Wil den Hollander - Bronder

While staying at a campsite recently I was browsing the books left behind by other campers and I noticed 'Johanna' by Wil den Hollander. I took it home because I own most of this author's other books though it had been a very long time since I read any. It was only after reading part of 'Johanna' that the penny dropped: these books have a connection with my 'blog books'. It had never occurred to me, I suppose because they are on another floor, on another shelf, with my Dutch novels.

I first encountered Wil den Hollander's stories in my teens, when they were serialised in the weekly magazine my mother read. The author, born in 1915, had emigrated to France in 1947 with her husband and young son to start a farm. In France three daughters were born. She had a very hard life in a strange country, running the household, looking after the children, making cheese, looking after the animals and kitchen garden. She had a taciturn husband who mostly left her to get on with things.

And she wrote. I would say her books are autobiographies disguised as novels. I bought the books in my twenties and found them fascinating, but I had not looked at them until now. There was one thing I remembered most of all: the massive meals Wil had to cook. At times of harvesting or threshing many men came to work at the farm and they had to be fed. In Holland she would have given them sandwiches but in France that just would not do.

Just to give you an idea here is a loose translation from a chapter on threshing. This meant 20 men coming to help and they had to be fed five times a day. Three meals consisting of bread with cheese or meat, cider and coffee with brandy. 

'But it was the hot meals I worried about. Simone helped me draw up a lunch menu: hors d'oeuvres, stock made with three kilo's of beef to which I had to add cream and eggs and tapioca. Followed by green beans in cream, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, four boiled chickens with a creamy sauce, a few fruit tarts, followed by coffee and brandy. In the evening I could serve the leftovers with salad, fried potatoes, and a roast.

The food that had been so carefully prepared was appreciated, but the pudding served with cream and fruit was received with mirth: did Madame think she was entertaining babies? Anything containing milk was not men's food.

I had taken six liters of brandy from the barrel and still they were yelling for more.... 

Wil was a natural storyteller and I was fascinated once again. Apart from books on her farm she wrote about her daughter, who suffered from MS and died young, and her son, who was conscripted into the army at the time of the war in Algeria. I can certainly recommend these books to my Dutch readers.

More information in Wil den Hollander can be found here.