La Chambre Des Reines

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Oh glorious heap of rubble, mouth filled with decayed teeth. It was love at first sight; you standing there so proudly and noble in the middle of the flat Frisian landscape, close to the dike of the most northern Dutch sea, "The Wadden Sea", covered with hundreds of grazing sheep. 

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You, beautiful small farm where rainwater slowly seeped inside, with your cracks, your thatched roof, that needs urgent repairs, your broken "uilebord" (wooden ornament attached to the roof of Frisian farms) your sinking foundations, your asbestos walls, your wooden beams covered with wood fungus and eaten by woodworm and long-horned beetle. Old farm in romantic decay, with the most beautiful garden that we had ever seen, overlooking the 19th century tower mill "De Hond" (The Dog) 

We had never seen anything like you before...

Inside you still hold old stables, a water pump dating back to the times that farms did not yet have their own water supply. You have never been a farm of large landowners, your stables accommodated a few cows and of course a pig which was for the farmer's own consumption. 

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One of the neighbours told us that he played with the children of the people who inhabited the farm some 60 years ago, when children still slept in small box beds, just like their parents, and when you were surrounded by a small ditch
and not by the stone path and green lawns we see today.

The children played tag and hide-and-seek in your stables, teased the pig and ran outside in the fields in their wooden shoes. In fall and winter time northwesterly gales pounded away at the Wadden Sea dikes and sent the sea over the dikes, which were not yet high and safe enough to protect the people living behind them. Religious farmers and fishermen who took refuge upstairs, praying during long and dark nights that the wind would die down and the water would drop...

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The real estate agent told us that you have been built before 1900, but he could not find your exact date of creation in the municipal archives. We dated you around 1890, which means you were already inhabited during World War I and II, when people in this part of the Netherlands were very poor. Proud and strong Frisians, an ancient and tough tribe with their own and language and history. 

We ordered a technical report, to see if we could afford the total make-over that you needed, the total face and body lift that you deserve, that you need in order to make it for another hundred years and more...we could not... and would not...because you are in terrible decay and you probably can't be saved at all as even the land on which you are built is subsiding...

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So.....we had to say goodbye, we had to let you go, but every time we will be in your neighbourhood, which is a 2 hour drive from where we live now, we will come back to see how you are doing and as long as you are there, we will dream on about how fantastic it would have been to live inside your walls...

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(Elenor)

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