3rd story of the war in my backyard
Kees Vanderheyden (keesv@SYMPATICO.CA)
Sat, 8 Mar 1997 14:36:38 -0500
Dear Tom,
I think I just sent you one of my unpublished stories. But I'm not
sure it went well. So I send it again. I'm sorry. Au revoir Kees
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 Œ44, 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