After thirty-six splendid stories from Tom Beaver this is the very last Beavertale. The series is finalised and will be concluded with a last greeting from Tom, only this time not with an "until the next Tale".

The day, the date, the year. Where all did it start in ernest?
Not on May 29, 1931, or did it? That is when I saw the light of day for the first time. Only then did I not yet know what it was. How far can a person think back to a real memory of conscious existence?
Is it being dressed up by the neighbour's daughter in a miniature postman's uniform?
Was it the first day at kindergarten, and the nice wooden toys, the sandbox and the green wooden fence, where at the top edge there were all kinds of little brightly coloured windows? Or was it the first time when you were allowed to go home alone from the little school in the Drukkerstraat?
Running fast you dropped yourself time and again sideways into the privet hedges. Our entire street had those, used as delimiters of the little front gardens. Later on you were given a good hiding, because the neighbours had been complaining to your mother. That street-urchin is always up to something new. Whaddoyoumean, being up to no good? I was only too happy, that I was big enough that I was allowed to walk home alone. Those seniors did not understand a thing.
Well, this afternoon I would neatly play in the woods; you did not meet those bores there; you only saw birds there and animals. Let's have a look, can we find a new rabbit-track, and maybe on the hill at that old oak tree was a new burrow. If you found an owl's fur ball you could poke it apart and find out what the owl had eaten. Or you could have a look if that large mushroom, King Boletus (in Dutch “Eekhoorntjesbrood”), which grew close to the path, where the fir trees started, was still there, and if the animals had eaten of it. And then, determined by the bites, guess what kind of animal it had been.
That's how you grew up, without a worry, mischievously, and a bit rambunctious. Well known at the doctor's, as you were there a few times for treatment of a head wound, or like that time when you were in grade school, and while running, entered, and coming from bright daylight into the darkness of the corridor you had not seen that you would run into the corner of a high lectern that was standing there and hit your eye. That meant big panic. First my older brother had to be found, who then had to accompany me home; I was bleeding like a stuck pig as they later said. Then, on the back of my mother's bike, going to the doctor.
Boy, that was interesting, now, the next day at school. "Did yes hear' 'bout wha' happ'nd to tha' Bark, he's foive stitches abov' 'is oye". That piece of dressing under that large plaster got dirtier and dirtier at the edges, as time and again I had to lift it a bit so that everyone could see the stitches. Especially the girls went for that. Insignificant matters really, but when you are six, seven, it is very important.
Marvellous years passed in that way, enjoying life.
And then came the War! For days there was tension because of the contradictory messages on the radio. Until on that day, when at four in the morning my father awoke us. War had started, and unknown to me, the little seed was planted that determined the remainder of my life.
That first morning we looked out of that upstairs bedroom window and saw all those little lights in the sky. Green and red ones, like beads, rising up above the houses. It were the tracers, my father told us, that were shot from Deelen Airport (Dutch Air force base just north of Arnhem - transl.). I found it very smart, that he knew all that.
Later that day the Germans rode on motorbikes and in lorries over the Roosen¬daalse Weg, (street in Arnhem - transl.) and through the woods, into the Arnhem suburb of the Geitenkamp. We had to stay inside. Those Germans were good for nothings. They were boogie-men and they shot at everything that was moving. After a few days it appeared again that those parents had not the slightest idea what they were talking about. When the Boy's Boarding School down at the Grensweg was evacuated, because the Germans were moving into it, we boys from the neighbourhood were watching. First at a distance, but steadily closer; and when one laughed to us and called out: "Was ist denn Boebgjen, kom maal hier" (German, "what is it lad, get over here" - transl.), we at first shirked back, but then, at a distance, again stayed put.
And then it became a matter of who dares to get closer, and who dares to call something back, and so, hesitant from the onset, we ended up in helping carrying in bedclothes and night tables from the lorries into the Boarding School. Exciting boy! You never really had been inside there, you were not allowed; those bargees' boys had been boarding there, and also those kind of boys that were no good. Actually, it was very logical, that the Germans had confiscated that School, as they were good-for-nothings as well and it was a passing home for them. That good-for-nothings actually turned out not to be too bad. We were allowed to come along to the ice cream cart, whose owner smelled good business, and had taken up a good location, close to the School. We even were allowed to choose what we wanted. I asked for an ordinary ice cream bar, no not such a double one, costing two dimes; but that cheeky neighbour kid from three doors on, asked for a chocolate cone, complete with whipped cream costing at least a quarter. And didn't he get it too! I thought that rather greedy, but a pity as well, as I had not dared asking for it myself.