Ode to Toby Vos | What a statement, what guts

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Dear Toby,

I must begin with a confession: I have read your diary. That's a crazy idea. I don't know how you would feel about me knowing the thoughts, fears and dreams you described in the diary you started in 1944 - as a 26-year-old. But since you later turned this diary over to the archives yourself, and furthermore refer to your “readers” in it, I'd like to believe you wouldn't mind.

Perhaps I was the reader you were looking for; one with appreciation for your self-mockery and with great admiration for your writing - and drawing talent. I enjoyed the ironic reflections on your life as a woman in Amsterdam, which you illustrated so beautifully with drawings in ink and watercolor. As a historian, I have seen many diaries, but this is the finest I know.

If anyone has looked at the city with attention, it is you. Because when you draw, you have to look closely. You knew how to capture city life in images, sometimes with seriousness and often with humor: troublesome neighbors, noise pollution, musings in the Vondel Park and sleepless nights in the quiet, dark city.

Especially with the image of the Westerkerk, you show your diary is also a work of art. You sketch the view of the West Tower from your home, three high on the Rozenstraat, as an illustration of why you are writing the diary. The yellow window frames -framed by a pink wall- are like the frame of a painting. This one catches the eye not only because of the colors, but also because of the windowsill, on which lies a soft pink pillow that you, the viewer, seem to be able to grasp in an instant. This beautiful miniature makes it clear that your diary offers a window into the city, which we get to see in your artistic rendering.

Amsterdam was your city. You lived there for more than a century-from your birth in 1918 until your death in 2019-and lived in very different parts of the city: the Jordaan, Amsterdam-Zuid and the Bijlmer. After your training at the Institute for Arts and Crafts Education, later the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, you made a career as an illustrator of magazines and children's books, including the Bijenkorf's gnome series of books. You signed your work not with the name “Neeltje Vos,” which you received at birth, but with “Toby Vos. This was a derivation of your nickname “Toppie,” which in turn refers to the writer Top Naeff, whom you admired. How delightfully unconventional to adopt the boyish name Toby. And what a statement. What nerve. 

My admiration only grew when I discovered that you participated in the resistance during the war. You were a courier with the Parool group and because you were so good at drawing, you were able to forge identity cards like no one else. You were arrested for this and interrogated, but fortunately you were soon released. You don't mention anything about the resistance in your diary. Presumably that was too risky. However, you do report on the hunger winter, the search for food outside the city and the shelling of Dam Square, leaving unique images of the war years. There are also stories among them, some of which seem partly or entirely made up, and in any case highly dramatized. For example, there is the comic strip “I am a hero” from April 1945, in which you come to the aid of a wounded soldier after an explosion and tear your dress into strips to bandage his wounds. Ah Toby, didn't you think yourself heroic enough?

A “simple woman's life,” all about caring for husband and children, was an abomination to you. As a woman in her mid-twenties, you just didn't seem quite sure you could really escape that fate. You took me in by the mocking way you depict your older self as a middle-aged lady in a floral dress who has run errands for her family and sits staring blankly ahead on the streetcar on the way back:

'Sturdy wide-legged both my legs are on the ground, the bag of cauliflower in the hollow of my lap. Blue-veined my hand rests on it. The wedding ring glitters in the sun.'

You felt that with your 'independent spirit of drawing' you might not be suitable for a relationship. A man would quickly feel inadequate, you thought, because you had “a pen that is irrepressibly ready to work. Whether your devotion to drawing really got in the way of a relationship, I don't know. All I know is that you were married for several years and had two sons within that marriage, whom you raised almost alone after the divorce. That must not have been easy. I can imagine that sometimes you needed a little sherry with that, as you once said in an interview.

You must have worked hard to make ends meet as a single mother in a creative profession. But when I look at your many contributions to children's literature, I get the impression above all that you enjoyed it immensely. You have been called a cross between Annie M.G. Schmidt and Fiep Westendorp because you not only illustrated children's books by well-known authors, such as Lea Smulders, but also wrote your own stories. In addition, you made craft and activity books for children. Wat zal ik eens eens doen? was enjoyed by all of the Netherlands; it received rave reviews and dozens of printings have appeared. Your “Word in Advance” is as witty as the many puzzles, riddles and crafts that “you can just do, without worrying too much”.

The humor sometimes has a somewhat bitter undertone when it comes to male-female relationships; in the stories you published in Hollands Maandblad, in the illustrations for the Belgian Penelope. Weekly for Women, and in the drawn memories and travelogues you gave as gifts to family and friends. Take the travelogue from 1949, in which you draw yourself in the streetcar, with a man sitting next to you, grinning at you, while you avert your gaze full of discomfort. Above that the emergency brake is visible, with the sign “Tout abus sera puni” (Abuse will be punished). I think it's clever how you use minimal means to capture the imagination so strongly in this drawing, which is more topical than ever.

I am also impressed by the candor with which you depict other facets of your life as a woman, as in the drawn story about the birth of your first son, in the early 1950s. The story is full of Tobian scenes, such as the scene in the hospital in which you, sitting on your bed, anxiously await what is to come and are terribly annoyed by your husband next to you, who is reading Moby Dick. In the story you further depict very concretely and plastically “the terrible instruments that the doctor has boiled out,” the torture of labor, birth and then breastfeeding and nipple fissures. You gifted the story of “little boy Daniel” to the doctor who “so neatly delivered you from the little guy. I can imagine it took him a moment to look up too.

Toby, you were a headstrong, brave and powerful woman who stood on her own two feet and managed to make a profession out of what you loved most from a young age: drawing, painting and writing. You not only gave a wonderful insight into the life of an Amsterdam woman during the war and afterwards, but you also depicted that experience artistically. When I look at the city now, I see your yellow-pink frame with it. Amsterdam has become more beautiful because of it.

Was signed,

Marleen Rensen