HOLIDAYS LONG PAST As a young boy, our family - with the exception of my dad - often spent the summer holidays at Bergen, a Dutch village close to the North Sea. You may wonder why my father didn't go. Well, to be honest, 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 swiftly 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 the music played by these pretty machines.     I remember the last time we made the bicycle trip, the weather was rather gloomy - but we hardly cared, after all, we were still young! But when we couldn't find Kom Bij Tom any more, most of the pleasure of the trip was gone. For a few years, we went there with two other families. The first was the family of auntie Ans, my mother's sister. The third family belonged to uncle Thijs. Uncle Thijs is one of the funniest men that I remember from my childhood. Trying to tell any of the stories that made the beach resound with laughter would be quite useless: the way uncle Thijs told them was as essential as Charlie Chaplin's appearance was to his films. 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. If these other people were Germans, we were too small to conquer 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. This weblog appeared on 12 May 2004 on Internetsite Overtom.nl.
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