MY MOTHER's ORANGE NOTEBOOK
(continued)
I noted my Mother also gave "bijlessen" , i.e. helped with the homework assignments of Pauline Kleyn, the daughter of a family friend.
I myself used to do that to her brother Jaap in the late 1940's. This was a fringe benefit, haha, of having a father who not only was a school principal, but who had to teach a full load and give some dozen hours a week "extra lessons".
One pupil I recall distinctly was a gardener who wanted to learn English before emigrating to Canada. When confronted with the expression "a lot of" (in Dutch: "een hoop" (a heap),
he immediately coined the term "a lot of cows", a pile of cow-dung.....Anyhow, said gardener could not afford the normal rate of less than a dollar an hour, so he would work in the garden for an hour. However, he once tried to protest this arrangement because he would get bone-tired working an hour - while my father was just sitting and talking, which was unfair...
Then I came across a 3x5 card I made up in 1960 in a family meeting concerning the guests I brought along from Woods Hole in the USA, Dr. John Zeigler, his wife Marion, and three typical American kids, as disobedient as they came even at that time.
The card reflects the rates we charged in the Oostdam B and B: $ 10 per night for the whole family, and dinners at $ 1 each, + baby-sitting at 1 guilder (say 25c) per hour "non-active) or f 1.50 if active...
When Marilyn got back after the first day without kids, she was flabbergasted to see the kids following my Mom like a flock of little ducks and doing everything she asked or told them immediately without dilly-dallying or protests.
Perhaps I should stop here with these few mementoes and let you have a look at the prices (all quoted in guilders, or Nf, in this time before the Euro)
when the dollar was still rather powerful at about Nf 3.80 to the dollar!
Notice that in that period of time, people still delivered bread (a baker), groceries ( a "groenteboer")
and milk (a "melkboer") while no charges accrued for pickup or organic wastes by the "schillenboer". The word "boer" is perhaps a bit galling to my wife Mercia, who is a "Boer" by birth, but presumably it has now been replaced by more P.C. terms or the functions plainly abolished.
Enough said, good night!
thumnails of some Orange Notebook pages - BLO fecit 20050417 - stories