Re: Memories of a dutch schoolboy in the summer of 44

Kees Vanderheyden (keesv@SYMPATICO.CA)
Sat, 8 Mar 1997 14:24:07 -0500 

Dear Tom,

Here is another of my ( two unpublished) stories of the summer of
44

                       € The pig who went for a ride €

        How we dreamed of stuffing ourselves during the war years -
and for good
reason.  Food was severely rationed for four years. Each member of
the  family
received a ration book which enabled one to get sheets of stamps
of all sorts of
colours. One of the town1s civil servants gave us stamps every
month for meat,
bread, potatoes, butter and milk. We also had a small vegetable
garden and a few
chickens. Thanks to bartering and the black market, my father
managed to obtain
sugar, flour and other goodies. We were totally obsessed with
eating.

        The constant necessity to get food took many hours of
thoughtful planning and
secret machinations on the part of my father. Our family meals
became an
astonishing combination of fertile imagination of mom who
created miracles
with nothing and the subterfuge of dad who succeeded in
uncovering food treats
in the countryside.

        My father had a stroke of luck. Before the war he worked for a
manufacturer
who had given him a sizeable hoard of bolts of wool cloth. Dad cut
these in
lengths and traded them for butter, sausage, lovely farm bread,
meat and Heaven
knows what else. He also carried on an active, ingenious business
so secret that
we largely knew nothing about it. Thanks to such entrepreneurial
arrangements,
every morning my sister Charlotte and I went to get two liters of
fresh milk
from a farmer who lived not very far from our home.

        In the course of the summer of ‘44, several months before
the liberation by the
Canadian forces, Dad managed to negociate for a whole hog. This
pink,  fat porker
held the promise of tasty chops, sausages, head cheese, ham and
other delicacies.
The farmer promised to deliver the animal, freshly slaughtered,  to
our house
early in the afternoon.

        He concealed it in his flat wagon, shaved bare and degutted,
covered with a heap
of branches, and cheerfully set off to our house on
Moergestelseweg Street,
completely unaware that two German soldiers had turned up there
and were in
the process of inspecting ou house with a view to enventual use.
My father
gravely lied to them, saying the house was still contaminated with
diphtheria
and that two of his children had died from that terible scourge. It
was true that
my two little sisters of two years and  two months, Marie-Thérèse
and Angèle,
had died at home in the diphtheria epidemic a year previously, but
no danger
remained at this time. The soldiers wore a puzzled look but
continued wiht their
inspection tour.

        The moment the farmer passed through the garden entrance to
our home, he
spotted the soldiers. Alarmed, he turned his wagon around in a
flash and took off,
heart pounding, down the shaded neigborhood streets. He circled
around numerous
times, passing by the house sharp-eyed, on the ready. My father,
awaiting the
precious cargo, was nervous. It was absolutely forbidden to
traffic in the black
market. If the Germans discovered the portk, the feast was over
and my poor
father hauled off behind bars.

        Happily for Dad and the farmer, the Germans left after their
rigorous
inspection. The coast at last was clear. We had to transform the
big pink pig into
meals of all sorts quickly, for we had no refrigeration. Mother set
to work,
wrapped in her huge white apron. One of the most distasteful
operations remains
engraved in my memory, the slimy fabrication of sausages with
ground pork
injected into tubes made from the intestines. Mother made
kilometers of them,
which hung festooned from the attic beams to dry. Dear pink piggy,
what pleasure
you gave us that memorable autumn of 1944.

Kees Vanderheyden
Mont-Saint-Hilaire, Canada
march 8th 97