it there. Almost as much as she hated me. We bitched and sniped all the time, teetering on the brink of open warfare. Increasingly, my father sided with the enemy. When domestic bliss could only be bought by reprisals, he gave in to her whining –‘hit him, hit him!' - and hit me.
I had skipped a class in grammar school because they thought I was clever, then another one because they thought I was crazy.
This morning, I would start secondary school, not the classic gymnasium, but the business-oriented ‘HBS’ derivative. I would arrive a complete stranger. A big one, too. I was a head taller than other boys my age, and I saw eye to eye with most teachers: a sure way to get you into trouble, especially when you have a myopic squint in your right eye and a glint of disdain in the other.
Well, at least I wouldn’t be the school bum. On my wrist, its dial on the inside, the pilot’s way, I wore my antimagnetic 21 jewel shock-proofed genuine leather strapped sports watch. I would take notes using a Mont Blanc look-alike, with an iridium-clad 18 carat gold pen and a snorkel type filler mechanism which never leaked dramatically. Needless to say that my ink was Royal Blue.
As we had missed the introductory meeting because my mother threw a tantrum when I kept refusing to wear my herringbone plus fours (called poop catchers3 in Dutch), I rode my bike into a multiple void – new school, new classmates, across the tracks, a better part of town.
There it was, classroom 1-D. Teacher-less pandemonium had not died down yet, so I furtively slipped into one of the backbenches, opened my calendar and checked my watch, the pilot’s way. I also leaked an almost imperceptible trace of Royal Blue ink on the wooden desk.
Kick-off would be an ‘introduction to English’, by Mr. De Bruin. There he was, a small, rotund man in tweeds, struggling with a pile of books and a big pipe. “Good morning,” he said. “He says goedemorgen, the girl on my right explained in a whisper. She resembled my mother. In Dutch, De Bruin added: “Some of you children” –children!– “may already have a smattering of English. If you do, please step right up and show us what you can do. “
For a second or so, nobody moved, or if they did, I beat them to the draw. “Ah”, Mr. De Bruin intoned, “The tall boy” – boy! – at the back of the class. Come forward, son, don’t be shy now, and let’s hear what you have to say.” It was a long walk to the blackboard, and I dragged my feet while I tried to raise my father’s rhyme from the dead.
I peez… There it was! ‘I peez in the goatstain...’ Giggles. ‘…awwentoo on the ton’. Hoots and catcalls. When the uproar finally died down, Mr. De Bruin said, in Dutch: “It seems we have a humorist in our midst. We can only hope that he will soon learn that life and getting a proper education are very serious matters, not to be laughed at.
They hunted me down, after school, a pack of six. I had never been much of a runner, though not for want of exercise. Also cracked was the dial of my watch. Thank God I wore it on the inside of my wrist, the pilot’s way.
***
1 pronunciation ee = [e:]
2 I piss in the sink, I shit on the can now, sometimes on the barrel .
3 drollenvanger