Somewhere in another lifetime...
One of the best friends of my youth was a boy called Gerrard McCaffery. He left school at 15 and got a job on the boats. He passed his driving test on his seventeenth birthday and the next day bought a Jag. Second hand, walnut dashboard, leather seats for the girls. He’d graduated from his Lambretta but was still a Mod. Ben Sherman shirts Pirate Radio off the coast. One summer I had an Austrian girlfriend. I can’t remember her name but I strongly associate that period with Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum and ‘Hey Jude’. Take a sad song and make it better. Then I went off to university, discovered a bit of the world and came back to find that Gerrard had taken over the Austrian girl and was about to marry her.
Nearly thirty years later, the phone rang and it was Gerrard, calling from Austria. Quite unexpected and fairly boring. Our friendship had only ever been about being Mods and chewing Juicy Fruit while trying to pick up girls on holiday from the East End in his Jag. By the time he phoned I didn’t do any of those things. All I really remember about the call was him saying something like “I’m quite surprised you’re still alive. I thought you and Hughie Short might have died of drugs or drink by now”. He was a ski instructor.
It was exciting to be going on board. We were a bit early, so we had a drink in the Cliff Hotel in
Dovercourt, then made our way to Parkeston. The football pitch where I often played for Little Oakley against Marine Shops had been concreted over and was now a lorry park edged with wire fencing and searchlights on pylons. As we approached, the security bloke emerged from his kiosk. He looked like he’d watched too many American films. Sunglasses at this time of night? He tried to look as if he was taking us seriously as nautical terrorists - two white-haired people in a respectable family saloon. He directed us, militarily, to our parking place. We embarked some time later, a bit delayed as Jacky became absorbed
looking at a series of embroidered panels made by the womenfolk of Harwich and depicting the town’s history and landmarks in a charmingly naive style. There was, for me, a pleasant familiarity about the whole scene.
I had the top bunk with C.J.Samson and ‘Sovereign’. It was rough getting up there as I hadn’t noticed the ladder. We both slept comfortably and soundly. Before we knew it, we were wandering towards the train at the Hoek at 8 o’clock on a quiet Sunday morning. We had to change at Rotterdam.
Classic landscape from the train. Dykes, cows, distant sharp church spires, the occasional farmhouse, diggers digging ditches, stands of poplars. Opposite us was a living consequence of Dutch colonialism. A young girl with a doll’s face, Indonesian bone structure like Java man. Interesting profile, wearing a hood edged with imitation rabbit fur.
We got to Amsterdam at about ten o’clock. The city’s early success was partly down to a man called Willem Beukelszoon who, in 1385, invented a new way of curing herrings. This meant that the herrings lasted longer before going rotten and so could be exported. Together with the beer trade the herring business helped Amsterdam’s merchants to get the economy going. The rest is history...
Except for dodgy people
Coming out of the station millions of bikes, leant together in rows of Olympian proportions. On the
pavements. We found the Hotel France where it had always been, on the Ouderzijds Kolk, the edge of
Chinatown and the Red Light District. We chose the Hotel France because it was fairly cheap and left our bags there till
check-in time later.
We wandered down the nearest street. Indonesian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian establishments, an
English Pub with a sign in the window saying “Everybody Welcome Except For Dodgy People”, a bread shop with the word Brood in big letters across its window, a place for foot massage, a gay bar, an Asian Fusion eating house, some souvenir shops, rubbish bags, dog shit, the smell of skunk, long-legged girls on sit up and beg bikes, picaresque and seedy. I read later that this street, the Zeedijk, has seen its fair share of wine, women, drunken sailors and drugs for several centuries. A Bhuddist temple, Chinese Acupuncture, a Scandinavian Pub, Japanese, Portuguese and Greek restaurants, Tapas bars, a shop selling requisites for dope smokers, small tins with pictures of cannabis leaves on their lids.
Entering Nieuwmarkt we saw the last surviving gatehouse of old Amsterdam, a great hulk with turrets, the whole thing built of brick, in 1488. Amazing bricklaying. For some time it was used as a place for weighing market produce and was known as the Waag, which means weigh in Dutch. We sat at a cafe, as you do in European capitals, and had a coffee or, in my case, a glass of hot water. And a green tea bag, separately. Along from us sat a woman wearing high leather boots, a mini-skirt, a blouse unbuttoned to display an expansive cleavage and on top a three quarter length plastic leopard skin coat. She looked like she’d had a hard night.
Joods
We proceeded down St. Antoniesbreestraat, where the Jewish community used to live. They’d never been made to live in a ghetto in Amsterdam. Nearly all the old houses had been knocked down in the 1970s and replaced with uninspiring apartment blocks. We passed smelly coffee shops and Rembrandt’s house, making our way to the Joods Historisch Museum. A man wearing a natty white skullcap came out of a door into the Portuguese synagogue. We carried on into the museum and entered into a reconstructed synagogue. A large Torah scroll unrolled on a lectern, silver jads, long handles of silver with little hands at one end, not backscratchers, used by the cantor to keep his place while reading from the huge Torah. Also on display a set of circumcision instruments.
Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition came to Amsterdam. Many were rich merchants with good global business contacts so they were welcomed by the Dutch. A couple of centuries later, the poor Ashkenazi relations arrived in Amsterdam as refugees from Lithuania, Poland and Germany.
The Portuguese connection seemed to be quite strong. The Portuguese synagogue was the largest synagogue in Europe when it was built. In the museum/replica synagogue there’s an imposing oil painting of a Portuguese dude by the name of Soussa. He’s sitting handsomely in a wealthy setting, a sheen of great wealth on his face. He’s holding an orange in his hand to symbolise his acceptance, as a Jew, into the Amsterdam establishment. He seems to be wearing lipstick, I thought. I was fascinated to learn that of the 400 or so plantations owned by the Dutch in the northern part of South America, more than a hundred were owned by Sephardi Jews.
Another interesting Jew who lived in Amsterdam was the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He was Jewish but didn’t make himself very popular with the Jewish community as he didn’t believe in God. I studied some of Spinoza’s philosophy at university, along with that of all the other philosophers discussed in Bertrand Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy”, which I really enjoyed and read from cover to cover. Spinoza argued in favour of a rather attractive philosophy known as pantheism, according to which the ‘divine’ exists in everything in the natural world, a bit like some Eastern religions such as Buddhism. To most Jews in Amsterdam, though, he was just a trouble-maker and they sort of sent him to Coventry.
Another trouble-maker was a man called Sabbatai Zevi, pronounced Zvee. He was a serious bullshitter who pronounced himself to be the new messiah. Plenty of Dutch and other Jews were taken in and started to worship Zevi. Later, people lost faith in him, particularly when he converted to Isalm under the Ottomans!
Some other items caught my attention in the museum. A sort of flag made out of buttons to advertise the wares of a lady called Sally Polack who, like the great Argentinian bandoneon player El Polaco, must have come from Poland. Lots of little lead seals originally attached to meat as a sign that it was kosher. Photos of poor Jews in Amsterdam in the early twentieth century - hawkers, rag and bone men, matchbox and shoelace sellers all living in poverty in slum conditions.
Duende Dos
That evening we walked across to the western side of the city. It was all a bit more spacious than our hotel area. Big trees in spring leaf hanging over canals, of which there were plenty. We saw people sitting on their front door steps drinking wine, overlooking one of the canals. We passed houseboats large and small. On the deck of one was a huge pot with a lilac tree growing out of it. I had the pleasure of using a ‘pissoir’ for the first time since my visit to Paris at the age of fifteen. It was odd to be urinating while looking out through the metal grille at young people picknicking on a landing stage below on a warm, relaxed spring Sunday evening.
We were heading for a tapas bar called ‘Duende Dos’ on Nieuwe Willemsstraat in the Jordaan (Garden) area of the city. The place was pretty full when we arrived at around 7 o’clock, everybody tucking into their tapas, drinking wine, families, some Spanish, pictures of flamenco dancers on the walls with the word ‘Pasion’ written on them in large letters. A cheerful buzz. As it happens, I’ve been having a bit of a Spanish phase recently. A few weeks ago I went to a concert by the wonderful flamenco guitarist Juan Martin; I’ve been looking again at the BBC ‘Por Aqui’ book to revise my Spanish, I’m learning a tune called Latinish Gypsy on the guitar, been reading ‘Hacienda’ by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, went to see a film version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ “Love in the Time of Cholera”, playing again my Radio Tarifa CDs and, most recently enjoying some TV programmes presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon about Spanish art and culture.
Actually none of these were really reasons for us heading to Duende Dos. Instead, we went to hear the music of a gypsy jazz guitarist born in Vietnam of English parents. His name is Robin Nolan and he’s written the most useful tuition books on gypsy jazz guitar playing. His band was playing later so in the meantime we amused ourselves with a bottle of Rioja, several aceitunas, boquerones, alcochofas, patatas bravas and an ensalada espinacas. Our waitress was so helpful and everything tasted good. At the table behind us was a Spanish slightly extended family. One of the women had a stammer. I’d never heard anyone stammer in Spanish before.
The musicians turned up - two lead jazz guitars, double bass and rhythm guitar played by John Friedrichs. Jacky sat next to his wife and had a good chat. Wonderful music, just the right atmosphere. Sitting with us were two young musician friends of the band. They were students, one studying composition, one a gypsy jazz guitarist, so I bought them a couple of beers. One was from Turkey, the other from Greece, historical enemies but best mates.
During the interval I had a chat with John the rhythm player . He gave me a few tips. I said I practise with a metronome. He said “Do you know how to practise with a metronome?” I said I thought I did but maybe I didn’t. John said that what you have to do is set the metronome going and tap your foot, keep tapping until you get the rhythm in your whole body and only then start playing your chords. John said you have to do this for two hours a day for ten years. That’s what he’d done, anyway. I bought Robin Nolan a beer by way of thanking him for his tuition books. After the interval the band was joined by an alto sax player who was also a fine musician. More or less a perfect European evening.
Johnny Sahib
I woke on Monday morning feeling weird and claustrophobic in our hotel room with no window so went out for a stroll to clear my head. I just wandered around the block, relieved to find that it was a cooler day. Just walking, getting my head together, on a canal bridge when a woman passed on a bike and addressed me in Dutch. I walked on, half awake, and the woman called out “Hey, Johnny, don’t go away. You wanna buy my bike? I don’t really want to sell it but I need some money”.
She looked Indo-Chinese, I imagined her to be from Vietnam but maybe more likely Indonesian, Dutch East Indies. Another consequence of colonialism. I said I didn’t want to buy the bike. She looked me in the eyes and said “You wanna come with me?”, in a quiet Eastern female voice. She was quite pretty in a Dutch East Indies kind of way. “No, my wife’s in the hotel just round the corner, but thanks for asking”.
“Can you give me a few coins, just a little something? I can’t even afford the metro”. I didn’t say “Why do you need the metro when you’ve got a bike?” and gave her a few Euros. She thanked me and we went on our ways, me feeling weirder than ever at the thought conjured up in my mind by this encounter. Especially her calling me Johnny, like Surabaiya Johnny or Johnny Sahib. I reflected on the way that there was still a kind of colonialism in the relationship between the woman and her clients. The same poverty and vulnerability, the same abuse of power. I found it all very sad, as she was probably a heroin addict and had, no doubt, stolen the bike to get some money, a common practise among Amsterdam junkies I think. What a life...Johnny.
Alive, alive-O
I ambled back to the hotel and walked into a broom cupboard next to the door at the bottom of the stairs. A very strange pre-breakfast interlude altogether.
The arrangement at the Hotel France is for guests to take breakfast at the next door establishment, the Molly Malone Irish Pub. As we walked into the dark bar, Sting’s weedy voice came through as piped music. “Message in a Bottle”. Wooden casks lined the walls, labelled ‘Poteen’, ‘Klarenaer’, ‘Jameson’, ‘Paddy’, ‘Korewijn’, ‘Roggenaer’, ‘Taainagel’.
Breakfast was pretty lousy, crappy bread, jam in plastic containers, slabs of processed Gouda, all designed to get lots of people fed with something in as short a time as possible at the lowest possible cost. Good fun, though. Sting moved on to “So Lonely” or was it “Sue Lawley”? An old French couple sat silently beside us. Everything cramped, terrible seating arrangement, surrounded by all things Oirish - a copy of The Irish Times, empty bottles of Hennessy cognac and Coleraine whiskey.
Tucking into a slab of processed Gouda, I made Jack laugh by saying “Well, I’ve already walked into a broom cupboard and been propositioned by a Vietnames prostitute and it’s only breakfast time”.
Button Heaven
Our plan was to go to the Noordemarkt. On our way there we saw the customary array of long-legged young Dutch women bearing down on us from their sit up and beg bikes, plastic flowers adorning their baskets, gingham check plastic seat covers. The longest femurs in the world.
We passed a dusty shop window in which the sole item on display was the severed leg of a mannequin, wearing a black stocking. I took a photo and then noticed that some wag had signed it in chalk on the wall next to the window frame ‘Man Ray ‘07’.
At Noordemarkt we saw a man selling glass and tile cutters. He demonstrated the efficiency of the tool to an enthralled crowd, cutting glass and tiles without a hitch. By the time we got there, he had only small fragments left. The cutters came with a guarantee that there was no way they would work anything like as well when you tried to cut a tile or a sheet of glass at home.
The market consisted, unsurprisigly, of a bewildering mosaic of stalls, some selling clothes, others ‘antiques’.One had the neck of a not very distinguished old guitar for sale, along with a His Master’s Voice type of record player.
At the button stall, I witnessed Jacky’s Assumption into heaven. All sorts of buttons, mostly round, but not all, different sizes, textures, patterns, finishes, colours. We spent a good half hour there, coming away with 40 Euros worth of buttons, three old postcards and an interesting label which I had bought because it had the word Surabaiya on it.
The Rijksmuseum
We walked all the way down to the Rijksmuseum. On the way we admired a lamp post which, like most of the others in Amsterdam, had ivy winding round it as part of the ironwork design. This particular lamp post also had a complete bicycle tyre on the ground around it.
Monday seems to be late-opening day, most of the shops being closed until after lunch. “The Rijksmuseum Is Open”, declared a huge sign on the front of the building. The museum is being refurbished and only one wing of it is open, showing an exhibition of the “Masterpieces” of the collection. The logo for this exhibition was a capital M. Boring or what? Anyway, we didn’t mind seeing only the masterpieces so bought a couple of entry tickets from a nice lady who sneezed violently. I said “Bless you”. She explained that if you sneeze three times in Holland, the sun will shine next day. She added that, in her experience, this never happens.
The first room had written on one of its walls “After the 80 years war (1568-1648), the Dutch expelled their Spanish rulers and established an independent state”. I think the Spanish ruled at that time basically because of marriage with Hapsburgs. During the 80 years war, Amsterdam first supported Spain. Then, after about 10 years, Amsterdam switched allegiance in 1578 in a U-turn known as ‘The Alteration’. After this, the city was very definitely Protestant, as the Reformation spread through most of northern Europe.
The first two paintings I looked at were large canvases of sea battles made using pen and ink. I’d never seen this technique before - it seems to produce a sort of cloudy, ghostly look. Both were painted by Willem van der Welde, an early war-artist who travelled with the Dutch fleet, made sketches as the battles were happening and later worked them up into large paintings in his studio. ‘The Battle of Terheide, painted in 1657, must be at least ten feet wide and about eight feet high. It depicts hundreds of ships, going back into the distance (i.e. higher up on the canvas) and records the blockade that English ships put on Dutch harbours in 1653. During the battle, the Dutch commander Maarten Tromp was killed.
The second of van der Welde’s pen paintings is ‘The Battle of Livorno’, painted a few years after the event in 1655. It shows the English ship ‘Samson’ going up in flames after being hit by a shot from the Dutch man o’ war ‘De Haalve Maan’, captained by Cornelius Tromp. There are masses of English sailors in the water, a jumbled crowd of them tumbling down, some clinging to burning masts. Horrendous. Each figure is carefully represented and, although the painting is several feet wide and high, the figures are each only about three inches tall. On the stern of the ‘Samson’ is a slick graphic motif of ‘The Man In The Moon’...
Then an allegorical painting, 1614, by Adriaen Pieterz van der Verme, depicting the competition between Protestants and Catholics to win the souls of ordinary Dutch people. The Protestants wear black while the Catholics wear monkish habits. The Protestants in their boat, and the Catholics, including a Bishop with his mitre, fish from their boats, using nets to try to catch the peoples’ souls. On the left bank, the Protestant reformers, on the right bank the Papists, the old religion.
In a cabinet we saw some artefacts associated with the Dutch colonial exploits, objects owned or stolen by the merchants of the Dutch East India Company, claimed to be the largets trading company in the world at that time. One of the early multinationals. The object that caught my attention was a slender wooden box about 20 inches long, made in either South India or Sri Lanka, somewhere between 1675 and 1700. The outside surfaces of the box were decorated with finely carved ivory plates. The carved plates were fixed to the box later and mainly showed floral motifs. It was actually a case to contain one of the characteristic long-stemmed pipes that you see in old Dutch paintings. The label said “Dutch merchants smoked their pipes wherever they went”.
The Dutch West India Company, the DWI, is referred to in several of the works on display. The DWI operated in Brasil, Suriname and one or two other places in the Caribbean region, as well as in North America. They traded in furs, gold, sugar and slaves. Something to be proud of.
Next, I studied a painting done in 1680 by Melchior d’Hondecoeter, an artist who specialised in the representation of birds. An undercoater. This picture showed a pelican, some ducks, a casuary, a flamingo and an African crowned crane (as far as I can remember, the national bird of Uganda). The painting was commissioned by stadholder Willem III and was intended for Het Loo Palace, where Willem and Mary had a menagerie of exotic animals.
Then a violin, complete with strings, made of earthenware, faience, around 1705. The violin is covered back, front and sides with the Dutch tile blue. On the belly, a picture of people dancing in a dance hall, on the back a fiddler plays in front of an inn. I started to wonder how resonant it would be if played, and then read the label which said it was just an ornament and not meant to be played.
A beautiful still life of fruit, flowers and shells, painted in 1671 by Balthasar van der Arst. And then an amazing rendition of fine lace in Rembrandt’s 1639 painting of a young woman called Maria Trip. Meindert Hobbema paintings like the landscapes you see from the train between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. When I was 16 one of my favourite paintings was Meindert’s “Road with Poplars”, only seen in not very good reproduction in a Thames and Hudson World of Art book. Lots of roads with poplars in rural Essex, too. Next, a portrait of Ephraim Bueno, a renowned 17th century physician and scholar. I think Ephraim may have been one of the Sephardi Jews.
Next, a most memorable small painting. A little crowd of people stood in front of Vermeer’s “The Kitchen Maid”, transfixed. It was like a magnet, drawing the viewer into its calmness. The only movement in the painting is the stream of milk being poured from a jug. The colours, half blue, half light grey/ochre just sit together and send out a feeling of spiritual balance. Hypnotic.
We looked at some Pieter de Hooch and Paul Sanredam. Jacky said “It’s quite nice to see these paintings of the streets because they’re just like the streets we’ve just walked down”.
In the end I wondered why there were no Breughels. It was because Breughel was Flemish, mostly Belgium, rather than Dutch. I don’t think there are many Breughels in Belgium either. Vienna’s probably best.
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
That evening, we had a drink outside a cafe in Nieuwmarkt to the sound of a very bad, very loud band playing in the square. On one of the bars in the square was written “Boulevard des Reves Brises”, rather Dylanesque, I thought.
Later we had a meal in an unusually spacious (for Cramsterdam) Vietnamese restaurant on the picaresque Zeedijk. Broken dreams, drunken sailors.
Our Dear Lord in the Attic
The next morning, we had breakfast at Molly Malone’s again, cramped, little elbow room. Bland slices of Edam with boiled eggs, a strange environment full of sleepy people,Sting still straining on “Message in a Bottle”, in his strangulated voice, Sue Lawley again and Desert Island Discs. “In this desert that I call my soul, You always play the starring role”. Melodramatic or what?. Sting would choose all his own songs to take to the desert island.
Jacky deftly pilfered several rolls, eggs, slices of cake that we would need on our journey home. The three Japanese people sitting at our table politely took no notice. They were actually concentrating hard on their fourth and fifth frankfurters and their mounds of scrambled egg. The climax of Jacky’s performance came when she snatched the largest apple, in a daring raid on the fruit bowl, on our way out, dextrously transferring it to her bag to join the other victuals sectreted therein. During breakfast, she also found time to clarify the meaning of the word ‘popinjay’ for me. As I said, I’ve been reading C.J.Samson’s “Sovereign”, which I’d strongly recommend to friends with a historical bent.
We went to see a canalside house where, in 1663, a hosiery merchant called Jan Hartman built a church in his attic. His wife, Lysbeth Jans, came from a family of compass makers. A big demand for compasses at that time.
In the drawing room was a box bed. People didn’t have separate bedrooms in those days and some say that they slept sitting up. It was certainly a very short bed. There was also a cabinet with painted panels depicting scenes in the life of the Prodigal Son, who had “squandered his inheritance and returned home to a loving father”. This reminded us a bit of John. One of the panels showed the son being enthusiastically prodigal, his arm around a young woman, his hand squeezing her bare breast as she holds a glass of wine in her hand while a cellist and a violinist serenade the fun-loving couple.
At the top of the otherwise domestic house was a perfectly formed Catholic church. This was the Reformation yet, in tolerant Amsterdam, the authorities turned a blind eye to Catholics worshipping, even though Catholicism was officially banned. It was OK as long as the building in which they worshipped didn’t look like a Catholic church.
To me, the church looked surprisingly big. Most of the space was taken up by rows of chairs, which could accomodate something like 150 members of a congregation. The altar was ornate. Around the walls hung paintings about ‘The Assumption of the Virgin’ and ‘The Lamentation of Christ’. Some putti, with a label which read ‘Twee Putti’ in Dutch. And a pulpit that could swivel back into a recess behind the altar, to save space.
Behind the altar, we looked into a cabinet that contained three crucifixes in bottles, like ships in bottles. Sting’s breakfast message made flesh. Also, some rosary beads. In Dutch, a rosary is a rosencrantz, apparently. It made me wonder what guildernstern meant. It then made me wonder what ‘Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead’ meant. Did it mean that rosaries are dead, that the Protestants have won? One rosary had large beads in the form of skulls, ten smaller beads in between the larger ones.
We also learnt about the Miracle of Amsterdam which happened in 1345. A sick man had vomited after being given the wafer during his last rites. The vomit, including the eructated body of Christ, was thrown into the fire in the sick man’s house. The wafer, miraculously, refused to burn. This was considered to be seriously meaningful, so much so that the wafer was taken to the Oude Kirke for safe keeping. But, again miraculously, the wafer re-appeared in the house of the sick man. Once again it was taken back to the Oude Kirke. After a while, it turned up once more in the sick man’s house. He couldn’t get rid of it. I don’t know if the sick man died in the meantime, while all this transsubstiation was going on, but I wouldn’t have blamed him. Anyway, this was the Amsterdam Miracle and people from around Holland and further afield started to make pilgrimages to Amsterdam to celebrate the wafer’s strange behaviour. Incredible, really. Still, it was only 1345 and most people were pretty stupid then.
In the two kitchens downstairs were some charming faience tiles on the walls. Blue drawings, thin lines, on off-white backgrounds, Delft blue, just one small figure or an animal in the centre of each tile. Wikipedia explains that “faience is the conventional name in English for fine tin-glazed pottery on a delicate pale buff body. The invention of a pottery glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an oxide of tin to the slip of a lead glaze, was a major advance in the history of pottery”.
This technique for tin-glazed earthenware was brought to Andalucia by the Moors. Later, some of this was exported from Southern Spain to Italy, often via the island of Majorca, from which majolica gets its name. By the late fifteenth century, tin-glazed earthenware was being made in Italy, particularly in the town of Faenza, the French for which is ‘Faience’. Apparently, “a painted majolica ware on an opaque white ground” was exported from Faenza not long afterwards. Some of this Italian faience was imported by the Dutch, who soon began to make their own, particularly in the town of Delft. Delftware is usually decorated in blue on a white or off-white background. This, in turn, was influenced by the blue and white porcelain that was
imported into Holland from China in the early sixteenth century.
This museumhouse is called the Amstelkring or “On’s Lieve Heer op Solder”, Our Dear Lord in the Attic. It also had a confessional. Today, you can go into the bit where the guilty sinner would have sat and looked through the screen towards a latent peadophile. But you can’t go into the bit where the priest would have sat. A sheet of clear perspex across the front, securing the imbalance of power that has endured through the centuries.
An old dream
As we left Oudezidjes Kolk, teams of men, in orange overalls, were putting up orange bunting and orange balloons all the way down the Zeedijk, ready for Queen’s Day. On the train going back to Rotterdam, we again saw lots of herons, ditches, dykes and diggers. Between Vlaardingen and Maasluis I noticed a cruise ship with a reproduction of the Mona Lisa printed on its huge funnel. Weird. The ship was named ‘Mona Lisa’. Cruise ship aesthetics.
We arrived at the Hoek in good time so decided to have a quick look round the small town. Would it be a mirror image of Harwich? As we left the station, we were greeted by some sheep.
We had a drink in the nearest bar, the Cafe Prins Hendryk. This, for me turned out to be a memorable experience but it’s not easy to explain it well. I had once, or maybe more than once, a dream in which I was in a bar in Holland. I grew up in Harwich and my dad often piloted the ferry to the Hoek of Holland so throughout my childhood there was mention of The Hoek. It’s also to do with illustrations in school text books. Line drawings of Dutch people, a farmer with a cap on and a bulbous, friendly Dutch potato-nose, with canals and windmills and cows in the background, perhaps in a geography book, maybe in the “Learn Dutch!” book that I once got out of the local library circa 1961, maybe avatars of the illustrations in our school French books, schoolboy stereotypes. This sort of stuff all mixed together. I pushed open the door of the Prins Hendryk and there I was, in that dream, those recollections, those fifty year old associations. Not deja vu, though, something quite different. Wonderful.
Old-style, lots of wood, everything wood except the things that were made of brass or glass. A seafaring theme, not even a theme, nothing so self-conscious, just a bar in the Hoek of Holland. I just felt so strongly that my dad had drunk in this place more than once. The barman was one of those line drawings, too. He brought me a beer and the special offer Koffie mit Appelgeback for Jacky. Black and white photographs of old ships and ferries decorated the walls in a way unnecessarily as the whole place was like a ship, like my dream.
As we sat there, me in a sort of happy trance, a fat woman played on a gambling machine, taking deep drags on a cigarette and looking somewhat unhealthy. She was wearing anoutdoor sports type jacket with the word ‘Annapurna’ written on the logo on her sleeve. Wearing her heart attack on her sleeve, I thought, childishly.
A young woman, local, just like Harwich people are in Harwich, confident in their smallworld security, was just going out of the door, in her unsporty grey tracksuit when the barman said something to her, probably about her swollen belly. She turned round sharply and, laughing, proudly displayed her distended body, at which the barman shouted “Sexy!”. Another little Hoek van Hollander on the way.
We wandered out and toward the ferry, noticing some bandy-legged bikers in full leathers and enjoying the signs everywhere that said “Ein Prettige Reis”. We had a pretty journey.
