AMONG THE DUTCHMEN
By C. R. HEWITT • ITTLE that you see in Holland reflects the bitter ordeal of the " occupation." Even at Rotterdam you must get out of the train and look round to find the bomb-damage. The lovely house- fronts of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Zeist and Delft appear as trim, fresh and foursquare as they do in the Dutch pictures ; the lines of eighteenth-century buildings stretch unbroken along the canal-sides. After the occultation the Dutchmen repainted their dream-like towns with symbolical zeal. The bicycles must be more numerous than ever ; the traffic miracles no less frequent. No Englishman could possibly guess why cyclists and walkers are not continually piling up in maimed heaps. The cyclists sit bolt upright on their saddles, their raincoats hanging straight down on each side of a covered-in rear wheel. This vertical position, the lack of trouser-clips, the spotless light raincoats, the short cigars, the perfect adjustment of the straight-brimmed hats, give them an appearance of inexpertness. It is illusory ; they are the maddest and safest riders in the world. Most of them carry leather despatch-cases that any Englishman would be proud to own (to judge from the surprising number you see on the Customs counters on the way home). Long black American cars, with radiators like rows of carnivorous teeth and headlamps like ferocious eyes, abound in every town. The upkeep of the large suburban houses, whose condition—at least externally— is a house-agent's dream, would in England require an income of £3,000. (" I don't understand it," a Netherlands Ministry of Economics official told me. " The country's supposed to be poor, and look at it.") The shop-windows are full. The children are well set-up, high-spirited—and innumerable.
Trouble lies below the surface. Almost every necessary commodity is rationed, clothing severely, and there is no easily-accessible black market. Milk is warationed, and bread, plain cake and some kinds of biscuits ; so are footwear and gloves. In the restaurants Mondays and Thursdays are cakeless, Tuesdays and Fridays meatless ; on Wednesdays you can have what you like. A good dinner will cost you twelve shillings, at least half of this being the cost of the mountain of vegetables you couldn't eat. (The fact that the Dutch diner-out completely polishes his plate makes you realise what war- time privation must have meant to these people.) The meatless days, by the way, expose some poverty of invention among Dutch chefs, who seem to have looked little further than fish and macaroni. " Sorry no cheese, mynheer," the waiters say. " It is all exported to England."
It comes as a surprise to most Englishmen visiting Holland that a smattering of German is virtually useless, even for deciphering street signs, railway directions and menus. Dutch, a language only Dutchmen trouble to learn, resembles no other. It is less embarrass- ing to discover this silently, by trial and error with the newspapers and the shop-windows, than by verbally airing any odd bits of German you might think helpful with the rare Dutchman who speaks no English. The Dutch just won't talk German or listen to it ; the occupation is still a vivid and noxious memory. The stories you hear, from starvation in the towns to the shouldering of solitary German soldiers into the canAls on dark nights, from the harbouring of resistance fighters in conc taled bedroom-wall cupboards to the tireless sabotage on the railways, are still retailed with cold fury. One lady I met told me she once cycled sixty miles on bare wheel- rims (the Nazis had commandeered all cycle tyres) to take half a hundredweight of stolen flour to her aged parents in a distant town, and then back in time for the 8 p.m. curfew.
The people are strongly Anglophil in their undemonstrative way. In the big towns there are few people who don't speak at least a little English ; but the railway and tramcar men, most of whom seem to be elderly men speaking only Dutch, go to great trouble to help the English traveller and obviously delight in doing so. There is about these, and the hotel waiters and the shop assistants, a grave, unsmiling kindness that should cure any predisposition to look around for the "comic foreigner "; it is the Englishman who discovers himself to be comic, the Dutchman whose natural dignity helps him not to laugh. They make no complaint that the English- man should expect them to understand his language ; they have never regarded this as evidence of British smugness or arrogance.
We are a small country," they say. " We can't expect the world to learn our language. English is universal. We must all learn English." It doesn't seem to occur to them that, as a great seafaring nation and the founders of a vast colonial empire, they might well have endowed the Dutch language with this universality but for a few twists and turns in history—and an accident of geography. I have sometimes wondered whether the Dutchman has the same feeling for the sea as the Englishman, whether the precarious situa- tion of his motherland, thirty feet .below sea-level, demanding unceasing vigilance for geographical survival, has perhaps accustomed him to regard the sea as his natural enemy, the landlubber view pre- vailing over the sentiment of sailors, ocean navigation being regarded merely as a means to an end.
But they have a frontier to the east which no dyke will contain. How do they feel about " the situation " ? So far as I could tell they are more level-headed about the war danger than we. Their newspapers (to judge only from headlines) are less hysterical ; their ordinary men of affairs more given to sober appraisal of Russia's military capacity, more cynical about Russia's intentions. The Dutch, I should say, are not afraid. They are quietly optimistic. It would take a lot to stampede them.
This solidity, this Dutch quality of having both feet firmly on the ground, sets a strange background for the American film posters outside the cinemas. Holland itself has hardly any film industry. The people go to see American and, to a lesser extent, British and French films, to follow the dialogue where they can and read the Dutch captions where they can't. How does their secondary-school English—which equips them amply to deal with the casual English contact—stand up to the Hollywood jargon, spoken from the corner of the mouth in a room lit only by the glint of a gun-barrel ? It doesn't. They let the jargon go by, and wait for the shooting. There are always queues for the cinemas ; on Sundays they start forming up at to a.m. I wondered how they would react to the English-made Olympic Games film, in which (since the characters are silent, or at least unrecorded) the spoken commentary could, of course, be in Dutch ; and remembering the tremendous feats of the Dutch girl, Fanny Blankers-Koen, I went to see it. It seemed to me that the audience watched this fine film completely unmoved. Repeated shots of the Wembley score-board showing "Holland" at the top produced no perceptible effect whatsoever ; nor did the numerous close-ups of Mrs. Blankers-Koen, who after all was the queen of the occasion, provoke a single hand-clap. But on its dignified way down the gallery stairs after the show the audiences talking in what sounded like the measured tones of people just leaving an uneventful company meeting, were saying " Blankers- Koen " to each other as a stage crowd murmurs " rhubarb."
It seemed to me that the Dutchmen hate fresh air. Opening a window in a hotel is, in most cases, a purposely complicated and serious operation, and should be done in secret. In the few cases where it might have been too easy, the window has been screwed down. Train-windows are never opened, and are therefore misted over with a fearful humidity ; you must wipe a place with your coat-sleeve if you want to see a windmill. In the less modern hotels such windows as there are in the toilets are carefully screwed down, the role ordinarily played by fresh air being entrusted to a wire cage of nutmegs on the wall. The cafés, the shops and the tramcars go in for fugs. This economy with oxygen may, I suppose, account for the pallor of so many Dutch faces ; it may even explain the thoroughness with which the middle-aged go old, the almost abrupt transition from a rather cosmopolitan youthfulness to a square, uncompromising Dutchness. But Dutchness is, I think, a warm and excellent quality.
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