In the summer the family went to Ameland. First in the cottage Martha near Nes (now called Ariadne), then in a tent and in a tent house: Belcampo. After returning from America in the house Sinne and Wille of the Leistra family, the parents-in-law of brother Piet.
With six sons in an upstairs apartment an ideal way to spend the school holidays. Stuff that had to come along came in a box that was brought from Groningen to Helpman by the HTO. The older sons with Pa on the bike along the Dokkumer trekvaart, Moe with the little ones by bus.
Family came to stay in the house Martha, including Grandpa.
Greetje remembers:
Ameland, I think in August 1957. My parents were with me on Ameland for a week, guests of uncle Jo and aunt Fokje. According to my mother in a ‘refined chicken coop’. My first acquaintance with this beautiful island. Many unforgettable holidays would follow later.
Ameland, this evokes a lot for me: always sunny, a warm family feeling, wind screens on the beach behind which every Schoonveld who was on the island at that moment settled, tent houses from which we organised treasure hunts for the entire field, toilets at the campsite where we stood in line endlessly (with a roll under our arm), the camp shop at ‘Klein Vaarwater’ where it was much more fun to do the shopping than in the grocery store in Bedum, the roof rack of our car that sagged because my mother wanted to take as much as possible with her because “everything is much more expensive on Ameland”, the walks through the Oerd together with our big cousins Piet and Koos.
After my fourteenth we went to Elspeet, Nunspeet or Garderen in a house of the PTT. Also nice but the family feeling was missing, I found it boring.
How did they do it?
The chicken coop that Greetje writes about is cottage Martha. It is still there on the edge of the village of Nes, in the recreation area De Vleyen. It is now called Ariadne. In 1958 I spent my first Ameland holiday there. The cottage was originally a chicken coop, built with the stones from the cobbled road to the German bunker on the Oerd. Greetje tells us that they stayed there, Grandpa Willem stayed there. Around 2010 we rented the cottage for a week around Christmas. The landlord thought that I looked very different from the photo from 1958 that I had sent him. After a week we found the cottage too small for both of us! It has a small living room of 16m2 and two bedrooms. In one there was room for a double bed with a cot next to it, in the second bedroom two bunk beds with 80 centimeters in between. How do you organize that as a family with 4 and later 5 children, if you also have several adult guests?
Baking stick bread
We heard that the French ate baguettes, stick bread in Dutch. My mother thought that was a great idea, all of us baking baguettes on the beach. In an old shoebox in our basement are a few of my father’s 8mm films. I had no idea what was on them, but recently they had them digitized and put them on YouTube. In this film from 1965 or 1966 images of Ameland and baking “baguettes”. A great adventure, but the baguette was inedible, mainly grains of sand.