Tales From the Secret Annex Part 12

What would you have thought in my place? It was pretty clear to me that Mijnheer Heesing was having a little joke; otherwise, he would surely have given me some stiff geometry problems to do. So I decided to answer his joke with a joke of my own and, with the help of Sanne Houtman, I wrote the "essay" in rhyme. Here is a part of it:

They cried, "Peep-peep" and "Quack-quack-quack."

"Quack, quack," said Mrs. Quackenbush, As she called her big, big brood; They waddled as fast as ever they could And gave each other many a push In their rush to reach their mother's wings.

"Oh, Mama, we hope you have some bread, For all of us are nearly dead!"

They were very hungry, the poor things.

"Yes, sure," said Mama, "I have your lunch, Eat this, and I will give you more; To get it, I had to go ash.o.r.e, But, as you see, it was quite a hunch.

I had to steal it, but you be fair, And each take his honest part."

The little ducklings were pretty smart, And obeyed the mother then and there.

In doing it, they made a rumpus; They cried, "Peep-peep" and "Quack-quack-quack."

But who was that with a ruffled back?

An angry swan! Oh, Heaven, help us!

-Etc., etc.

Heesing read it; read it aloud to the cla.s.s, also read it to some other student groups, and gave in. From then on, we were good friends; he paid no further attention to my chattering, and never punished me again.

P.S. The long and short of it is that my math teacher was a very decent sort. The nickname "Mrs. Quacken- bush" has stuck to me, and I have Mijnheer Heesing to thank for it.

Roomers or Subtenants

Friday, October 15, 1943

When we had to make up our minds to rent our big back room, it came as a hard blow, because none of us was used to having paying strangers in the house.

But when times are hard, when taking in roomers becomes a necessity, you have to swallow your pride and a good deal more. Which is just what we did. The big bed- room was cleaned out and refurnished with a few extra pieces that we had; but that wasn't nearly enough for a high-cla.s.s bed-sitting room. So my father went out and poked around at all the auctions and public sales and came home today with one little thing and tomorrow with another.

Three weeks later we had a beautiful wastebasket and a lovely tea table, but we still needed two armchairs and a decent cupboard. My father went out again, and this time as a special attraction he took me along with him. Arrived at the auction, we sat down on wooden benches with some worn-out buyers and awful-looking characters and waited, waited, waited.

We could have waited until the next day, because on the day when we were there only porcelain was being auctioned off.

Disappointed, we went home, and next day we came back for another try, though without much hope. But this time we had better luck, and my father actually got hold of a fine oak cupboard and two leather club chairs.

By way of celebrating the new furniture and the roomers we hoped would arrive soon, we treated ourselves to a cup of tea and a piece of cake. Then we went cheerfully home. But hold on, when the cupboard and chairs were delivered next day and put in the room, my mother found the funniest little holes in the cupboard; my father examined it and. . . true enough, the cupboard was full of woodworms. Such things aren't marked down on paper and neither can you see them in a dark auction room.

After that discovery, we inspected the chairs, and they too were full of worms.

We called up the auction rooms and asked them to take the things away as soon as possible. They came all right and my mother sighed with relief as she watched the auction furniture going out the door. My father sighed too, but that was because of the money he had lost on this proposition.

A few days later my father met a friend who had some extra furniture, and was glad to let us have a few pieces until we could find something better. So at last our problem was solved.

Then we made up an ad and put it in the window of the corner bookstore, and paid for a whole week.

People soon came to look at the room. The first was an old gentleman, who wanted a room for his unmarried son.

Everything was almost settled, when the son put in a few words and what he said was so crazy that my mother began seriously to suspect that he had a screw loose. And she was quite right, because the old gentleman admitted rather sheepishly that his son wasn't quite right in the head. My mother showed them the door as quickly as possible. Dozens of people came and went, until one day we opened the door to a fat little man, who was willing to pay and didn't ask for very much, so we took him. That gentleman really gave us more pleasure than trouble.

Every Sunday he brought chocolate for the children and cigarettes for the grown-ups, and more than once he took us all to the movies. After living with us for one and a half years, he took an apartment of his own with his mother and sister. Once when he came to see us later on, he said he had never had such a good time as with us. Again the ad was hung up in the shop window and again big and little, young and old people rang the bell. One was a fairly young lady with a kind of Salvation Army hat, so then and there we started calling her "Salvation Army Jo- sephine." We took her, but she wasn't as pleasant a roomer as the fat gentleman. In the first place, she was an awful slob, she left things lying around all over the place, and in the second place, which was worse, she had a fi- ance who often got drunk and we didn't like that in the house. One night, for instance, we were all woken up by the bell; father went down to see, and who should he run into but this lout, as drunk as a lord, and he kept pound- ing my father on the back and shouting: "We're good friends, aren't we! Oh yes, we're good friends!" Bang!

My father slammed the door in his face.

When the war broke out in May 1940, we gave her no- tice and rented the room to a friend, a young man of about thirty, who was engaged to be married.

He was very nice, but he too had a drawback: he was terribly spoiled. Once in the cold winter days, when we all had to scrimp on electricity, he complained b.l.o.o.d.y murder about the cold. Which was a shameful exaggeration, because his room was the warmest in the house.

But you have to be patient with roomers, so we gave him permission to use his electric heater for an hour now and then. And what was the upshot? All day long he kept his heater on "hot." We begged and pleaded with him to be a little more economical, but it didn't help. The elec- tric meter went up something awful, and one fine day my dauntless mother unscrewed the fuse and disappeared for the afternoon. She put the blame on his stove, said it put too much of a strain on the fuse, and after that the young man had to sit in the cold.

All the same, he too stayed with us for one and a half years; then he moved out and got married.

Again the room was empty and my mother was going to put in an ad when a friend called up and made us take a divorced man, who was in urgent need of a room. He was a big tall man of thirty-five with gla.s.ses, most unpre- possessing to look at. We didn't want to disappoint our friend, so we rented the room to this gentleman. He too was engaged and the girl often came to our house. It was almost time for the wedding when they quarreled and head over heels he married a different girl.

About that time we moved, and then we were rid of our roomers (for good, I hope)!

Dreams of Movie Stardom

December 24, 1943

(This was written as a "secret" answer to the questions of Mrs. Van Daan, who never tired of asking me why I didn't want to become a movie star.)

I was seventeen, an attractive girl with flirtatious eyes and a wealth of dark curls -- a teen-ager filled with ideals, illusions, and daydreams. In one way or another, the day would come when my name would be a household word and my picture would occupy a place of honor in the memory book of every damp-eyed bobby-soxer.

The questions of how I was to achieve fame and in what field bothered me very little. When I was fourteen I used to think, "That will come in good time," and when I was seventeen I thought so still. My parents were not aware of my grandiose plans, and I was foxy enough to keep them to myself. It seemed to me that I'd be better off, should I ever become a celebrity, to experience things in private before sharing my adventures with Father and Mother. I suspected that they might not be overly enthusiastic about such a turn of events.

Let no one think that I took those daydreams of mine I very seriously, or that I had thoughts for nothing else. On j the contrary, I was always industrious in school and, besides, did much reading for pleasure. At fifteen I had finished one of our three-year high schools. Now, mornings,

I attended a school that specialized in teaching foreign lan- guages, and in the afternoons, I did my homework or played tennis. One day (it was autumn) I was home clean- ing up a closet, when, amid a pile of a.s.sorted discarded stuff, I came upon a shoe box, with the words MOVIE

ST ARS written in large letters on the lid. I remembered that my parents had ordered me to throw this box out, and that I had hidden it carefully so n.o.body would find it.

Curious, I lifted the lid, took out the many little pack- ages inside, and loosened the elastic bands in which each was wrapped. I got so fascinated looking once more at all the made-up faces, that I was startled when, a couple of hours later, someone tapped me on the shoulder to ask me to come to tea. I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by little stacks of newspaper and magazine clippings.

Later, in straightening my room, I kept the movie-star box aside. That evening, I continued my examination and found something that impressed me so that I couldn't get it out of my mind.

This was an envelope filled with pictures of a family of movie actors, in which three daughters were stars. I came across the address of the girls, whose name was Lane.

Then and there, I took a piece of paper and a pen and started writing a letter to the youngest of the sisters-Pris- cilla Lane.

Secretly, I mailed the letter, which was in English. 10 it I told Priscilla that I would love to have a photo of her, and also of both her sisters, and asked her to be good enough to answer me, as I was keenly interested in the family.

I waited more than two months and, though I didn't want to admit it to myself, I had lost hope of ever getting an answer to my letter. There was nothing surprising in this, for I realized that if the Lane girls answered the notes of all their admirers and sent photographs to them, all of their time would have to be devoted to their corre- spondence. But just then my father one morning handed me a letter addressed to "Miss Anne Franklin."

I hastily opened and read it. My family were very cu- rious and, after I had told them of my letter, I read Priscilla's aloud. She wrote that she would not send photos before she knew something more about me, but that she would be more inclined to do so if I would write her, in more detail, about myself and my family.

Truthfully, I wrote Priscilla that I was more interested in her personal life than in her film career. I wanted to know, among other things, if she went out much in the evening; if Rosemary had to work as much and as hard as she, etc., etc. Much later she asked me to call her by her nickname of "Pat." Priscilla seemed so pleased with my letters that she answered each one faithfully.

As the correspondence was, naturally, conducted in

English, my parents couldn't object, as it obviously provided good practice for me. In her letters, Priscilla told me that she spent most of her days at the studio and gave me an idea of how she divided her time. She corrected my mistakes and mailed my letters back to me, on condition that I would return them again to her. Meanwhile she had sent me a big collection of photos.