My father though not large in stature was larger than life. My childhood memories of him are very vivid. When he entered a room things seem to start happening. The very few times he wasn’t talking or being busy, he was reading or playing chess with a friend.
Later, he discovered the quietude of fishing. He could spend a whole day on the river, all by himself, staring at the water. I don’t think he caught anything ever.
One of his friends told me later that if my father would have had a car accident, he would talk about it in such an entertaining way, they all wished they had one as well.

I was his only daughter and adored him. He could be extremely irritating but never boring.
He always pointed out to me there was nothing stopping me to succeed in life and that in a time when a woman was supposed to give up her job the moment she got married. His pride in me pushed me to work hard in school.
He ingrained in me that free education was a gift not to be squandered. He was the youngest from a family of seven children in time Social security hadn’t been invented yet, so his older siblings were sent to the factory to bring money in for the family. His mother was a widow and they were not very well off. He as the youngest was given the opportunity to stay in school after he was 14 and to attend a teacher training college all paid for by his siblings.

He found it hard to cope with this burden of gratitude. His answer was to live as far away from his brothers and sisters as he could.
Growing up in near poverty had an enormous influence on him. His education breaking him free of it drove him to be an inspiring teacher, who would never give up on his pupils if they wanted or not.

Listening to him teaching maths for free, to the struggling students at our house, getting louder and louder as if he wanted to shout the concepts in their poor brain, my brothers and I decided early never to ask him help with our homework.
Once I forgot this wise decision and asked him for some help with Algebra. Four hours later, we had practically gone through all the maths from that school year. It was my first semester. Every time I tried to escape he would turn the page to the next chapter with the ominous words: “Ah, yes, Pythagoras, so wonderful. I have to tell you about this”. I loved him too much to stop him.
His favourite subjects were the Sciences with Mathematics coming first and foremost. My brothers and I were always expected to do well in these subjects as he had a bit of contempt for the arts.
“A mathematician can learn anything, but a person who has to take alpha, read art, way, can never learn maths”.
To prove it he dared a friend of his, a language teacher, to get a certificate in Maths, while he would do the same for a language, in this case, German.
He tried to look sympathetic when his friend failed the Maths exam, while he gained his certificate with honours. He had nobody fooled.
Another proverb he told us and his students was ” A mathematician is lazy”. He meant that when you have a mathematical problem, the shortest way to the answer would always be the right one.

For being a teacher, he actually didn’t get much involved with our schoolwork or school for that matter. Parents evening he found a waste of time.
His reason was, as he never failed to tell us, that we did not learn for him but for ourselves. “If you don’t want to make the effort, you can always drop out and sell pencils door to door”. It is still one of our family proverbs.

School directors, he worked under, were not always happy with him, as he wanted to make time for ‘his’ students in school more interesting and was constantly badgering his superiors to get better books and materials.
Long before Secondary schools had labs to practice Chemistry and Physics, he spent a large part of his, and our, school holidays fashioning homemade practice sets for his students. We had to fill an endless number of vials with chemical substances and clean last years test tubes all the while getting the full lecture about the ingredients and their properties. The fun part was that we could test the sets out ourselves.
I still remember mixing hydrochloric acid with sodium chloride, resulting in a puff of white powder, Salmiac liquorice, like magic!
He once painted all the halls of one of his schools during the summer holidays, as he found they looked shabby and uninviting.

In Curacao, he had painted a mural depicting some typical Caribbean landscapes. Against his opinions about them, he was a gifted artist and could play any instrument you put in his hands.

If at any time he found his director didn’t appreciate what he was doing or tried to interfere with what and how he was teaching, there would be a minor explosion and there he was again, applying for yet another job.
Curacao had quite a few schools and he has taught at most of them. Later in the Netherlands, he only had two. He died before he could add to that number.