Silver Cloud
2005
Aircraft and 100 kilos of rice paper cut in small strokes
Haarlemmermeer Noord Holland
Towards the end of the Second World War a group of boys walked through the Dutch town, Middelburg, which had been heavily bombed. One of them was my father. He was seven years old. On the empty streets, among the ruins, they found thousands of strips of silver paper. It looked very mysterious. They didn’t dare touch it, until the bravest of them carefully picked up one of the silver strips between thumb and forefinger. Then they all picked up the strips, smelling them and turning them around their fingers.
Older people told my father that the strips were scattered from aircraft and he imagined how the enormous, glittering silver cloud had descended and then disintegrated into whirling fragments over the city. It was only later that he realised that the thousands of strips had been scattered during the battle for Scheldemond, and that they had been used to disrupt German radar.
My father’s story about the silver cloud is lodged deep in my memory and with also it the astonishment that he had experienced 60 years before.
On 10 September 2005, at three ’o clock in the afternoon, an aircraft scattered one hundred kilos of glittering strips above the Haarlemmermeer. In doing so it gave us another event to remember.
