Because my impressions were wrapped up in World War Two, modern-day Holland was nothing the way I had pictured it. It was clean, efficient and bustling; a customs officer in a blue-grey uniform greeted me with Goede-dag and asked if I knew his cousin in Auckland. There were green-uniformed guards at the airport too, with automatic weapons.
I stayed overnight at a hotel and the next morning got on a big yellow bus to northern Holland. A first sight of tulips brought memories of fried-onions to my throat. So did the memorials to resistance fighters. Once a war cemetery, full of endless little white headstones. Once even, an old German Tiger Tank, battered and the barrel bent upward, but fresh-painted in her battle colours — now a tourist attraction.
The fields opened out, fresh and green with big brown-patched cows. Towns and small villages with red-tiled steep-roofed houses; one had a German Pak-40mm artillery piece in the main square. Doves were perching on the long barrel.
Even then, I wasn’t certain what I would find. I knew where I was headed but had not the slightest idea what to do when I got there. I’d e-mailed ahead and the local museum had answered: they had no weapon of that description, inferring (basically) that I was wasting my time. I didn’t show the e-mail to my parents. A waste of time or not, something inside said I had to do this for Grandad.
So we reached the village of Olms.
‘You know what to ask?’ said Kristine.
She was a sort of community officer, tall, with very fair hair and very blue eyes; wearing a blue dress and a blue cardigan. Like all the Dutch I’d met, she was ultra-neat in appearance; I had on my best leather jacket and chinos, but still felt like a dishevelled slob. Her white teeth were perfect, so I tried not to smile widely and show my fillings.
Her welcome was genuine; an honour, she said, to pay respects to the descendants of brave Allies who had freed them from German occupation. So she would help all she could, but (said very nicely) that would not be very much. She would take me to the canal but, first, a drive around?
I stashed my gear at the hotel and climbed into her little 2CV. Olms had narrow cobblestoned streets, a little church that dated from the fourteenth century and a big council-chambers, built a mere three hundred years ago. Also various burger-joints and souvenir shops. I bought Mum a plastic-clogs keyring and a windmill bottle-opener for Dad. I knew they would appreciate them.
I should have gone straight to the canal; somehow though, I kept putting it off. So we visited the town museum. The curator was away that day, but I went through their World War Two section. Rifles, revolvers, a defused mine, a 50-calibre machine-gun from a downed Liberator. Black-and-white photos, one of a tumbled heap of men — hostages executed when the Resistance blew a bridge. But among all the exhibits, no 8mm Luger with wood-inset handle.
So I couldn’t put off the canal any longer.
My image of the canal was a sort of wide horseshoe crescent, with the windmill, elm trees, looking much as it did in ’45. As though I could easily ID their path, maybe some déjà-vu lightning zap. Kristine may’ve thought that too. Anyway she was very quiet as we came up to the canal and parked. I got out and stood there, looking.
Yes, a wide horseshoe crescent, I had that much right. A width of some twenty metres of slow-moving dark water. The old watermill was gone, torn down in 1946. The elms were gone, cut down for firewood in that same winter. The canal banks had been landscaped in the fifties with neat flower-beds and benches. The big rock where Jingo had died, long removed; after all the landscaping, nobody could even guess where it was.
‘All the old people who would have known are gone,’ said Kristine softly. ‘Today’s old people were small children then — and there are no photographs.’
And of course all trace of the aircraft crashed in the fields was gone. Helmut’s body was found, thrown from his plane. A few years back, his family took it home for reburial. We walked from the fields to the canal. It was late afternoon and there was almost nobody around, save one old boy nodding on a park bench.
We sat down on another and Kristine continued to talk, in her soft voice. About how the town changed in those sixty years. Then, there was nothing to eat and the people were starving. But just before war’s end, the big planes came over and the sky rained food. The war ended and rebuilding began. The old mill went to firewood, the canal was swept, bank to bank and full length.
She had a list from the town archives. Assorted rifles, some machine-pistols and hand-guns, even a Boyes anti-tank rifle from 1940. A truck-load of unexploded shells and bullets — even a burned-out kubelwagon. And many bodies. But nowhere on the list was a World War One Luger with a wooden grip.
‘Do you know it is in the canal?’ she asked.
I had to shake my head. ‘No.’
She knew what I was thinking. ‘The water is very black and bad these days. Divers, a year ago, say this when they looked for the body of a child. You would have to know just where to look.’
And that was exactly the problem. I did not know just where to look — and the canal had already been dredged. I could not even guess where the final confrontation between Grandad and Jingo took place. So I told Kristine I would like to stay here a while. She nodded, gave me that nice smile and gave me directions back to my hotel. Then she went back to the car.
I sat there by the canal. Nobody around but the old boy still nodding asleep. Grandad’s war had come to an end here and so had my search for the truth.
I had come a long way for nothing.