MY JOURNEY
70 years ago, I came to Canada. Why did I come?
In September 1949, after graduating from my university prep school in July, I was drafted into the Dutch army. I was a heavy smoker then, and, as soon as I had received my uniform and army-issue heavy boots, I was told to run 3 km, which just about killed me, unfit as I was. Six weeks of primary training shaped me up, after which I was sent to a special school to become an instructor. Completed that course in 8 months, and with the disastrous colonial war in the Netherlands East Indies concluded, not surprisingly, the military brass suspended the draft, so, with no new recruits, I had become army surplus and on April 1 1951 was discharged from the Dutch army with the rank of sergeant, thoroughly convinced that army life was not my cup of tea.
So, there I was, 22 years old, engaged on August 31 1950 to my later wife. Dreams even 60 years after, revealed to me that, subconsciously, I was deeply worried how I would ever make a decent living, because my 8 years of secondary training – it usually takes 6 – in 6 languages and 7 mathematical subjects, had failed to train me in anyone particular way, except, perhaps, steeling my resolve to succeed. Also, what the private school – my father paid the tuition – had finally instilled in me, unruly youngster, was a measure of discipline.
Graduating from this drill school resulted in a temporary aversion to serious reading, perhaps partly caused by resentment to some of the teachers who were psychopaths, while all were quite impersonal and remote. The entire staff had doctor degrees and addressed us by our last names only. The dress-code was formal suits. Also, the school’s intellectual challenge, geared to the male offspring of the elite with inherited brains and born in academic households, was a far cry from my background, with both parents having only primary education, and I the first of the entire family venturing into this brainy atmosphere. In the end it was my Greek teacher, Dr. Abel Westerbrink, 1911-2008, who pulled me through my last oral exam, consisting of translating a section of Homer’s Iliad in front of a university professor. My final diploma depended on this: For years I had nightmares that I had failed.
Economic conditions
Upon my army discharge, in 1951, a cloud of defeatism hovered over the Netherlands. The 5 years of German occupation, 1940-45, psychologically had caused the same effect as today’s period of a Pandemic: both had restrained personal development. With a direct Soviet-Russian threat looming – the Berlin Airlift being a clear example – plus the disastrous outcome of the Indonesian Colonial War, where some 150,000 soldiers had served and thousands had been wounded and died needlessly, the economic mood was grim. In addition, the corner grocer, the neighborhood baker, the average small storeowner, the 12 milk-cow farmers, all felt their livelihood endangered, due to consolidation and chain stores, so all at once, thousands of enterprising people pictured themselves as surplus, and looking for an alternative, me included. No wonder, emigration was seen as the solution, and became an unstoppable wave with Australia and Canada as favorite destinations, openly encouraged by the central government.
That’s how, three months after leaving the army, I ended up in Strathroy, Ontario, on a grain farm, where, at $60.00 a month with room and board, I came to live with a small, nominally Presbyterian family, where the farmer’s wife was a former teacher. It was an ideal beginning for me, an eager English student, ready to perfect the language. Within weeks I was able to have conversations, and take part in them.
That all happened 70 years ago this year.
With the harvest done, and little else to do, after two months I left the farm, boarded a bus to Hamilton and found a job in a feed mill in Grimsby, working a 58-hour week at 50 cents per hour, $29.00 per week. Did that for 6 months, then, after a 3 months stint at a finance company, I became self-employed as a life insurance agent. My fiancée arrived in Canada in September 1952, and worked as a nanny until we married in June 1953. By that time, we had saved enough to buy a bed, table, chairs, kitchen utensils and a small couch. Rented a basement apartment for $25.00 per month.
Now, seventy years after my transplanting from the Netherlands’ most northerly city, Groningen, an old university town, to urban Ontario, I am sure that my move has influenced my personality in different ways.
Change of name, a new language, and religion.
I was baptized with two names, both of which I treasure: Egbert Drewes, named after my maternal grandfather, a farmer, a man my mother adored. He, upon her marriage in 1923, gave her a dowry, equivalent in today’s funds to $100,000, enough the furnish a complete household, with enough to spare for my father to start and equip his own bakery-supply business, including an automobile. Nobody then called me Egbert: I was called Eppie, or Ep. My wife and siblings have always called me Ep, and my Dutch nieces and nephews still call me Oom (uncle) Ep.
Soon after arrival I adopted ‘Bert’ short for ‘Egbert’, a good Saxon name. The first English king was ‘Egbert’. A name-change also involves a personality change, I believe, a phase that took place over decades, greatly influenced by my marriage as well. The ‘Drewes’ part is also Saxon, and is derived from Druid, related to the ancient Celtic religion. Perhaps this explains my love for Celtic Christianity, a ‘nature’ based faith system. I now believe that John 3: 16 is the Bible’s most telling text, because there it says that God, “So loved the cosmos, the natural universe, (containing all that lives and moves and has a being), that he sacrificed his only beloved son, Jesus the Christ, to redeem (buy back from the Devil) his beloved earth, because only his death would give us ‘eternal’ life, not in heaven – a pagan notion – but on God’s eternal (and holy) earth.”
My faith also tells me that, with Christ’s re-appearance – now fast approaching – the Bible and the church will disappear and Creation will be perfected, to serve us and for us to serve it (her) forever: a true life of service.
The name change, the rapid adoption of a new language, living in St. Catharines, with a growing family, 5 children born from 1954-1965, building in 1962-63 an 1800 square feet house with a home-office for my insurance-real estate business, still left me time to be deeply involved with Christian education locally and provincially.
And then there was the church!
Oh, the church!
Today I look at the ‘heaven-believing’ church with great anxiety and even with horror as it abuses or, at best, totally ignores the pre-eminent place ‘creation’ takes in our lives. When I met my oldest brother for the last time some 20 years ago in the Netherlands, his parting words were, “Meet you in heaven”, which left me speechless. The church, because I love it, has always spelled trouble for me. In 1966 I quit as an elder in one church, switched to another local one in the same denomination and, when a new minister came, couldn’t stand his legalistic views, so, rather than face another confrontation, sold my insurance business in 1975 and moved 300 km east to rural Tweed.
There, after taking three university courses and writing three 100 pages master theses on a single family dwelling, a 12 unit apartment building and an industrial property, I became a successful commercial real estate appraiser. My wife too – she died 6 months ago at almost 93 – thrived, becoming a master grapho (hand-writing)-analyst, giving workshops, writing a column, a recognized public speaker through Toastmasters, and an active participant in the local church where I too served in different offices.
Now, by and large, I see the ‘heaven-directing’ church as an obstacle to the Coming of the Kingdom, the New Heavens and Earth.
Seventy Years in Canada.
Looking back 70 years, with the insight of hindsight, I recognize my wife’s immense influence on me, her wisdom in preparing me for a life of independence, of gently – and sometimes not so gently – asserting herself, and especially being a great mother for our five talented children, endowing them with her intellect and common sense.
Had I remained in the Netherlands, I would never have had these experiences, would never have successfully translated four good books, (one even winning an award) and would never have become a religious blog-writer, with untold many readers world-wide.
The ways of the Lord are mysterious. Soli Deo Gloria.