The Dentist from Amsterdam

Luky;
When I was a child in Amsterdam a woman came to us daily to help with the housework. For the benefit of Paul Gallico fans I'll call her Mrs Harris.

Mrs Harris, although somewhat rough of tongue, possessed a heart of gold.
I have a feeling she couldn't read, because once when I was ill she bought me a book about Little Red Riding Hood, written in English, which at that time none of us could make head or tail of.
But illiterate or not, Mrs Harris possessed a shrewd inborn sagacity which she displayed in the education of her intellectually challenged son Peter.

Confidence in appearance
Peter was fourteen at the time, and doing very badly at the school he attended.
He was a placid, lovable child. When he had lost his milk teeth and his permanent teeth had appeared, they were large in size.
On the whole Peter had been an extremely amiable child but by now he had become somewhat sensitive.
His mother loved him dearly and was always working out ways of helping him to develop his social skills and feel confident in his appearance.

With great patience she taught him to tell the time.
His inability to work with money she solved as follows.
She'd put the money for the baker - my father - into his left pocket, and that for the butcher into the right one.
The grocer's list and money was kept in his shirt pocket.
Lots of Peter's anxiety was cured in this way.
Mrs Harris told my mother one day that she and Peter felt that his teeth detracted from his appearance.
She went on to say, "I've decided to have the lot extracted and get him some dentures."

Ability of dentists
Somewhere my mother had read or heard about the ability of dentists to extract teeth and to fit artificial ones into their sockets by means of a bridge anchored on either side of the remaining good ones, and she suggested that Mrs Harris try to have this done.
Mrs Harris agreed and made an appointment with the dentist.

When they arrived at the surgery, Peter grew very nervous, and in a bid to reassure him the dentist showed him a set of dentures which had failed to meet the required standard.
He pointed out each tooth, giving it a different name.
"This is Jane," he said about one, "and here is Olive.
That one over there is called Deborah and these two are Angela and Gladys."
Peter was fascinated and kept repeating the names, so the dentist kindly added:
"You can keep these teeth, my boy. And you must come back next week so that I can continue working on your own."

That evening Peter and his mother sat at the kitchen table, looking at the dentures.
Patiently Mrs Harris made him repeat each name and when they returned to the dentist the following week Peter, normally so taciturn, rattled off all the names of the teeth in rapid succession.
"Clever boy," the dentist praised.
"Why don't you come and work here during your holidays?"
It is doubtful whether he seriously meant what he said, and it is certain that Mrs Harris forgot his words, but on the first school holiday Peter rose at the crack of dawn, dressed with care, shone his shoes, slicked down his hair with water and made his way to the dentist's rooms.
My mother said that Mrs Harris, normally a human dynamo, was so distressed that she could hardly do a stroke of work that day.

Beaming
Late that afternoon Peter came home beaming:
"I'm allowed to come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow!" he proudly announced.
Eventually Peter became assistant to the dentists' technician and never overbaked an artificial tooth in his career for as far as we followed it.
He earned more money than some of his peers.

The kindly dentist always took a great interest in Peter's work, and the latter became a man full of joy and confidence.
It sounds almost like a fairytale, but it really did happen.
And the chief credit, I believe, goes to his mother.
When Peter got Mrs Harris for a mom he hit the jackpot.

*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette in beautiful Amsterdam