God's Callgirl Read Online Free Page B

shouted.
    My panic grew even wilder—how could a couple of jute bags protect me? But he was off already and looked back only once. ‘Get the hell under those bags!’ he yelled. I proceeded to worm myself right inside one of them, sobbing with terror, when I heard a sound from the other side of the track, a soft whistle. When I looked around I saw two soldiers in German uniform hiding under the bushes in a ditch. I recognised them by their helmets. The soldiers, both very young with good intentions obvious in their eyes, were urgently beckoning me to come to them. I did not hesitate, but ran into their arms.
    I must have fainted, for the next thing I remember is waking up in my bed at home to the excited voices of my father, mother and the neighbours. I came groggily down the stairs and saw my father displaying a bandage around his thigh from where a bullet had just been extracted. He had been spotted in the forest by an American pilot who thought he was German and had circled until he scored a hit. I sat down bewildered on the lower steps of the stairs, listening to the hullabaloo.
    Such incidents were typical of my father. On home leave from his soldiering duties one day, he dared the Germans to do their worst when once again the sirens were blowing. He lit his pipe and stood outside the back door, leaning against the brick wall. He had just inhaled a deep draught when a piece of shrapnel penetrated the bricks right by his left ear, shattering them and leaving a jagged hole in the wall. When he came inside he laughed at my distraught mother, whom he had successfully defied, and who was now weeping from a mixture of anger and relief. I was nearly six when the most shocking event of the war touched our neighbourhood, one which cowed everyone. I tried to make sense of their agitated gestures and hoarsely whispered words. Ten men had been rounded up and made to stand against the brick wall of the cotton mill, just on the edge of town, where they were shot in reprisal for the death of a German patrol soldier. One of the victims belonged to a family in our street. They had dragged his body home, leaving a trail of blood. Fierce hatred flared against the Germans.

PRIMARY INSULTS
    BY THE TIME I left the Montessori school at the age of five I was able to read fluently and calculate in thousands. I was a rotund and beamingly happy child. Despite a worryingly prolonged case of whooping cough when I was three, I had come through. There were distressing things in my life that happened at night, but when I woke up these nightmares seemed to vanish. A young child lives in the present moment whenever possible, and I was no exception.
    And then came primary school. It was also run by nuns, with the help of a few lay teachers, in a two-storey red-brick building next door to the Montessori school. By the adjoining wall was a mossy grotto sheltering a chipped and faded statue of the Virgin Mary standing on ancient slimy-green rocks. Oh, the terrible boredom of this new school! I could already read fluently so they put me up a grade, but it made hardly any difference. The only new and exciting thing was musical notation. The toilets in this school were horribly dirty, full of nasty words and awfulness. And for the first time in my life I started to seriously live in fear.
    The nuns at my primary school in Tilburg were probably typical of teaching nuns in the 1940s worldwide. They preyed on the vulnerability of children. Fear is still used as amotivator in our education systems, but the nuns had it particularly easy. They could use the threats of eternal punishment in hell or being burned alive in purgatory on top of punishment and humiliation in the here-and-now. Sarcasm, ear-pulling, pinching of cheeks and slaps with the ruler were quite enough to intimidate us without us running the added risk of the disapproval of Almighty God. The nuns had God on their side, and they were against us, so we had it tough. Even touching a nun’s habit was a