THE LANGUAGE OF THE MILLS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 32, 8 February 1939, Page 3

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MILLS

For Generations the People of the Netherlands Have Read the News from the Sails

J7ROM Tokyo to Paris, from Iceland to Cape Town, the windmill stands •s symbol of the Netherlands landscape. For three years I lived in the Netherlands, between bulb fields and the seashore, among bushes and the mills that line the canal banks < writes Kurt Lubenski in the Christian Science Monitor). Often on quiet summer days 1 visited a Netherlander who lived on the other side of Amsterdam in the village of Wormerveer by the River Zaan. He %-as Mynheer Mars, a school teacher. In his spare time he painted, looking just like the typical artist of one’s imagination in his brown velvet jacket end flowing neckerchief. His favourite subject was the broad level landscape of the Netherlands with mills on the horizon. He had made himself a reputation with his drawings and paintings of windmills. His atelier, built by himself, was on a small, green island cut out by little irrigation canals. There he would sit and paint his beloved mills and there he taught me their secret. Before us stretched the green plain of the Netherlands, checkered with innumerable squares and lined with the narrow canals. From their banks, each well clear of the next rose the mills. I could fancy that they were giant studs fastening the picturesque image of this landscape to the blue sky. Sometimes their sails revolved slowly, then again so rapidly that it would jseem venturesome to go near them. The sails face in the same direction; the millers see to that every day, for the cap which carries the sails can be turned about and is set according to the wind. Thus the mills stand in the Netherlands landscape, taking their part like human beings in its everyday life, grinding corn into flour, pulping paper, or sawing wood, whichever may be their metier. The code c f the mills has been handed down by the millers from generation to generation. The sails of these mills could send messages in code hundreds of years before telegraphy was invented. By the River Zaan. where the painter Mars lived, the Netherlands becomes the perfect mill-land. Here :r. times past were the home ports of merchant ships that sailed the world’s oceans. The needs of these busy little mercantile towns and of the ships which rode at anchor before them gave work to the mills. Broad is the stream of the Zaan. The old houses that look so plain from the streets turn their opulent, curved, wooden gables toward the river. Here and there on them one may see a date harking back some hundreds of years.

Yet these houses are all inhabited. Their occupants continue the enterprises bequeathed them by their fathers and forefathers—merchants, seamen, or millers. In the Zaan district every mill has tis recognised name nowadays just as it always has had. There are “The Dominie,” "The Prince’s Court,” “Butcher,” “Young Princess,” “The Honey Pot,” and many names such as “Josiah the Hero,” taken from the Bible. Sometimes the first owner has left his name to the mill. Our present highly technical age has, of course, narrowed the circle of the mill’s activity just as it has of every other traditional handiwork. Mynheer Mars and I often discussed the future of the mills when I visited him in his studio among the many little canals. The mills belonged to the landscape around him as much as the trees and bushes did. Between the waters of a polder lies, not far from the village of Wormerveer, a mill called “The Seeker,” Our only way there is by boat out to the little green islet. The miller, a man in his fifties, with serious steel-gray eyes looking from his deeply-lined face, rows us across. He and his mill have been idle since the last time the huge stones in there ground waste from a neighbouring factory into cocoa butter. But to-day there is plenty to do, and even the miller’s son has to help. They are setting the sails with windboards and red wind-sheets. The ponderous cap of the mill is turned to face the wind, so that the mill creaks and groans in every beam. The miller, hammer in hand, climbs high up the steps on the sails. He makes his mill speak. Mynheer Mars and 1 listen with our eyes to the ancient signlanguage contrived by the Zaan millers. Up there the miller Is standing on a wooden sail as if on a ladder. All the wind-boards, each some three feet long, which are normally fitted in the sails according to need, every one adding power, are now being knocked out of the wooden framework with the hammer. Every windboard removed from or replaced in the sails has a readable meaning which can be recognised from the far distance by anybody learned in this language of signs, which has been developed with every means at the disposal of the mill and curiously adapted to its daily wants. When the sails stood obliquely the stonecutter in his far-off village could tell that the miller was calling him to come and polish the stones smooth and clean again. Wind-sheets are spread on the four sails together with the wind-boards, so that not a capful of useful wind shall be lost. Every miller used these sheets, rolling up their

corners much or little, to make his own more or less secret code, which he used to communicate with his family or with his men. When for some reason, he was detained at home, he needed only to look out of the window to know what news there was from the mill. And if eventually the mill worker let the drawrope hang down from the platform beneath the cirling arms, the miller knew that his mill was still grinding but that the corn was coming to an end; he would have to look for more work. The ancient language of the mills on the Zaan is founded in this way on the needs of shrewd, hard-working business folk, but it can also be gay and cheerful. When the arms are hung with coloured streamers and with wooden and cardboard figures of cupids and cherubim which swing in the air

shining with gold paint or bright with colour, you do not need to be adept in the language of the mill to know that here some joyful event has happened—a birth or a marriage. When Princess i Juliana was married to Prince Bern- ' hard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, one mill not far from The Hague was made to express the public joy with hearts shot through with arrows, cupids playing horns, glittering star decorations, like a Christmas tree. The miller at The Seeker on the Zaan does not own such finery. “Ah, yes,” he said. “When Grandfather married Grandmother I make no doubt the sails had all kinds of ornaments on them. But that was in the good old days before machinery. I took up milling because by father was a miller and his father before him, but I'm the last of the line, there’s no gainsaying that now. My boy will be an electrician or a mechanic or something of that sort. He'll soon forget the old mill when he gets to the town. But it’d be a pity if he forgot the language of the mills, wouldn’t it?” The miller was rowing Mynheer Mars and me back to the road as he spoke, his son sitting in the boat’s bows. Everywhere along the horizon the windmills stood out from the flat landscape against the evening sky. Many of them were still, one or two circled in the wind. Factory chimneys farther off sent columns of smoke into the tranquil summer air. It is not long since the attention of the Netherland nation was drawn to the fate of the mills which for cen- , turies have so charmingly decorated their landscapes. An organisation was formed with the object of protecting existing mills and restoring those which had become derelict. Millers who had furnished their old mills with modern electric motors to make them independent of wind and weather sometimes removed the sails; but here, too, the organisation took steps to preserve the traditional appearance. And many a Netherland mill which continues to speak the language of the sails no longer uses them for grinding. The mills, and with them their language, are becoming in the Netherlands the property of the nation.