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    The Tide in the Attic
    The Tide in the Attic
    The Tide in the Attic
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    The Tide in the Attic

    By Aleid Van Rhijn

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    First published in its original Dutch version in 1953, this is the English translation of Een helicopter daalde, which tells the story of a family in the Netherlands caught up in the middle of the 1953 North Sea flood disaster, brought on by a heavy storm that occurred on the night of Saturday, 31 January 1953 and morning of Sunday, 1 February 1953. The floods struck the Netherlands, Belgium, England and Scotland.

    A combination of a high spring tide and a severe European windstorm over the North Sea caused a storm tide; the combination of wind, high tide, and low pressure led to a water level of more than 5.6 metres (18.4 ft) above mean sea level in some locations. The flood and waves overwhelmed sea defences and caused extensive flooding. The Netherlands, a country with 20% of its territory below mean sea level and 50% less than 1 metre (3.3 ft) above sea level and which relies heavily on sea defences, was worst affected, recording 1,836 deaths and widespread property damage. Most of the casualties occurred in the southern province of Zeeland.

    Although this book is classed as a children’s novel, it will appeal to readers from eight to eighty years old.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMuriwai Books
    Release dateJun 28, 2017
    ISBN9781787204935
    The Tide in the Attic
    Author

    Aleid Van Rhijn

    ALEID VAN RHIJN (September 5, 1908 - November 17, 1989) was the pseudonym of Dutch journalist and author Aleid Berend van Mourik. ARNOLD JULIUS POMERANS (27 April 1920 - 30 May 2005) was a German-born British translator. Born in Königsberg, Germany in 1920 to a Jewish family who left for Yugoslavia and later South Africa, Pomerans he emigrated to England in 194. There he became a full-time translator in the 1950s, after first working as a teacher, translating some two hundred works of fiction and non-fiction, selected from most European languages. Among the authors he translated were Louis de Broglie, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, Johan Huizinga and Jean Piaget. His translation of George Grosz’s autobiography earned him the 1983 Schlegel-Tieck Prize and in 1997 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for The Selected Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. In his obituary he was called “one of Britain’s finest translators” by The Independent. In 1956 he married Erica White and the pair carried out much of the translation work together. He died in Polstead, Suffolk of cancer in 2005, aged 85.

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    Reviews for The Tide in the Attic

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Last night I read "The Tide in the Attic", a reread of a book from my youth. It was as good as I remembered, if not better.The story is based upon a massive flood that overwhelmed the dikes and seawalls of The Netherlands in 1953. While not graphic, the author paints a tense and scary picture of one farming family and their struggle to survive the ever-rising flood waters.This was a Weekly Reader book from 1962, but it is not a children's book. I read it as a youth of about 10 or so, yet it is also well suited as an adult read.
    • 4/5
      A catastrophe hit the Netherlands in the winter of 1953, when three forces collided along the Dutch coast - extremely strong and high tides caused by a total eclipse of the moon, a major and lengthy storm in the North Sea, and a depression south of Iceland with hurricane force winds. This fatal combination caused many dikes to break, flooding over 500,000 acres, killing over 1,700 people.The Tide in the Attic is a young adult novel which follows a fictional family through the terrors of that night, January 31 to February 1, 1953. Some neighbors saw trouble ahead and evacuated. Most drove their livestock to higher ground. Those who stayed behind with their homes had to continually move higher as the water rose. In this book, the Wielemaker family, along with their farm hand, a cat, dog and goat, stay put on Sunset Farm, which is on a 'polder' (a low-lying tract of land enclosed by dikes). The men try to make all the buildings secure as the storm grows near. The women gather food, warm clothing and coverings and move those goods higher as the water rises. Through a sleepless night, the family in the attic listen to their buildings disintegrating. As the water gets too deep in the attic, they punch a hole through the roof and spend the rest of the night sitting miserably freezing on the rooftop awaiting rescue. Those rescued were taken to Duivenisse, which remained above the flood; the queen visited there in the days following. I had no previous knowledge of this event, and found this book to be a good introduction, though not very deeply informative; I found myself searching more online.

    Book preview

    The Tide in the Attic - Aleid Van Rhijn

    This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

    To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – papamoapress@gmail.com

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    Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

    © Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

    Publisher’s Note

    Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

    We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

    THE TIDE IN THE ATTIC

    BY

    ALEID VAN RHIJN

    Translated by A. J. Pomerans

    Illustrated by Marjorie Gill

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Contents

    TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

    CHAPTER ONE — A game in the loft 6

    CHAPTER TWO — The worst is still to come 9

    CHAPTER THREE — Ready for the flood 15

    CHAPTER FOUR — The water comes nearer 22

    CHAPTER FIVE — A desolate Sunday 34

    CHAPTER SIX — Huddled in the loft 41

    CHAPTER SEVEN — A new calamity 49

    CHAPTER EIGHT - On the roof 56

    CHAPTER NINE — Another day dawns 67

    CHAPTER TEN — The helicopter 72

    CHAPTER ELEVEN — Kees meets his Queen 83

    APPENDIX 86

    REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 88

    CHAPTER ONE — A game in the loft

    ‘It’s blowing up quite a gale,’ said Kees Wielemaker.

    ‘What of it?’ his friend Jaap Buis replied. ‘Let’s pull the rope round here. Come on, pull...still harder...that’s it. Now it’s fixed.’

    The two Dutch boys were playing in the spacious loft of Sunset Farm.

    The farm buildings were large and not very far from the village. You got there by turning left a hundred yards past the last house in Church Street. From it a path led to Zeedorp and to Sunset Farm. At the entrance to the drive stood two stone pillars, with ‘Sunset’ carved into one and ‘Farm’ into the other.

    It was a very fine farm.

    The first thing you saw was the house giving on to the cowsheds and the stables with the big loft above them.

    Next to them was another large building, with more cowsheds below and a hay-loft on top. All the outhouses were thatched, except the pig-sty which stood between them and the orchard. Altogether it was a lovely old farm.

    The entire farmyard was covered with ground sea-shells, making a sort of paving. It looked very pretty and reduced the amount of dust. But the chickens would scratch about in it and often dig up the soil underneath.

    Six people lived on Sunset Farm: Mr. Wielemaker the farmer; his wife; his son Kees; his little daughter Sjaantje; Jacob, the farm hand; and Trui, the maid.

    Then there were some twenty cows which were let out on the fields in summer, five horses and about a dozen pigs. Of course, there were chickens and ducks as well. You couldn’t imagine a farm without chickens or ducks, could you? And, of course, there was Miesje, the snow-white cat, and Bob, the great brown watch-dog.

    But let us have another look at the boys up in the hayloft.

    It was wonderful playing up there in the winter. There was plenty of room and you could really let yourself go. Nobody minded how much noise you made and Kees and Jaap went there as often as possible. Jaap Buis, the teacher’s son, was Kees’s best friend; they were in the same class and spent as much of their free time together as they could. The loft was just above the cowshed, and you could easily get up there by a ladder. Most of the floor was covered with hay but one corner was not, and it was here that the boys usually played.

    They had rigged up a tent out of bamboo sticks and old pieces of sail-cloth. It was not so simple, for the tent kept falling over. So they had decided to fasten it to the timbers with a thick rope. They had the whole afternoon to do it, for it was Saturday afternoon, Saturday, January the 31st, 1953. The wind was raging round the hay-loft.

    Half an hour later, Kees and Jaap had finished.

    Their tent was a farmyard; Kees was the farmer and Jaap the farm hand.

    ‘But we’ve got no cattle,’ Kees said.

    Jaap had a wonderful idea; Jaap always had wonderful ideas.

    ‘Let’s bring Bob and Miesje up here,’ he said.

    Bob, the farm dog, was delighted to be taken up in the loft with the boys, and didn’t even mind being tied to a rope.

    But Miesje, the family cat, put up a fight when the boys tried to tie a string round her neck. When protesting didn’t do her any good, she made the best of a bad job, lay down and fell asleep.

    As they were busy stocking up with animals, they decided they might as well take Witje up, too. Witje was a snow-white young nanny-goat born last summer. She was a playful thing and would much rather have romped about in the yard than be dragged up a ladder. But now there she was, tied to a pole and looking round inquisitively.

    ‘But we still need a farmer’s wife,’ Jaap called out.

    Just then, they heard voices below. The boys peered down and saw Kees’s little sister, Sjaantje, with Geurt Adriaanse. They had turned up just at the right moment.

    Geurt’s father worked on Sunset Farm but lived in a little house in the village. Geurt was in the same class as Kees and Jaap.

    ‘Hallo, Geurt!’ Kees called out.

    ‘Hallo,’ Geurt replied.

    ‘Come up, you,’ Jaap shouted to them. ‘We’ve made a farmyard up here.’

    ‘And we’ve got a lot of livestock as well,’ Kees added.

    ‘We’re short of a farm hand.’

    ‘And we need Sjaantje as the farmer’s wife.’

    In a moment Sjaantje and Geurt were up. Bob wagged his tail; Miesje woke up and started miaowing. Witje sniffed inquisitively at Geurt’s hand.

    ‘Geurt,’ said the make-believe farmer, ‘you’ll have to go and feed the animals and you, Jaap, ought to get on with the milking.’

    ‘Very good, sir,’ Geurt and Jaap answered.

    ‘I’m going to see to your supper,’ said the ‘farmer’s wife’. ‘There’ll be bacon, eggs and potatoes. And strawberries and cream to follow.’

    So they went on with their game, which they were enjoying tremendously, laughing, talking and shouting all the time. From time to time, they couldn’t hear each other speak. That was when the west wind made the beams creak noisily and startled Miesje in her sleep. It was a very violent storm.

    CHAPTER TWO — The worst is still to come

    It was half past five, and outside it was pitch dark. The entire Wielemaker family were sitting round the table in the big kitchen. Miesje had lapped up her milk and was dozing by the stove, and Bob was eating large hunks of bread from his dish.

    ‘We had a marvellous time up in the hay-loft,’ Kees said, taking a tremendous bite out of his piece of bread and butter.

    ‘Just listen to the storm,’ his mother exclaimed.

    ‘There’s worse to come for it isn’t high tide yet,’ her husband replied and his face looked worried. ‘There’s no sign of the storm letting up.’

    ‘And then there’s tomorrow’s spring tide,’ Trui said as she got up from the table. She picked up the pot from the stove and poured out some more coffee.

    ‘Dirk from the farm next door passed by this morning. He told me the water level was pretty high there,’ Jacob said as he held out his cup.

    ‘Do you think the sea-wall might give?’ Kees asked thoughtfully.

    ‘Don’t even say such things, Kees,’ his mother reprimanded him.

    Kees quickly took another bite.

    ‘Things would have to get pretty bad for that to happen,’ Jacob the farm hand said. ‘The sea-wall can’t give way. It’s much too solid.’

    At that moment they could all hear a terrific din on the roof.

    ‘Whatever can that be?’ Mrs. Wielemaker asked anxiously.

    ‘I think a few tiles must have come off,’ Jacob said. ‘I’ll go and have a look.’ He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and went out. Mr. Wielemaker, anxious to know what the trouble was, quickly followed him.

    ‘May I go, too, Mother?’ Kees asked.

    ‘You’ll stay right here indoors in this terrible weather.’

    Mr. Wielemaker and Jacob were back very quickly. Their faces were flushed with the wind and their hair was all over their faces.

    ‘What was it?’ Mrs. Wielemaker asked anxiously.

    ‘Part of the chimney has blown off—at least

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