Amsterdam,
Unknown photographer – © Newspapers.com, reproduced with permission
I have been watching them all morning; those bicycle wheels going round and round and round the Leidseplein.
There is something hypnotic about it. Something a little frightening too. Like watching life on a perpetual treadmill.
But there they go — democracy on wheels — swinging along, wheeling and turning together, five and six abreast, like a well-drilled circus act. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; postman, politician, priest. Up and down go the sturdy Dutch knees and round and round go the wheels pedalling through the wind and rain in a steady, changeless rhythm.
A nation that knows where it’s going, you would say. A nation that goes butting into life head down, knees working like pistons, as if adversity was just a stiff head-wind after all…
A few weeks ago this small country suffered one of the cruellest disasters in its long and arduous history. In a single night one-tenth of its whole area disappeared under flood water. Enough tragedy there, you would have thought, to inspire a dozen epic poems.
But I have just been reading a remarkable paragraph in a publication called the “World News Bulletin,” a Dutch newspaper distributed free to foreign tourists in the Netherlands.
Let me read it to you:
“Life in Holland has resumed its normal course except that the people are working doubly hard. The sea which has swallowed up the fertile soil will gradually be driven back. Visitors to Holland next summer will find the majority of the gaps in the dykes closed, many houses repaired, and most of the fields green again.”
Such complacency! Such wonderful prosaic optimism! “Life has resumed its normal course except that people are working doubly hard.” Only a Dutchman could see it like that.
And, reading it, I thought of a story someone told me yesterday — about an old farmer on the drowned island of Walcheren who refused, blasphemously, to be rescued. When they pointed out that his land was under four feet of water he threatened them with a pitchfork. So they left him. And for all I know he is still there, baling out…
Now, of course, it’s easy to be misled by stories like that. Easy to see all Dutchman like that gallant, pig-headed old farmer hanging on blindly to what was his. After all, isn’t that the motto of the House of Orange “Je Maintiendrai” (What I have I hold)?
But I am finding that there is more to it than that. There is a younger generation of Dutchmen growing up who have come to the conclusion that stubborn courage in an emergency is not enough.
And I am thinking particularly of Kees Colenbrander.
I had not met Kees Colanbrander before last night. Now, after a few hours in his company, I think I know him very well indeed.
Kees lives with his charming, vivacious young wife, Marlyn, and his two sturdy youngsters — David, aged five, and Matthias Robin, who is just six months — in a three-roomed apartment at No. 89, Gerrit van der Veen, in New South Amsterdam.
Kees is 35 and works in the Discount Department of the Netherlands Bank. He is a Doctor of Laws at Utrecht University. So his is a steady job with sure, if slow, promotion.
But Kees is also something of a man of action. He saw service in the Far East and holds a reserve commission in the Royal Netherlands Marines. And rather often these days, I think, the marine in Kees Colenbrander quarrels with the Doctor of Laws.
The Doctor of Laws, for instance, will argue, with good reason, that the state of Holland’s export trade has never been better since the war. The country is prosperous. The people are happy and well-fed. And that the Dutch guilder — with the possible exception of the Swiss franc — is probably the most acceptable currency in Europe. (And all this might be a straight “quote” from the “World News Bulletin.”)
But this smug self-satisfaction only spurs the Marine into action.
“Yes. That’s exactly what we said in 1938. We were sitting pretty. And then what happened? The war caught us while we were counting our guilders. And after the war we lost the Indies. And what are we now? A very small country enjoying a temporary boom.
“Oh yes! We work hard enough. Per head of population we’re probably the hardest-working people in Europe. But what do we export? Bulbs, chocolate, and cheese!
“It’s time we faced up to realities. In the past our wealth has come from two main sources — from trade with Western Germany and from what used to be called the Dutch East Indies.
“Now Western Germany is on her feet again — and how long she’ll stay there without American support heaven only knows. And as for the Indies — well, they’re gone.”
You have to be a Dutchman to understand the bitterness in his voice when he said that about the Indies. For the Dutch East Indies — Indonesia as they call it now — meant something quite different to the average Dutchman than British India did, for instance, to the average Englishman.
To the Dutchman Java and Sumatra were as much part of Holland as Amsterdam itself.
Try to imagine what it would feel like to wake up one morning and find that Australia was no longer part of the British Commonwealth and you have some idea what the loss of the Indies meant to the Dutch.
But now they’re gone, as Kees Colenbrander said. And there’s no use crying over spilt milk or lost colonial empires.
“It simply means that Holland is a much smaller country than it ever was — and the sooner Dutchmen wake up to that fact the better for all of us.”
For, you see, Kees isn’t thinking of himself or his own generation. As he puts it: “I’m well fixed. I’m not much worse off than I should have been before the war. I own a bicycle instead of a car, it’s true. And it’s also true that there are now 40 men in the bank holding exactly the same academic qualifications as myself, whereas 20 years ago, when there was far more scope, there wouldn’t have been more than 10. Which means, I suppose, that my chances of promotion have been slowed down just that much more.
“But, all things considered, I have a good life. We’re cramped here, as you can see (and I could see only a very comfortable, very compact little apartment where beds disappear into the wall at the press of a button, plenty of books, gay carpets, and some very nice old brass and china), but one day, when the boys are grown up, I hope we’ll move into the country, which is what every Dutchman dreams of doing one day.
“I have the best wife in the world. (And Marlyn, who isn’t at all the blushing type, blushed furiously at that.) We live a very full life. And at weekends there is the beach hut by the sea and we can sail and swim.”
No. It is none of these material things which worries Kees Colenbrander. What disturbs him is the future of young David — just at that moment roaring and splashing in his tub — and a much younger Matthias Robin, lying on his back in his playpen solemnly surveying the ceiling with eyes of real Delft blue.
Kees hopes fervently that they won’t want to follow him into the bank; that they will grow up with skill in their fingers. For what the world is going to need, thinks Kees Colenbrander, is not another generation of tidy bank clerks and good committeemen but men who can do the big old-fashioned jobs — like building bridges and laying railways and sailing into unknown territory. Above all — he thinks — it’s going to need men who aren’t afraid to take risks.
“And if such opportunities don’t exist in the Old World any more — well, I shall be proud to think that any son of mine could become a good American or a good Canadian or a good Australian.”
Strange talk for a young man of only 35, who still looks fit enough to cover a Commando assault course in well under par? Perhaps. But as you penetrate deeper into Europe you find that there aren’t very many really young men around any more.
And you begin to discover something else. That Europe, like Holland, is getting smaller all the time. So that in these little countries many people are looking forward, almost as their only hope, to a day when they will no longer be Dutchmen or Belgians or Luxembourgers but just citizens of the world.
And so the wheels go round and round the Leidseplein. But here and there they are breaking out of the old vicious circle…
Reproduced with permission
© 2024 Newspapers.com
Jerry F 2024
