Information About F. van den Beemt

Memories

Memories are based on documents, family lore or personal experiences. They give more information about a person, but are not necessarilly complete or correct.

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Photo of the twelve children of Johannes Andreas van den Beemt and Dominica Elisabeth Maria Kramer, ca. 1938?

In the back: Hedda, Jan, Nicky, Leo, Gré, Stof. In front: Harry, Trees, Maria, Frans, Cees, Ben

Kees and Frans always had to peel potatoes before they went to school. Kees always said: Can I stop already? I have to poop too, you know.

That pooping is exactly right and the potato peels too. Kees was used to using me a bit as his personal slave, so I often had to carry his bag when we walked to the Canisius School together. I was taught there by brother Stof, who was a teacher there and so I was used to brothers who were the boss. Frankly, I didn’t mind that at all. Being the youngest had its advantages and disadvantages. For example, Pa had already tried his parenting methods on my older brothers and he more or less left my parenting to the sister on duty, first Nici, then Trees and later Maria. Trees in particular was a great girl with a big heart so that altogether I can look back on a very nice childhood.

The Zanderijen were, as far as I know, dug in the 1930s to provide the Spiritus factory with clean industrial water from the Zoom. It was a forbidden area but we went there on Wednesday afternoons or on the weekend with a whole group from the neighborhood as an outing. We then brought sandwiches and a tin cigar box, in that box the sandwiches were then roasted over a fire, really adventurous. The water was wonderfully clean at the time. You had to stay away from the pump with which the water was pumped into the Zoom otherwise you would be sucked up. In the end we liked the swimming pool with the salt water of the Scheldt better because it swam lighter.

The swimming pool in Bergen had a boys’ side and a girls’ side. There was a fence between the baths and a mesh fence under water. The idea was that you could not see each other in swimwear and certainly could not get together. The trick was now to pick a hole in the mesh under water and then to come up wearing a bathing cap on the girls’ side.

The bath had salt water. That was let in at high tide into a large container on the boys’ side, where it then remained to settle, then at low tide the baths were drained again and they were refilled from the reservoir. The bath was therefore regularly emptied so that the holes in the mesh were easy to repair and never stayed open for long.

During the war the Germans came to swim in the bath. They entered the pool with a platoon at a time and dressed in swimming trunks on the lawn next to the deep end. The entire group was then naked at a certain point. We still used to swim in a full swimsuit back then and were very surprised and slightly embarrassed about that bold behavior.

After the liberation, the trainer Vriens of the swimming club Juliana thought it was a good idea to continue training in the winter. He had a small truck with a covered truck bed with benches in the back, and he drove the club to the indoor swimming pool in Antwerp. As far as I know, Trees and Maria went, but did not tell anyone at home that mixed swimming was taking place and that all those boys and girls would be packed together in the back of that truck late at night.