Like a Guardian

'Begin at the beginning', my granddaughter, Tracy, told me.

I didn't think so. There was nothing very special about my early childhood; my experiences during and shortly after the war - between ages seven and fourteen - had affected me far more. Bad experiences, but very good ones as well.

When the war began, the fact that my father was Jewish made little difference to me. Not then. But once he was sent to a concentration camp I learned to hate, with a burning, all-consuming hatred. Eventually though, many years later, I managed to overcome my loathing for anything German.

Right from the start my parents knew what to expect, so they taught me to be as independent as possible. Just as well, because although there were long periods when the family was together, I was away for long spells too. Hiding. First in a rear room with a family I didn't know, next with Protestant people in Friesland, where I got used to a new language. After that with a Catholic widow and her two sons, and following the war I stayed with foster parents in Switzerland, learning yet another language and having to adjust to a very different lifestyle. And back to Friesland again.

I can't make that confusing jumble clear by writing a conventional autobiography, starting at the beginning and following a strict chronology. To give a true picture of myself I will have to write this chronicle in the same jumbled way as my early life was. I'll follow the development in broad lines, but I'll include many jumps in time, forward and backwards. That's how my life was, that's how I am, and who I am: living in the present and the future, but haunted by the past.

PART ONE: FOUNDATION

Chapter 1

'Grandpa, do you really want to write all that stuff about yourself?'

'To be honest, Tracy, no, I don't. People kept asking me to. Friends, family.

Maybe being an artist gives obligations? How can I explain it? What if my art is not complete if people can't meet the man behind my work? That would mean I'll have to tell how I became that man in the first place. Tell about my love of words, and my music, and how I tried to reveal my thoughts through my sculptures. It scares me a bit.

I think I'll start by introducing my family.

First of all there is Karen, my wife. Now of course grey, but when I first met her she looked beautiful with her long, dark hair, ready to become a Yiddisher Mamme. She still looks pretty good to me. Her parents: Felix and Elisabeth Augustin - I called them Papa and Mama - were both literary people, especially Mama, who had written several novels and plays and poems and radio plays, and both had translated books as well.

Next my Mum and Dad: Johanna and Maurits Cappèl, Jo and Mauk for short. Dad was one year younger than Mum, and like almost everybody else, he had a birthday every year. Mum did not: she was born on 29 February 1904. Leap year. On the day that occurred only once every four years. When, in 1944, I celebrated my eleventh birthday, Mum celebrated her tenth real birthday! I felt proud having overtaken her.

My grandparents from Dad's side: Opa and 'big' Oma Cappèl, and from Mum's side: Opa and 'little' Oma Beukers. Opa Beukers lived in Edam, where he was a woodcarver and jeweler and very keen gymnast; little Oma ran a grocery and tobacco store in the big front room of the house.

I must tell you a funny thing about Opa Beukers and his twin brother Uncle Frans. In The Netherlands you were not allowed to set up a jewelers business without special diplomas. You had to have a business diploma to prove you knew accountancy and business practices and what not, and a jeweler’s trade diploma as well. And even then you had to send every piece of jewelers you made to a government essaying office! Opa was too much of an artist and couldn't be bothered with all those rules. So, when Opa and Uncle Frans had to sit the jewelers trade exam, one took the theory exam twice, and the other did the practice exam for both of them.

Oma Cappèl was the daughter of the diamond cutter and jeweler Mozes Polak and his wife Marianne. One of ten children.

Opa Cappèl had been the village doctor on the Friesian island Ameland, in the north of the Netherlands, before he became a highly respected psychiatrist in Amsterdam. With two other Dutch psychiatrists he introduced hypnosis as a therapy. I was born in Opa Cappèl's house¹. There was only one minor hitch: just as Mum tried to cross the road to his place, she got severe labor pains. She stood right on the tram rails in the middle of the road, and had to wait till the spasm passed. That was all right, the tram in turn waited for her! And for not-yet-born me. After that it was a normal home birth. Opa must have been very proud to deliver his first grandchild himself. Sadly, he died when I was only six months old.

Meet our children: Roberto and his wife Shirley, Roger and his wife Michelle, and finally the youngest, Naomi.

I have five brothers and sisters, all younger than I am: Trudi, Arthur, Nico, Tom and Joke-Willy.

And by now we have four grandchildren. Starting with the youngest: there is Sarah, a bright eight years old. Her ten-year-old brother Liam - the best of his class - enjoyed mowing the lawn when he was only half his present age. Both are Roger and Michelle's children.

THE YOUNGER CAPPÈLS

Clockwise: Shirley, Gemma, Michelle, Roger, Roberto, Liam, Sarah and Tracy.

GEMMA

After Gemma's best friend, Blaine, got killed in a traffic accident, another friend gave her emotional support. Gemma then recorded her first single.

You wiped the tears from my eyes,

And you didn't pretend to understand.

You told me everything would be OK,

From the first time I believed you were there,

And you actually cared,

And you have no idea what that meant to me.

Roberto and Shirley have two daughters. The younger one, Tracy, at twenty one, is a fine gymnast and cheerleader coach with a wall full of medals. In her spare time she managed to do very well at University, and is now a great teacher.

And finally Gemma. The oldest of our grandchildren, two years older than Tracy. Gemma finished high school, she is the most musical of the bunch with a great voice and she has put out her first CD, a nice single: 'From Me To You'. Gemma is married now to a nice young man, Jason, and has presented us with our first great-granddaughter, Madison!

TRACY

You just can’t help but love and admire her: Tracy. Berto and Shirley’s second daughter is a girl of boundless energy and enthusiasm, a great gymnast and cheerleader coach who really understands children. She is an excellent teacher now too.

So there is our family; now for the memories.

I'll try and balance the bad memories with the pleasant ones. Like the old dreams of the girls I loved.'

'Cool, Grandpa, tell me about them. How old were you when you first fell in love?'²

'You would ask that, wouldn't you, Gemma? Fair enough. Would you be surprised if I had just turned seven? Maybe you'd call it a crush, to me it was love. I thought of her all the time, and it lasted for several years. Her name was Greetje van de Pol, and she lived not far from us on the way to school. They had a small front garden with a kind of iron picket fence and I always waited for her next to the gate. No, not always, sometimes she was early and then she would wait for me so we could walk to school together. She had dark brown curly hair and she was the best singer I could imagine. Every Friday afternoon she was allowed to sing in front of the class, and she always asked me in the morning which song she should sing that day. She looked so beautiful standing there beside the teacher's table, and she kept looking at me all the time while she sang.

On the way to school we couldn't help meeting the Protestant kids going to their School with the Bible at the other end of the village and the Catholic kids going the opposite way. Our Public School was just about halfway between the other schools. We often stopped to take off our wooden clogs to hit them on their heads. They did the same. Not really unfriendly either, it was just a kind of ritual.

We never talked about love. You didn't do that. We talked about her singing and how much I liked it, and that Greetje wanted to be a real singer when she grew up. And about our pet rabbits, and our teacher, Miss Zinkweg. But not about love.

Once, when I had chickenpox, Miss Zinkweg had come to visit me after school and told me Greetje had asked her to say hello to me after she had sung my favorite song in front of the class that day, even though I was sick at home and couldn't hear her. Or maybe because I was sick at home.

And you know what was funny? I had been given a book for my seventh birthday about some kind of creatures that lived in tunnels under the ground. So at night, lying in bed, I would imagine there was a tunnel like that from my bedroom to Greetje's house, and every night I went to see her. And every night I fell asleep before I got there.

I really loved Greetje, until one day when I was almost nine. I remember it as if it happened only this morning. I wore leather shoes that day instead of clogs. She came through her gate just as I was kneeling down to tie my laces that had come undone. I didn't notice her until she was standing very close to me. I looked up and for the first time I saw her face from another angle. It was so weird, as if she were a stranger. She looked so different. I still remember thinking: 'Is that what she looks like?' After that morning my love for her slowly faded away.

Not much later the Germans started to evacuate the whole village. They needed the district, they said, to build their Atlantic Wall, as part of the war effort. Once the war was over we met again. Greetje told me she and her parents had been lodged with a family in Friesland, so they got through the war quite safely. And no, she was not going to be a singer after all, she said. Greetje had become just another girl.'

'Are you going to put that sort of stuff in your autobiography? It’s pretty personal, don't you mind people reading it?'

'Actually, Tracy, I do mind, but after all, you can't write an autobiography and leave out the personal stuff. Good and bad memories, it's all part of the pattern. No, I never wanted to write about my life. I thought what if it actually gets published and all sorts of people read everything I did and felt? Total strangers can then look right inside me. Only people kept asking me to. So, I finally gave in, and I decided if I asked you to help me, and I told a few other people, and of course Karen, that I'll write that autobiography, then I couldn't back out any more.

Of course there is an additional problem: my earliest memories belong to a person who was only two years old, and it will be difficult for a seventy six-year-old to truthfully speak with the voice of that child.

I feel safe to talk about my parents and my uncle and aunty. They're not there anymore, so they won't get hurt if I mention things they wouldn't talk about themselves. Things from the war, things they have tried to forget ever since. But I won't say much about people who are still alive, and I won't use their real names without their permission anyway. That means I'll use a pseudonym for your Dad and your Mum - I'll call them Roberto and Shirley - and for our old friends Heather and James. We lost contact with Heather and James, so I couldn't ask them. Everyone else I'll call by their proper names.

Come to think of it, I may write some parts of the book in the form of short stories. Like when I have to describe something that would be too difficult to tell people face to face. So instead of beginning my story with my earliest memory when I was still learning to talk, at my grandmother's place in Amsterdam, I'll begin with something that happened to me not long ago on Kawau Island. A true story that I'll call 'WHITE BREAD.'³

WHITE BREAD

'The ferry is late today,' Marge says. 'They're getting slack.'

'They're often late nowadays,' Ray agrees, looking across the bay to the distant mainland.

'As long as my ice cream doesn't melt,' Marge worries. 'The other day the grocer hadn't put enough newspaper around it and it had all melted. I don't like slushy ice cream.'

They are sitting on the old weathered seat at the end of the jetty: three elderly people waiting for their groceries. They don't mind living on small Kawau Island away from the regular services, away from roads and shops. In fact, they wouldn't have it any other way.

'Have you ever counted all the hours we've been waiting for something? I bet it'd be more than a year if you add it all up. Fancy spending a whole year out of your life waiting.'

'Don't think like that, Marge,' Ray shakes his head. 'If you weren't sitting here in the sun you'd only be washing dishes or something.'

'But it's true. All my life I've been waiting. Even as a child. You remember the Blitz? When we were waiting for the sound of the bombs, waiting for the all-clear siren?'

'Funny word, Blitz,' Ray says. 'You'd think they'd have a good English word for it after all that time.' Ray combs his fingers through his short, grey hair. 'Funny word.'

Leo doesn't say anything. He was born in Holland and he reckons English is a funny language anyway.

'We were bombed out three times,' Marge tells Leo. 'The last house had no windows left, and no doors. But that was all right, we still had a roof over our heads. Remember? No, you weren't there, were you. It was like a rabbit warren.'

'A rabbit warren?'

'Yeah. Holes everywhere, like in a rabbit warren.' Marge's lively sense of humor must have helped her survive the war. 'Did you celebrate VE Day, Ray?'

'Of course we did. Didn't everybody?'

'Actually, where were you then?'

'At the airport. I was supposed to be on duty. You know, the other pilots and all the crew had gone to town to celebrate. Only I was supposed to stay at the airport. But in the end I thought blow that for a joke! The war is over. So I left too.'

'Good on you.' Marge turns round, faces Leo. 'And you, did you celebrate VE Day too?'

Leo is surprised. How could Marge think even for a second that he had not celebrated that day? The part of Holland where he came from was the very last to be liberated. Only three days before the end of the war. His mind jumps back more than half a century. More than half a century, but it feels like this very morning. Again he is a young boy, waving a homemade Dutch flag at the long lines of Canadian tanks rumbling into the city. Tanks full of dirty, tired but grinning soldiers. And crowds of pale, skinny people waving at them and cheering like mad.

'Yes,' Leo says. 'We celebrated too.'

'We once dropped food parcels on you folks,' Ray says.

'What?' Leo jumps up, to stand facing Ray: 'You, you were one of those pilots who brought us food?'

Ray nods, looks at a fishing boat some way in the distance. He looks down at the water but what he sees instead is the North Sea. Far beneath him. Ahead is the Dutch coast, the dreaded Atlantic Wall of the Germans. He is back in his bomber, in his cockpit. Behind him a load of food parcels instead of bombs, food parcels attached to parachutes.

'We killed a lot of Germans. That was bad. But we were young and there was a war on. Yeah, we brought you your food parcels. We saw many of them break when they hit the ground, but maybe some of them were still alright?'

'Alright? We saved every last crumb!' Leo snorts. 'Our daily ration by then was 400 calories. 400 Calories of boiled sugar beet mixed with salted endive. People were dying. But that day? How could we ever forget it? We all climbed up on our roofs to see you come in. Bombers, a lot of them. All flying very low. And no flak! Just for once the Germans did not shoot at you. You were flying much lower than I'd ever seen you before. Flying so low and dropping those big dark containers full of food. White bread. It came from Sweden, they said. From the Swedish Red Cross. Everybody got half a loaf of white bread that very same day. The most beautiful bread I've ever tasted. Real white bread. And margarine. Clean, soft, yellow margarine. And you brought it to us!'

All three fall silent, reliving those long ago days.

A low rumbling sound cuts short their thoughts. Not planes this time, but the ferry bringing the weekly groceries.

Marge takes a deep breath. 'There's the ferry,' she says.

'Yeah, there's the ferry,' Ray repeats.

The skipper brings her to a stop only inches from the jetty. No need to tie on. His crew, a young woman with red hair, hands over the cartons of groceries. 'How are you, Marge? How's your leg today?' she asks.

'How's yours?' Marge answers back. She often feels uneasy with people 'from outside' and today in particular she does not want her memories interrupted.

The woman looks at Ray, who waves his hands in an 'I don't know' gesture.

Marge stacks her groceries on her old wheelbarrow, then trundles it down the jetty and along the track up to her house.

'I always wondered who brought us that food,' Leo says softly, walking next to Ray on the narrow jetty. 'I always wondered.'

Behind them, in the distance, the ferry disappears around the headland.

THE KEIZERSGRACHT IN AMSTERDAM

Big Oma lived in the house on the far left. The coach house was behind the curved front door, and Uncle Herman’s motor yacht was usually tied up in front.

'Was it really like that, Grandpa?'

'Too right my dear. You can't imagine what it felt to meet one of the men who helped save my life. And Ray⁴ looked terribly pleased too.

Let's talk about something else. Perhaps that earliest memory?

I was not quite two, I think. My grandmother lived in one of those marvelous old houses on the Keizersgracht - the second of the famous three canals in the old part of Amsterdam - together with my Uncle Herman and Aunty Greet. Uncle Herman kept his river launch, the 'Albatros', in the canal right in front of the house. I'll tell you about that boat some other time. The ground floor of the house used to be the coach house and stable, but I was not allowed in there because it had been turned into a garage. The big staircase was of white marble, with a basket on a long cable along the wall. When the milkman came, or the baker, Oma put money in that basket and let it slide down that cable. Then the milkman put the milk bottles in the basket and I was allowed to pull it back up. Oh, and another thing I remember: in the front room they didn't have ordinary wallpaper, but heavy, gold-embossed leather instead. And you should have seen the furniture, all dark red mahogany, and it smelt of old polish wax and fresh coffee. They had a green parrot in a very large brass cage who could sing a lot of songs. But of course I didn't know all that yet when I was still learning to talk.⁵

Oma was sitting in her big leather chair in the middle room and I stood next to her. She tried to make me say the Dutch word for cigar: 'sigaar', but I tried and tried, and every time it sounded like 'sisar'. I don't know why she picked that particular word, probably because of the 'g'. I could hear the difference all right, but no matter how hard I tried, the 'g' sound wouldn't come. I did learn in the end, but not that day. No wonder really, most English speaking people never learn. Only a Scotchman can: the 'ch' in a word like loch sounds much the same as that Dutch 'g'. Afterwards she sang for me. She could not sing very well, but she sang a lot. One Dutch children's song in particular I remember. That song told the story of three comical doughnuts, who went to visit a poor ill pancake. I never found out why those doughnuts were supposed to be comical. Maybe only to make it rhyme with the next line?

Drie oliekoeken, die waren heel komiek.

Ze gingen eens bezoeken, een pannekoek was ziek.

Early on she also sang songs that I couldn't understand at all. Not then anyway. Many years later, here in New Zealand, we got a record of Yiddisher songs, and as soon as we played it, I recognized some of them: those were songs Oma had sung for me before the war.

Songs are essential to me. When I lived in Friesland during the war I learned Friesian songs, and later, in Switzerland, old folksongs from that corner of Switzerland. Like a song about a man from Appenzell who would eat his food plate and all, a song with a long yodeling refrain.

It always left a deep impression when someone would sing or play music for me. There was that time for instance when I had to see a specialist in a small town a long way from home, and I had to stay for a few days in a small guesthouse.⁶ There was a young lady staying at the same place who played piano. I was 14 then and she was pretty old, at least 18 I thought, but one evening she played for me, and she sang in a high, pure voice. Old songs, some rather sentimental, like 'Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf ein'. Not songs I would have chosen myself, but I can still see her sitting there behind the piano in a little side room near the garden, and I can still hear her.

Just by sharing music some people became important to me, people I might otherwise not have remembered at all. And I keep being surprised by how many people remember me from occasions when Karen and I made music for them. Like that day when we walked down to Mansion House Bay, on Kawau Island, to get an ice-cream, and there was an elderly couple having lunch. They asked us to join them, they recognized me straight away.'

'With your beard, anybody would recognize you.'

'I know. Anyway, they had been in the audience during our last two concerts in the Mansion House Courtyard⁷, and they wanted to talk about our music. I treasure that kind of thing. I like to think that if nothing else, at least my music will live on in the minds of others.

Maybe that is how I should try and write these memoirs too, like our concerts? Like the concert we gave some time ago in Warkworth, for their 150 years celebrations. Twenty-two items, close to two hours of music. All fairly short pieces of old music on a lot of different instruments. Music jumping backwards and forwards between the 14th and 17th century. Dances, gentle music, more serious items. Music for flutes and violin, for psalteries, lyre and drum. At the end we had shared a lot of ourselves with our audience. I'm sure they got a lot closer too to what we were telling them about in our music: life in those early days.

'That would make it kind of confusing, wouldn't it?'

'Maybe so, but isn't that how things come to your mind? One memory brings up another, all connected.'

'Better get your butt into gear then, Grandpa!'

'Cheeky!'

Chapter 2

'Before the war there were two radio stations in The Netherlands, and as a child I imagined those were housed in an enormous building with large orchestras and singers and announcers and what not constantly marching in and out. I couldn't understand why they didn't have the same orchestra playing the whole afternoon. Wouldn't that have been a lot simpler? It never occurred to me that they used gramophone records. Different now, isn't it?

It was even more different in my parents' younger days. They were actually engaged for nine years before they got married.'⁸

'Nine years? Really?'

'Yeah, really. Customs have changed a lot since then.

They both came from fairly well to do families, especially from my Dad's side. His Dad, my grandfather, was a highly respected psychiatrist. Once a week they had a bridge evening with some really rich friends. How rich? I'll tell you. One day the daughter of one of them was getting married, so everybody sent massive flower pieces for the ceremony. But when one of the earlier guests saw that most of the flower arrangements were even bigger than his, he quickly sent one of his servants to the florist to buy another piece yet, on behalf of his toddler son. When that arrived it was so big, they had to take the front door off the hinges to get it inside. And if you had ever seen the width of the front doors of some of their houses, you would know what that meant.

Fortunately, Granddad was respected more because of his work, than for being rich, so Dad and his younger brother, Uncle Herman, were brought up like ordinary boys. Apparently, Granddad was somewhat amused by his friends' lifestyle, and never tried to compete with them.

Anyway, my parents were only about nineteen when they met. Mum had just started as a teacher on the island of Texel, while Dad was studying there at the nautical school. It seemed a pity to waste his studies, so after he finished, he spent several years sailing as third mate and marconist.'

'What's a marconist, Grandpa?'

'A wireless operator. You know, keeping contact with other ships by Morse code signals? Anyway, he first sailed on a steamer carrying pine logs from Finland to Hamburg and Amsterdam. He brought Mum a beautiful amber necklace back from Finland. I still have a photograph of Mum sitting in her little room where she was boarding, wearing that necklace. She was writing a long letter to Dad. In front of her two portraits of Dad, behind her the porcelain bowl and water jug people had in those days to wash themselves in the morning. Not long before her death, when she was 83 years old, still wearing the same necklace, Mum recalled how she had written a few pages every night. And she recalled how, earlier yet when Dad was still at the nautical school, he would come and visit her on his ancient motorbike. The way to start that bike was to push it and run alongside until the motor caught and jump on as quickly as you could.

MUM IN HER ROOM ON TEXEL

Writing her daily letter to Dad. In front of her two special portraits of Dad.

DAD’S SPECIAL PORTRAIT

The four-leaf clover which Mum glued around his face is now, more than eighty years later, still undamaged.

THE S.S. FLANDRIA

Dad served as third mate and radio operator on the steamship FLANDRIA, while carrying passengers and freight on the Rotterdam - Brazil run, and - on the home run - bananas.

After some years on the Finland run, Dad served - again as third mate - on another ship, hauling bananas from Brazil and carrying passengers as well. He was away for at least three months at a time, with nowhere to spend his money. After nine years Mum and Dad had saved enough to buy a house in Amsterdam, in the Laing's Nekstraat, in one of the older suburbs close to a large park. Meanwhile Mum's Dad had carved a magnificent set of oak furniture as wedding present. After Mum and Dad got married, Dad stayed ashore and got a job in the office of the Gas and Electricity Department of Amsterdam. He rather disliked being a civil servant after his years of sailing, but 'that's life', he said.

Almost two years later I was born.

One of the first things Dad did once life had settled down to a regular routine, was to build himself a big radio with a black front panel full of switches and dials. In between the switches were three movable points to hold special coils,