The Kite Flyer
MY CHRISTIAN NAME is Gerrit, and I am a de Waal.
I am an only child, if you don’t count the two stillbirths my Mama Anneka suffered late in her pregnancies. My older brother Karel and younger sister Kathrijn are buried beside each other under the same tree in the apple orchard. In autumn, we are careful not to eat its fruit when it ripens.
I was born on Monday, June 3, 1686, and spent the first twenty-six years of my life in Middelburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland.
I lived in the attic of the three-storey house my overgrootvader, my great-grandfather, Hendrick, built using timbers salvaged from the Santiago, a Portuguese cargo vessel loaded with spices his ship captured off the mid-Atlantic island of St Helena in March 1602.
His full-length portrait hung on the wall beside the stairway to the first floor.
In one of my earliest memories, I was playing on the mezzanine when my Papa Maarten appeared. Towering over me, he stooped, took my hand and guided me down the stairs, one careful step at a time. He stopped beside the portrait, then swept me up without warning to straddle his shoulders.
Gripping me there with one hand, he turned to face the painting. ‘This is Hendrick,’ he said, pointing. ‘He is your overgrootvader, your great grandfather.’
I remember looking into a pair of grey eyes so piercing they seemed to stare right through me. His grim square face frowned beneath the black leather peak of a sun-bleached red cap pulled low across his forehead. Wind-burned lines fanned from the corners of his eyes. He wore a salt-and-pepper goatee and his lips were so compressed his mouth was a straight line with no hint of a smile.
He was wearing a simple pale blue uniform jacket silver-buttoned to his lace-collared neck. The sleeves were rolled back halfway to the elbow. His large hands, with fingers linked, rested across his lap…
Then I saw the tattoos of tiger salamanders on the backs of each hand. Their dark blue scaly tails coiled round his thick forearms, their fire-breathing open mouths blasting red and orange flames across his fingers.
I froze, and then screamed, locking my legs against Papa’s chest and digging my fingers into his throat as my mind raced.
The dragons in the stories my opa, my grandfather, Laurens, has read to me are real!
‘That’s enough of that,’ Papa rasped as he staggered down the stairs.
He tore my hands loose, put me on the floor and squatted beside me. He held me at arm’s length and I sensed his impatience when he saw how confused and terrified I was.
‘You’d better get used to him, Gerrit,’ he said before he let me go. ‘You are the latest de Waal, so he’ll be watching over everything you do.’
Watching over everything I do? When I glanced back through my tears, I saw Hendrick’s eyes boring into me as I stumbled across the black and white tiles towards the safety of the kitchen.
That was in 1689, when Papa was home for a year between voyages to the East Indies. He had returned the day before after a three-year absence and was a stranger to me. Apart from that incident with the dragons, I have only the faintest memory of him when he was home that time.
All I can faintly recall is the eerie sensation of hovering in the air over smiling faces in the apple orchard when he threw me skywards before I plummeted into the safety of his waiting arms.
I was three years old. Was it terror I’d felt then or exhilaration once I’d become accustomed to it? Was I too young to feel either?
It took me several years before I could look up at Great Grandfather Hendrick’s judgemental gaze and fiery hands without feelings of fearful awe as I passed up and down the stairs.
Publisher: Dune Publishing (26 October 2020)
Language: English
Paperback: 390 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1925999846
Brief Summary – Elevator Pitch:
1686 – 1712, Middelburg, Zeeland, the Netherlands.
Gerrit de Waal is born in 1686 during the Dutch Golden Age of oceanic sea-faring, exploration and trade. His father disappears on a voyage across the Indian Ocean in 1694. Determined to search for his father, Gerrit signs on aboard the sailing ship Zuytdorp in 1711. He survives her shipwreck in June, 1712. Cast ashore on the Australian continent, he is saved from certain death by a chance meeting with a local Malgana family. Assimilation does not come easily, in the place where the sun meets the sea. Lennard Currie has researched the de Waal family tree and believes his life intertwines with theirs.