And today we still have food on the table

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Am not keeping a record . Can you ? When we have 120 pages we publish.

The house in Antwerp was a big beautiful  house with a balcony.

I used to spend hours watching the cars go by.  Maybe ten to twenty an hour on that very large avenue .

Avenue de France was the widest avenue in Antwerp and we were at the corner of rue Kookelberg .

Four lanes for cars, a pedestrian lane and a  lane for the trams .

I was ten year old and crazy for cars .Once a day there would be a Minerva the Belgian equivalent  of a Rolls Royce and I would shout ” There is a Minerva ” incredible in these times of the depression .

The trams were fast and there was an accident with a young man. I hate trams .

Everybody talked of the depression. When will it finish ?

I was ten year old for a long time. I did not realise that things were going to get worse not better. But my mother started to say after each meal ” And today we still had food on the table “. Good food  and I did not see why I would worry .

Every morning I would run to the kioske at the end of the avenue and buy Le Matin d’ Anvers . And run back home . I never could walk until I was seventy year old . And when I walked it was in strange ,large steps of a dance as if I was in a boat

In fact it looked ridiculous and sometimes groups of students of the Lycée d’ Anvers would imitate me with a kind of swinging parade .

Then one day in 1933 I returned with terrible news .

Hitler had become the Fuhrer of Germany and promised to get rid of all the jews in the whole world .

My parents became nervous but we could not leave ” Le Tank ” which had become an institution .

When I behaved badly my mother would threaten to fill my mouth with pepper, but she never did . My father during dinner would make me listen to Chinese music. It really frightened me . In fact he had bought a Chinese vase, very large and threatening , atone of the auctions where he was bidding higher than anybody else.

Our house was a museum of Boule seventy and eighteen century furniture that my father brought home every time he could outbid the competition .

It helped us when we were at the point of going broke .

He sold diamonds but gave to much  credit so that the real concrete business was my mother’s.

Once in a while there were people from Argentine in Antwerp. They were the El Dorado .

Also when Holland beat Belgium in soccer and money was flowing for two days.