Dutch Girl Read online

  “There were still a few Dutch planes that were allowed to fly,” Audrey remembered. “Somehow my mother had contacted my father and asked him to meet me at the train in London from [Folkestone] where I was coming in. They put me on this bright-orange plane. You know, orange is the national color, and it flew very low. It really was one of the last planes out. That was the last time [before the war] I saw my father.”

  Tension ruled the airways—German fighter planes patrolled the skies over the English Channel and North Sea looking for warbirds taking off from British fields. On 26 September fighters had mistaken a civilian KLM DC-3 for a military plane and attacked. As a result of that incident, the entire KLM fleet of DC-3s had been painted orange to clearly identify them as noncombatant aircraft. Even Audrey noticed that the airliner, considered giant because it had two engines and twenty-five seats, “flew very low” across the North Sea as part of the pilot’s effort to draw less attention from patrolling German fighters.

  But she made it; the plane landed safely at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport where Ella and the boys greeted her. Two hours later by train from Amsterdam to Arnhem, Adriaantje was walking into her new home at Sickeszlaan 7 to begin the next phase of life as a Dutch girl in a neutral Netherlands.

  4

  Edda

  In December 1939 Adriaantje Hepburn-Ruston flew into the airport in Amsterdam as a foreigner. Yes, her blood was fifty percent Dutch, with a quarter each of English and Slovakian, but she hadn’t more than visited various van Heemstra living spaces in Holland during her short life. Now, a Dutch stamp would be imprinted on the girl’s soul immediately, firmly, and permanently so that, in many ways, she would always be Dutch.

  Being Dutch was unlike being anything else in the world, as she would soon enough learn. The Dutch had been masters of the world at one time, particularly masters of sailing and commerce, which resulted in the booming Dutch East Indies in one direction and the equally vibrant New Amsterdam, later New York City, in the other. They excelled in the arts, producing “Dutch masters” such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, and later, van Gogh.

  As Audrey put it, “Holland has been an admirable country, from the early ages to today.”

  The Dutch were a religious people, Protestants in the majority but with a large Catholic percentage as well and firm in their faith. They lived industrious lives, worked exceptionally hard, wore clothes neatly until they wore them out, spoke their minds, showed up early for appointments, kept homes that were tidy to a fault, ate good food meticulously and let nothing go to waste, and led the world in fitness because everyone rode bicycles everywhere over the notably flat terrain. In fact, Holland was the only country in Europe that kept growing its land without encroaching upon its neighbors—the remarkable Dutch used the power of windmills to drain seas and keep them at bay behind dikes to create rich farmlands called polders. They managed their abundant water by creating a system of canals that supplemented the many rivers and moved food and other goods easily from place to place. Above all, the Dutch didn’t brag about accomplishments as individuals but knew they were the best country on the face of the earth. It was a fact; they just were.

  Arnhem, the city that would become Adriaantje’s new home, had once been a medieval fortress worth storming and conquering, as proved by the Burgundians, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French, all of whom possessed it or at least fought for it at one time or another. Arnhem was a most unusual Dutch city because part of it sat on significant hills that descended through the flat city center all the way to the edge of the Rhine River. Wealthy Dutch businessmen had made good lives in the East Indies and returned to Arnhem and its surrounding villages to build lavish villas for retirement, so that Arnhem showed elegance wherever one turned. Audrey’s opa, the baron, hadn’t quite accumulated such wealth because he had spent his life in law and government. To be a Dutch noble didn’t mean wearing a crown; it meant serving as an example to others and helping those who were less fortunate. So the former burgemeester of Arnhem and governor of Suriname led a quiet and rather frugal life while managing to represent the van Heemstras as a family with an impressive history of leadership and service to the nation.

  “First of all, we were not one bit wealthy,” said Audrey in 1990 for the umpteenth time. She had been dealing with assumptions about the fortune associated with her mother’s and grandfather’s titles—baroness, baron—since new Broadway star Audrey Hepburn first made the newspapers in association with Gigi. She wasn’t easy to anger in interviews, but this topic had a way of setting her off. “My mother didn’t have a dime…. My parents divorced when I was ten, and my father disappeared and all that. But we didn’t have any money at all.”

  They really didn’t. The baron’s decision to enter public service and the needs of his six children slowly chipped away at the proceeds from the sale of various family properties so that by the late 1930s, the money was gone. A dozen Audrey Hepburn biographers have alluded to Huis Zijpendaal, Baron van Heemstra’s castle in Arnhem, as if he owned it. They have talked about Audrey being born with a “silver spoon in her mouth.” Ella did employ a nanny in Belgium and a housekeeper in Arnhem, but that was the extent of the family silver spoon. At the time Ella arrived in Arnhem, she was working to earn a living and renting a small townhouse. Ella’s father lived on a pension from government work and rented rooms at Zijpendaal after he had sold Villa Roestenburg in Oosterbeek and arrived at the status of widower with grown children.

  So here came Ella’s daughter from exile in county Kent, England, to a new country with a new language. The van Heemstras anticipated the return of little Adriaantje, who stepped off the orange airliner at Schiphol Airport after a tumultuous day that saw her leave Elham in a hurry and spend moments too few in number with her elusive father. Then her plane had wave-hopped the Channel and the North Sea, and after all that she had met up with her mother for a reunion during which no embrace was offered. Ella took her daughter’s hand and led her to the train to Arnhem.

  Audrey would always admit that Ella wasn’t an affectionate person. As a result, she would say, “I spent a lot of time looking for it [affection] and I found it. She was a fabulous mother, but she came from an era. She was born in 1900—Victorian influence, still—of great discipline—of great ethics. A lot of love within her; not always able to show it. And very strict. I went searching all over the place to find somebody who would cuddle me. You know? And I found it, in my aunts, in my friends. That is something that has stayed very strong [in me].” After all Adriaantje had been through that day, an embrace at the airport would have been reasonable to expect. The lack of one was typical Ella.

  But Baroness van Heemstra excelled in other areas. Within three months of Audrey’s arrival, Ella found a larger dwelling for her reunited family, a two-story apartment that spanned the second and third floors above a flower shop on a main thoroughfare, Jansbinnensingel, in Arnhem Centraal. It was in some respects the loveliest boulevard in the city, with the apartment overlooking green lawns and aging fountains.

  Ella’s son Alex began dating an Oosterbeek girl, Maria Margarethe Monné, in 1941, and they would marry two years later. The girl everyone knew as “Miepje” said of the apartment: “I was there many times…. Downstairs [on the second floor] were the sitting room and the dining room, above, the bedrooms. Ella worked for the posh home furnishings company Pander from The Hague. Her house was a showroom. It was a mixture of classic and modern. Beautiful in color. It looked good. My mother-in-law was very progressive.”

  Ella’s job with H. Pander & Zonen of The Hague further dispelled any notion of van Heemstra wealth. She had agreed to take on a ninety-minute commute each way by train. Among its many businesses, Pander commissioned art deco furniture from the most gifted designers in the Netherlands. The job with Pander suited Ella’s background and tastes given that Pander was the place for the upper class to shop for furniture. The fact that she arranged for her apartment to serve as an Arnhem showroom for Pander showed her practical side sin
ce it meant less commuting, and she didn’t have to pay for her own furnishings.

  Ella found the reunification of her family a major adjustment after spending so much of the 1930s gallivanting, chasing bad boys and excitement. But here she now was, nearing the magic age of forty and accepting the responsibility of a mother in a world facing war, single and caring for three children.

  Audrey’s last companion, the Dutchman Robert Wolders, knew Ella late in her life and said she was “a superior woman. Very, very humorous. Extremely well read, well educated. But critical of most everyone, including Audrey.” In addition he labeled her, “Biased. Intolerant.”

  Audrey would spend most of the next forty-five years subjugating her will to that of her mother. Ella the benevolent dictator would see to her daughter’s needs and desires on the one hand, but reinforce Audrey’s feelings of inadequacy—she was worth just enough to be dumped by her father—on the other.

  “I was given an outlook on life by my mother,” she said, “a lady of very strict Victorian standards. It was frowned upon to bother others with your feelings. It was frowned upon not to think of others first. It was frowned upon not to be disciplined.” On another occasion Audrey explained, “My mother always wanted to be useful and really impressed it upon us. ‘You have to be useful.’” Ella’s attitude molded her daughter into an intense loner and introvert who relied only on herself—and to a small degree her older brothers—while craving the acceptance of the adults around her. The self-discipline instilled by Ella would become legendary in Audrey, who would always be known for meticulous attention to detail as she went about every job she ever undertook.

  For Adriaantje, the ten-year-old newly minted Dutch girl who had spent her first years a Belgian before becoming English, the culture shock upon arrival in Holland was profound, especially since Ella decided that her daughter must present herself as Dutch. It was that simple to Ella: Just be Dutch.

  In theory the girl without a country could speak “Nederlands” since she had used Dutch words as a quiet young visitor to Oosterbeek years earlier. It seemed deadly logical for Ella to toss her daughter into the fifth-year class at School 21A, the Tamboersbosje, which sat on the Sonsbeek side of the Arnhem Centraal train station. To help Adriaantje along, Ella enrolled her under a pseudonym, Edda van Heemstra.

  “I used my mother’s name,” said Audrey, “because it wasn’t too good an idea to draw attention to the fact that I was English.” This was true enough; many of Ella’s Arnhem friends these days were German, some of them Nazis, and Germany was at war with England. Socially and politically, Ella needed to minimize her ties to anything English.

  But the concept of “Edda” failed miserably. After three-plus years attending the Rigden’s English school with a small roster of children, Adriaantje/Edda found herself alone in a large building where only Dutch was spoken, a language she didn’t know. She was terrified.

  “That first morning in school, I sat at my little bench, completely baffled,” she remembered. “I went home at the end of the day weeping. For several days I went home weeping.”

  On another occasion she remembered her first days “in a huge classroom not knowing a word that was being said and every time I opened my mouth, everyone roaring with laughter.” Classmates made fun of her “horrible accent.”

  Thirteen years after “Edda” began instruction at Tamboersbosje, at a time when the press paused to look back at the Arnhem years of Roman Holiday star Audrey Hepburn, her teacher H.F. van Loon would remember the agonized pupil and her troubles adjusting. “She had a hard time speaking and writing in Dutch,” the instructor recalled.

  Ella now began to understand the terror Adriaantje was experiencing and realized that perhaps shoving her daughter into the deep end of Dutch culture might not have been the wisest choice. Ella attempted to ease the transition in an Arnhem church. A group of thirteen and fourteen year olds “were asked to continue Sunday school at the Christian Science Church,” remembered one of the teens, David Heringa, because “there would be a new young girl there and it would be helpful for her to have kids around who could speak English. It was a small Christian Science community, perhaps fifteen students and three teachers. Audrey at that time was a little quiet girl.”

  In the last weeks of 1939, Adriaantje kept hearing about an upcoming event that everyone in the family was going to attend. Her mother was, among her many other talents, a poet, and she would be part of the program planned at the end of the year. She also promised Adriaantje that ballet would be performed, and so anticipation built as Christmas came and went.

  The evening finally arrived: Friday, 29 December 1939. The shy girl with the short bobbed hair accompanied her mother to the local auditorium, the Stadsschouwburg, or City Theater, in central Arnhem, just two blocks from the Arnhem Road Bridge. The theater overlooked a beautiful park that featured the little lake Lauwersgracht. Audrey watched crowds of well-dressed people troop inside. Here she experienced the local arts for the first time, with the evening a benefit for the Local Commission for Special Needs, which assisted victims of the recent Nazi aggression toward Poland. Baron van Heemstra, Adriaantje’s opa, was chairman of the national fund for special needs, and his job was both desperate and heartbreaking: In less than four months, tens of thousands of injured and displaced Polish war victims now needed the world’s help.

  That evening the ten year old couldn’t understand the many speeches delivered in Dutch by, among others, Arnhem Burgemeester H. P. J. Bloemers and by Ella’s sixty-year-old cousin, Baron Schelte van Heemstra, and his wife, Tilly. Schelte was the queen’s commissioner representing the central government in Gelderland, which meant that their entire party sat at the front of the first balcony in the Schouwburg—these seats in the Gold Circle were reserved for the queen of the Netherlands.

  The Schouwburg featured an orchestra pit and 650 seats spanning stage level and two balconies. From the best seats in the house, Adriaantje watched her mother recite three poems she had written in recent years before a house that was packed up through the second balcony. Ella had written one of the poems to celebrate the birth just four months earlier of Princess Irene of the Netherlands—daughter of van Heemstra family friends Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard. Another poem written back in 1935 looked ahead to the then-imminent departure of Adriaantje for Elham. In writing Ella could intellectualize her affection for her daughter, even if she couldn’t offer embraces:

  Little daughter of mine, tomorrow you will leave home—

  into the world to boarding school.

  Not yet permanently away—but it’s a start.

  From a young age on you were so much more

  ‘free-spirited’ than me.

  You went (freely?), you talked (freely?),

  you treated me as a friend.

  That’s something wonderful and also ‘binding’.

  You saw ‘no difference’ in me, no aristocratic lady.

  Ah, that was wonderful and I do hope I prepared you well for being alone.

  It will be your thoughts that will shape your life.

  I only gave you the foundation—a direction.

  You see, first I was your friend, a good mate.

  We were comrades in words and deeds.

  This, daughter-mine, is over because you stand alone.

  In this case friends are not enough—not one!

  Even not friends like me. Completely yours.

  Even not me, who loves you so much.

  No child, the best comes NOW! because in your independence no one can give you what I, as a mother, can give you.

  This you will find out.

  Because: if you are away,

  we will become more than good friends.

  Look, if you wouldn’t leave tomorrow

  (you have a look on your face as if it’s all so weird!),

  I would say: darling, it’s true—try it.

  You will finally feel what’s it like to be mother and her child.

  Too beautifu
l to explain.

  And as life opens up to you: don’t forget that whatever friendship you leave behind, may I call myself ‘mother’.

  Of the evening’s festivities, the Arnhemsche Courant reported that Baroness van Heemstra “recited three of her own poems, with a warm, equally moved voice. Sensitive reactions of a mother to the farewell of her daughter who attends boarding school, of the mothers on the departure of men and sons who were called to arms, and on the parental happiness of the royal family. There were flowers for the poetess … whose artful recitation set a serious tone in the otherwise cheerful evening.”

  Audrey discovered at this event just how plentiful her family in Arnhem truly was. Ella’s older sister Meisje and her husband, Otto, Count van Limburg Stirum, attended—Audrey’s aunt and uncle who lived with Opa at the castle. The count was a cheerful fellow who laughed a lot and dressed with great style; Audrey would soon grow to adore him. Everyone referred to him as Otto, and Audrey learned he was a prosecuting attorney in Arnhem.

  Cornelia, Countess van Limburg Stirum, Otto’s seventy-one-year-old aunt and a beloved lady by the way people reacted to her, made a big fuss over shy Audrey. The countess was very Dutch, with a round face and warm manner. Ella’s youngest sister, Arnoudina, attended the evening’s festivities, as did various other van Heemstras from Arnhem. Ella also introduced Audrey to some Quarles van Uffords, the family of first husband Hendrik and blood relations of Alex and Ian. Oosterbeek had been their family home for generations.

  Yet the crush of socializing—most of it in rapid-fire Dutch—could only confuse and frighten the shy girl who took refuge in the cultural aspects of the evening. She sat enthralled by the dance in what soon became a cataclysmic experience; she understood for the first time what dancers were able to express as human movement in response to music. This wasn’t one dancer in Folkestone performing to a gramophone. It was a deep stage with many dancers moving inside spotlights and accompanied by the Arnhem Symphony Orchestra. Said Audrey, “These devices drew me into the enchanted world of music, where one didn’t have to talk, just listen.”