A History Lesson

It’s obvious the Dutch have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the elements.

They’re a hardy bunch, undeterred by the wind and the rain as they cycle their kids to school or to collect the weekly grocery shop. This week I actually cycled past a woman (cycling past someone doesn’t happen very often but when it does it’s quite a memorable event) with one child shoved into her shopping basket in front, another on a child seat just behind the handlebars, and another in a child seat on the back. That’s a lot of weight to be heaving around. It’s a common sight to see bikes with a wheelbarrow like attachments to the front where you will often find a couple of toddlers, or a ton of bricks. These people are tough.

This weekend brought more unseasonable sunshine, so once again Mr T and I headed outdoors. This time we drove the forty miles or so just north of Amsterdam to the small former fishing village of Marken, for a lesson in Dutch history.

Marken is now attached to the mainland via a dyke, but it used to be an island, with access to the North Sea via the Zuider Zee.  Like a lot of Holland, the island regularly flooded, houses were washed away and many lives were lost. When the fishing industry was in a boom there was not enough high ground on Marken to build homes for all the fisher folk, but with typical Dutch stoicism the Markers built their houses at a lower level on ‘stilts’, hoping that the flood water would simply wash under the house and leave them alone. It didn’t, it continued to wash them away.

However, the creation of the Ijsselmmer lake in 1932 cut off the access to the North Sea and although finally putting paid to the flooding, made fishing an unsustainable livelihood. Marken is now nothing but a hotspot for tourists who come to see how the Dutch used to live.  There’s a rather spooky museum which tells the story of the island, with a collection of grim faced (and who can blame them with everything they had to put up with ) waxwork ‘Markers ‘ in the traditional costume.

Outside  in the Autumn sunshine, in a cafe over looking Marken's deceptively picturesque harbour  I was highly envious of the tall, lithe Dutch family who arrived on their bicycles, no doubt having cycled the 20 miles from Amsterdam to get there, and sat next to us, tucking into their generous portions of apple pie and lashing of whipped cream. This I realised, is how they can do it, how they can waffle back doughnuts and potato croquettes as if there’s no tomorrow, drink pints of beer as if it is going out of fashion, and still stay slim. 

Earlier in the week we had to call an engineer to sort out our house’s heating problems and discovered for some inexplicable reason our home owners had set the internal thermostat at an incredibly low 14 degrees – basically the thing would never come on of its own accord until an ice-age hit. Why put the heating on when you can wear thermals and a jumper? Why hop in a car when you can pedal a bike? Why move somewhere safe and dry when you can live on an island that constantly floods? These people revel in adversity. The battle doesn't just make them tough, it burns calories.