2023-10-04 14:39:00
”We always had DH at home.” Maurice, 97 years old, is undeniably what one might call a faithful reader. A daily habit that he inherited from his mother, also an avid reader of our columns. In 1995, our newspaper gave a page to Maurice’s mother. “Laure: a hundred years of DH”. An article found in our archives, in which the centenarian looks back on her daily readings.
“The news item page, I put it aside, and I don’t miss a beat,” she said. The sport ? “Oh no. Besides, my son doesn’t even bring me the sports notebook. On the other hand, every day, he comes to drop off the other part for me.” If he no longer remembers the circumstances of the report, the page is kept carefully in Maurice’s belongings. And unlike his mother, he appreciates the sports pages. His favorite pen? Miguel Tasso. In front of sports journalists, he also takes off his hat. “The job seems very complicated. Because when there is no match, you have to find all kinds of subjects, interviews with former players, analyses… You have to have imagination.”
But besides sport, “I read almost all the newspapers. I have time, it must be said,” smiles the pensioner. One of his favorite sections: Latest Mood, on the last page of the daily newspaper. “Every day, a kind neighbor comes to collect the newspaper from my mailbox. He leaves it in front of my house, and that saves me from having to go down. During lunch, I browse, and I mark the articles I want to read, and then I read in my living room.”
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Maurice says he cherishes the paper. “As I don’t have internet, I have to fall back on the newspaper. I am against the Internet, against smartphones and social networks. And at my age, the newspaper allows me to stay informed.”
“Before, we could go for a walk at 11 p.m.”
In his house in Laeken, Maurice has a beautiful perspective of the Chinese pavilion. This Laeken resident has seen Brussels change over the decades. Evolution, but not improvement in his eyes. “Before, we could go for a walk at 11 p.m., midnight, without problem. There was a form of freedom… and respect for the police. There were certainly thugs, but not like now.”
Despite his disconcerting vitality for an almost centenarian, his memory sometimes plays tricks on him. “These are flashes, which come back here and there.” But a smile emerges when he talks about the Brussels of the last century. A capital of which he mainly knows the north. Born on rue des Horticulteurs in Laeken in 1925, Maurice settled, after his marriage, a few meters away, still in the Bockstael district. Before finally landing on Avenue des Croix du Feu. “You see on these old maps, there are almost no buildings in this neighborhood. They destroyed Brussels,” sighs the Laeken resident, referring to the massive urbanization of the capital. “It was better before, I think. In ’58, the neighborhood changed profoundly,” notes the senior, who even remembers visiting the Universal Exhibition… in 1935.
His father, Maurice, lost him when he was only 5 years old. “He was a war invalid.” And ultimately succumbed to the consequences of war gas. As for his mother, she died at the age of 102. Now a widower, the Brussels resident counts on his two children and four grandchildren, in Brussels and in Brabant. They also read the DH from time to time, once Maurice has finished it. “I give the newspaper to my daughter, and it travels.”
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