I think it’s a great story anyway

I promised you a great story and finally… here it is.

(My laptop is still in a coma, it stopped working a week before the warranty expired and now the insurance company and the computer company are arguing about money, so it can take weeks before I get it back (and with ‘weeks’ they probably mean ‘months’) and since hubs had to buy a new laptop for one of his employees anyway, he bought a new one for me too. He does excessive things like that. But I’m not complaining. I’m extremely chuffed and am happily typing away here.)

For this story I did have to check some details with my mother, so I phoned her yesterday. My mother is a great storyteller, but she often leaves out details and I often forget to ask.

The story

My grandfather died in 1948 when he was only 48 (yes, I too have worked out that he must have been born in 1900), leaving my grandmother and his two daughters (my mother aged 17 and my aunt, aged 18) behind on their small farm. It was difficult for them to make ends meet and in 1951 my grandmother decided to sell the farm and start a cafe in the nearby city of Groningen. A brave decision. To start something so totally different to what she was used to.

My father, who describes his hairstyle (if we may call it that) as ‘airport Eelde with afforested surroundings’, airport Eelde being a small local airport, my grandmother and me.

 

She took over a small existing cafe that was located in the front room of a house, just across the road from the main entrance of the largest hospital in the North-Eastern part of the Netherlands. My grandmother, my aunt and her husband (by then my aunt had married my uncle and they joined my grandmother in her new life) had their living room in the back room, divided from the front room cafe by glass sliding doors. (One of those details; where was my mother? I haven’t a clue. Had she married my father by then? Had they moved to Amsterdam already? Why don’t I know? I should know when my mother married my father. Shame on me! But it isn’t important for this story, so we can forget about that for now. Phew!)

The front room, the cafe, had one of those round iron stoves in the centre. “I can still see it”, my mother said. “Grandma always had a jug of milk on top of that stove. By the end of the day the bottom of the jug was covered in a thick brown layer of burned milk.”

But, even though that doesn’t seem very appetizing to us, the cafe was a big success! At some point my grandmother even bought the three floors above the cafe and grandma, aunt and uncle went to live upstairs, adding the back room to the cafe. And they employed waitresses. What a change to the difficult life on the small farm.

I remember spending holidays with my grandmother, aunt and uncle in that big house above the cafe. I must have been about five or six years old when they gave me a small white apron and I was allowed to go into the cafe and empty the ashtrays. A very important task, they assured me. And a task I took very seriously. And when I had emptied all the ashtrays (this was obviously in the days when smoking was still a very ‘hot’ thing to do) I was allowed to go into the kitchen and choose either an ice cream or a meatball as a reward for all my hard work. I remember the meatballs. My uncle made them and they were the best meatballs ever. Me being a vegetarian now has nothing to do with my uncle’s delicious meatballs. Let that be clear.

That’s me, in front of the cafe. I’m not sure if my sister is preparing to jump out onto the street or if she has another excuse for that weird pose. Talking about weird poses; one should never point towards one’s pointy hat when one’s wearing a mini-dress. Let that be a warning to you! Perhaps I should have used the flag to cover up certain parts. It must have been someone’s birthday. I usually don’t go through life wearing shiny pointy hats. Or mini-dresses. Or holding a flag actually. My mother spent most of her years then knitting openwork knee-stockings. With calve-killing elastic through the top to hold them up.

 

The cafe was very popular with taxi drivers who had lots of customers among patients and visitors to the hospital, but it was also the place to be for doctors and nurses. ‘Koffiehuis Prins’ became a famous place in Groningen.

Somewhere in the seventies my grandmother, aunt and uncle sold the cafe and moved to a village close to Groningen, where my grandmother went to live in a small house and my aunt and uncle and their children moved into a larger house nearby. I then spent all my holidays with my aunt and uncle. My friends in Amsterdam, where I was born and raised, thought spending your holidays in the province Groningen was a very exotic thing to do. People in the Western part of the Netherlands, where Amsterdam is, do not go up to the Northern part voluntarily. This is ‘farmers country’.

My aunt and uncle always had a house full of people. Used to catering for people,  my aunt often got out of bed in the middle of the night to fry chips and eggs for my cousins and their friends, when cousins returned from a night out and brought all their friends home to have a midnight snack. And then she took a dive in the freezer to get out ice cream for everyone. I can still picture my aunt in her dressing gown, her bottom and her legs sticking out of the freezer, with the rest of her hidden somewhere in the cold depths, shouting out what was on offer that night. “Vanilla, strawberry, chocolate? Anyone want more fries? Burgers?”
I really enjoyed their relaxed and welcoming attitude. My mother often pointed to her forehead, declaring her sister mad. She still does, come to think of it. Ah well, it takes one to know one.

The hospital extended, expanded, got bigger and bigger. The main entrance moved to another side, it accommodated cafes and even a supermarket, so it turned out that my grandmother had sold ‘Koffiehuis Prins’ at the right time.

My grandmother and my uncle are no longer with us. They’ve moved on to the great cafe in the sky.
‘Koffiehuizen’ are very much a thing of the past. At least the ones where you can buy coffee and meatballs. In the Netherlands coffee shops seldom sell coffee anymore. They do sell other stimulating substances though. But that is a different subject.

Who’d have thought I’d end up living in the same village my grandmother, aunt and uncle moved to when they sold the cafe. Or to be accurate, we live in the smaller village next to it. But it belongs to that same village where my grandmother, aunt and uncle lived and where I spent all my holidays. I must have cycled past our current house very often.

When hubs and I first moved to this house, about 12 years ago, we regularly went to the city of Groningen to visit the market, the lovely delicatessen shops and to have a coffee. But never in ‘Koffiehuis Prins, because that was in a different part of town. One time however, when we just moved here, we did walk to the place where my grandmother’s cafe used to be, so I could show hubs where I’d been ‘employed’ all those years ago to empty the ashtrays.

To my surprise it was still called ‘Koffiehuis Prins’ and it even looked exactly the same as I remembered it. It was closed, but I could see through the window that the walls had the same panelling as they had thirty years ago. There were the same tables and chairs, the same bar with the same big round shiny metal coffeemaker on top. It just looked as if time had stood still. A seventies-relic. Weird. And very obviously it wasn’t as thriving a business anymore.

And here comes the great part of the story…

We usually are too busy now with other things, mainly four-legged things, to take time for some relaxed market visiting and coffee drinking in Groningen city. But last week we decided to go to Groningen and park the car in the Eastern part, near the hospital, and walk into town from there. We were very close to where ‘Koffiehuis Prins’ used to be. So we walked down that street, but I couldn’t quite figure out which of the buildings it was. There was an Indian restaurant that looked like it could have been it. It was opposite an old entrance of the hospital, but we couldn’t decide if it was the former main entrance. So we stood there and looked, and looked again and then decided that the Indian restaurant most probably was the former ‘Koffiehuis Prins’. 

We strolled through the town, went to the market, bought a big bunch of tulips and went home.

We fed the four-legged creatures and made ourselves some lunch, sat down at the table, opened the newspaper. Hubs took the economy and the sports section, leaving me with the more interesting supplements about food and houses. Every Saturday there is a review of a restaurant in the newspaper. Every Saturday I read that review. Last Saturday the review was about…

…the Indian restaurant we had seen that morning and that we thought might have been housed in what used to be my granny’s cafe. But we weren’t at all sure. What are the chances that the review was about that restaurant? On that day?

The review started like this:

‘The iron stove (remember the one with the forever cooking milk on top?) has been there for ages, but that is the only thing that still reminds us of ‘Koffiehuis Prins’. Situated opposite the old entrance of the hospital, around that stove love between doctors and nurses flared up; taxi- and ambulance-drivers waited until the hospital telephoned that patients were ready for transport; the neighbour read his newspaper; the mailman dropped in for a cup of coffee. That same stove still is the centre point. But now of Indian restaurant Kohinoor, where bright colours ban all memories of the famous cafe….’

Famous cafe!

And it turns out that Hermus and Zandstra (the culinary journalists) approve of the restaurant too. So I’m thinking we’ll have to go and eat there some day soon. They won’t have my uncle’s delicious meatballs, but that doesn’t matter. I’m a vegetarian now anyway.