My mother had become a nurse because of the war. In 1944, just outside the village behind the dunes where she lived, a plane had crashed, and she and her friends had found the English pilot, still in his parachute, dangling from a poplar. He wasn’t too far from the ground, so the girls could clearly see his eyes rolled back in pain. His injuries proved to be less serious than they had thought—nothing but a dislocated shoulder—but the experience had made a lasting impression on my mother. The helplessness she felt when she found the pilot made her decide to devote her life to caring for her fellow man, for the weak and the sick: she was going to be a nurse. Her father, the mayor of the village, pointed out that a smart girl like her could be a doctor if she wanted to, but that was something she firmly rejected. In my mother’s eyes, doctors were unstable types who told young women to undress when all they had was a cold and roamed the dunes with the mayor, the local lawyer, and the vet, slurping noisily from pocket flasks and shooting helpless little rabbits. She was exaggerating, of course, but she wasn’t off the mark. My grandfather was a hunting fanatic whose chief misfortune in life was that the queen had sent him to a village in the dunes, where there wasn’t a decent deer to be found. And it was also true that he, as I was to discover on later visits, played bridge once every two weeks with the lawyer, the vet, and the village doctor, something that was really an excuse for heavy port and claret consumption. Whether the doctor actually did have his young patients undress for no medical reason, I don’t know, but I had noticed, on the few occasions when we were in the village and met him at my grandfather’s house, that he behaved rather nervously around my mother.
My mother was what you would call a formidable woman. Both feet planted firmly on the ground and as certain of where she came from as where she was going. Somehow she was able to convince those around her, at a time when many women still regarded themselves as loyal subjects to their husbands, that she was a free and independent person and quite capable of leading her own life.
But there was one thing she had forgotten to take into account; and that was her compassion, the way in which my father’s hair fell across his forehead and the boyish innocence of his broken body. When the osteopath’s scalpel made the first incision it was as if the knife penetrated her own skin, opened her flesh, laid bare her bones. Although this was not her first operation, she felt her knees shaking and before the first pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that my father’s legs were could be put back together, my mother lay in the next room, on a sofa, recovering from the first and only fainting spell of her life.
My father had spent the war years in England. He was fifteen when the Netherlands were invaded and on the morning of May 10 he and his best friend found themselves on the grounds of the glider club, where men were taking down the wind socks and signposts in a naive attempt to prevent the enemy from landing. That was something that was, indeed, not to happen but most probably not because of the heroic resistance of the club members. The Germans seemed to have a lot more on their minds than capturing seventy yards of shorn grass and a couple of wooden sheds.
That morning my father, for the first time in his life, had had a fight with his father. They were standing in the sunny parlor listening to the radio, when my father said they should leave the country. My grandfather shook his head. He had a business to run, a firm that dealt in colorings and flavorings for the food industry, and he wasn’t going to give up without a struggle everything he had built up over the last twenty years. He asked his son how he supposed they would survive in another country, with no money, no possessions, no chance of work or housing. “But that’s exactly the point: survival,” said my father. “Money and property are replaceable. Life is not.” My grandfather had told him that he was being irresponsible, that he on the other hand had obligations toward other people, not just the family, but the people who worked for him. “They can save themselves!” my father had cried. My grandfather’s eyes had blazed and he had said that he had always taken good care of his people and that now, now that things were really down to the crunch, he would keep on doing that. After that he had forbidden his son to speak anymore about the subject and my father stalked out of the door, angry and desperate, grabbed his bicycle, and rode to the glider field. On the way he saw people taping up the windows of their houses and packing suitcases into the trunks of their cars.
At the club they were busy dismantling the airstrips. The winch was still there at the end of the runway and his friend Benno, two years his senior, was standing beside it, waiting for the cart to take it away.
“I want to go up,
