Chapter One

Ancestors

 

 I was born in The Hague around midday on the third of April 1933, the second child and first boy of Stephanus Leonardus Hinfelaar and  Petronella  Aleida Vermeulen.[1]

The name Hinfelaar appears in the Baptismal books of the Roman Catholic Church of The Hague since the beginning of the 18^th century. For some unknown reason one of the male children  always received the Christian names Johannes Franciscus. The one in 1711 was followed by three others with the same Christian name, one in 1748, a second in 1808 and a third in 1850.

The latter married a certain Maria Bignel in 1870. They had three children, two girls and one son, born in 1879, again called Johannes Franciscus.

He married Anna Catharina Essenberg in the year 1900. This couple, my paternal grandparents would cast a long shadow over a great number of  descendants during the 20^th century.

 

The happy-go-lucky Anna Catharina, ‘Cato’ for short, had come with her family from a small hamlet, called  Nederweert in Limburg, the most southern province of The Netherlands. Her father was a policeman and was promoted to The Hague. He and his wife were staunch Catholics and expected all their five children to ‘marry in the faith’,  that is with a Catholic husband or wife.

To their consternation and chagrin the easy going Cato fell deeply in love with a Protestant ‘heretic’, a painter and decorator, called Frederick De Graaf, and insisted on marrying him. She was restrained in doing so by all the members of her family, who desperately searched for a catholic young man in the parish of the West End of The Hague. They found him in our Johannes Franciscus Hinfelaar with whom she was forced to marry in 1900, apparently against her wishes.  

The marriage became a disaster, as she remained in love with Frederick De Graaf all her life. Despite constant rows and tensions she had seven children, five girls and two boys, all born during the first decade of  the century. My father was the youngest boy. He had an older brother, again called Johannes Franciscus , born in 1903.[2]

My father, Stephanus Leonardus Hinfelaar, had little regard for his parents. He always said that his father was a weakling and that his mother was a flirt who kept on visiting De Graaf, her former boyfriend. He had by then married a very respectable Protestant woman by whom he had three children, Jan, Freek, and Zus.

However my father’s eldest sister, called Mia,  born in March 1901  had a more balanced and kinder opinion of her father with whom she, being the first daughter,  seemed to have had a loving relationship.[3] He worked for a transport company, called Hoying. It possessed a fleet of horse-drawn carts that imported fresh vegetables from the Westland, a thriving market garden area  between The Hague, the Hook of Holland and Rotterdam. He was made to work long hours, left home very early and came back when his children were already asleep. He was an easy going, laid back, person who was too tolerant of his wife for she was lively and out for any adventure. according to his neighbours.

On Saturday afternoon, when he was free, he spent his time cleaning his rabbits’ hutch and repairing shoes for his family

On Sundays he stayed at home, did not go to church, but sent his children. He gave each of them a cent for the offertory collection but being children they hung around at the back of the church, and later spent their cents on a few sweets. After they returned, he played with them and took them for a walk. Later he asked his eldest daughter to go and buy a ‘maatje’ of gin (about one tenth of a litre) in a small bottle. Once he had drunk it, he became very mellow, fetched a cushion from the bed, curled up and took a siesta on the floor of the sitting room. The children kept on playing and made a lot of  noise. They could even dance on his belly as he slept so soundly that he did not notice anything. They had to wake him up when the evening meal was ready.

On feast and birthdays they were given a treat: a bucket full of mussels, which could be bought for ten cents from the men in the barges, moored in the canals nearby.

It was a period of inventions. They went to see a ‘bioscope’ on a white sheet in the street and they saw the first plane made of wood, flying over The Hague. He loved to hoist his daughter on his shoulders on ‘Prinsjesdag ’ (Princes Day) in September so that she could see the Royal Parade, and  Queen Wilhelmina herself in her golden chariot on her way to the opening of the Dutch Parliament. The first horse-drawn and, later, electric trams came to the inner city  and gas lamps were installed in most of the main streets.

At first they lived in the ‘Hofjes’ (Court Yards) of the inner city called ‘Nieuwe Haven’ (New Harbour.) These were clusters of four little family homes built in a square in such a way that, except for the front, each house shared the walls with their neighbours. Access to these hofjes was through a small passage in between the more prestigious houses of the people of the middle class, the burghers. The parents slept downstairs in an ‘alcove’, a kind of cupboard and the children slept all together upstairs in the loft. These ‘hofjes’ were romantically painted by the Dutch painters but at the beginning of the 20^th century they were cheaply built often without a damp course and poorly maintained by the proprietors. There was no hot water in the houses. This was obtainable from a shop nearby together with peat and coal. Around 1903 the family decided to move to a more prestigious part of the town, to the nearby Koningsstraat, (Kings Avenue) near Oranjeplein, (Orange Square).[4]  The family became more respectable and the children were accepted in the nearby catholic school where Mia completed the 5^th year of the Lower Primary School. At that time, before the invention of the motorcar, the streets were marvelous playgrounds for the children.  Life was pleasant enough until one day, in 1911, their father was suddenly made redundant and became chronically unemployed. Without any state assistance the family could hardly pay the high house rent and was threatened with eviction. Their father accepted desperate and humiliated a part time job as a watchman, something that did not suit him at all.

Their house had to be redecorated and painted. This was done cheaply by De Graaf who, by then, had become a widower. Cato renewed her intimate friendship with him to the disgust of the neighbours and the members of the family who soon told her husband about the behaviour of his wife.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The weak Johannes. F. Hinfelaar was not strong enough to go against it, could not cope and was soon very near a mental break down. One day, in springtime 1912, he suddenly said goodbye to his wife and walked away from six crying and wailing children. They saw him turn the corner towards the Hollands Spoor (Holland Railway Station)  where he took a ticket to Amsterdam, and was never seen again

 

This was extremely traumatic for the six children. Without any source of income the whole family was soon thrown out of their house and their poor furniture was sold publicly by auction. They were given shelter and a bit of food by the Salvation Army, where they slept together in the one iron bed, that had been saved from the auction. Their mother continued unashamedly with the relationship with her lover but was told by the management not to leave her children alone and to be back at the house of the Salvation Army  before 10 p.m. She wanted to get rid of her children with whom she roamed the streets all day until De Graaf knocked off from work at 6 p.m.  She had a lady friend, a kind of soothsayer, who was unmarried and wanted a little girl to help her with the house chores.  One of the children, Catharina (Toos), just six years old, was told to stay with her.

The mother became so fed up with the hungry and crying children that one day she took them to the River Fish Market on the corner of the School street, near the medieval city church of St James the Major, told them to stay there  and then disappeared in the crowds. They waited and waited. Towards the evening they were taken to the police station where the constables pitied the shivering children and  shared their sandwiches with them.

However Mia, as the oldest, remembered the address of the soothsayer and told it to the police who took the children back to their mother. The latter was extremely angry with her and from then onwards there was little love lost between the mother and her eldest daughter.

A few days before Christmas 1913 the mother took the children again to the same spot and told them that someone would come and take care of them. The children roamed around all day in the Westend,  and suddenly one of the children, my father ‘Steef’, who was six years old, was overrun by a galloping horse of a local greengrocer. He was taken to hospital, where the greengrocer brought him a small Christmas tree with sweets as compensation. He had to stay there for a week, until his wounds were healed. Meanwhile the other children had indeed been picked up by the Salvation Army and were brought to a kind of transit home, a big house with a beautiful garden, hired by the Salvation Army for the down and out.

There they had to wait until a verdict was pronounced by the state judge who specifically dealt with abandoned children. The final verdict was severe. Their father, Johannes Franciscus Hinfelaar, was condemned and banned permanently from ever seeing or claiming guardianship of his children. He died a few years later in Amsterdam. The circumstances and the cause of his death were never known.

Their mother, Anna Catharina Esseberg, 33 years old, was relieved temporarily from any parental authority and the State took charge of the six children, of which the oldest, Mia, was twelve and the youngest, Johanna, ‘Jo’ was four years old. As Catholics they were transferred to a home run by lay members of St Vincent de Paul. Their mother was not allowed to visit them any longer, She seems not to have cared very much and, after the death of her first husband, she finally married her beloved Frederick de Graaf and so became ‘respectable’ again.

One day the boys were told that they had been put under parental guardianship of farmers in far away Budel, in the South, near the Belgian border while the girls went to a house, run by the nuns in Middelburg, in Zeeland. The boys were separated from their sisters and did not see them until adulthood. Later both Jan and Steef were moved to an Institute, run by a religious order of German Brothers in Roermond, an old town near the German border.

They were regarded as waifs and strays from the slums of Holland’s growing towns who had to be rehabilitated and re-educated.

 

The strict order, discipline and even abuse that occurred in these Gestichten, Institutions, have  recently been brought to light  and dealt with accordingly. It remains difficult to judge a mind-set of almost a century ago when these unfortunate children were treated so differently. Whatever may be said, we, his children,  got the impression that our  father, Steef, and his older brother Jan, suffered more from the behaviour of their parents than of that of the Brothers. They were given a solid education, were taught a trade and were given opportunities unknown to a poor inner city boy of that time. My father learned to play the trumpet, and later the bugle. He would give all of us a knowledge and a love for classical and opera music that stayed with us for life.

After his primary education he attended a recognized Trade School in the town of Roermond, where he became a carpenter and cabinet maker. When he was near adulthood at 17, he left the Institution for his home town, The Hague, as a settled craftsman and artisan and without any apparent rancour or hatred towards the Brothers.

 

Life in The Hague was not easy. He found employment easily and learned to work with modern machines, but he was heavily institutionalized, shy and withdrawn. Things became better when some of his friends took him to a course in ballroom dancing where the master noticed his natural feeling for rhythm. The latter asked him to act as his assistant during the next course, as there were often more young ladies than young men.

It was during one of these courses that he met my mother, a flamingly red haired girl called Petronella, (Nelly) Vermeulen.

Who was this self willed young woman, who at first sight refused the advances of my father as ‘he squinted and came from the backyards of the inner city’, the remark she made after one of her lady friends suggested that Steef would be a good husband for her? [5]

 

Both her father, Hugo Vermeulen, and her mother, Maria Kraan, had come from the heart of Holland, from the lush area around Oudewater, a small fortress town whose population had remained catholic throughout the Reformation. Hugo Vermeulen’s father was a successful dairy farmer and by dint of hard work and proverbial Dutch parsimony had become wealthy.  When their children grew up he did not wish the prosperous farm to be divided into smaller parcels but, according to primogeniture custom, stipulated in his last will that the property had to be bequeathed to the eldest son, while his remaining children were given a considerable sum of money as dowry or brideprice.

At the end of the 19^th century The Hague, until then a small settlement around  the pretty and rustic Houses of Parliament and the Court of Holland, suddenly started to expand rapidly. Labourers from all other provinces of the Netherlands flocked to it in great numbers. Until then most of the houses were built in the sand of the dunes, slightly above sea level but now cheap, rented, apartments were constructed in the lower peat marshes of the inland polders. They were poorly built, very damp and musty. It was to one of these tenements, on the southern edge of the town near flourishing market gardens that my grandfather migrated, together with his young wife, Maria Kraan and with the princely sum of 1500 Dutch Guilders. Before her marriage she had been ‘in the service’ of the Vermeulen’s family as a milkmaid. Their plan was to start a business in fresh vegetables. She was to manage a greengrocers shop and he would transport the vegetables from the market gardens to the shop. Both were devout Catholics and, as a son of a ‘burgher farmer’, Hugo Vermeulen became member of the local parish finance committee in charge of collecting the church tithe.

In rapid succession  nine children were born.[6]

Grandpa Hugo Vermeulen was not a businessman. To the despair of his practical wife, he was a dreamer and spent his capital on impossible projects that became a financial fiasco. He started a transport business, bought one horse after the other and dreamt about acquiring a lorry. It came to nothing. The horses died one after the other, in a period when there was fierce competition from among other transport companies.

At the beginning of the 20^th century poverty reigned among the people who had moved from the rural area into town. Grandma Vermeulen stood long hours behind the counter in the shop, and listened to the sob stories of her customers. She was goodness herself and allowed people to buy ‘on the slate’ without expecting swift payment. Many housewives never paid their debts.

Things came to a head in 1919, just after the Great War, when my mother was twelve years old. A purveyor of boiled beetroots demanded immediate payment and when her parents failed to pay, he applied for bankruptcy. Both the transport company and the shop were put in the hands of the receivers, everything, even the beds of the children, was auctioned publicly in front of the shop. The family became ashamed to appear in the neighbourhood.

When the parish Council heard of Hugo Vermeulen’s bankruptcy he was instantly dismissed from its Financial sub-committee. According to the Dutch opinion of that time, he had lost the respectability of being a burgher and was relegated to the status of  a labourer.[7]

The family, now on the dole, moved to a very small rented apartment in the “Schilderswijk’ already then poor quarters of The Hague, the streets of which are called after the famous Dutch Painters. The proud Hugo Vermeuelen,, who had called himself a free ‘burgher’  had to accept employment as a casual labourer for one of the market growers nearby. Each day his daughter Nellie (my mother) had to bring his afternoon lunch to him and found him slaving away in the fields, so humiliated and sad.

Her elder brothers had to leave school early and became unskilled labourers, navies in the railway yards. Some of them started to drink and when they came home there were fights and rows. Gradually the once respectable burgher family started to disintegrate.

All this made such a lasting impression on my mother that she, as the youngest daughter, vowed then and there to marry a husband who would not ‘dabble in business,’ but be a professional artisan who would not drink but faithfully bring his pay packet to his wife each  Friday evening.

A few years after the debacle of the bankruptcy one of her older sisters, Marie, left home, after years of working as a maid ‘in service’ to pay back the debts and entered the convent in 1922. By this the family became respectable again.

My mother was intelligent and did well at school. The nuns encouraged her parents to let her become a teacher. This was not to be.  She had to help her parents in their poverty and bring in money as quickly as possible. In order to save money for her trousseau, she became a fulltime maid-in-service for a titled, colonial family, called Ritzema Van Eck in a high class quarter of the The Hague There she learned  the niceties of the Dutch Higher classes. In her  free time she  took special lessons in ballroom dances  and so met my father.

 

 

[1] My father spoke about his family background so often that it made a lasting impression on me and on all my brothers and sisters. He left us his Memoires, a small book, written and published around the time he reached the venerable age of 90 in July 1996.

 [2] Names of the children : Maria (Mia) 19 March 1901, Sophie (Fie) 1 October 1902, Joannes, (Jan) 23 November 1903, Hubertina 1905, died after three years), Stephanus, (Steef) 21 July 1906, and Johanna, (Jo) 21 June 1909.

[3] Bibliographical Notes, by Marie Meiers-Hinfelaar, written for her daughter, Tineke Meiers.

[4] The house, no 547, still exists, and has been recently restored.

[5] One of my maternal aunts called Marie, whose name changed into Sr. Hugolina when she entered  the convent, gave me the details of  my mother’s  background a few years before she died in 1997.

 [6] Frans in 1896, Cornelia in 1898, Lena in 1900, Willem in 1901, Marie, (later Sr. Hugolina) in 1903, Hugo in 1905, Gijs in 1906,  Petronella,(Nellie) in 1907, and Arie in 1909

[7] From the middle of the 19^th century onwards, the Dutch Catholics  were divided into the Middle Class of the Burghers, who spearheaded  Catholic emancipation and the Lower Class of  Workers who trusted and followed the leadership of the Middle Class. See my forthcoming publication : The Autobiography of Bishop Van Sambeek, White Fathers Generalate, Via Aurelia, Rome.