Jan de Hartog grew up as the child of academics in Amsterdam, but for a while in the early 1920s his mother was in hospital and he was sent to a foster-family in the Zuiderzee fishing port of Huizen. It was there that he made his first trip on a fishing boat and — as he describes it in this lightly-fictionalised account — realised that he had equally strong passions for the sea and for storytelling.

By the 1920s, it was illegal for fishermen to employ anyone under the age of sixteen, but — as de Hartog explains — almost all of them had a clandestine "bramzijgertje" (cabin-boy) on board. No-one knew how they got there, although of course it was every schoolboy's dream to put aside boring life on shore. The narrator is one of those boys, and by a suitable accident he finds himself taken on as bramzijgertje on the OD69, the smartest botter in "Oostdam" (i.e. Huizen). We get a lovely description of his experience of the Zuiderzee herring fishery in the last years before the closing of the Afsluitdijk killed it off. The entire fishing fleet (minus the Catholic Volendammers) puts into Hoorn for Sunday service, where the "illegal" boys are sent up to the gallery and somehow have to get through the tedium of two three-hour services without provoking the ire of the church dog-whipper, but afterwards there's the relief of a storytelling evening aboard the fishing boats.

Pretty much pure nostalgia, with a fair amount of de Hartog's anger at the way an entire regional culture was killed off in the name of progress and coastline-management. Splendidly engaging storytelling, anyway, and a book that probably works as well for adult readers as it does for children.

(This isn't acknowledged anywhere as a translation, but it seems to be a Dutch reworking of de Hartog's earlier English book The lost sea.) ( )

Leuk verhaal voor het slapen gaan, of als je toch niets beters heb te doen.
vraag me af of de auteur van dit boek een deel van zijn leven beschreven heeft. ( )