The Ladies of Bethany

The Ladies of Bethany, an order of Dutch nuns, were infinitely kind to me. I first met them when I stayed briefly in their guesthouse in Rome called Foyer Unitas Casa, in the snowy winter of 1984–85. I was initially referred to them by the redoubtable Thea Waddell, whose son Richard I knew at Trinity. Originally there were four sisters, Miss Luff, Miss Klompé—a sister of Marga Klompé who in 1956 became the first female minister of state in the Netherlands—Miss Josefa Koet (pronounced like shoot, seated here on the right), and Miss Leideke Galema (on the left). The order was one of the first to eschew the habit of the religious, and to adopt as well as civilian clothes the slightly confusing practice of referring to themselves by the secular “Miss.”

The four women converged upon Rome from various different places in, I think, the mid- to late 1950s, with an essentially outward-looking and ecumenical mission, much supported by Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, who was at that time Pope Pius XII’s sostituto for ordinary affairs in the Vatican secretariat of state. With Monsignor Montini’s assistance they found accommodation in the Palazzo Salviati in Trastevere, a sinister, ramshackle building that was used by the Germans during the war as a point of deportation of Roman jews from the Ghetto. Possibly the ladies moved from there once or twice before Princess Orietta Doria Pamphilj was persuaded by Monsignor Montini, with whom she was on friendly terms, to restore and make available to them and other religious bodies an essentially derelict, six-storey palazzo she owned that adjoined the great family church of S. Agnese in Agone, which dominates the Piazza Navona. (She had previously sold the huge Palazzo Pamphilj to the Republic of Brazil, whose embassy to Italy continues to occupy it.)

With the coming of the Second Vatican Council the work of the Ladies of Bethany suddenly assumed far greater prominence in Rome than it had previously, and the guesthouse they maintained, and the hospitality and programs they offered their guests, were geared towards accredited non-Catholic observers at the Council, both Orthodox and Protestant—Davis McCaughey was a guest at around this time—and continued thereafter to support far greater efforts in inter-church and inter-faith dialogue.

On one occasion, Miss Galema once told me, a young theologian then staying at Foyer Unitas, who was peritus to Josef Cardinal Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, received word that his mother had died in Germany, and therefore needed to be driven straight away to the old airport at Ciampino. This Miss Galema did, thus earning the sincere gratitude of the future Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

At around the same time, Monsignor Montini, who had in the meantime gone to be Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, was elected to succeed Pope John XXIII. For the rest of his life, Pope Paul VI took a lively interest in Foyer Unitas, and presented to the ladies the gold chalice which a kindly Dutch Jesuit priest used every afternoon for the masses he said in their beautiful little chapel, a calm, whitewashed slice of Holland right in the heart of the Baroque city.

I only ever knew Miss Koet and Miss Galema. Miss Luff and Miss Klompé died long before I arrived in Rome. Miss Koet, alas, died some years ago, but Miss Galema is still going strong, and, when last I received news of her, was busily drawing up plans to travel to the Holy Land. She is now well over ninety. I recall many good stories that each of them told me a different times, Miss Koet with wry good humour, wit and wisdom, and Miss Galema with considerable flamboyance. One of those has remained especially important to me.

Immediately after the end of World War II, Josefa Koet was attached to a convent in Vienna. When I learned this, I asked her with the boldness of the very young and inexperienced whether she had ever seen Carol Reed’s The Third Man—convinced when I did so that her reply would be no, and that I would be introducing a comparative simpleton to something potentially interesting and novel and informative. As usual, with infinite indulgence, she surprised me. Yes, she had not only seen that marvelous film, but had seen it many times, because it so perfectly captured what she recalled of the sinister postwar mood and rubble of occupied Vienna. And evidently she knew it far better even than Carol Reed, because clandestinely, Josefa and her fellow religious undertook the hazardous task of ferrying messages—letters, memoranda, deeds, money, etc.—between families for the time being divided between the three allied sectors and the locked-down Soviet, from which even temporary departure was for several years forbidden. Such communications were naturally also prohibited by the Russian military authorities, and there were numerous instances of people being deported to the east, or even worse simply disappearing for presumed political and other offenses far less serious than this essentially humanitarian work, about which, incidentally, certain officers of British military intelligence were glad to learn as many trivial details as Miss Koet could remember. Josefa told me she was not aware at the time that she was ever being debriefed, but she eventually reached that inevitable conclusion with considerable alarm. Alarm, because on one occasion in an especially cruel midwinter she was detained by Russian soldiers for four interminable hours on an exposed railway platform, as she was about to cross back into the British sector, and was questioned there in some detail about the purpose of her visit to the Soviet. They never learned that she was carrying an infinitely compromising brace of letters in both outside pockets of her overcoat—compromising not only to Josefa herself, but obviously to each and every correspondent who had entrusted them to her care through an intermediary—because when at length the Russian military police conducted a careful body search, they made the simple, life-saving mistake of asking Josefa with considerable gruffness to unbutton and open wide her overcoat for ease of frisking, and evidently assumed that nobody would be so stupid as to carry secret messages anywhere other than below many layers. They mocked her vocation, shocked her by the intrusiveness of the search, but eventually let her go.

Years later, I am still struck, indeed ever more so, by the extraordinary bravery exhibited by Miss Josefa Koet, then and on numerous subsequent occasions—bravery to which she would never have laid claim, but almost certainly would have dismissed with a chuckle instead. She simply did what she had to do, and it would never have occurred to her not to do it. Goodness of heart, strength of spirit, gentleness and wisdom. How rare are those qualities, and how lucky we are when, with luck, it is given to us to encounter them at an early age? Josefa died peacefully some years ago in a pretty retirement home, formerly a boarding school for the children of Rhine barge captains, at Arnhem in the western-most corner of the Netherlands, not too far from the house in which she was born.

Letter from Montréal

Some weeks ago I visited my friend Leideke Galema, a Dutch nun (left) who lives in comfortable retirement on the outskirts of Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands. I first knew Miss Galema years ago when, living in the belfry of the church of S. Agnese in Agone on the Piazza Navona in Rome, she and her co-religious Miss Josefa Koet (right) hired me as a general dog’s body, telephone answerer, plant-waterer, and errand-runner. It was heaven.

Miss Koet died not long ago, but Miss Galema is thriving. She met me at the little railway halt, in the middle of open fields, and we walked in the drizzle through the village to her charming villa. It was once used as a boarding school for the children of Rhine barge captains; the river is less than a kilometer away.

Right across the road is the convent where Leideke boarded during the war. She was sent there after the English teacher at her previous school in The Hague made off with the best friend of his own daughter, a classmate of Leideke’s. ‘We were only fifteen,’ she says, with a look.

Following the terrible Battle of Arnhem in September 1944, her present home was co-opted by the British army as a temporary palais de justice. The local Nazis were rounded up, and thrown in the cellar. Leideke tells me this with relish, as if there are a few of them still down there.

I went to Amsterdam as a courier, escorting to the Van Gogh Museum our very large painting of the celebrated Dutch-Cherokee lion tamer of Boston and Hartlepool Mr. Isaac van Amburgh, by Sir Edwin Landseer.

In the freight warehouse at Schiphol, the crate and I were temporarily stored in a secure spot near the diplomatic pouches. India’s are dark green, rather smart; the United Arab Emirates and France had mountains of them, but I looked in vain for ours.

While we were waiting for the forklift man, an otherwise innocuous-looking stack of twenty or so little wooden boxes was loaded into the back of a heavily guarded van, rather more strenuously than seemed necessary. What is shaped like a box of tissues, weighs a ton, and clinks dully? When the vehicle visibly sank down on its haunches, I realized we were looking at a shipment of gold bullion.

There is only one thing more spine-chilling than the air temperature after a Canadian blizzard, and that is standing outside the Hôtel de Ville in Montréal, looking at the St. Lawrence River: mighty, choppy, slate grey, and lethally fast-flowing. Thank goodness I am standing beside Florent the farmer, a human windbreak.

It seems incredible that the original settlers decided to stay on after the first winter (1642/43). Driven by necessity, and by an amusing mental picture of burly French-speaking Hudson’s Bay fur trappers paddling past moose, Iroquois and redcoats, I head straight to the firm of Henri & Henri, fourrières, in the rue Sainte-Cathérine est, and buy myself a slinky beaver hat. In this weather, fake fur does not cut the mustard.

Florent tells me my beaver looks ridiculous, and no doubt people in warmer climes will want to throw paint at it, but these are not moments for hesitation: I must have furry ear-flaps, and I must have them now.

Which reminds me, not long ago I examined a new acquisition in our rare books department, the 1914 illustrated trade catalogue of Winsor & Newton Ltd., Manufacturing Artists’ Colourmen. I was immediately intrigued by the off-printed testimonials glued opposite the relevant product, one of which is a pungent relic of empire.

On October 29, 1911, only a month before setting off for the South Pole by sledge, Dr. Edward A. Wilson, the universally liked “Uncle Bill” of Scott’s doomed five-man polar party on the British Antarctic Expedition, wrote from the Terra Nova at Cape Evans in McMurdo Sound, reporting that Winsor & Newton watercolours and papers had demonstrated remarkable stability in the extreme cold. Although the letter is here reproduced in facsimile, I wonder if it has ever found its way into the Scott literature.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Melbourne artist E. J. Shearsby of 66 Tivoli Road, South Yarra, wrote:

You will no doubt be interested to know that whilst on a sketching tour in Gippsland (Victoria) two years ago, I had a large surplus of your Flake White on my palette at the completion of a day’s work, and, with the aid of my palette knife, applied it to the surface of a fallen tree, which was minus its bark. Last month I paid another visit to the locality and have had an opportunity of comparing the paint with some fresh from the tube, and find it has not discoloured in the slightest. This proof of permanency is of importance in itself, but when I add that the paint has been fully exposed to Australia’s summer sun for two years, and the tree lies on marshy land, and had for several days of each winter been submerged by the overflow of the River Latrobe [sic], these facts are worthy of record and speak well for the purity and permanency of your Flake White.

Québecois say some very strange things in their version of French. A senior colleague of mine remembers a man behind the counter in a Montréal bookshop apologizing for keeping her waiting because, he explained, he was ‘sur le téléphone’ – a phrase impossible to formulate unless you had thought of it first in English. Sure enough, I hear it too in a café called Schwartz’s, where I exchange occasional monosyllables with Florent the farmer, and then again shopping for CD oddities in the enormous music store called Archimbault.

Carriages on the Montréal Métro have rubber tyres as in Paris, while the names of stations are fantastically mixed: Champ-de-Mars, Peel, Verdun, Namur, Pie IX, Square Victoria, Côtes-des-Neiges.

The portrait of the Queen on the new money is surprisingly good.

The memorial to Lord Nelson is a statue on a column. It went up in 1808, carries a long inscription in English, and was paid for by public subscription. Everywhere there are similarly post-imperial vibrations.

A melancholy moment in the biting tundra of the car park at Pierre Trudeau International Airport; a long embrace—rocking gently back and forth, crunching the snow—and then goodbye to Florent the farmer, with his beautiful arms, arctic ear-muffs, and the Toyota pick-up he’s driving home to Trois Pistoles, Québec.