Kees van Kooten

Kees van Kooten has been writing (humorous) books and columns since the 1960s, but he's best-known in the Netherlands as part of a long-standing radio and TV comedy duo with the late Wim de Bie. In his 2013 Boekenweek novella, he digs into memories of his father, a travelling salesman who was called up into the Dutch army as a reserve sergeant in the mobilisation of September 1939. Among the heirlooms from his father that van Kooten has kept are a splendid pair of binoculars and an album of wartime memories which he sadly never took the time to go through with his father while he. was still living.

Looking properly at the album for the first time to prepare this book, he discovers an army letter addressed to his father referring to a complaint from a civilian, a Mr Treurniet of Berkel-en-Rodenrijs, about the requisitioning of a pair of binoculars valued at f9.75, now missing from military stores. Could it be that his father acquired the binoculars dishonestly in the heat of (not-quite) war? Van Kooten imagines various fanciful scenarios that might lie behind such an incident — the adolescent Treurniet Jr. spying on a beautiful woman who has just moved into Berkel-en-Rodenrijs, Mrs Treurniet stalking a handsome dentist, and so on, but whatever trace there might have been of this wartime "petite histoire" in official archives has long gone. Maybe someone in Berkel or Rodenrijs remembers the J Treurniet of the binoculars...?

Charming, idiosyncratic, and an interesting little sidelight on the brief period in which the Netherlands was trying to defend its own neutrality, and on the way we look back at that period now.… (mere)