Land for our Sons (1958) and This Faithful Book (2019) by Maxine Brandis / Madzy Brender à Brandis

 

This was a tip from Clarien, who blogs here (in Dutch) on her smallholding. Looking up information on the book and the author made me curious so I ordered it, plus her World War Two diary This Faithful Book. 

First of all a note on names: the author, Mattha van Vollenhoven (always called Madzy) was married to Wim Brender à Brandis (this name is not as unusual as I thought, I found extensive family trees on the Internet). In Canada she wrote under the name Maxine Brandis. Her daughter, a writer who edited the diary, also uses the name Brandis, but chose to use her mother's full name for that book. Madzy's sons (more on them later) use the full name.

Maxine and her family (she and her husband have a daughter and two sons) emigrate to Canada in 1947. They travel to Terrace, British Columbia, where they stay with friends. Soon they are able to buy a small farm. They keep goats and chickens, and grow vegetables and fruit, which they sell. The house on the farm, which is very small (at first the whole family sleeps in one room), is gradually extended. Although they have chosen a location with a very short growing season (June to September) they are successful. At first the town where they live is very isolated (three trains a week) and there is no hospital or dentist.

Maxine makes a strong point for immigrants to learn the language and to adapt to the new country. However, sometimes she herself has trouble adapting, like on the occasion when a young child calls her by her first name. She is shocked: "in the Netherlands they would call me aunt Maxine!" She then gives us a glimpse of her strict upbringing in an upperclass family, where she had to address her father with the formal "U" instead of the informal "je". Like French and German, Dutch has two forms of address. I can relate to her shock. I can still recall my discomfort when, staying with my sister in Australia in 1970, I was expected to call people aged 70 and over by their first name. At home we just did not do that. 

 

The farm prospers, and the children do well, with Maxine becoming manager of the district's cooperative society, but after a while Maxine's husband feels he should return to university (after having spent a few years there in the Netherlands) as having a degree will give him more chances. So they sell the farm.

I'm afraid I was slightly underwhelmed by the book. It is not so much a story as a series of vignettes, in which everything goes well, everyone is friendly and hardly anything goes wrong. At times it felt like an ad for emigrating to Canada. I thought the title odd as Maxine has a daughter and two sons, and the family had no plans to continue farming.

This Faithful Book was published in 2019. It is the diary Madzy kept from 1942 till the end of the war. The diary was translated and edited by her daughter Marianne. In 1942, Madzy and her husband Wim, who had been an officer in the Dutch army, are living in a small, isolated, house in the middle of the Netherlands with their small daughter Marianne (nicknamed Pankie). Wim has to report to the occupying German authorities once a month. In August 1942, two days after Madzy has given birth to their son Gerard Wim and his fellow officers are arrested without warning and sent to P.O.W. camps in Poland. He will not return until 1945. Madzy starts keeping the diary as a kind of letter to Wim, for him to read after his return.

I enjoy reading about ordinary, day-to-day life in those exceptional circumstances. This book was especially interesting to me as my parents lived nearby and also had two young children. I was once again struck by the hardship suffered by people in the last year of the war. Maxine was lucky to have people staying with her to help (mostly her old nanny, still employed by her mother), but it fell to her  to find enough food for the family, especially hard in that last extremely cold "Hunger Winter", when they sometimes had nothing more to eat than a few slices of bread or some potatoes There was no electricity, very little fuel and they lived close to a railway line that is often bombed. On top of that she has to find room for evacuees and Germans who demand a billet. I'm also sometimes amazed at the things that did still work, like delivery of letters, even from Wim in his prison camp in the Ukraine.

Sunday, 21 January. It was exceptionally beautiful in the be-snowed woods and even though we constantly heard heavy artillery fire in the distance, and now and then the bang of a V-1 or V-2, it was still beautiful, almost in a holy way. I've now wrapped each of the children in a blanket in a little nest, with a fur coat around their feet. It's terribly cold in the bedroom."

"Tuesday, 30 January 1945. Today we heard all of a sudden that we have to make do with our bread ration for two weeks instead of one. This means that we have 500 grams per person per week, Gerard 400 grams."

"Wednesday 2 May, But who can describe how overwhelmed we were when, just after that, five of those huge birds (airplanes bringing food) flew right over our little house? We screamed, waved, jumped, cried - what all didn't we do? The emotion was indescribable; it is as though a little window opens and one can again see a house of peace."

During the last months of the war they are often in the firing line, and many houses in the village are destroyed. After the German surrender Madzy still has to wait and hope for Wim to come home. In the end he returns on the 5th of June. In one of the final chapters Wim tells the story of his years in captivity.

In a postscript daughter Mariane writes: "Madzy had intended to give the diary to Wim when he returned, but she never did; he only read it after her death. It's easy to guess why she made that decision. (...) Very probably she felt that he (Wim) should not be exposed to the grimness of some of what she had written in the diary, that the best way to heal would be to look forward rather than back. Before post-traumatic stress disorder became more widely understood, this was what one did." Marianne then tells the story of the rest of Madzy's life. On emigrating to Canada she says:" It's hard for us in this time to imagine how little Wim and Madzy knew about their destination. Other than (as it turned out) misleading and romanticized information from Peter and Enid, they knew virtually nothing because there were no sources of information." Life on the farm in Terrace seems to have been more primitive than Madzy would have us believe in her story in Land for our Sons. After a visit in 1952 her mother reported to people in the Netherlands that her daughter was living in a "hut."

Madzy died in 1984. Her three children have all had interesting careers: Marianne became a historian and writer, find information on her here. Gerard became a wood engraver and maker of books, his website is here. Her third son Joost, born after the war, is known as Jock in Canada. He is a social entepeneur and inventor. An interesting article about him can be found here

I can recommend this book if you would like to know more about life in an occupied country during World War II. There are two other titles which I loved and which might be of interest to English readers: I Was a Stranger by Sir John Hacket, republished by Slightly Foxed , the story of General Hacket's escape from hospital during the battle of Arnhem and his stay with the sisters De Nooij in Ede. Because I grew up in a neighbouring village I knew that story long before I read the book. I also recommend The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es, published by Penguin, a story of a young Jewish girl in Holland during World War II, who hides from the Nazis in the homes of an underground network of foster families, one of them the author's grandparents. Part of this story takes place in the village where I was born.