She had to sleep with her parents in the summer house. If she was jealous of us, I do not know, maybe not. But to sleep in the tent was not allowed, yet. Mardy, the younger sister of Erik, often joined our adventures. Because, “It’s too dangerous to keep a hurricane lantern inside a tent, it must remain outside!”. And outside the tent the hurricane lantern from my father was burning. And sometimes sleep a night in a borrowed small tent from his older brother, together with Erik, whose parents had also a summer house. Great for building huts, digging tunnels and adventures with campfire with other children. But then the question was what to do with a rope in The Netherlands, all flat, no rocks or mountains to climb. A good strong woven rope from about 1 inch diameter and 20 feet long. I was probably one of a few boys who asked a “long and strong rope” for his eleventh birthday, what I got from my parents. High up to the ceiling in the gym and back down. At school, during gym class, I applied myself to the ropes to be able to climb rope as good as possible. And climb along a rope further into the well and back up again to the daglicht. The part of the book in which Dick climb along a rusty ladder into the well on Kirrin Island, and managed to pass a large stone what was fallen into the well and stuck at some depth. I myself should have been at that time between ten and eleven years old. It must have been about twenty-two years after the first publication in the Netherlands, that I read the first book and explicitly identified myself with Dick Kirrin, the younger brother of Julian, who was then eleven years old in the book. “Five on a Treasure Island” – translation published 1943 in NL
0 kommentar(er)
