THE SCARRED OAK. William Walraven
on the Belgium border before they got married, and they had a flat French accent, which haunted them for many years for being strangers in his village. Anyone who visited or moved to a village and had no close family bonds with anyone in that village was not accepted and were handled as total strangers. Anyone having a different accent was practically an outcast. It was also nearly impossible for Eric’s parents, who moved to this village when Eric was one year old, to get to know the villagers. Everyone was called by a series of first names instead of their surnames.
A name like John from Pete and Mary from the Cross was very normal and, for the villagers, no problem. It meant that John was the son of Pete and Mary (everyone knew Pete and Mary) living close by the old iron cross at the outskirts of the village. It could even go a step further. If John married and had a child called Tilly, anyone asking, “Who is that child?” would get an answer like “Oh, that is Tilly, from John from Pete and Mary from the Cross.” All these villages were like close-knit families living there for generation after generation. Everyone was somehow related to others through centuries of intermarriage. Through this interbreeding, the percentage of misformed, lame, blind, and all sorts of handicapped people was very high over the whole district.
Feuds between villages was very common, and it was practically impossible for a young man to start courting a girl from another village. Naturally, it happened, but both young people, besides being in love, had to have the willpower and determination to withstand the abuse rendered to them by their villagers for not choosing one of their own kind. If after they were married, they moved to one of the two villages, it was half as bad, but if the two moved to another village, it would be a long time before they were accepted in that village.
Besides the deep coal mines and everything related to it, farming and growing of vegetable seedlings, which were sold in bunches at the neighboring marketplaces, was the only industry in many villages. Most farms were small, everyone having no more than one horse and four or five cows. Anyone having more than that was considered a large farmer.
More than half the working men in Eric’s village were coal miners. The closest mine, the largest one, was within an hour’s ride by bicycle, the bicycle being the only transportation at the time. Only the well-to-do who lived in the cities could afford a car as a means of transportation.
Eric’s parents were from good old stock. His father, John Oosterbeek, was a medium-built man and was the second oldest in a family of ten children. At the age of thirteen, John’s father had died between the bumpers of two railroad cars while his youngest child was just one year old. With only six years of grade school behind him, Eric’s father and his older brother of one year had to find a job to keep the rather poor family on their feet.
His first job was in a glass-blowing factory. In an unbelievably hot and smoke-filled factory, he was put to work as a glass blower. He dipped the long hollow rod into the hot liquid glass and blew his lungs out until his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets while turning the rod between his hands—twelve hours a day, six days a week. It made him grow up fast. The job was too hard for him. His lungs had not the volume of a mature man, and many times the red-hot glass would cool off too fast before entering the mold and would brake. He’d then receive more kicks under his behind from the forever drunken foreman. He had to take all this because in those days, a job was hard to find. His young heart, however, would burn from the unfair handling he had received for trying his utmost. Finally, he was transferred to the fine crystal-grinding section. After about three or four years with the only thing to show were his hands full of scars, the leftover cuts of the broken crystal, he found a job in a large laboratory connected to the coal mine.
Eric’s mother, Martha, was raised in the village two miles from Eric’s father. They lived above a grocery store, while her father also worked at the railroad. Her mother, Eric’s favorite grandmother, operated the store besides raising four children.
At a very young age, Martha found herself a job as a live-in maid for a very wealthy family in her village. She was a hard-working young woman, and her love for the kitchen and preparing food for the family and the many parties, made her in no time the chef cook. Her knowledge of cooking never left her, and she was well-known in Eric’s village after they moved there. She was many times asked to cook at weddings, parties, and funerals.
Martha met John with a bang. John, now twenty-four years old, went with some friends one Sunday by bicycle to Martha’s village to have some fun in the local bars. After a few hours and in a good mood, they chose to return home as unexpected bad weather was approaching the village. Before they reached the end of the village, however, the rain came down in buckets, and lightning and thunder blasted the skies above them. Quickly they decided to find cover and wait until the rain had subsided. John found cover in the hallway of the store operated by Martha’s parents. As good-hearted, down-to-earth villagers at that time, Martha was sent downstairs to invite the young man in the hallway to come upstairs out of the rain and have a warm cup of coffee. At the moment when Martha, now eighteen years old, met John, a lightning bolt lit the sky, followed immediately by the exploding sound of thunder, and that was how Eric’s parents met. Two years later, they married and moved to a small village close to John’s job. In the three years that they lived in the village, Martha gave birth to two sons. First came Johann and, two years later, Eric.
The laboratory, which was part of the coal mine where John was employed as a general laborer, manufactured large amounts of ammonia, one of the many products made from coal, to be used in the manufacturing of fertilizer. It created an impossible smell in the village when the wind blew from the wrong direction. For this reason, they moved when Eric was one year old to the village where Eric spent his young years.
Six years later, Martha gave birth to another son, Paul. Another six years later, Eric’s only sister was born, Ellie. For two years, they lived in a very small house on the main street of the village.
Eric was only three years old but still remembered them moving into a larger house. His father was moving the furniture piece by piece with his heavy wheelbarrow, while his mother was packing and unpacking the smaller articles. He remembered having a hard time pedaling his little tricycle up the loose white gravel-covered driveway of the new home. Constantly, the little wheels of the tricycle got stuck. It drove him into a tantrum. His father, noticing the misery his little son had created for himself, picked him and his tricycle up with one arm and, with a couple of large steps, put him down on a flat concrete walking path behind the house. Eric never forgot this incident because at that moment, he realized how strong and powerful his father was.
The new house had a very large kitchen, his mother’s paradise, and a huge living and dining room with very high ceilings separated by two unbelievably hard-to-move sliding doors. Upstairs were three large bedrooms; only two were occupied—one by his parents and the other by Eric and his brother, Johann. The third was used for storing space.
The reason that Johann and Eric slept together in one large bed was to preserve body heat in the wintertime; central heating in homes was unheard of at that time. The only room that was heated by a coal stove was the kitchen and once in a while, on a special occasion, the stove in the living room was used.
Eric could not remember if the dining room was ever used. Everyone had a room like that. It had the best furniture and was only used as a showroom. Eric always got a scary feeling whenever he walked into this room. The forever-shining massive table surrounded by chairs stood there like a statue, and the big heavy framed pictures of his grandmothers and heavy-mustached grandfathers without a smile on their faces would watch every move he made. Even if he moved from one side of the room to the other, it seemed that their eyes were always following him. At one time, he even stuck his tongue out to one of his grandfathers, and he was positive that one of the moustaches moved slightly. It scared him so much that for many weeks, he didn’t dare go back into this room again.
Sleeping with Johann in the same bed had its problems. Johann had in his young years the nasty habit of bed watering, with the result of Eric waking up many times as wet as Johann was, depending on what side Johann was sleeping when the accident occurred. Johann’s or, for that matter, Eric’s misfortune didn’t promote brotherly love, because many times Eric would use in their arguments the striking word “bed pisser.”
Across