I Can't Stay Long

by Laurie Lee

  Work, relaxation, and a tingling sensation of the mind ventilated by casual friendships and the reflective canals – this is the particular make-up of Amsterdam. And here, as in most other countries in the world, you get the quick feel of a city in its bars. In Hoppe’s, for instance – a place of tropical wine casks labelled Port à Port, Crème de Cacao, Curaçao – I found commerce and culture mixing as close as clubmen, briefcases among the beards. It was evening, and there was a buzz like a Spanish tavern coming from bargees, bankers and burgomasters. There were also lean working artists still wet with paint, a few jazzmen getting stoked for the night, students hungry with visions, lovers floating in corners, and a young girl wearing jeans and a tiara …

  Another bar, the Scheltema, lying close to the post office, was really a snug working beer-hall for writers. Here was a long plain room with an iron stove in the middle, wooden tables, writing desks and newspapers, pools of silence and animation, a journalist reading his proofs, a wordy scribe talking wastefully to his girl, and, head down in the corner, with a jug of wine and a book, a poet actually on the job.

  Holland is a consolidation of rich dry land imposed against the will of the sea. But it remains a seaman’s country, a nation of mariners, and wherever you go you can’t forget it; even the inland farmers walk with a kind of sailor’s roll, as though not quite sure of the solidity of the ground. The cities are like seaports, no matter how far they lie from the coast, their houses hugged by canals and ships. They are not copies of Amsterdam, being provincial and distinct, though most of them have something of its open charity. I went to two of these cities: ’s-Hertogenbosch in the south and Groningen in the far north-east.

  Groningen is in one of the older parts of Holland, east of Friesland, on the north road to Germany – a region not visited by many outsiders, lying somewhat out of range of the obvious. It surprised me when I came to it, rising from fields of burnt wheat like an egg-cup in a well-baked tart, and I liked it so much for its unexpectedness that I couldn’t pass it by.

  Groningen is sugar, corn, flowers, tobacco, ship-building, and learning. Canals like tree-rings radiate round its centre, marking the 1,000-year growth of the city. It is provincial yet worldly, land-locked yet nautical, and its university is old and famous. My first memory is of the Vismarket with its Parisian chestnut trees, its pavements covered with buckets of roses, and the girls round the flowers like golden bees – Nordic students with pollen-dusted skins. There was also the Grotemarket nearby, in the town’s main square, tented with stalls like a Mongol village, where I bought clogs and honey, and some thin smoked eels – the finest I have ever tasted. The eels come from Kampen, on the old Zuyder Zee, and are best the size of the little finger. The black silken skin comes off like a stocking, leaving the flesh faintly touched with pink; and nibbling at these as I walked round the market I seemed to be enjoying the rarest refinements of cannibalism.

  My hours in the Grotemarket were musically quartered by the bells of Martini Tower, whose feathery harmonies came floating through the air as though borne in the beaks of pigeons. This 300-year-old carillon is the pride of the city, and the makers’ descendants are still in the business. ‘At their factory,’ I was told, ‘you’ll see nothing much – just shabby people messing about with sand.’ But these Dutch bells are famous; they seem to gild the air, and the Hollanders love to ring them.

  On the canals of this town ancient barges from Amsterdam moved as slow as the shadows of sundials; in its museums were relics of Bronze Age tombs mixed up with wicked little Roman gods; I saw a church stuffed with carvings of Hebrew sacrifice – bearded prophets and bleeding rams, and a medieval poorhouse inscribed over the door: ‘Do not mock. No one knows his fate.’

  Most of the bars in Groningen seemed to be run by sailors taking a rest between trips round the world. Their conversation was burred with the slang of ten languages, and their recollections were gaudy as parrots. The bars at night were crowded with students playing dice or talking of destiny, and wearing red college caps stitched with long brilliant feathers that seemed to grow straight out of their brains.

  Almost everyone in the city spoke fluent English, for the Dutch have the gift of tongues; yet it was English with a difference, with capricious inflections, so that you never quite knew where you were. I remember one student describing the liberation of Groningen, after the siege of 1672: ‘We were attacked by persons from all the world,’ he said, ‘but by God, you know, we beat it!’ Another invited me home, and described the way – or perhaps it was some private dream of his own. ‘There are three large blocks of flats,’ he said, ‘and I am in the first.’ I went, and there were four, and they were rather small, and he was in the third.

  But my biggest surprise in this provincial town was the sophistication of its food. Most British hotels (out of London anyway) offer lugubrious dishes cooked in railway steam and served in the spirit of family prayers. But for dinner here I had gigot d’agneau à la Provençale, wild duck ‘in the Chinese Fashion’, and a white Rhine wine (Deidesheimer Herrgottsacker) as clear and cold as dew from a grotto. The head waiter received my praise with modesty, his mind clearly on other things. ‘I am serving two lobsters for Mr X,’ he said, ‘a very particular man.’ Mr X was in charge of a local shipyard which was building a yacht for the Prince of Monaco. Eating my ripe wild duck, and watching the Prince’s man at his lobsters, I felt Groningen to be a versatile town.

  Unpronounceable ’s-Hertogenbosch, lying south near the Maas, offered another variation of provincial life. Its name, in English, means ‘The Wood of the Duke’, and I found it medieval, ornate and lively. This is a Catholic city, with the gay, sumptuous bars which seem often to go with the faith. (Is the stand up, sink-it-quick, hang-your-head type of bar, entirely a nonconformist invention, I wonder?) I spent an evening here in a rousing café singing songs to a mechanical organ – a relic of Can-Can Paris, magnificently decorated and covered with life-sized goddesses in wax. Here I drank local gin, which tastes like a mad relation of Calvados but which insidiously captures the palate. For late dinner I had trout, and the local richly-stewed ‘hunting-dish’ (designed to be eaten from the back of a horse), followed by the town’s own brandy, mixed with cooking sugar, and Bossche Koek (or gingerbread) with coffee.

  ’s-Hertogenbosch is no tourist town, but has mysterious beauties of its own, where motionless canals, full of silver light, lap the houses like baths of mercury, and rooftops carry creepers whose wing-pointed leaves resemble the devils of Hieronymus Bosch. This fifteenth-century surrealist was, in fact, born in the city, and some of his work can be found in the cathedral. The cathedral, they say, is the best in Holland, and its carillon the finest in Europe; recitals on its bells are given every Wednesday morning, during which the cafés switch off their mechanical organs.

  Holland is one of those small coastal countries which have made a big noise in the world, the sea carrying its reverberations. It lies coiled on itself like a North Sea prawn, clasping the Ijssel Lake to its heart, and poking a bent antenna of sandy islands in the direction of Scandinavia. Its web of waterways is what holds it together, and its towns are the knots in the system. But between the canals lies the rich green farmlands, many of them below sea level. And everywhere I went on my circular trip I was met by that stamp and diversity of coast and landscape which is the unique handprint of the Dutch on Europe.

  First, the wind-torn sand dunes north of The Hague, which seem in summer to be entirely inhabited by children – brown-legged and handsome, with mysterious ice-blue eyes and blond hair cut in ragged cups. They raced round the sand as though spawned by the waves, shouting sea cries at one another, and in their faces one saw the origins of both English and Americans, for these were first-base Anglo-Saxons.

  These sand dunes ran north for some seventy miles, covered with gun-sites and tangled grass, one of the original sea-walls behind which the medieval Dutch began to dry out and consolidate their nation. Here was Oude Holland, a north-pointing thumb wearing citi
es like garnet rings, with such quantities of sky that the roads shone like water and the cars seemed to ride on air. The reclaimed fields stood at different levels (the oldest having sunk the lowest) with canals running past at roof-top height and ships sailing among the chimneys. Trees leaned one way, bent by winds, but the fields were apple-green. Foals stood in the grass licking each other’s shoulders; there were windmills like great stopped clocks; boys were fishing in ditches full of water-lilies, watched by cows from the tops of the dykes. It was somewhere around here that Sir Philip Sydney, tired of summer and the Lowland Wars, threw off a poem like a short sharp cry, one of the truest war-cries of them all:

  Oh, western wind, when wilt thou blow,

  That the small rain down may rain?

  Christ! that my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed again …

  North of this ancient battlefield there is new-found land, only recently raised from the sea, great plains of ripe wheat rolling in heavy waves as though the sea was still there, but edible. Then there is the twenty-mile dam across the Zuyder Zee, a narrow chalk line ruled on open water, which only recently has changed the whole geography of the country, turning a sea into a placid lake. Over the dam, in Friesland, is old land again, some of it dyked in the Middle Ages, where the rolling blond farmers speak a language of their own, being unaccustomed to visitors, and raise their black and white cattle – which on the vivid green turf look like negatives stuck to landscapes of Kodachrome.

  Spinning between the towns one is constantly bruised by the light, as though everything had been torn from a rain-washed sky. But there is a stillness about the country places, slow movements of men and grass, steady rhythms of barges and solid horses drawing cargoes over fields and water. South of Friesland the villages stand grouped like paintings, so perfect you scarcely dare go into them; and along the spacious basin of the three great rivers all is so quiet you can hear the fish. Crossing the Maas by ferry I remember coming to a small river town which seemed never to have been visited before. Had I had an accident? they asked. Was I looking for someone? Should they fetch the pastor and show me the graveyard? They gave me a drink in the beautiful square, deserted save for playing children, who themselves were beautiful – a mixture of butter-gold blonds streaked with something dark from the Indies …

  This curiously vivid intimacy, as of something seen under glass, is one of the most haunting qualities of Holland – old barns with thatched roofs streaked with brilliant mosses; old farmers wearing embroidered skull-caps; old women on bicycles, their heads down to the wind, their skirts ballooning like pirates’ sails; the flat, pressed fields as neat as card tables, vivid streaks of garden flowers; and the bright-backed cows standing along the dykes like old china arranged on shelves.

  One Dutchman who never forgot this original light of his homeland was Van Gogh, in spite of his years of exile. In a wood north of Arnhem (Hooge Veluwe by name) you’ll find one of the finest collections of his work in the world. Over two hundred canvasses, covering the whole of his life, hang in a gallery set among the trees. Here are the gold-spinning sunflowers (the cottage flower of Holland); the rhythms of wind in the clouds and fields; the brilliant Delft-blue paint; the darker blue of Dutch clay; and those weather-knotted portraits lit by a still green glow as though reflecting the old canals. Van Gogh, the master, over-towered the dykes and was less national than most Dutch painters. But a visit to Holland helps you to see with his eyes, where simple objects – a chair, a table, a jug – seem double-lit, raised up from their background. He gave such objects identity, yet enlarged their meaning, fusing them with the whole, so that his sunflower is life, his chair a portrait of solitude, his last landscapes the tortured whorls of creation. I particularly remember one of his earliest studies, that of a family of peasants eating; their clay-furrowed faces seemed forked from the earth, and they were eating with hands like roots …

  In spite of the sophistication of the cities, of Rotterdam and the Hague, this peasant structure is still the reality of Holland. It exists on all sides, in habits and dress, in traditions, in work and leisure. I remember coming by chance on a pony market, in the village of Bemmel, near Nijmegen. It was a market holiday, the surrounding fields were empty. Little girls were carrying bridles and a year’s supply of whips; sturdy young farm boys, dressed in suits of velvet, were tapping their clogs with malacca canes. There were tents of gold cloth, like a medieval tournament, where the boys and their girls were dancing, or were sitting on barrels drinking beer and flirting – and this at ten o’clock in the morning. Under the trees by the tents were gathered several hundred ponies, bushy-tailed and golden-maned, over which farmers were bargaining by slapping each other’s hands, petulantly, in the traditional manner.

  This was a straight village market, compact and oblivious, making no concessions to tourists or visitors. Another village, even more mysterious in its self-containment, was Staphorst, on the road from Groningen, where only recently a local adulterer had been put in a cart and dragged round the streets in shame. Here was a puritan society, based on fifteenth-century morality; they wore traditional dress, and hated cameras.

  It was Sunday morning when I came to Staphorst, and I found the village deserted. I walked slowly the length of the empty street, eyes front, showing my empty hands. Every window shuttered, either with heavy dark curtains or with little screens of opaque blue glass. I saw nothing, heard nothing; I came to the end of the street and began to retrace my steps. Then gradually I was aware of a twitching of curtains, of faces hovering behind the geraniums. I was the tourist, but Staphorst was indoors, and Staphorst was watching me.

  It was like being in a forest full of invisible life, conscious only of eyes in the undergrowth. Then – perhaps because I was alone, or because my eyes got used to it – I noticed a slow relaxation of nerves. A tiny figure in the distance suddenly scampered across the road, followed by another going in the opposite direction. Next, I saw a child, quite close, standing in a full skirt and bonnet, watching me gravely, like an old-fashioned painting. One by one, other shades began to appear, wearing clothes of another century – a mother and child dressed austerely alike, a boy in velvet leaning against an apple tree, and four young girls, dark as a Grecian chorus, grouped silently around a well. The girls particularly were like apparitions, dressed from head to toe in black – black shawls, long skirts, and silver-buckled shoes, with black bonnets tied under their chins. I left them there in their watchful silence, their faces white against all that darkness, standing in the Sunday garden, born for the boys in velvet, born to this village and perhaps never to leave it.

  Staphorst in most ways was a private world, resembling a page from an early Bible; but I found that traditional dress in Holland comes in two varieties: the true and the tongue-in-cheek. In Staphorst it is the garb of a religious conviction, but in some of the show-towns, like Marken and Volendam, it is worn to put more colour into the tourist’s camera. Down in Zeeland, however – those four delta-islands groping like fingers in the North Sea’s mouth – isolation has preserved a number of genuine old styles, still worn by the wives of farmers and fishermen. You see them hurrying by, carrying buckets of fish to the market, dressed as richly as Stuart queens; puff-shoulders, lace veils, embroidered shawls, coral chokers, a dazzling rattle of heavy gold jewellery – all containing ornate yet subtle variations, and all eye-catchers against modern drab. The starched lace headdresses may be plump as pumpkins or tall and narrow as sticks of celery; and the gold head-ornaments rise like spiral horns, or frame the face like barbaric horse-blinkers. This weight of real gold, worn daily to market, may be worth several thousand pounds; it is often indeed the wearer’s dowry, which she may carry until she dies. But such glories are passing, the wearers are growing older, and you must hurry if you wish to see them. For these rare birds of an often puritan paradise will soon be as extinct as the Madagascar roc.

  Zeeland, like many other parts of Holland, has learned to live on the edge of disaster. Its
only security is the dykes, ‘the dreamers and watchers’, the first and second sea defences, as strong as the hands and the faith that built them, but still vulnerable to treachery and fate. Twice in the last twenty years, first by war and then by storm, the dykes were broken and the islands drowned. It meant wilderness and death when the sea came back; then the slow rebuilding of dykes. Now giant new works are planned to join the islands to the mainland and to block off the sea arms for ever; another of those promethean gestures made by a patient people who have never considered the sea unconquerable.

  Maybe it isn’t; but part of the quality of the Dutch is their knowledge of its power, and their passion for a soil they cannot take for granted, and for their towns and fields which, precious and threatened, they hold together by love and nerve. On my journey round Holland I was constantly reminded of this, and it gave an extra value to all I saw.

  My last night in Amsterdam was spent in a small students’ bar papered with manifestoes on the meaning of life. Here I talked until dawn with a tall thin undergraduate and his short and fat companion. For several hours they addressed and questioned me, debated jazz and the finer points of philosophy. The lean Quixote explained that they were from the city’s two universities; ‘One material, the other spirit.’ The nodding Sancho agreed, admiring the tall one, especially his final question: ‘How can you prove to a Dutchman the existence of doubt, when doubt has no dimensions? …’