The Colonel (3 page)

Today, the family recalls that the Ponsies also owned a small store in Raamsdonksveer with the colorful name of A Thousand and One Things Bazaar. It offered both new and used items, even new
Bible covers and special funeral mass fronts, which the Ponsies fashioned out of black crepe paper.

The tinker and his wife peddled these to the area churches, many of which never guessed that the books inside were the very ones they had earlier discarded. But the store
generated only a struggling income, so when the weather kept the Ponsies off the waterways, Johannes loaded up a horse and wagon and took his wares to the farmers of the surrounding regions.

But the Ponsies couldn’t ignore their greater wanderlust, preferring the itinerant life, drifting from village market to town fair, assimilating themselves into the merry hubhub of organ
grinders and jugglers.

By the time Adam and Maria married, Johannes Ponsie was seventy years old and in poor health. The newlyweds welcomed him to their home with the understanding that Johannes and his wife would
help with baby Sjef and the other children as they came along.

The van Kuijk family would expand rapidly. On March 31, 1902, Adriana Maria, also called Sjaan, was born. As the eldest girl, she would always be a “second mother” to her siblings.
The following year, the van Kuijks welcomed Johannes Wilhelmus, but the boy would not live four months.

Adam and Maria planned quickly for another child, and Maria Wilhelmina, known as Marie, arrived before the year was out, on November 12, 1904. But tragedy befell the couple again with the birth
of Johanna Huberdina, called Anneke, on July 22, 1906. She, too, would die in infancy. As before, the van Kuijks rushed to produce another baby, and Petronella Johanna, known as Nel, was born
September 23, 1907.

Given their recent pattern of infant deaths, the family was anxious about the health of their seventh child, whom they would name Andreas Cornelis, after Adam’s father and his friend
Cornelis Roovers, a cobbler who accompanied Adam to register the birth at the
Burgerlijke Stand
in the town hall.

Dries, as the family nicknamed their fifth living child, had his mother’s clear blue eyes and was robust and energetic almost from birth. Much to
the van Kuijks’ relief, his delivery, at home above the stables, was unremarkable.

As the first surviving male child in nine years, Dries was doted on by his three older sisters. They dressed the infant like a doll and delighted in taking him for carriage strolls in nearby
Valkenburg Park, and around the Begijnhof, a cheerful group of sixteenth-century convent houses occupied by the lay order of Begijnen nuns.

As he grew to a toddler, Dries appeared to be a normal and even gregarious boy in every way. But as he got older, he displayed an unusual characteristic: he slept with his eyes open and was
known as the family sleepwalker. The family had to lock the doors to keep him from venturing outside in the small hours of the morning, but even that did not always deter him. One day, a neighbor,
Mrs. van Overbeek, came to inform his mother that Dries had been standing in the street in the middle of the night, apparently asleep.

From the beginning, Dries was more a Ponsie than a van Kuijk. He had the Ponsie sense of humor, playfulness, and appreciation of fun, and their optimism, imagination, and daring. And in addition
to his mother’s eyes, he possessed her small, taut mouth (if his father’s thick bottom lip), the set of her nose, her soft chin line, and her tendency toward a general fleshiness, a
characteristic of the robust Ponsie family. His genetic coding dictated that by the time he reached his teens, Dries would thicken in the hips and waist in an almost womanly fashion.

Since the child spent so much time in the company of women, he looked forward to his visits at the
gasthuis
with Grandfather Ponsie. The old man was always quick with a funny story of
one kind or another, especially about the gypsy life, the hustle, bustle, and magic of the little fairs, and the thrill of closing a sale to people who didn’t want, and - couldn’t use,
a wooden puppet with carved hands, or another piece of chipped crockery or tin jewelry. It was all in the presentation, Grandfather Ponsie made clear. And if you had to be just a little
cunning—if you sometimes had to trick people into thinking they needed something they - didn’t—well, everyone was the better for it.

And despite the grandfather’s rootlessness, the ancestral Ponsies, like the van Kuijks in the Middle Ages, had been people of means, he told the boy. Originally from France, they had lost
their status and bearing when they fled to Holland during the Revolution. But they were well-mannered
people, elitists who appreciated the best of everything and dressed in
finery—even gloves!

The latter story had a profound effect on the child, for as Marie Gort–van Kuijk, Dries’s sister, remembers, “Dries was very keen on his looks, and he paid a lot of attention
to his clothes. When he got a little older, he would really dress up. He was a gentleman, but he could look down on people a little bit. He thought he was just better.”

All this talk about traveling and freedom and fine clothes—and most of all being somebody—swirled around in the boy’s head. He would come home from visiting his grandfather and
soon find himself stuck between his dreams of the Ponsies’ independence and nomadic lifestyle, and his father’s stern sense of order, discipline, and obligation.

Adam, who performed his professional duties with military precision, hoped Dries might become a soldier like him, if for no other reason than the guarantee of work in the city. But Dries, who
had a difficult time taking orders from anyone, showed little interest in soldiering.

In Adam’s time, the father and the priest were law in Holland, and a clash between this particular father and son was inevitable, especially since Adam van Kuijk, who considered humility a
virtue, was not one to indulge his children. He went to church daily, and saw to it that Dries, who rankled against regular church attendance, became a mass server. The van Kuijks worshiped at
various churches in the area, primarily at the St. Josefkerk, situated next to the town brewery, and the Antoniuskerk, in the St. Janstraat.

According to the
Wijkregister,
or the neighborhood register kept by their priest, the van Kuijk children “performed their religious duties as they should in the period
1916–1924—all of them received the Holy Communion and were confirmed.”

But Adam van Kuijk stayed close to his God for reasons other than strict Catholic obeisance. When Dries was about six, Adam was diagnosed with diabetes, and his kidneys had begun to fail. A
frequent patient at the Catholic St. Ignatius Hospital, Adam feared he would not live long, but if Dries helped him with the horses and package delivery, the father might be able to conserve his
strength.

Yet while Dries shared Adam’s love of animals, he hadn’t his father’s sense of regimented order. Once the boy took several of the horses to Hendrikus Rogiers’s blacksmith
shop and on the return trip let them go to see if they could find their way home. Such boyish pranks did little to bolster Adam’s waning health.

Still, Adam did not let his illness get in the way of duty. He rose each morning at five o’clock, readied the horses, and delivered packages until 7:00 or 8:00
A.M.
, when he returned home for breakfast. If he found the boys still in bed at that late hour—and Dries often was—he reddened in the face, yanked the child from
his sleep, and beat him with a stick for bad children that he kept behind the door.

“When they had done serious wrong,” remembers Marie, her father’s favorite child, “they got serious punishment. Our parents wanted the boys to have a better job than our
father had, to make easier money and not have to work so hard.”

The family was poor, but it was not by any means considered low-class. Maria van Kuijk took great pride in the fact that once the girls reached age twelve and finished primary school, they went
to work as live-in maid servants and nannies to some of the finest families in Breda. A young girl who served with such a respectable family was recognized as good lineage herself. And if it was an
irony that the van Kuijks themselves had a maid, Maria reconciled the expense by remembering that both the van Kuijks and the Ponsies had once been aristocracy.

In recent years, accusations have arisen that Maria, to put on airs and earn more money for luxuries for herself and parochial schooling for her children, forced her husband to work long
overtime hours for van Gend en Loos and to moonlight at a variety of jobs—shining the boots and belts of Breda’s police force, peddling postcards to the soldiers at their barracks, and
dealing in secondhand furniture and household items.

It was precisely the way her father and brothers had always made a living, so why shouldn’t it be a supplemental form of income for Adam? Besides, now there were other children in the
fold. Engelina Francina, called Lien, was born November 13, 1910, followed by Adam Franciscus, or Ad, on September 21, 1913. Two more children would round out the family to eleven, or nine
surviving, the last two named in honor of those who died: Johanna, born May 8, 1916, and Johannes, or Jan, on October 1, 1918. Maria managed to find a pillow and blanket for all, and Adam provided
an extra place to sleep by sweeping up at a small auction house and taking a bed that hadn’t been sold as payment for his work.

As the children were growing up, their mother, who practiced as much religious discrimination as others in Holland of the time, restricted their playmates—no Protestants or low-class
families—and strictly forbade them to go into the music hall next door.

Whether her mother thought Marie was too drawn to the sound of
music and laughter, in later years she convinced the girl to join the St. Josef convent in Etten en Leur for
Franciscan nuns, a move that was perhaps a comment on married life from a woman who was forced to marry. “I was never happy at the convent,” says Marie, who spent eighteen years in
servitude, “and I told my mother I wanted to leave there. But she said it was probably best that I stay.”

Maria would expect much of Dries, too, when he grew older. For now, she was content to let him be a child, and argued with her husband when Adam required too much of his time in the stables. By
age seven, Dries had already been slipping away by himself to explore Breda’s streets and alleyways with his best friend, Cees Frijters, and schoolmate Karel Freijssen, and to visit
Grandfather Ponsie and absorb himself in fantasy.

The stories about the small fairs and village markets only heightened the child’s anticipation of
kermis,
or the large fair, which came to Breda on the third Sunday in October
after the last mass. Situated at the Grote Markt, its tents and brightly colored awnings spread out through the neighborhood, down Halstraat, then across Oude Vest to the Kloosterplein, and up
Dries’s own street, Vlaszak.
Kermis
was a major event in Breda, a week of renewed good spirit, laughter, and optimism, when the adults drank too much and threw caution and Catholic
reserve to the wind, and the children finagled ways of earning money for exotic treats, mechanical attractions, and games of chance.

Dries was no exception, and using the techniques his grandfather taught him, he hustled a few guilders whenever the opportunity arose, mostly trading or running errands.

To Dries,
kermis
was a nearly delirious escape from the glum world of his father and the nonsense of school. Apart from the circus—which brought the clowns and larger animals,
like elephants, to the Gasthuisvelden—
kermis
was the child’s favorite thing in all the world. When either was in town, the boy would vanish before daylight and not come home
until the moon shone bright in the sky.

When his parents figured out that his fascination had turned into something of an obsession, they strongly suggested that the boy spend more time on his studies and less on dreaming of
fly-by-night pleasure. However, it is doubtful that their words carried any weight. Dries - didn’t tell his mother that when
kermis
rolled around, he regularly cut school to be at
the head of the line to ride the merry-go-round, since the first round was free. Getting something for nothing seemed to thrill the child, and when Dries realized that being paid to be part of the
fair was
more fun than simply watching it, at nine, the enterprising boy became what Americans would call “a carny”—literally, someone who works in a
carnival, a term considered pejorative by some.

It started out small—an offer to help a vendor nail the boards together for his booth in exchange for a candied apple. From there, he was promised free admission for helping the
roustabouts raise the tents. His mother somehow found out that he intended to aid in the building of the viewing stands and thwarted his plans. But she couldn’t stop him from hiring out as an
advance man, bumping along the cobblestone streets of Breda on a high, old-fashioned bicycle with a sandwich board hung over his shoulders.

Before long, he was working shoulder to shoulder with the principals, first as a circus water boy—following along after the clowns and smoking the butts of the cigars they threw on the
ground—then as a feeder and caretaker of animals. And when he got a little older, as a barker.

“I worked for a gypsy and stood in front of her tent,” he once said. “I waved my cane and called to people who passed by, ‘Have your fortunes told for fifty cents.’
I would get to keep twenty-five cents.” Then came the day when he told a fortune himself and “got to keep the whole fifty cents.”