The Colonel Read online

  Like so much of Breda, the row-house neighborhood is a mix of old and new. Five shops down from the former van Gend en Loos building, at Veemarktstraat 52/54, there’s the Spronk Muziekhandel, a record shop whose window front features a sticker with a likeness of Elvis Presley and the dates 1977–1997, a reference to the twentieth anniversary of the - singer’s death.

  Little has actually changed here for centuries. On the Grote Markt, the the cobblestone square that serves as the vibrant focus of life in this easygoing town of some 130,000, the handsome old buildings that have housed everything from hay markets to municipal offices since Breda was granted its city charter in 1252 are still in use, as is the Grote Kerk, the impressive Gothic church with its openwork gables, crocket spires, and a baroque onion-shaped dome ornamenting its tower.

  The church, which took 125 years to build and dominates the town, has stood above the Grote Markt since the thirteenth century, a silent witness to Breda’s succession of feudal rulers from 1250, its Spanish conquest in 1591 and 1625, and its French domination from 1793 to 1813. Not far away, atop the Kasteelplein, where Catholics once tortured the Protestants and then burned them at the stake, looms the Kasteel, Breda’s citadel, built in 1536. Today, it houses the Koninklijke Militaire Academie, or Royal Military Academy.

  The military tradition of Breda, an army city where the Royal Dutch Indian Army, or Koninklijk Nederlands-Indies Leger, established their headquarters—and where, as a soldier, René Descartes first became interested in math—has long been a strong and honorable source of pride. And so, in 1887, when Adam van Kuijk was drafted into the Dutch army as a private in the 3rd Regiment of the Field Artillery, and stationed at the Seelig Barracks in Breda, the twenty-one-year-old was joining a noble and historic tradition.

  The son of a working man—probably a fisherman—named Andreas van Kuijk, who hailed from Enkhuizen, about forty miles north of Amsterdam, Adam, born May 7, 1866, had grown up in the village of Raamsdonksveer, twelve miles north of Breda.

  This particular branch of the van Kuijks (or van Kuyks) could perhaps trace their ancestors back to the Middle Ages, when they were a wealthy, aristocratic, ruling-class family, for more than a hundred years (from 1295 to 1428), governing the small town of Hoogstraten.

  Later, when the region split in two, the southern part was assimilated into Belgium. The van Kuijks could not sustain their rule in the new political geography, and fled fifteen miles due north to the town of Breda. Their ancestors forever claimed to be related to the lords of Hoogstraten, and never forgot their sense of loss, or their sense of entitlement—no matter how tenuous it might have been.

  Adam van Kuijk had joined the army for a twelve-year term. His artillery unit relied upon horse-drawn gun carriages, and Adam found he had a natural affinity for tending horses. When he was discharged in 1899, he stayed in Breda and took a job as livery man for the freight and package handling firm van Gend en Loos, the UPS of Holland. Although he had just spent a dozen years in army attire, Adam was happy to don the heavy, dark, double-breasted van Gend en Loos uniform, with its shiny brass buttons and regulation cap.

  Van Gend en Loos had established their offices at 66 Veemarkstraat, a prestigious main thoroughfare in town. The company used the rear of the building to stable its ten draft horses and offered an apartment above the stables for the livery man and family.

  As it happened, Adam van Kuijk did, indeed, have a family on the way. The mustachioed army man was not especially comely. He wore a perpetually stern, if not sour expression, his cheeks sunk in, his dark eyes seemed drilled in his head, and he carried the gene for the van Kuijk ear (the left one stuck out almost at a right angle), which he was destined to pass on to his first two children. His personality—rigid, disciplined, and unyielding—was also not the type to turn the head of the opposite sex, nor was his stiff, humorless voice. But while still in the service, he had begun dating Maria Elisabeth Ponsie, a woman ten years his junior. The youngest of eight children, she was also from Raamdonksveer, born September 2, 1876, the daughter of freewheeling merchants.

  Whether the couple got caught up in the Christmas spirit, or in ringing in the twentieth century, sometime in December 1899, Maria conceived a child. Adam and Maria were Catholic, as were most people in southern Holland, and allowing few outlets beyond the pale of the church, their Catholicism was far more strict than the Catholicism practiced in America. With the attending guilt and sense of propriety, especially as Maria was beginning to show by springtime, the couple married on May 10, 1900. Their son, Josephus Andreas Johannes, also called Joseph, or Sjef, was born four months after the wedding, on September 19.

  By the time of Sjef’s birth, Adam and Maria had taken up residence in the bovenhuis, or living quarters above the stables, and as part of the marriage agreement, her parents, Johannes and Maria Reinenberg Ponsie, had moved in with them. The accommodations were snug: the area had a living room and a great room—the newlyweds slept in one, and the Ponsies in the other—with a loft that would double as the children’s bedroom.

  Maria’s parents, Johannes and Maria, could not have been more different from Adam van Kuijk, except for their shared Catholicism. The Ponsies were parlevinkers, floating peddlers who traveled Holland’s intricate river and canal system, selling and trading household goods from their barge to other travelers on the water.

  Today, the family recalls that the Ponsies also owned a small store in Raamsdonksveer with the colorful name of A Thousand and One Things Bazaar. It offered both new and used items, even new Bible covers and special funeral mass fronts, which the Ponsies fashioned out of black crepe paper.

  The tinker and his wife peddled these to the area churches, many of which never guessed that the books inside were the very ones they had earlier discarded. But the store generated only a struggling income, so when the weather kept the Ponsies off the waterways, Johannes loaded up a horse and wagon and took his wares to the farmers of the surrounding regions.

  But the Ponsies couldn’t ignore their greater wanderlust, preferring the itinerant life, drifting from village market to town fair, assimilating themselves into the merry hubhub of organ grinders and jugglers.

  By the time Adam and Maria married, Johannes Ponsie was seventy years old and in poor health. The newlyweds welcomed him to their home with the understanding that Johannes and his wife would help with baby Sjef and the other children as they came along.

  The van Kuijk family would expand rapidly. On March 31, 1902, Adriana Maria, also called Sjaan, was born. As the eldest girl, she would always be a “second mother” to her siblings. The following year, the van Kuijks welcomed Johannes Wilhelmus, but the boy would not live four months.

  Adam and Maria planned quickly for another child, and Maria Wilhelmina, known as Marie, arrived before the year was out, on November 12, 1904. But tragedy befell the couple again with the birth of Johanna Huberdina, called Anneke, on July 22, 1906. She, too, would die in infancy. As before, the van Kuijks rushed to produce another baby, and Petronella Johanna, known as Nel, was born September 23, 1907.

  Given their recent pattern of infant deaths, the family was anxious about the health of their seventh child, whom they would name Andreas Cornelis, after Adam’s father and his friend Cornelis Roovers, a cobbler who accompanied Adam to register the birth at the Burgerlijke Stand in the town hall.

  In the year 1909, the 28th of June, has appeared before us, civil servant of the county of Breda: Adam van Kuijk, age 33, profession: deliveryman, residing in Breda, who gave notice of the fact that Maria Elisabeth Ponsie, without profession, residing in Breda, his wife, on the 26th of June of this year, at 11 hours in the afternoon in this country has given birth to a child of the male sex, which child will have the names of Andreas Cornelis. This notice has been given in the presence of Hendrikus Rogiers, age 26, profession: smith, and of Cornelis Roovers, age 22, profession: shoemaker, both residing within this county.

  Dries, as the family nicknamed their fifth living child, had his moth
er’s clear blue eyes and was robust and energetic almost from birth. Much to the van Kuijks’ relief, his delivery, at home above the stables, was unremarkable.

  As the first surviving male child in nine years, Dries was doted on by his three older sisters. They dressed the infant like a doll and delighted in taking him for carriage strolls in nearby Valkenburg Park, and around the Begijnhof, a cheerful group of sixteenth-century convent houses occupied by the lay order of Begijnen nuns.

  As he grew to a toddler, Dries appeared to be a normal and even gregarious boy in every way. But as he got older, he displayed an unusual characteristic: he slept with his eyes open and was known as the family sleepwalker. The family had to lock the doors to keep him from venturing outside in the small hours of the morning, but even that did not always deter him. One day, a neighbor, Mrs. van Overbeek, came to inform his mother that Dries had been standing in the street in the middle of the night, apparently asleep.

  From the beginning, Dries was more a Ponsie than a van Kuijk. He had the Ponsie sense of humor, playfulness, and appreciation of fun, and their optimism, imagination, and daring. And in addition to his mother’s eyes, he possessed her small, taut mouth (if his father’s thick bottom lip), the set of her nose, her soft chin line, and her tendency toward a general fleshiness, a characteristic of the robust Ponsie family. His genetic coding dictated that by the time he reached his teens, Dries would thicken in the hips and waist in an almost womanly fashion.

  Since the child spent so much time in the company of women, he looked forward to his visits at the gasthuis with Grandfather Ponsie. The old man was always quick with a funny story of one kind or another, especially about the gypsy life, the hustle, bustle, and magic of the little fairs, and the thrill of closing a sale to people who didn’t want, and - couldn’t use, a wooden puppet with carved hands, or another piece of chipped crockery or tin jewelry. It was all in the presentation, Grandfather Ponsie made clear. And if you had to be just a little cunning—if you sometimes had to trick people into thinking they needed something they - didn’t—well, everyone was the better for it.

  And despite the grandfather’s rootlessness, the ancestral Ponsies, like the van Kuijks in the Middle Ages, had been people of means, he told the boy. Originally from France, they had lost their status and bearing when they fled to Holland during the Revolution. But they were well-mannered people, elitists who appreciated the best of everything and dressed in finery—even gloves!

  The latter story had a profound effect on the child, for as Marie Gort–van Kuijk, Dries’s sister, remembers, “Dries was very keen on his looks, and he paid a lot of attention to his clothes. When he got a little older, he would really dress up. He was a gentleman, but he could look down on people a little bit. He thought he was just better.”

  All this talk about traveling and freedom and fine clothes—and most of all being somebody—swirled around in the boy’s head. He would come home from visiting his grandfather and soon find himself stuck between his dreams of the Ponsies’ independence and nomadic lifestyle, and his father’s stern sense of order, discipline, and obligation.

  Adam, who performed his professional duties with military precision, hoped Dries might become a soldier like him, if for no other reason than the guarantee of work in the city. But Dries, who had a difficult time taking orders from anyone, showed little interest in soldiering.

  In Adam’s time, the father and the priest were law in Holland, and a clash between this particular father and son was inevitable, especially since Adam van Kuijk, who considered humility a virtue, was not one to indulge his children. He went to church daily, and saw to it that Dries, who rankled against regular church attendance, became a mass server. The van Kuijks worshiped at various churches in the area, primarily at the St. Josefkerk, situated next to the town brewery, and the Antoniuskerk, in the St. Janstraat.

  According to the Wijkregister, or the neighborhood register kept by their priest, the van Kuijk children “performed their religious duties as they should in the period 1916–1924—all of them received the Holy Communion and were confirmed.”

  But Adam van Kuijk stayed close to his God for reasons other than strict Catholic obeisance. When Dries was about six, Adam was diagnosed with diabetes, and his kidneys had begun to fail. A frequent patient at the Catholic St. Ignatius Hospital, Adam feared he would not live long, but if Dries helped him with the horses and package delivery, the father might be able to conserve his strength.

  Yet while Dries shared Adam’s love of animals, he hadn’t his father’s sense of regimented order. Once the boy took several of the horses to Hendrikus Rogiers’s blacksmith shop and on the return trip let them go to see if they could find their way home. Such boyish pranks did little to bolster Adam’s waning health.

  Still, Adam did not let his illness get in the way of duty. He rose each morning at five o’clock, readied the horses, and delivered packages until 7:00 or 8:00 A.M., when he returned home for breakfast. If he found the boys still in bed at that late hour—and Dries often was—he reddened in the face, yanked the child from his sleep, and beat him with a stick for bad children that he kept behind the door.

  “When they had done serious wrong,” remembers Marie, her father’s favorite child, “they got serious punishment. Our parents wanted the boys to have a better job than our father had, to make easier money and not have to work so hard.”

  The family was poor, but it was not by any means considered low-class. Maria van Kuijk took great pride in the fact that once the girls reached age twelve and finished primary school, they went to work as live-in maid servants and nannies to some of the finest families in Breda. A young girl who served with such a respectable family was recognized as good lineage herself. And if it was an irony that the van Kuijks themselves had a maid, Maria reconciled the expense by remembering that both the van Kuijks and the Ponsies had once been aristocracy.

  In recent years, accusations have arisen that Maria, to put on airs and earn more money for luxuries for herself and parochial schooling for her children, forced her husband to work long overtime hours for van Gend en Loos and to moonlight at a variety of jobs—shining the boots and belts of Breda’s police force, peddling postcards to the soldiers at their barracks, and dealing in secondhand furniture and household items.

  It was precisely the way her father and brothers had always made a living, so why shouldn’t it be a supplemental form of income for Adam? Besides, now there were other children in the fold. Engelina Francina, called Lien, was born November 13, 1910, followed by Adam Franciscus, or Ad, on September 21, 1913. Two more children would round out the family to eleven, or nine surviving, the last two named in honor of those who died: Johanna, born May 8, 1916, and Johannes, or Jan, on October 1, 1918. Maria managed to find a pillow and blanket for all, and Adam provided an extra place to sleep by sweeping up at a small auction house and taking a bed that hadn’t been sold as payment for his work.

  As the children were growing up, their mother, who practiced as much religious discrimination as others in Holland of the time, restricted their playmates—no Protestants or low-class families—and strictly forbade them to go into the music hall next door.

  Whether her mother thought Marie was too drawn to the sound of music and laughter, in later years she convinced the girl to join the St. Josef convent in Etten en Leur for Franciscan nuns, a move that was perhaps a comment on married life from a woman who was forced to marry. “I was never happy at the convent,” says Marie, who spent eighteen years in servitude, “and I told my mother I wanted to leave there. But she said it was probably best that I stay.”

  Maria would expect much of Dries, too, when he grew older. For now, she was content to let him be a child, and argued with her husband when Adam required too much of his time in the stables. By age seven, Dries had already been slipping away by himself to explore Breda’s streets and alleyways with his best friend, Cees Frijters, and schoolmate Karel Freijssen, and to visit Grandfather Ponsie and absorb himself in
fantasy.

  The stories about the small fairs and village markets only heightened the child’s anticipation of kermis, or the large fair, which came to Breda on the third Sunday in October after the last mass. Situated at the Grote Markt, its tents and brightly colored awnings spread out through the neighborhood, down Halstraat, then across Oude Vest to the Kloosterplein, and up Dries’s own street, Vlaszak. Kermis was a major event in Breda, a week of renewed good spirit, laughter, and optimism, when the adults drank too much and threw caution and Catholic reserve to the wind, and the children finagled ways of earning money for exotic treats, mechanical attractions, and games of chance.

  Dries was no exception, and using the techniques his grandfather taught him, he hustled a few guilders whenever the opportunity arose, mostly trading or running errands.

  To Dries, kermis was a nearly delirious escape from the glum world of his father and the nonsense of school. Apart from the circus—which brought the clowns and larger animals, like elephants, to the Gasthuisvelden—kermis was the child’s favorite thing in all the world. When either was in town, the boy would vanish before daylight and not come home until the moon shone bright in the sky.

  When his parents figured out that his fascination had turned into something of an obsession, they strongly suggested that the boy spend more time on his studies and less on dreaming of fly-by-night pleasure. However, it is doubtful that their words carried any weight. Dries - didn’t tell his mother that when kermis rolled around, he regularly cut school to be at the head of the line to ride the merry-go-round, since the first round was free. Getting something for nothing seemed to thrill the child, and when Dries realized that being paid to be part of the fair was more fun than simply watching it, at nine, the enterprising boy became what Americans would call “a carny”—literally, someone who works in a carnival, a term considered pejorative by some.