The Hiding Place

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The Hiding Place

By Corrie ten Boom, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill

Narrated by Wanda McCaddon

Length 8hr 14min 00s

4.9

The Hiding Place summary & excerpts

John and Elizabeth Sherrill, July, 1971, Chippaqua, New York Chapter 1 The One Hundredth Birthday Party I jumped out of bed that morning with one question in my mind, sun or fog? Usually it was fog in January in Holland, dank, chill and grey. But occasionally, on a rare and magic day, a white winter sun broke through. I leaned as far as I could from the single window in my bedroom. It was always hard to see the sky from the baillet. Blank brick walls looked back at me, the backs of other ancient buildings in this crowded centre of Old Harlem. But up there where my neck craned to see, above the crazy roofs and crooked chimneys, was a square of pale, pearl sky. It was going to be a sunny day for the party. I attempted a little waltz as I took my new dress from the tipsy old wardrobe against the wall. Father's bedroom was directly under mine, but at seventy-seven he slept soundly. That was one advantage to growing old, I thought, as I worked my arms into the sleeves and surveyed the effect in the mirror on the wardrobe door. Although some Dutch women in 1937 were wearing their skirts knee-length, mine was still a cautious three inches above my shoes. You are not growing younger yourself, I reminded my reflection. Maybe it was the new dress that made me look more critically at myself than usual. Forty-five years old, unmarried, waistline long since vanished. My sister Betsy, though seven years older than I, still had that slender grace that made people turn and look after her in the street. Heaven knows it wasn't her clothes. Our little watch-shop had never made much money. But when Betsy put on a dress, something wonderful happened to it. On me, until Betsy caught up with them, hems sagged, stockings tore, and collars twisted. But today, I thought, standing back from the mirror as far as I could in the small room, the effect of dark maroon was very smart. Far below me, down on the street, the doorbell rang. Callers? Before seven in the morning? I opened my bedroom door and plunged down the steep, twisting stairway. These stairs were an afterthought in this curious old house. Actually, it was two houses. The one in front was a typical, tiny Old Harlem structure, three storeys high, two rooms deep, and only one room wide. At some unknown point in its long history, its rear wall had been knocked through to join it with the even thinner, steeper house in back of it, which had only three rooms, one on top of the other, and this narrow corkscrew staircase squeezed between the two. Quick as I was, Betsy was at the door ahead of me. An enormous spray of flowers filled the doorway. As Betsy took them, a small delivery boy appeared. "'I stay for the party, miss,' he said, trying to peer past the flowers as though coffee and cake might already be set out. He would be coming to the party later, as indeed, it seemed, were all of Harlem.' Betsy and I searched the bouquet for the card. "'Pickwick!' we shouted together. Pickwick was an enormously wealthy customer who not only bought the very finest watches, but often came upstairs to the family part of the house above the shop. His real name was Hermann Sluhring. Pickwick was the name Betsy and I used between ourselves because he looked so incredibly like the illustrator's drawing in our copy of Dickens. Hermann Sluhring was without doubt the ugliest man in Harlem, short, immensely fat, hair bald as a Holland cheese, he was so wall-eyed that you were never quite sure whether he was looking at you or someone else, and as kind and generous as he was fearsome to look at. The flowers had come to the side door, the door the family used, opening onto a tiny alleyway, and Betsy and I carried them from the little hall into the shop. First was the workroom, where watches and clocks were repaired. There was the high bench over which father had bent for so many years, doing the delicate, painstaking work that was known as the finest in Holland, and there in the centre of the room was my bench, and next to mine Hans the Apprentice's, and against the wall Old Christoffel's. Beyond the workroom was the customers' part of the shop, with its glass case full of watches. All the wall clocks were striking seven, as Betsy and I carried the flowers in and looked for the most artistic spot to put them. Ever since childhood I had loved to step into this room, where a hundred ticking voices welcomed me. It was still dark inside, because the shutters had not been drawn back from the windows on the street. I unlocked the street door and stepped out into the Barteljoristraat. The other shops up and down the narrow street were still there.

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