Messenger for the fallen

The blue van turned off Royal York Road onto South Drive. The man on the back ramp gripped a bar with one hand, and with the other, pitched my bundle of papers onto the side of the road, just a few feet from where I stood. A biting wind carried an early snow flurry. A gaggle of Canadian geese, eager to escape winter, honked as they passed overhead. 

I was early because of the Remembrance Day holiday. I shouted my thanks, waved at the man and rolled the bundle face up. 

The day before, at eleven o’clock in the morning, we’d had a brief ceremony at school.  Our teacher reminded us of the fallen soldiers in the two World Wars and in Korea and asked us to stand for a minute’s silence to honour them. 

Afterwards, it struck him that I had lived in Holland during the war and, quite unexpectedly, he asked me to tell the class about some of my experiences. I was unprepared. I panicked. The events had happened long ago in such a distant land that I found it impossible to relate them here in Humber Valley Village School. 

I shook my head, turned red, felt heat rush to my cheeks, and was overwhelmed by the distance from my hometown that I’d never see again. After an embarrassing silence the teacher called us back to work, but my mind went thousands of miles across land and ocean and again, as with Opa Van der Ploeg’s death, I felt out of place. I was here, but a good part of me was not here. How far can one’s thoughts be removed from one’s body? I could not imagine a place farther from me than Leeuwarden. How long had these first few years been!  

And, in spite of the time and distance, I could recall it all in an instant: playing soccer with my friends on the pavers of the Van Cronenburghstraat; smelling the sweet smoke in Wynsma’s cigar store and the putrid stench of the stagnant water in the Oostersingel; and hearing the lively hustle and bustle of the Friday market. How long had it been since I sat in my school desk behind Annie De Vries, whose pigtails were a constant temptation? 

And a sudden realization hit me: I would never see my city and my friends again. Sitting there in my school desk at Humber Valley Village School, I had to fight back tears. There was no one I could talk to, no one who could understand.

Memories

At lunchtime, I joined some of the boys in my class in the schoolyard. It was football season, but the football they tossed around was foreign to me. It was cone-shaped; it was carried far more than kicked, and its manner was unpredictable. The only football I knew was round and was handled only by the goalie. I ran with the boys, ignorant of whose side I was on, my movement across the field as haphazard as that of the ball. I was relieved to hear the whistle of the vice-principal signaling the end of lunch.  

In the afternoon, our teacher read a poem written by a Canadian poet, John McCrae, called “In Flanders Fields.”

The cadence of his voice carried me back to Holland.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row by row,

That mark our place…

I had not seen any soldiers’ graves in Holland, but I remembered the plane that had crashed just outside of my city. I remembered the ugly hole in the field and the men saying, “they found body parts all over the field.” I saw those body parts in my dreams for several weeks. 

There were no poppies in that farmer’s field, just some Holstein cows that, to me, looked strangely out of place. They appeared totally oblivious to the casualties and the cruelty of war. They chewed their cud, content as always. I forced those thoughts out of my mind and tried to concentrate on the teacher’s explanation of “In Flanders Fields.” 

 … and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

He explained the contrast between the larks and the guns, between nature and machine, between the bravely singing larks and the dead silent soldiers.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders Fields.

These soldiers died for me, I thought. They lie buried across the ocean as far from their village, families and friends, as I am from mine. I felt that I had a better understanding of “In Flanders Fields” than anyone else in class did. But I could not share it. 

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders field. 

Had I betrayed the soldiers who had died for me by my unwillingness to share my war stories? 

Things we could not say

The following day was a holiday. I could start my paper route early because of it. So rather than at 3:30 pm, I started delivering at 2:00 o’clock that afternoon. As I twisted the steel wire that bundled my papers and removed the packing wrapper, I saw the headline just beneath the Toronto Daily Star heading: “Canada Joins With Queen and Rest of Commonwealth in Honouring Dead in Two World Wars and Korea.”  

There was a picture of the ceremonies at the Cenotaph at Toronto City Hall. Thousands had come to pay their respect.

Why could I not have shared with my classmates the excitement of the liberation of Leeuwarden? Or the grief of the death of my brother Jan?  Why had I not shared my feelings about “In Flanders Field” with them?

Why did I not tell my Canadian friends about the night when Mom called me out of bed at two o’clock in the morning? When at the age of six, I was awakened by a tug at my shoulder.

“Allan, Allan, wake up!” There is panic in Mom’s voice. I have never heard her speak like this before.  

I feel her hand shaking my right shoulder. I am confused. What does she want? There are no lights in my bedroom. Mom is bending over me; her loose hair tickles my face. But I’m not laughing. 

And now the panic in her voice grips my throat. She tells me to quickly put on the clothes she hands me. My brothers are already dressed. It’s so confusing.

“We have to go downstairs.” And now I hear the steady drone of airplanes overhead. And every now and then, I hear a low rumble. Is it thunder? 

“We have to go downstairs; come on, Allan, quickly now.” And Mom helps me into my pants and socks and sweater and holding her hand I walk behind my two brothers down the hall. I feel the cold linoleum through my thin socks. My brothers’ dark silhouettes dance on the corridor wall. Mom carries a small flashlight in her right hand. I hear the whine of the dynamo as she pumps the handle in her palm. I clasp her free hand. We don’t speak. 

As we go down the staircase, the silhouette ghosts become grotesquely large and haphazardly fold over the ceiling above. We reach the bathroom. Mom opens the door and inside is Dad with my sister Miep on his knee, and now the bombs are dropping and the house shakes and I start to cry and Dad takes me on his other knee. Mom tells Cor and Jan to sit on the floor, bow their heads and cover them with their arms. Dad prays:

Our father in Heaven

Hallowed be Your Name

His voice is calm. We huddled in our bathroom because the Wartime Safety Inspector told Dad it was the strongest part of our house. I am scared. I repeat the words of The Lord’s Prayer, imitating, in my mind, the steady lilt my Dad gives to the words. My father on earth has his arm around me. His fingers clasp my elbow. I don’t know what hallowed means. I don’t know why Dad prays for our daily bread. Why doesn’t he pray for the bombs to go away? But I don’t mind really what he prays. I am comforted that he prays. Please God, I pray silently, make the bombs go away.  

Mom has her hands on Cor and Jan’s shoulders. I close my eyes again. I pray again. A few times the thunder is so close that I think the house is going to fall on us. 

But after an hour or so, the thunder, like a passing storm, lessens until we hear it no more. Dad says that we can now go safely to our beds. He thanks the Lord for keeping us safe. I pray too. 

The next morning, I hear that a bomb has hit the Christian Trade School just a few blocks from my house.

Tribute to the dead

On South Drive, a car slows down. The driver opens his window. He leans over and shouts at me, “What’s the headline?”

I shout back, “Canada and the Queen honour the dead.”

He pulls away. He raises his hand in a thank-you salute. 

I slowly count the papers in my bundle and load them into my Toronto Daily Star shoulder bag. 

The bag feels so heavy that I have to lean over to the left to balance my body.  I am thankful for the heavy load. I deliver the November 11 paper to my customers on the Kingsway.

 A messenger for the fallen soldiers.

This story is an excerpt from chapter 10 of Allan’s memoir “Where is here: An immigration story” published by Oakwood Press, 2008.