Ode to Elisabeth van Swol-Mater | What you might call plain

This is an ode to my mother, Elisabeth van Swol-Mater (1912-1986). She was the second youngest child in a large Amsterdam family. Her father, Adolph Mater (Amersfoort 1866-Amsterdam 1942) was an orthopaedic shoemaker in Amsterdam's Overjord, Marnixstraat. Her mother, Elisabeth Johanna Maria Singels (Amsterdam 1870-1950), housewife and daughter of mill De Gooyer.

How great her grief must have been when her father died literally by a blow from the mill when she was young; he went to fix the sails when it stormed. My mother could not talk about her, the grandmother I never knew, without getting tears in her eyes. About how she warned her in the street about pavement, when my mother had to walk again with an eye patch on. 

Mother had six brothers and three sisters. Except for one, an outlier, they all had a great love of art in one way or another. One loved interior art, carpentered for Rietveld and played singing saw and instilled in her a love of jazz music; the other loved antiques, Asian art and music boxes and was married to a Hirsch cutter, the third sang in the Westerkerk choir and aspired to a place in the Nederlands Kamerkoor if his wife had not dissuaded him from doing so and he ended up as a company manager at cleaning company Cemsto, the fourth loved poems and wrote poetry himself, but apparently just not well enough to be included in the commemorative collection V in verse, the occupation and the resistance in verse followed closely by Anthonie Donker (1965). The fifth loved books, beautiful stationery and paper and had attended publishing school, but quit Vlieger's shop (since 1869) when the owner turned out to have wrong sympathies in World War II. The eldest sister had the most beautiful thing in the house I could imagine as a child: a piano! Together with mother, she prodded a barrel organ man to play ‘Lang zal ze leven’ under our window on my birthday. Which he did for a trifle. The youngest sister had a penchant for fine jewellery and practised as a beautician, with her full consent, on my mother. 

In particular, my mother instilled in me a love for books and for fine art and design. I now have her tasteful collection of glassware and ceramics in my house. When I was older, she would slip me some of her pocket money every month to buy a Salamander pocketbook, for instance. I still have them all. Also unforgettable is the moment when we, - I still small and by her hand - were standing at the bottom of the stairs of the Stedelijk Museum and she looked up and stood stock-still. She was struck by what we saw: a Mobile by Calder, moving gently on the airstream like a stately swan. Unfortunately, due to her poor health, such outings were rare. But the ones we made, I will never forget. Worth an ode!

This is an updated and completed section from the first chapter of the booklet I wrote about my mother: Eyes of My Mother (published by Boekscout, 2012).