Five Brothers and a War

A van Pelt Night Out

Brilliant though they thought they were after they had undressed and gone to bed, they were still not out of the woods. They were quite proud of themselves—initially. Just when they were about to drop off, Jan whispered, “Oh, oh!” Kees asked what the matter was and he whispered back that he heard a noise downstairs, like somebody pacing up and down the hallway. He concluded there was only one thing to do, in order to avoid having their father doing the “bear-in-the-zoo” pacing all night. They shuddered at that concept and hated to consider the consequences. Jan decided that he would make some noise to draw attention to their presence by making the trip down to the second floor water closet. So when he went downstairs, he made no particular attempt to be quiet, and succeeded in drawing his father’s attention on the ground floor. “Is that you, Piet?” came Leendert’s strong voice. “No, it’s me, Jan” was the reply in as calm and casual a manner as he could muster. There were a few moments of very awkward silence where Leendert no doubt realized that he might have been building up a lot of steam for naught, while wasting precious bed rest. “WHAT!!??”, he demanded, “How long have you been there?” “Oh quite a little while”, came back Jan’s somewhat timid response, not knowing what else to come up with. This was too much for his dad. After he inquired about Kees’ and Bertus’ well-being, he said he would deal with the matter in the morning. The morning came—a great, quiet Sunday morning. The boys woke up to a horrible smell in the room. Kees’ first thought was that the cat had been at it again. But after sniffing out where it came from he had to conclude that it came out of his jacket pocket. While trying to work out what might have happened, he reconstructed the adventures of the last evening and it slowly began to dawn on him how his pocket smelled so bad. On their way home in the dark, he must have stepped in a pile of dog poop. In their efforts to be very quiet getting into the Margrietstraat, everyone had taken off their shoes. Then, in order to use both hands to navigate through the eavestrough, Kees had put his shoes in his jacket pockets. The thought of cleaning it up abhorred him. But then he thought of the Dutch expression, “ Je moet je niet in je zak laten schijten”, which literally means “Don’t let anybody shit in your pocket”, although the actual meaning of the expression was closer to, “Don’t be taken for a fool.” Remembering the expression would shortly prove to be a life saver. Kees was the last one to come bouncing down the stairs to the Sunday morning breakfast table. Thunder clouds hung heavy in the air as the tension could have been cut with a knife. In an attempt to lighten up the crowd, Kees burst forth with, “Before discussing last night, I like to know who has been shitting in my pocket.” The effect was amazing. In one fell swoop everyone was howling with laughter. The wind had been sucked out of the sails of the speech Leendert had planned, and Marie found great delight that Kees had to clean up the mess Kees had created. The boys lived another day.

van Pelt

Five Brothers and a War

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