‘I wish you good fortune with all my heart,’ the Queen said and held out her hand. Mr. Wielemaker forgot to take off his cap. He took the Queen’s hand into his large farmer’s hand. Then Jacob did, too, but first he wiped his right hand against his trouser leg.
Then the Queen held out her hand to Kees. ‘You, Kees,’ he heard her saying, ‘must help your father as much as you possibly can. I’m sure you will.’
Kees realized that this was probably the only time in his life that he would be so close to his Queen and the only time he would have a chance of speaking to her. So he decided to take it. He drew a deep breath, put his hand into hers and said in a firm voice: ‘Yes, I will, Your Majesty.’
Then the Queen walked on.
Their hearts full of joy and pride, the three of them watched her walk away, a scarf round her head and mud on her boots, just like any villager.
‘She...she,’ Mr. Wielemaker said, his voice trembling with emotion, ‘she is really a mother to her people.’
He wiped a tear away with the back of his hand.
‘Yes, she is,’ Jacob answered. ‘A true mother.’ Then they walked on.
‘She is the Queen,’ Kees thought, ‘Queen of the Netherlands, Queen over our whole country, including the land which the sea has now flooded. But Father and those like him will rebuild it, and I will do all I can to help them.’
APPENDIX
SOME FACTS ABOUT THE 1953 FLOODS AND THE DUTCH DELTA PLAN
Holland is a low-lying country; its official name, the Netherlands, makes that clear. Near the coast, a very large part of the country is below sea-level. It consists of areas which the Dutch have reclaimed from the sea. The process still continues. Large man-made dams, called dikes, keep out the water and must constantly be looked after. A Frenchman once said: ‘God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.’ You can see what he meant.
The sea is a little like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; it can be very kind but it can also be very cruel. As a friend, it carries our ships, gives us fish to eat, and beaches to bathe from. But as an enemy, it can behave like a monster, a monster with an insatiable appetite for land. If the land is close to the sea, and the dikes are not well looked after, the sea often swallows up large areas. It is constantly trying to win back the land that has been wrested from it. No matter how hard men fight her, the sea never gives up.
The Dutch, in particular, have to be on their guard all the time. Holland is really a fortress besieged by the sea from three sides: the north, the west and the south-west. The fortress is protected by dunes and dikes and is defended by the men of the Dutch Reclamation Board, from the Minister and the Chief Engineers down to the ordinary 124 workers. If the dikes were not looked after and maintained, as much as forty per cent (two-fifths) of the whole country would be in constant danger from the sea.
During the night from 31st January to 1st February, 1953, the sea saw its chance, and took it.
A sixty-five-mile per hour gale was blowing inland. It drove the water from the Atlantic through the English Channel into the North Sea, and up the channels of the Dutch Delta. On top of that, there was a spring tide, i.e. the time of the year when the tide is at its highest, so that the Dutch coasts, the Delta and the other estuaries were assailed by unprecedented masses of water at tremendous pressure. The dikes had not been built to withstand such force, and collapsed in more than two hundred places.
The south-west of Holland, where the Wielemakers’ farm was, was almost completely flooded. So was the island of Texel. The sea came in with a vengeance.
It roared in and swept over fields and pastures. 133 towns and villages were badly hit. Some disappeared altogether because the water reached a height of 15 feet. Some 500,000 acres, most of it agricultural land, were flooded.
1,794 people were killed; 20,000 head of cattle, 2,300 horses, 10,000 pigs, 1,400 sheep and 144,000 chickens were drowned. 3,810 dwellings and 450 farmsteads were completely destroyed, 4,000 houses and 1,000 farms were badly damaged. 100,000 people had to be evacuated.
The total damage amounted to 1,000 million Dutch guilders or $280,000,000.
The Dutch people rose to the occasion, almost to a man. As soon as the news of the disaster was known, people from all over the country came forward to offer their help. Aircraft and motor vehicles arrived at the scene, and by Sunday the rescue operation was well under way.
Troops were called back from leave and were sent to the south-west and to the island of Texel. Foreign soldiers, too, came to the rescue.
Aeroplanes and cars, helicopters, rowing and motor boats, were all used to evacuate people from their house-tops, people who had spent many terrible hours of mortal peril, without food, heat, light or water.
Then the Dutch set to driving the monster out of their country again. It was no easy task. Of the seven hundred and fifty miles of dikes in the affected area, half were destroyed. Two hundred breaches had to be made good. Some were only a few feet wide, but others stretched for hundreds of yards.
The first job, therefore, was to repair the dikes, for while they were down, the water gushed in at high tide and ran out at low, causing further damage to dikes and farmland alike. Moreover, salt deposits from the sea rendered the land unfit for agricultural use. It was a difficult job because some of the dikes were inaccessible by road, since the roads were still under water, or by boat because the water was too shallow. And the constant tides made the task more difficult still. The problem of supplying the repair workers with food and shelter was another headache. Still, the work proceeded apace.
The Government, the Dutch Reclamation Board, and the people were united in their determination to prevent any repetition of the last catastrophe. The Dutch showed that their generosity was not restricted to helping war victims—that was taken for granted—but stretched to other good causes, as well. Only a month after the disaster, the Relief Fund had received voluntary contributions to the value of $19,600,000. This meant that every Dutch man, woman and child, from old-age pensioners down to new-born 126 babies had made an average contribution of two dollars each. Of course, that wasn’t enough.
But a nation that was prepared to help so generously, that was resolute, and that had enough skilled men to do the job, deserved to win through. The motto of Zeeland, one of the Dutch provinces, has become the motto of every Dutchman: ‘Luctor et entergo—I struggle and I conquer.’
A few weeks after the disaster, the Dutch Minister of Transport and Waterways appointed a commission to work out a plan to safeguard the future of the land. The commission was called the Delta Commission and it made far-reaching and costly proposals for damming up and shutting out the sea from four of the main Dutch sea arms. The remaining two, essential to Holland’s maritime trade, were to have the dikes along their banks considerably reinforced and raised. Work began in 1957, but it will take well over twenty years and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete this very ambitious plan. Then, however, Holland and the Dutch people should be quite safe from the fate that befell the Wielemakers and many others in 1953.
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