Ode to Trijntje van der Hoek | On her behaviour, there is nothing to be said

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Dear Trijntje,
 

From a future unimaginably distant for you, I am writing this ode to you. We don't know each other. Between our lives there is at least 100 years. You are my great-great-grandmother, I am a descendant of your son Wiebe. Although I did not know your name until recently, there is a family story by which you live on among your Amsterdam descendants. I am curious to know what you think of that. In that story, you, a young widow, come to Amsterdam from North Holland on foot with your four children, hoping for a better life. But who are you really? For this ode, I went in search of your story.
 

Your name is Trijntje van der Hoek and you were born in 1857 in Hoogwoud, Noord-Holland. Your father works there as a carpenter and you are the oldest daughter of four children. Death always turns out to be close by. You experience the death of one of your brothers and are only 10 years old yourself when your mother Marijtje is also buried.
 

What grief that must have given. Your father remarries Gerritje and together they have four more children. The family numbers seven children in total. Around your 18th birthday, father, Gerritje and the other children move to the poor working-class neighbourhood of Kattenburg in Amsterdam. Your father first finds work there as a carpenter and later tries to earn a living for the large family as a porter. You don't go with him.

You are 25 years old when you marry Cornelis Kuilman in 1883. Cornelis comes from a family of millers and he works as a servant at a mill in Zijpe.  After six years of marriage, disaster strikes again. Your husband Cornelis is pulled lifeless from the water near Oudesluis on 2 September 1891, according to the Zijper Courant. The cause of the accident is unknown. It is a tragedy. You have three small children together and you are heavily pregnant with the fourth. Baby Pieter is born six weeks after Cornelis' death. What was it like to have death so close to you again? How was it to go on?
 

You decide to go to Amsterdam too, at least then you will be near your father, stepmother, siblings. Actually, I can't imagine you did that on foot Trijntje. Your eldest son Cornelis is 7, son Wiebe is 6, daughter Antje is only 2 and then the newborn baby Pieter. Family stories are not always reliable. 

In January 1892, you are registered in Amsterdam. You find accommodation on the Eastern Islands. This neighbourhood is sandwiched between the shipping industry and has many cheap one-room and basement houses. When you leave, the Baptist community in Zijpe gives you 100 guilders to 'buy a little affair'. You use that money to take over a small trade in sweets in a basement flat at Kleine Kattenburgerstraat 26.

But life is not easy. Your small business in sweets does not earn enough to support your family in this poor neighbourhood. You barely earn enough to pay the rent on the basement flat, let alone take care of the children. By necessity, you take your silver head iron and two pins to the Stadsbank van Lening to have some money. When you arrived in Amsterdam, you might still be wearing Noord-Holland regional costume, but in a city with people of all origins, wearing regional clothing is an unnecessary luxury.

A year and a half after arriving in Amsterdam, the need is so great that you apply for support from the Burgerlijk Armbestuur. You run out of money and have a hefty rent debt. How did you experience this, Trijntje? A bit resigned or just slightly ashamed? The Civil Welfare Board pays you a home visit, a report is made about you. They ask about your reputation in the neighbourhood. It is noted in your file what impression you make: 'there is nothing to criticise about her behaviour' but also that you are dead poor 'no useful furniture present'.

'No usable furniture present'. What should I imagine with that Trijntje? At the time you were living in your cellar flat on Kleine Kattenburgerstraat, a committee of the Roman Catholic People's Union was mapping housing conditions in various working-class neighbourhoods. Whereas in the Jordaan the slums and alleys are typical, the basement dwelling turns out to be specific to the Eastern Islands. In Kleine Kattenburgerstraat, the committee counts as many as 59 of which they visit 43. They are dismayed by what they find. 'The dampness, darkness and stench in many cellars made them horrible lodgings for people'. Only 13 of the 59 cellar houses on your street are labelled 'suitable for habitation'.
 

According to the report, entire families live in small dank rooms where people not only live, cook and sleep but also wash. In the vast majority of basement dwellings, an adult can barely stand upright, that's how low the ceilings are. You too must have lived like this in one room with all your children. No useful furniture present. A bucket with a shelf as a toilet. A kerosene stove for cooking. Sleeping under damp laundry hanging to dry in the room. Did the committee come to see you too? It could well be....
There is increasing interest in the housing situation of workers in Amsterdam in the late 19th century. This involves using field research, statistics, drawings and sometimes photography to document the living conditions of the poorest people. It may surprise you but there are a number of famous photos of cellar dwellings depicted in all kinds of books on the city's history.
 

I am now trying to look at those photos through your eyes. Small rooms with a bedstead. But also details that give a sense of home; a border of crocheted lace along the shelf with pans, a faded tablecloth, a picture against the wall. How was it with you Trijntje? Did you manage, despite all the poverty, to make the room you lived in with your children still feel like home? I also see pictures of homes where poverty has given up all hope.

During a new home visit by the almshouse in 1893, it is noted: 'condition of family has worsened since previous examination'. You are entitled to support in the form of 2 loaves of bread and 1 guilder. That guilder is barely enough for rent. Two loaves... for 4 growing children and an adult woman. 

Not only do you have money worries, but the poverty and poor housing conditions also have an impact in other ways. Little son Wiebe contracts the contagious eye disease that goes around. In the same year, Wiebe and his sister Antje are also nursed in the infectious diseases department of the Buitengasthuis because of scarlet fever. 

By then, you have already left that miserable cellar flat and are living in a room in the Derde Wittenburgerdwarsstraat. You try to earn money with a small business dealing in pots and pans and as a maid, but that doesn't bring in enough money either. As usual among poor people, you keep moving to a new address to save money. After all, when you move house, you don't pay rent for the first period and that saves money. So in a few years, you live at up to eight different addresses in the 3e Wittenburgerdwarsstraat.

In the room you lived in at 36 Third Wittenburgerdwarsstraat, a tiny painting of a flower must have hung on the wall. According to my grandmother, her father, your son Wiebe painted this at the age of 10. It is the most direct link from you to me. The painting is in the cupboard at my house. When I touch it, I bridge our distance in time with my fingers for a moment.
 

I search and look at old photos of Wittenburg and its surroundings. This is where you must have walked, this is how the city looked through your eyes. Would you have known that man there in the photo, or those two women with their tied-up aprons?

The begging stops and you are referred to the Baptist Church for support. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find anything about it. However, things must have slowly improved. The moving becomes less frequent. The eldest children probably start working from the age of 12 as is usual to contribute to the costs. From 1913, the children marry and fan out across the city. They come to live in the newer city neighbourhoods that have just been built. You still live with your youngest son and his family for a while.

In 1927, you move for the last time. You are admitted to the Zon's Hofje on Prinsengracht number 159-171. This small almshouse of the Mennonite congregation accommodates needy old women. The hofje still exists, Trijntje, you would recognise it at once. I walk in. So this is where you spend the last five years of your life. I suddenly remember a piece of a handed-down story. That you, Trijntje van der Hoek, after a life in poverty, finally found peace in a poorhouse; in other words, the Zon's Hofje.

Trijntje van der Hoek's life, like many of her peers, left little trace. In the late 19th century, many people came to the city from elsewhere in search of work and a future. The great history stories about 'the migration to the city' are often about numbers and very little about the stories of these people. The Amsterdam of Trijntje no longer exists. Many houses on the Eastern Islands were declared uninhabitable over time. The neighbourhood was largely demolished and replaced by new construction in the 1970s and 1980s. Today's city no longer has rattling carts, horses and basement houses.
 

This tribute is therefore for you Trijntje, but also for all those other Amsterdam women who tried to keep their heads above water in similar circumstances.