Klaas Van Bommel was a twelve-year-old Dutch boy who lived where there were plenty of cows. He was over five feet tall, weighed a hundred pounds, and had rosy cheeks. He always had a big appetite, and his mother said his stomach had no bottom. His hair was a color between a carrot and a sweet potato, thick like reeds in a swamp, and cut straight from one ear to the other.
Klaas wore wooden shoes that made a loud noise when he ran fast to catch a rabbit or shuffled slowly to school on the brick road in his village. In summer, he wore a rough, blue linen shirt. In winter, he wore woolen pants as wide as coffee bags, called bell trousers, shaped like upside-down cowbells, buttoned to a thick, warm jacket. Until he was five, Klaas dressed like his sisters. Then, on his birthday, he got boy’s clothes with two pockets, which he was very proud of.
Klaas was a farmer’s boy. He had rye bread and fresh milk for breakfast. At dinner, besides cheese and bread, he got a plate full of boiled potatoes. He would stab a potato with a fork and dip it into a bowl of hot melted butter. The potato and butter quickly disappeared "down the red lane." At supper, he had bread and skim milk, left after the cream was taken off to make butter. Twice a week, the children enjoyed a bowl of curds with a little brown sugar sprinkled on top. But at every meal, there was cheese, usually in thin slices, which Klaas thought were not thick enough. When Klaas went to bed, he usually fell asleep as soon as his yellow hair touched the pillow. In summer, he slept until the birds began to sing at dawn. In winter, when the bed was warm and Jack Frost was active, he often heard the cows talking in their way before he jumped out of his straw mattress. The Van Bommels were not rich, but everything was spotlessly clean.
There was always plenty to eat at the Van Bommels’ house. Stacks of rye bread, a yard long and thicker than a man’s arm, stood on end in the cool, stone-lined basement. The loaves were baked once a week. Baking day was a big event at the Van Bommels’, and no men were allowed in the kitchen unless they were called to help. As for the milk-pails and pans, filled or emptied, scrubbed or set in the sun to dry, and the cheeses piled up in the pantry, they sometimes seemed enough to feed a small army.
