Life in the enterprise

Once I saw a crocodile on a stretcher. They had his mouth tied shut. So I could touch him calmly. At the back of our house, we looked out onto a jungle. The sounds that came from it were sometimes a bit scary for me as a child. In the afternoon, we drank tea in the garden. We would eat boiled peanuts with it. The peanuts were peeled from their outer shell. They grow in that shell at the roots of the peanut plant, underground. Sometimes we would drink Siroop Susu. This syrup also went well with our Kelapa Muda. That is young coconut. It was cut into pieces and placed in the coconut water in a glass.

Mother couldn't handle the climate well. She suffered from migraines. I would often massage her forehead. This was called "pietjieten."

"In those days, we didn't have a TV, but we wouldn't have needed it! A slope lower was the large vegetable garden, and even lower was the jungle. One time, when it stormed very hard, I saw a huge forest giant of a tree fall there."

In the evening, we sat on the steps of our house, looking out over the jungles below us at the beautiful sunset. The sky was filled with the most magnificent colors every evening, and my father played his accordion.

We walked barefoot. This meant that we, who were nail biters, also gnawed at the nails of our toes. Not only our nails suffered, but also our wooden pen holders. All those things were smeared with quinine by my father. Because quinine is so bitter, he hoped to make us stop by that. But we quickly got used to that taste and continued to gnaw calmly.

Occasionally quinine was also administered to us as a preventive measure against malaria. We would stand next to each other, all five in a row, and my father would aim the pills one by one into our throats.

We used to go swimming at Wijnkoopsbaai. There was no one else there, the beach was entirely ours. Therefore, we didn't have to wear a swimsuit.

There is a legend about the goddess of the Indian Ocean, Dewi Nyo Roro Kidul. You could tell from all the tsunamis that she had become restless, or rather angry, because she was not receiving enough offerings from the local population. This goddess was married to the sultan of Yogyakarta (and every successor!). You should not swim in the sea wearing a green swimsuit, otherwise this angry goddess would take you to her palace deep in the sea.

Mother weaved, painted, wrote poetry, and taught us how to sculpt. She loved orchids and ferns. They grew hanging on bark inside or outside, living off of moisture and air. A fern was called chuveluurtje. No local grower knows it by that name. But at the international nursery day in Bingerden, to my delight, there was an expert who called it that.