My primary school was De Klimroos, a Roman Catholic school. I was a loner. The harassment usually wasn’t extreme, but occasionally it was, making the school a war zone. Every day was a battle. But I was in it for the long run to finish school. That came with thoughts like, ‘Standing with the back against the wall is not so bad because they can’t attack you from behind.’ And, ‘Humiliation is bearable as most people will forget about it after a week or so.’ Sometimes, they blamed me for things I didn’t do. Once, there was a fight between two boys. One boy’s glasses fell on the ground and broke. I was one of the bystanders. Someone might have accidentally stood on the glasses. Everyone said it was me. I had seen these glasses lying, and they weren’t close to my feet but to other children’s feet. Only no one believed me. It was pointless to argue. It became an insurance affair, but in the end, the insurers agreed that it wasn’t my fault because the glasses were already lying on the ground.

Not being good at sports was another disadvantage. Sports at school was one year of torment, but it ended on a high note. Before the summer holidays, the last lesson was monkey cage, a freestyle adventure and great fun. The teacher sometimes made the children choose teams. I was always the last one remaining. No one wanted me in their team. We had school swimming for a year. Nearly all the children got their swimming diplomas, except me. The following year, my mother made me go to the swimming pool alone to attend swimming courses early in the morning before school, between seven and eight AM. And so, I got the first diploma, A, and the year after, even the second, B. The year after that, my teacher, Mr B*****, once sent me on an errand to another class led by Mr. H*********. When I came in, some kid yelled, ‘Enasniël can’t swim.’ Mr H********* then whispered in my ear, ‘What diploma do you have?’ I whispered, ‘B.’ And then he asked the kid, ‘What diploma do you have?’ He said, ‘A.’ ‘Enasniël has B,’ Mr H********* said. And then the joke was on him.

My lucky number was twenty-six. When looking at it, you immediately see why it is such a beautiful number. So that doesn’t require any further explanation. My date of birth, 26 November, was another reason. Green was my favourite colour, also for obvious reasons. Everyone can see that other colours aren’t as green. Green is also the colour of success, while red is the colour of failure. If something goes well, you see a green check mark. If something goes wrong, you see a red cross. I dedicated a little poem to the number twenty-six. It may go down in history as one of the best poems about the number twenty-six ever written, but that is entirely due to a lack of competition. The English translation is below,

Twenty-six letters in the alphabet,
Twenty-six weeks makes half a year
Two litres of mercury weigh close to twenty-six kilogrammes
And oh, how heavy that is.

Near the entrance was a sign attached to the fence. On it was the name of the company that had installed it. On its back, someone had written, ‘Enasniël Drogoel ís crazy.’ The text remained there for several years. Everyone could see it when passing the gate. It was nearly impossible to miss. It reminded me of what others thought of me. There was a wall around me, so it hardly mattered. One day, a teacher gave me a chore near the entrance and some tools, allowing me to remove the sign.

For many years, I had two friends, Marc and Hugo. They were classmates. Hugo came first. I ran into him when passing his home. He invited me in. And so, we became friends. Hugo’s mother had a board position in the Roman Catholic Church. His father was a manager. Marc came somewhat later. His father was a sales agent for a Swedish firm. They had a Volvo. They had a dog, a boxer named Boris. Marc had a sleeping room in the attic with his younger brother, filled with Legos and other toys. The Swedish firm sold sewing threads, so we had a lot of wires to play with. And there was a radio.

We started a few clubs. I was the instigator. Our inventions club came first. We gathered money to buy technical items and Legos and experimented with a broken television my mother had left in the attic. We opened it, inspected its interiors, removed some parts, and put them back together. Marc warned me about the capacitor, which he believed was inside it, as it had an electrical charge, and we made fun of what might happen if we hit it. We made the television work again without understanding how.

Later came the germinate club. And the antique club, which was more of an excavations club. We found pottery pieces in the ground and stored them in the shed. We also buried a tube with a document in the forest. It contained our names, signatures, a date and an explanation, and we hoped someone would uncover it after 1,000 years. And we listened to the radio. Marc and I shared a passion for the radio programme Dik Voormekaar Show, with funny voices and noises, and where everything went wrong, a brainchild of the comedian André van Duin. I truly enjoyed everything he did. Van Duin also made songs and sketches together with Corrie van Gorp. It was hilarious.

Marc was fond of gadgets. In the 1970s, digital watches from Japan came to the market. They were expensive at first, costing as much as 300 guilders, but Marc soon had one. These watches had features like a stopwatch, time zones or a calculator. Hugo was a bragger. The things he or his parents owned were always better. When his father bought a Hyundai car, these were the best cars in the world, even though a Hyundai didn’t come close to a Volvo. We had a Peugeot and no reason to boast.

One day, when arriving at school, the children were awaiting me on the path from the gate to the schoolyard. They stood on both sides and scolded me while I passed. They had all agreed on it and had perhaps organised it. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough kids to fill the entire stretch on both sides. Marc walked at my side like a true friend, but Hugo was among the kids scolding me. Hugo once explained his friendship as a kind of charity. He said his mother had told him it was a good deed to befriend sorry kids like me. His mother was a high-ranking figure in the Catholic Church, so she might have taught Hugo that he had to earn his place in heaven.

And then there was the strange incident with the plum. Once, I told Hugo that two plum trees were in our backyard. Hugo said that was impossible, ‘Plums grow on bushes, not on trees.’ And there was no way of convincing Hugo. He was sure I was wrong. We had two plum trees, and it was late autumn or early winter, so the trees were bare, and it was impossible to show him plums hanging in a tree. After the argument, we went to the fallow land behind the shed, which would later become my tree garden. There also was a plum tree, one I hadn’t thought of, and there, high up, hung one shrivelled plum in that tree, which was otherwise completely bare. And I pointed at the plum, saying, ‘There you see a plum hanging in that tree.’ That finally convinced Hugo. In hindsight, it is most peculiar that there was a plum. One sole plum was hanging there. The birds had not eaten it. That wind hadn’t blown it out. You could almost think it was left hanging there for me to prove Hugo wrong.

Whenever someone complimented me, I believed this person was mocking me or wanted something from me. Some children praised me for my calculating skills, but they were jeering, and I knew. They didn’t like clever kids. In the sixth grade, we had mental arithmetic, so we couldn’t use paper to calculate. Once, the teacher asked us to calculate the average of 1/3 and 1/5. And then the teacher said the answer was 1/4. Everybody had that answer except me, as I had 4/15. And so, I laid out the proper calculation, which we all had learned, loudly in the class, making the teacher, Mr R****, look like a fool. More than three decades later, my wife once went shopping with my mother in Nijverdal. Someone discovered she was my mother’s daughter-in-law, so this person said to her, ‘So, you married Mr Headstrong?’ If you are right and they are wrong, they ridicule you and call you stubborn.

And my father regularly said, ‘You are so good at tuning the radio. Can you please do that for me?’ He followed courses named Management Labour New Style. To inspire workers, you praise them and tell them how great they are to make them do what you want. Tuning a radio was a simple job anyone could do, so he was lazy, making me wonder, ‘Does he really think I am that stupid?’ Criticism worked better with me. People usually don’t lie when they criticise you.

My grades were not exceptional. They mostly ranged between seven and eight, with ten being the maximum. That is partly due to the school’s egalitarian socialist philosophy, which made getting a higher grade than eight nearly impossible. Some children were as intelligent as I was. Hugo was among them. And there was a girl named Madelon who was more intelligent. However, the combination of being clever, a strange loner and doing poorly at sports was particularly unlucky, making me a subject of pestering.

After initially being timid, I grew more courageous over time while liking a good joke. I prepared a smoking device and lit it near the paper storage next to the bicycle shed, making it appear that the papers had caught fire. At eleven, I had become the tallest boy at school, had grown fearless, settled some scores, and intimidated those who stood in my way. Once, there was an incident with fountain pen refills. We had fountain pens. They had refill cartridges, which some kids, including me, collected to make rings or other objects. Some kids played with them in class, so the teacher took the cartridges from them and put them in the bin. I took them out, probably on the way to the toilets, and they saw me doing it. They demanded them back and threatened me, but I didn’t return them.

Another incident was at a school camp. We were biking, and another kid tried to push me off the road. I didn’t budge and crashed into him, which severely damaged my bike’s wheel. It folded. The teachers made a school camp newspaper with jokes about the damaged bike. I gave the perpetrator a bloody nose, but I don’t remember whether that was at school camp or later. There probably were a few more incidents. The final year’s school report has gone blank because Mr. B****** had used a different type of ink that didn’t stand the test of time. Still, I vaguely remember him expressing concern about my increasing assertiveness and the clashes with other children.

I was also a sensitive kid. Once, I accidentally hit a girl or broke something of her. She kept complaining about the incident, making me miserable because I had wronged her. Ultimately, I could make her happy with a guilder, which settled the matter.

Twenty-five years later, we had a primary school reunion. My former schoolmates gave me a hero’s welcome. They all cheered when I came in. It felt like being an Olympic gold medal winner returning to his home village after the games. One of them said that they appreciated my coming. They believed they had made my life so miserable they had expected that I wouldn’t come. All the other black sheep hadn’t shown up. But the thought of not coming had never crossed my mind.

Featured image: my primary school class