As young teenage boys we liked discovering thing like deserted old homesteads..Harry Potter move over ... We decided to explore the dilapidated homestead, and to pick and eat sweet oranges in the orange grove. For us Dutch boys, picking oranges was really something, because oranges are an imported exotic fruit; they don’t grow on trees in Nederland. Soon we entered, or I should say broke into, the old house. Everything was dry and it did not smell musty like some old Dutch houses; this old house was sort of crisply clean. Streams of sunlight infiltrated from the many windows and skylights in the roof. No rubbish around, clean, tidy, other-worldly is a better description; squeaking doors mysteriously moved as though by an unseen hand, swaying on their hinges. No breeze, but it was not scary yet titillating to the senses, awakening curiosity. We could hear a variety of birds tripping on the hot tin roof. There was no furniture in the house except inbuilt bookshelves still filled with serious old books, like The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, and it still had piles of newspapers from the 1920s and ’30s neatly stacked up. Pictures were still hanging on the wall; they were Aussie soldier boys from the Great War, in their simple but fresh uniforms, all handsome young men, sad to think that as they sat for their photographic portraits, in the back of their mind they might have just had an inkling they might just not make it back to Oz. It was as though they wanted to be part of our adventure, these young Australians; some of them had Dutch names, wanted to be part of our adventure of discovery, and in their pictures, they seemed to be saying there is more, there’s more, or maybe, I thought, they could have met my opa on his river-sailing clipper as he delivered aid to the Belgians during the Great War, people at Ieperen or Passchendaele (Aussies call it Ypres).
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 03:32:36 +0000
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