Memoirs of Pake and Beppe

Things went from bad to worse in quick order.  During our stopover in Iceland, we were treated to a fine meal in the airport restaurant.  The food was tasty, and the portions were hearty.  Mother even licked off her plate after the dessert – no sense letting good food go to waste.  We all ate very well.  Something we would come to regret a little later.

  The airplane was refueled, and we were asked to board again.   A few new passengers were added to our number.  One of the passengers was a young boy of eight or nine years.  He was accompanied by many medical paraphernalia including an oxygen tank.  When the moment arose, I made my way over to the boy’s mother to see what his condition was.  I enjoy meeting and getting to know new people.  Mother always preferred to keep a watch over the kids, so I often found myself free to mingle. 

The boy suffered from an asthma condition and needed to go on oxygen when we flew above the clouds.  I felt sorry for the young boy as I compared him to my own young and healthy son.  Tjeerd had his own small problems but he had the makings of being a fine strapping young man.  I realized how easily we take our health and the health of our children for granted.  The Lord had been so good to us. 

The weather had become noticeably windier as the day grew later.  The airplane took off and we all could notice a difference in the smoothness of the flight.  The older children settled in for a long time occupying themselves in reading their books.  I had brought along the newspaper and was beginning to read through that when the stewardess announced that due to a problem with the supply of oxygen for the young child, we were restricted in how high we were able to fly.  She passed along the pilots’ apologies and informed us all that we would be wearing our seatbelts for the remainder of the flight.  This would mean that the children would be stuck in their seats.  I gladly buried my nose in the paper avoiding eye contact with my wife.  I could sense she was not happy with the way things were going. 

The plane lurched up and then down.  Again up and again down.  The girls had been feeling sickly earlier on and the constant moving up and down was not helping them feel any better.  I have to say my own uneasiness increased as I read an article on the second page of the paper about the difficulty of immigrants settling in and finding work in a new country.  What were the odds of that article being there?  I carefully tore it out to keep Mother from seeing it and unnecessarily worrying.  Things would not be that difficult for us …. I was eager to learn and willing to work hard.  It couldn’t be as difficult as they were making it out to be.  Could it?  The plane lurched up again and then down.  I could feel my own stomach lurching.  Even the stewardess was having difficulty walking the aisles. 

It was not a wonder when three of the girls began to cry and ask for a bag to throw up in.  My own meal was sitting heavy in my stomach.  Very soon there were a lot of air-sick people.  The sick bags were handed out freely as one after the next needed to make use of them. 

I went back to my paper.  On page three there was another alarming article.  This one spoke of the difficulty in learning a new language after the age of ten.  New research had decided that after the tender age of ten the brain found learning new languages a difficult challenge.  I was disturbed.  What would the difficulty be for someone in their thirties, forties, fifties?  My head began to ache in the worst of ways.  The smell in the plane was not helping me in the least.  I carefully tore the third page out as well.  There was no need giving Mother anything else to be concerned about.  She seemed to have her hands quite full at the moment. 

I told Mother that I needed to lie my head back a while as I was only feeling worse by the minute.  I did notice that at this point all five of the children were looking quite green and four of them were already sick in the bag.  In the worst of ways, I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of our traveling by plane.  I was thankful that our flight was only twenty hours as opposed to twenty days. 

Mother was very busy with the children.  They had run out of bags and we were forced to reuse the ones we had.  No matter, after a couple of hours all of our stomachs were empty.  When I asked Mother how she was doing she snapped at me that she had no time to be sick.   I could see that she would not have done well with all the kids by herself on the boat. 

Sleep was impossible so I went back to my newspaper and read tales of crime and economic decline.  At that point I could barely make sense of what I was reading.   I must have dozed off for a while. 

There are times in ones’ life when it is as though all the fears and demons in your mind rear their ugly heads and drive out all rational thought.  The agony and fear that I had felt to a small degree in my mind as I thought about our future seemed to grow beyond belief in my sick and scared thoughts. My dreams were vivid and awful. 

I woke up to the cool hand of my wife on my forehead.  She looked me in the eye and smiled.  “You did right Roel.  This is exactly where we are supposed to be.”  The newspaper I had been reading was tucked beside her.  The cut-out pages neatly folded with the rest. 

My relief was instantaneous.  My head stopped pounding, my stomach settled, the ache in my chest dulled.  We were in this together.  I don’t know if she ever realized just how much her words meant to me. 

The voice of the pilot came over the loudspeaker.   We were arriving in Montreal.  We had made it.  The children perked up and we all sighed in relief as the plane taxied to a stop. 

I gathered my loved ones and our suitcases and led them off the plane.  We posed for a picture on the steps of the plane.  July 1, 1954.  The first day of the rest of our lives.  The Dutch government paid for our departure from Holland, and the Canadian government made it a national holiday when we arrived.