A visit in time… the Geuzenberg (*)

Dear Guy,

I don’t know why today, my thoughts were taking me on a fanciful long distance flight to the kitchen at the Geuzenberg. We know how much you liked the warm incandescent light over there, reflected by the yellowish orange kitchen cabinet. You preferred to make your homework at the spacious kitchen table, rather than on the varnished writing desk in, what was in your eyes at that time, a huge living room. One day you shared the thought that from all the places you were living, that apartment would be your preferred choice to visit.

You know that you had your bedroom above the kitchen, at that time still decorated as a real children room with an animal decorated balatum (*) and similar printed wallpaper. Yes the nylon curtains must have been printed with animals too. The windows of both the kitchen and your bedroom were quit big. Unfortunately the sight was reduced to the backside of other houses and their dreary courtyards. As you started to hate the childish decoration of your room and being already a voracious reader, you were conquering the ‘chaise longue’ in the living room, at least during winter.

Also the Lego city map was deployed in the living room on the writing desk and meant for rebuilding endlessly the same buildings till the moment you started to deploy your own creations. I’m sure you will never forget the negotiations with the under neighbor, the landlady, who one day gave you a huge spiced biscuit for your sinterklaas. You were slightly disappointed and you have asked her to exchange it for a small box of black flat Lego bricks. She accepted the deal and I think that this was the only time you remember having seen your mother embarrassed.

I’m sure you have also the remembrance of having spent several hours in the landlady’s kitchen while waiting for your mother to come home, making some homework, watching the big pictures of the Lourdes Grotto. Yes the landlady was extremely pious!

There was an obvious reason why you were banned from your favorite kitchen table to the godly kitchen of the neighboring bigot. In what was probably one of your first artistic lightning experiments you had decided one day to create a Christmas ambience with candle lights, at the wrong moment of the year. I know that a fire was avoided in the nick and that you’re mum, in a comprehensible hysteric mood, dropped all the Christmas decoration into the canal in front of the house. Charles the Fifth (who ordered the digging of the canal, centuries earlier) must have turned himself into his grave seen his canal abused as a holy waste dump.

The only place we still have to visit is the attic. In the summer it was your favorite games area, as for years now you are trying to remember what you were exactly doing there apart from reading. It was like an inside cave of robbers but with only one  brigand. The most exciting part was the small dormer window at the backside that gave you a wider view on those courtyards and sometimes you could see her, the girl next door, at a glimpse…

The neighbor girl.

She accepted a few times to accompany you to the swimming pool.

But one summer later she had other interests.

@ Mireille

Geuzenberg 5

9000 Gent.

Dear Guy, let’s visit other places soon as we have to make some haste … time is threatening us.

Yours always,

Guy.

(*) Geuzenberg (Beggars mountain) = street name; Geus = beggar or a infidel or unbeliever (religious)  

(*) Balatum: Balatum is built up from a smooth floor coverings with bitumen impregnated felt and provided with a printed decorative wear-resistant top layer. The product was developed in the 1920s and produced by the Manufacture du Nord Balatum to Baisieux, founded in 1923 by three industrialists including Auguste Lannoye owner of Papeteries de Genval. Product name and were protected by a patent. Balatum sold in rolls had its greatest popularity in the middle of the last century when it was a cheap and easy to apply an alternative to linoleum and for the emergence of, inter alia, carpet, vinyl flooring and laminate flooring.