It was calm winter weather. The frost in the fields below was already beginning to melt in the morning sun. The trees on both sides of the Dijkweg in Heerhugowaard cast long shadows, reaching as far as the cloche farms on the left. With one step, Bregitta de Groot hoisted herself into the milk truck that was standing there, and plopped down behind the wheel. To properly operate the Ford’s accelerator, she had to pull up her skirt a little. Now it was time to be calm and determined. Start, disengage, put the bakelite lever in first gear and then lightly accelerate and release the clutch. Calm and determined, for beside the milk truck, the municipal official stood with his hands in his pockets, watching this young woman bring the great beast to life and make a soft growl.
That’s roughly how I imagine it now – my grandmother’s exam ride on January 27, 1925. In an old cookie jar belonging to my father I recently found the document that Bregitta, then eighteen years old, was given. She successfully drove up and down the dike in Heerhugowaard and then passed. ‘Driving license for driving motor vehicles in general’ reads on the yellowed paper. In the corners still the imprints of thumbtacks with which the document had been pinned to the cabin of the truck. But wait a minute? Grandma? A truck driver’s license? 1925? We had never heard her talk about that.
Cool power woman!
As soon as I publish a photo of the driver’s license on social media, there is a flood of reactions, also from complete strangers. ‘What a tough chick!’ one Rose responds. ‘Cool power woman’ let one Tarik know. ‘This kind of pride may transcend generations’, one Hans philosophizes. Apparently this strikes a chord. But the director of the CBR, Jan Jurgen Huizing, also reports. Your grandmother is a trendsetter, he concludes. “May we have a copy for our historical archive?” The Huygens Institute comes on the air with the message that they had until now awarded the honor to Jacoba Jansen from The Hague as the very first woman who can drive. “But she got her motorcycle license two years later!” For example, almost a hundred years after her exam, I find out that none other than my own grandmother was the first Dutch woman with a driver’s license. My sense of pride is now starting to get slightly euphoric.
It makes curious. What kind of woman was my grandmother anyway? I mainly knew her as that friendly little person with blue-purple permed hair and glasses that were way too big, who always made stewed pears and pulled pork when I went to stay there, because I liked that so much, she knew. But Grandma was always taken care of down to the last detail. “I like beautiful,” she said. But she was not a woman who liked to talk about herself. And I wasn’t a grandson asking her questions, I confess. I didn’t know much more than that her first husband had died on May 10, 1940 at the Moerdijk Bridge. That grandmother as a widow with six children, two of whom were sickly, had to get through the war. And after the war, he married Grandpa Donker, an even-tempered florist who was equally modest and friendly, who never went out on the street without a hat. Oh yes, her motto was ‘strength to cross’. This suggested that she had had to carry a heavy burden in her life. But she didn’t say a word about that.
I consult my 95-year-old father, the only one in the family who can still dig up sharp memories of grandma and consult various archives, assisted by Roel Rijks, the founder of the Honorary Debt Awards Committee, among others. This is how my grandmother, who died in 1999, comes back to life. And as more is known about Grandma, my appreciation and amazement grows.
people in hiding
“Did you know that grandma had people in hiding in the house during the war?”, my father starts off. He still knows exactly who. “Those were Herman Wagenaar and André van Elburg. They were wanted by the krauts after a failed break-in at the city hall of Alkmaar.” I fall off my chair. Grandma? A widow with four daughters and two sons who offers shelter to wanted resistance members?
Herman and André slept for a few days in the attic in the girls’ room on the floor in 1944, until the coast was safe enough to leave Alkmaar. The story goes that the church had approached Grandma, knowing that she had a grave dislike for Germans. One day she had sent away two SS men who wanted to come and do a search, saying: “My husband has fallen! Isn’t that bad enough? Leave me alone!” The soldiers were apparently so impressed by this angry young widow that they did not dare to step over the threshold of her modest little house on the Omval in Alkmaar.
Wagenaar and Van Elburg were not little boys. Wagenaar led a resistance group of six young men. During the burglary of the town hall on February 24, 1944, one of them, Jan Hoberg, was arrested, tortured and executed two months later. He kept his jaws tight. But what if he had passed? I should not think about it. And would Grandma have been aware of that risk? Housing the resistance was punishable by death, Roel Rijks tells me. “Your grandmother was very brave.”
In 1948 there was another knock at her door. A respectable gentleman brought her a resistance cross. But that was not for herself, the decoration was for her husband, who as a conscript soldier was killed in an artillery shelling. Would she then have thought: could I also claim it?
In honor of God
Maybe she had plenty of other worries on her mind. She made ends meet during the war years on the money she received for office cleaning and anonymous donations from benefactors. ‘To the glory of God’ was written on the envelopes she found in her letterbox. Later in the war, it sometimes contained distribution coupons – for fat, refreshments or flour. In the cookie jar I find a few more that Grandma managed to save. And every Sunday two gentlemen of Saint Vincentius came by with change from the collection. It was laid out on the kitchen table in straight rows of pennies, nickels, and dimes. After which the biscuit tin was looted. “Grandma found that counting the collection money extremely humiliating,” my father recalls. Bregitta swallowed her pride, because she couldn’t afford to argue with the church.
Photo Private property
Back to the milk truck. It was owned by Jan de Groot, the father of her husband Jaap. In the photo I get from my father, he is proudly standing next to the truck, wearing wooden shoes, his son Jaap behind the wheel. The milk cans piled high in the back and a gentleman’s bicycle in between. All men in this photo, grandma is nowhere to be seen. I do find a photo in my grandmother’s family album as a young girl. She looks like Shirley Temple’s sister, with that curly hair and dreamy look. In a photo of her engagement, the seriousness has set in: she sits upright, modestly and seriously, with a book on her lap, her fiancé towering over her. That’s how the relationships were then, no matter how tough you were as a young woman. At their wedding in 1926 they sang: ‘Live in love pure min. Like the hunter with his shepherdess.’ Who the hunter was and who the shepherdess was, that was left to guess.
My father still remembers what happened back then. “Grandma got engaged to Jaap, who was destined to take over the milk transport company from his father from Schermerhorn. But he had exam anxiety and was too young to drive. Bregitta then said: ‘I’ll do it for you’. As soon as she was eighteen, she got behind the wheel. I suspect she received driving lessons beforehand from her future father-in-law.” The milk truck provided a constant source of income. Soon the children arrived and Bregitta focused on her shepherdess role. According to tradition, she soon handed over her driver’s license to her husband.
Spotlight
My intrepid grandmother had another quality that is now emerging from the mists of the past. After her marriage, my father recalls, she and her husband regularly performed at weddings and parties. It also took some courage: standing in the spotlight and performing a song or play in exchange for a drink, a pastry and a tip. Jaap accompanied her on the zither and couldn’t sing unkindly himself. Grandma was getting more and more excited about it. Then she appeared as a nun, then as a vagabond or notable. My father digs up a notebook in which grandma, in graceful curly letters, immortalized her repertoire from that time.
I see her in my imagination emerging from the wings at a wedding. Dressed up as a man, a poor slob in this verse. More than twenty years after I last saw Grandma, her voice resonates in my head, but now with a different meaning. It’s the voice of that brave girl with her driver’s license, that brave aunt who opened her house to hunted resistance fighters. The voice of a woman with a heavy cross that she could shed if she crawled into someone else’s skin. Grandma Bregitta, who I never asked for anything and who never put herself first. How I have failed her and myself.
I read: ‘Now you must be thinking. What are you supposed to do here? Such an old man, such decency. Oh people, I am of the old days. And love the fun and the kindness. Been on Earth for a long time. I have also experienced heavy things, but always fearlessly.’
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