The first was an elderly gentleman hoping to find a place for his unmarried son. Everything was almost settled when the son himself spoke up, and he said such crazy things that my mother seriously began to wonder if he had all his marbles. She was right, since the elderly gentleman hesitantly admitted that his son was a bit out of the ordinary. You wouldn’t believe how fast she showed those two the door.
Dozens of people came and went, until one day the door opened to a short, fat, middle-aged man who was willing to pay a lot and had few demands, so he was quickly accepted. This gentleman actually gave us more pleasure than trouble. Every Sunday he brought chocolate for the children and cigarettes for the adults, and more than once he took us all to the cinema. He stayed with us for a year and a half, then moved into his own flat, together with his mother and sister. Later, he used to drop by from time to time and swear that he’d never had such a good time as he’d had with us.
Once more we put an ad in the window and once more our doorbell was rung by young and old, short and tall. One of them was a fairly young woman wearing the same kind of bonnet they wear in the Salvation Army, so we quickly dubbed her ‘Salvation Army Josephine’. She got the room, but she wasn’t as nice to share the house with as the fat man. First of all, she was terribly messy, leaving things all over the place. Second, and more important, she had a fiancé who was often drunk, and he was even less charming to have around. One night, for instance, we were startled out of our sleep by the doorbell. My father got up to take a look and found himself confronted with the inebriated fiancé, who kept clapping him on the shoulder and saying, over and over again, ‘We’re mates, aren’t we? Yeah, we’re real mates!’ Bang…the door was slammed in his face.
When the war broke out here in May 1940, we gave her notice and let the room to a thirty-year-old man of our acquaintance who was also engaged. He was nice, but he had one failing: he was terribly spoiled. One time, during the winter, when we were having to economize on the electricity, he complained bitterly of the cold – a shameful exaggeration, since the heat in his room was turned up as high as it would go. But you have to humour your lodgers sometimes, so he was given permission to switch on the electric fire occasionally for an hour or two. What do you think he did? He kept that fire turned on full blast all day long. We begged and pleaded with him to economize a bit, but it didn’t help. The electricity meter kept ticking faster and faster, so one day my fearless mother took the fuse out of the box and disappeared for the rest of the afternoon. She then blamed the fire for supposedly blowing the fuse, and the young man was obliged to sit in the cold. Nevertheless, he was also with us for a year and a half, until he left to get married.
Once again the room was empty. My mother was about to place another ad when a friend called up and foisted a divorced man on us who was in urgent need of a room. He was a tall man, about thirty-five years old, with glasses and a very unpleasant face. We didn’t want to disappoint our friend, so we let the room to him. He too was engaged, and his fiancée often came to the house. Not long before the wedding they quarrelled and broke up, and he rushed headlong into a marriage with someone else.
Just about then we moved and finally got rid of our lodgers (hopefully once and for all)!
Friday, 15 October 1943
My answer to Mrs van Daan, who’s forever asking me why I don’t want to be a film star.
I WAS SEVENTEEN, a pretty young girl with curly black hair, mischievous eyes and…lots of ideals and illusions. I was sure that someday, somehow, my name would be on everyone’s lips, my picture in many a starry-eyed teenager’s photo album.
Exactly how I’d become a celebrity or what direction my career would take was of little concern to me. When I was fourteen, I used to think, ‘All in good time,’ and now that I’m seventeen, I still think that. My parents suspected almost nothing of my plans and I was smart enough to keep them to myself, since I had the feeling that if I ever got a chance to be famous they wouldn’t like it and that, at least to start with, I’d be better off on my own.
You mustn’t think that I took my daydreams seriously or that I thought of nothing but fame.
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