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Hilda, probably Christmas 1944, with her children.
From right to left, clockwise: Olga, Sheila, John,
Brigid, Randal. Lis was Catherine in the second
and third books of the Canadian trilogy. Photo ©
by permission of Estate of Hilda van Stockum.
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[The following is an excerpt from Walter Romig, The
Second Book of Catholic Authors, 2012. Romig was born in 1905 so he would be 116 years old in 2021. This is a scanned version of the book via HathiTrust. Google describes it the book as being in the public domain. Since the comments by Hilda van Stockum are as of circa 1944, the book must have appeared around that time.]
A YOUNG FRIEND of mine, around nine years old, when asked at school to write about her past life, began dramatically:
“I was born in the slums of Amsterdam while my heartless mother was enjoying herself in Pans.”
Nothing as exciting happened to me. I was born in a comfortable house in Rotterdam in 1908, with both my parents very much in attendance and suitably impressed. In fact, I have learned that they made quite a fuss over me.
My father was an officer in the Royal Dutch Navy, and we moved about quite a bit. That may have been the reason I didn’t go to school until I was ten years old and already knew how to read and write. I read so voraciously, in fact, that I knew all about school long before I went there, and the day that I was first told to stand in the corner was a red-letter day for me! I’ve tried to express this delight in my book Pegeen, where a little girl also goes to school late and enjoys experiencing what she had so often read about.
Another happy day was when I first discovered that I could write down my own stories. I immediately began a long tale [p. 304 of book] about two little girls called Mientje and Cateau, their adventures interrupted by sums and grammar and punctuated with inkblots. However, what worried me most was the cramp in my fingers I got from writing. Being only eight at the time, the physical effort was greater than the mental, and I remember wondering whether grownups also had to go through such agony whenever they wrote.
In the first years of my life my mother spoke English with me. Her mother was Irish and had spoken English with her. Later on, when my brothers were born and Dutch nurses came into the house, my mother stopped talking English with us and I forgot a great deal of it. But I believe the ease with which I express myself in English is due to the fact that it was my chief language as a baby.
My parents were not Catholic; I was the first in both families to come back to the Faith. The first time I felt an interest in the Catholic Church was when I was six years old. My father and mother never talked to me about religion, but they once left me to be cared for by a Catholic nurse who had pictures of Christ in her bedroom. I didn’t know who He was and asked about Him; so she put me on the bed and talked to me for an hour. She was terribly shocked that I should be so ignorant, and seemed to blame my parents, so I did not love her, but the story she told impressed me. A little later, I got a children’s Bible and I said I wanted to go to church. My parents, both agnostics, sent me with the servants to the village church: a whitewashed, chilly affair with nothing that would appeal to a child. There was only a black-coated man talking a long time in a peculiar voice. I decided that I had been fooled; it wasn’t a church at all; and
I didn’t ask to go again.
But one day when I was walking with my mother, we passed a Catholic Church, and I immediately dragged my mother inside.
“This is a church!’* I cried, sniffing the incense. “This is what I meant; this is where God is!’’ Mother thought it all very dangerous and unsuitable and quickly hurried me away. [p. 305 of book]
Before I went to school, my father used to give me geography lessons with an orange and a candle. I remember being exceedingly troubled at the idea of becoming an angel and flapping around between all the big round worlds in a space that never ended. The way my father talked about it, I calculated that
there wasn’t much chance of my ever meeting another angel except once in a thousand years or so, and even when you did meet one there wouldn’t be much to do but sit on one of those round worlds and have a chat. Even if you fell off it made no difference, because there wasn’t anywhere to fall to. I remember being so troubled about it that I had to get out of my bed and go to my parents to be consoled. They were playing chess together and looked very cosy and comforting. They convinced me that my fears were more funny than tragic.
Of course there isn’t space enough to tell all that happened in my life so far, but it seems to me the best thing will be to tell roughly what events brought me into the Church. You see, most other Catholic authors are born Catholics and have to tell how they became authors; but I was born with an ever-wagging tongue, and can more fitly describe how I became a Catholic.
When I was sixteen, we moved to Ireland, and there, of course, I came in close contact with the Catholic Church. I attended the art school in Dublin and argued about philosophy with the other students. I read Freud and Shaw and Dostoievsky and interested myself in the Montessori system of education. Presently I heard that there was a Montessori school in Waterford, and I wrote a
letter to the Mother Superior of the convent which ran the school, asking if I might see it. I got a kind letter back, inviting me to come, and so one day I walked up the driveway to the convent door.
I was eighteen then. I wore a bright red dress, close cropped hair, and was gaily swinging my round straw hat by its elastic band. I never saw such merriment as when the Sisters caught sight of me. When they had laughed their fill they explained that they had expected and dreaded the arrival of an elderly, severe-looking schoolmistress, with pince-nez and notebook. [p. 306]
They couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw me ambling up the driveway. It was a great relief to them; and they promptly proceeded to spoil me. I was a vegetarian in those days, and so they pressed lettuce and fruit on me every hour, for fear I would waste away in front of their eyes. They let me help with the housework, and in the evenings I sat in the room where the novices weren’t even allowed and talked my head off to a circle of appreciative listeners. This visit made a deep impression on me. 1 hadn’t known nuns could be so natural and so merry, and their cordiality and gifts touched my heart. When the Mother
Superior gave me a badge of the Sacred Heart to wear I carried it about for a long time until it got lost.
When I was nineteen, I went back to Amsterdam to study art, and there, in a library, I found G. K. Chesterton, who has since been my guiding light among mortals. I bought all his books, and felt how the sweeping broom of his intellect was cleaning the attic of my mind.
In 1931, 1 went back to Ireland and met my husband, who was then studying at Trinity College, Dublin, and a friend of my brother’s. We married in 1932, and he went off to America, his native country, to get a position, and send for me when he had things settled. While he was gone, I came in contact with what is called “the Oxford Group,’’ and experienced an emotional conversion. I thought I had discovered the secret of life, and made a fool of myself trying to convert fellow Christians to my own recent immature faith; but I was blissfully ignorant of that,
and very happy. It was around that time that I wrote A Day on Skates (1934). After a while, I discovered that the Oxford Group was good as an irritant to startle you out of your own groove, but entirely unfit as a daily spiritual guide. So I searched among churches, and chose one that wouldn’t be too particular about dogma, landing in the Episcopal church. But the Episcopal church has many mansions, and as I practiced religion and grew in wisdom, I wandered higher and higher until I became a bigoted Anglo-Catholic. Those were the days when I would poke my head into a church and sniff. I could tell whether it
was “high” or “low.”
[p. 307] In February, 1934, I arrived at last in New York, where my first baby [Olga—Joan in The Mitchells trilogy] was born in November of the same year. When she was three months old, my husband got a position with the gov-
ernment [he was hired by Henry Morgenthau for the Farm Credit Administration] and we moved to Washington, D.C., where my four next
babies were bom and where my widowed mother came to join us.
Meanwhile, even the Anglican church proved unsatisfactory and distressingly illogical; so finally, in 1939, the light dawned and I became a Catholic. The Cottage at Bantry Bay, and, Francis on the Run, its sequel, were written in the Anglican days. They were inspired by an Irish family which I knew very well. The three later books, Kersti and Saint Nicholas, Pegeen, and, Andries, were all written after I entered the Church. My mother entered a year after I did and just before the Nazi invasion of Holland, which gave her the strength to bear that
terrible blow.
I feel very fortunate and very happy, and I hope in some way through my books to give children a feeling for the beauty of life and its fun. And also its holiness. And the only advice I have for Catholic authors is to love God and neighbor as much as they can. For without love, nothing is ever created.
Original Editor's note: Hilda van Stockum is, in private life, Mrs. Ervin Marlin. Her later books for younger readers, illustrated by the author, include Kersti and Saint Nicholas, 1940, Viking; Pegeen, 1941, Viking, Andries, 1942, Viking.
Blogger's Note: I am John Tepper Marlin, considerably older than I was in the photo at two years old in 1944; I was Timmy in The Mitchells trilogy. I live in New York City and East Hampton, New York; and Vero Beach, Florida. Olga (Joan) lives in Nairobi, Kenya. Brigid (Patsy) lives in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England. Randal (Peter) lives in Ottawa, Canada. Sheila (Angela) lived outside of Watford, Hertfordshire, England, but sadly is deceased, leaving four daughters and their families. Lis (Catherine) lives in London. If you want to reach any of my living sibings, contact me at TepperMarlin [at] aol.com. I am also Hilda van Stockum's executor and handle rights including permissions for reproduction of her art and writing. Most of her 25 books for children are still in print and under copyright until 2056. English-language editions are published by Bethlehem Books, Purple House Press and Boissevain Books. Translations of her books are available in French, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese and German. She has also translated books from German and Dutch into English—and her French was pretty good as well.
