SUMMER HOLIDAYS (12 may 2004)
As a young boy, I used to go with my brothers, sisters and my mother to Bergen, a Dutch village close to the North Sea.
You may wonder if my father didn't go with us. Well, to be honest, not really. He either stayed away, or came over for just a few hours. In the latter case he arrived on the beach, took off the jacket of his suit, wrote a few postcards, stayed for a while and returned home.
We usually went there by bike, sometimes accompanied by a few uncles. The younger children and the aunts used to go by train.
One of the major attractions of the bicycle ride was the fact that halfway there was a bar named Kom Bij Tom, which housed an impressive number of pianolas and large music boxes, where we spent much of our limited financial means to hear these boxes play.
The last time we made the bicycle trip, the weather was rather gloomy - about which we hardly cared. But when we couldn't find Kom Bij Tom any more, all the pleasure of the trip was gone.
For a few years, we went there with two other families. My mother's sister, aunt Ans with her family. The third family was the family of uncle Thijs.
Uncle Thijs is probably the funniest man I remember from my childhood. It is quite useless to tell any of the stories that made the beach resound with laughter, because much of their humour depended on the way uncle Thijs told them.
The aunts and the young children usually went to the beach by train - a steam train called Bello, which plied through the dunes until August 1955.
Bello
Sometimes the aunts hired beach seats made of cane.
beach seat
At other times the boys dug a large hole in the ground where the grown-ups could sit and put their bags. When the group returned the next day, the hole was sometimes occupied by other people. When the other people were Germans, we were too small to get it back by force. But we didn't fail to remind them of their previous occupation - after all, this was not very long after the Second World War.
Of course, there is much more to tell about childhood holidays. But this is mainly an introduction to the next weblog, in which I'll tell you about my most recent visit to Bergen.
