Boelens’ stories sometimes seem to have run straight out of a detective novel. Who knows the mystery of the rabbit burglary? In the early 1960s, the family is startled by thumping and clanging in the shop below their bedrooms.
Egbert takes a look. The door was forced, but nothing was stolen. After a makeshift repair, Boelens returns to bed. “The next morning it turns out that a bundle of comics has been stolen. Even stranger: four rabbits are happily hopping around on the shop floor.” Boelens and the police are initially puzzled. The burglar can still be arrested later and then the monkey comes out of the sleeve.
On his first attempt, the thief is startled by the shop bell. He then decides to steal some rabbits elsewhere. After all, it was almost Christmas. On the way back he makes another attempt, this time with more success. His eye falls on the comics, but there is no room left in his bag because of the rabbits. The hunger for reading is greater, because he releases the animals in the store to make room for reading.
The riddle of the forest pond monster falls into the same category. “The story went around that there was some dangerous creature in the water. Ducks just disappeared. The stories got longer and crazier. Like we have our own Loch Ness monster here.”
Roelof likes to fish himself and regularly casts a fishing rod at the pond. One day, he is about eight years old, he sees something floating on the water. “It turned out to be a huge pike. Over a meter long!” The beast succumbed to its own gluttony: suffocated on one of the ducklings.
Mystery solved, Boelens fishes the animal out of the pond. The beast then goes on the parcel carrier of his bicycle. “I showed it to everyone. ‘Look what I’ve got, guys.’ At one point I had the whole of Emmermeer on their feet, I believe.” The monster was given a final resting place at the allotment gardens. “Right next to Wolfsbergen cemetery, how appropriate do you want it to be?”
Speech waterfall Boelens clearly enjoys telling stories. They splash effortlessly off his tongue piece by piece. “It’s great that you can entertain others with it. It creates recognition, it brings back memories and that’s nice to see. Emmermeer is and continues to change. People come and go. But by putting those stories on paper, they remain in kept anyway.”