First, a brief story:
In the summer of 1965, by one of those flukes that has pursued me from time to time, I found myself in Rotterdam, playing officer cadet on a Canadian naval frigate. We were in Rotterdam for an official visit, tied to a wharf across the harbour from where, in 1951, the Havelaar family had departed for Canada aboard the M.V. Zuider Kruis.
Shortly after arrival, I was granted some leave to visit my great-aunt Emilie Mees, known in the family as “Old Tante Miek”, who lived on an estate in the middle of Rotterdam.
We eventually got around to what we'd been doing in Rotterdam, and I explained that I'd been part of a select group of appropriately turned-out cadets and officers who had been received at City Hall.
“And did anyone make a fuss over you?” she asked.
“No, except I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter.”
“Well, it's too bad it wasn't the old mayor who greeted you. He would have recognized the significance of meeting a Havelaar.”
I think that was probably my first real insight into my dad's culture.
Those of you who have read his blog (justhavelaar.wordpress.com) will know the particulars of my parents' voyage to and settlement in Canada, and will appreciate the vistas of opportunity that move provided. You probably won't, however (because he glosses over the facts) fully grasp the hardships of the first ten years or so, which went hand-in-hand with the adventure.
It can't have been easy, for example, to survive that first Canadian winter with 4 young children in an uninsulated house built largely of wet shiplap. In fact, I now think I probably very nearly didn't survive it.
It can't have been easy for an ex-publisher to survive and then become accustomed to working in the woods as a chokerman, or in a sawmill, hauling lumber from the greenchain and loading it into boxcars, either of which would have been hard for anyone.
It can't have been easy the first time he was “laid off” during one of those cyclical logging-industry downturns, and anyone can imagine what he experienced, wondering how the family would cope, and where the next job was. I know that fear penetrated even my seven-year-old brain.
It can't have been easy working in English, a language of which he really had only academic knowledge. (Especially in Terrace, BC, where the rules of grammar didn't really apply!)
I know it was a real leap of faith and desperation to pack up in Terrace so that he and my mom could go to Normal School in Victoria.
And the whole time, I now realize, a man who had grown up in a family of considerable privilege, with maids to look after the household, had to deal with the fact that we were constantly desperately poor in a way we had never been in Holland, and could only escape that poverty through his labours and intellect.
If you asked him about this, he'd tell you they were successful because he and my mom were a formidable team, with complementary skills. He'd tell you he owed everything to her strength and sense of purpose, and the fact that he couldn't fail her. He'd refer to her ability to manage and stretch the little money they had. And he wouldn't be wrong: they did complement each other, and she was a rock.
But I think there's more to it than that. I think my father, in a way that eluded even my mother, had an adamantine sense of self. He never doubted that it was important to be a Havelaar, not in the standard social or class sense, but rather in the sense that he was part of a long line of people who knew how life worked.
He had been brought up imbued with the social and cultural capital of his extended family, and he just knew the rest would come.
And then, of course, it did.
