Learning to Skate
On my Oma's skates
I arrived in Holland on Boxing Day, having travelled solo, as an 11-year-old, all the way from New Zealand. It was an interesting journey, taking 36 hours on Air NZ to Sydney and then KLM through Asia, Beirut and Rome. All the while, KLM was talking to immigration. I had been flying on a Dutch passport, which a well-intentioned air hostess from air New Zealand had said she would look after and return to me when we arrived in Sydney. I never saw it or her again. They let me onto the plane, but there was a possibility that without the passport, I might get sent straight back to New Zealand.
I arrived at Schiphol wearing a shirt and shorts. It had been around 25 degrees at home, 35 degrees in Bangkok and then in Amsterdam, it was around -3 degrees.
Immigration kindly let me in at the demands of my grandfather, or Pake the Fresian moniker for Opa.
He was ‘woedend’ as they would put it. In other words, furious. His wife, my Oma, lay a hospital bed in Amsterdam, riddled with cancer, having been told she may never leave the hospital alive, and he was dammed if he would see his Dutch citizen grandson turned around. Fortunately, he did have a copy of my birth certificate.
A couple of days later, after Pake with some help from one of my aunts, bought me some winter clothes, corduroy pants, a warm jacket, and fur-lined boots, the side of my face became very sore.
I knew immediately what it was.
When I left Auckland, my foster sister gave me some spending money and brother Roger must have given me the mumps. So I spent the next few days getting accustomed to my new bedroom at our home, my new home, in Bakkum.
It was a cold winter. Our backyard was covered in snow, and you could safely walk on the ice in the ponds.
Tom, one of my uncles who was still living at home, introduced me to snowball fights. I had seen snow in New Zealand, but nothing like this. I loved it, but I think he was taking it easy on me. I think it would have been different if I had been one of his army buddies, or even his siblings.
Nek minit, as we say in New Zealand, I caught a chill and ended up in bed with a cold or flu. Between the mumps and the flu, I spent most of my first two weeks in bed.
I discovered Radio Veronica on a transistor radio that Tom loaned me, and these were some of the tracks I was listening to in my bedroom. Soon I would be making weekly visits to the local record store in Castricum to pick up the free Radio Veronica Top 40 Sheets.
Veronica was a pirate radio station, just like Radio Hauraki which had started 3 years earlier, from 3 miles off the coast of New Zealand. They had a similar pioneering rebel culture and like Hauraki, still exist, although as a legitimate commercial radio station.
Here’s one of their Top 40 Hits commercials for the mandatory Top Hits of all Time to 1974. Also available on 8-Track! Bet you know some of these songs.
After my confinement, I got to enjoy being out in the cold. Our home backed onto the sand dunes and there was an old toboggan, which my father had probably used as a teenager. All I had to do was open the back gate and there were kilometres of sand dunes to explore and slide down.
Next, I had to learn to ice-skate, at the Ijsbaan in Bakkum. This is a large outdoor skating rink, a stone’s throw from the beach. The problem was, that everyone who wanted to come had full-size Noren or Nordic ice skates. Aged almost 12, my feet were too small to wear them anyway.
The solution was to give me Oma’s old skates. They were known as Koninginen Schaatsen, or Queen’s skates. They had shorter blades and you had to tie your shoes onto them, a bit like putting a ski boot into the binding.
That’s me in the foreground with my grandmother’s ice skates on. You can see that the people behind me had longer blades and were higher off the ice.
Sometimes the laces would loosen and the skates would start pointing in the wrong direction and I would have to go to the mound of the snow which was the centre of the oval rink, to tighten them up again.
After a couple of visits, which were as ugly as the bruises on my backside from hard landings, I was able to build up speed in the fast lane around the outside, but I was never able to skate as fast as the people with their prized Noren.
This huge skating rink remains a very popular place for families to go in winter. But sadly with climate change, it is a coin toss as to whether it will be cold enough for the ice to naturally form. Not every Christmas is white anymore. But for me, I had gone from a tough time after my parent’s breakup, to a wonderful life in Holland.