‘People were so afraid of electricity that they didn’t dare to turn in a light bulb’

Riet van Pelt sits stately at the dining table in her spacious, spotless three-room apartment in Dongen. With her back stretched, her hands flat on the table and an attentive look, clearly a woman who does not allow herself to be told anything. For her generation, the Brabant woman was ahead of her time, because she has always worked full-time and effortlessly combined that with a family with four children. The word ‘tired’ is not in her vocabulary. Taking action and persevering when things go wrong is her credo.

How are you?

‘For someone my age I can say: good. I live independently, do not have a diet and if possible, I drink a drink or a glass of port with my neighbor once a week. You have to make something of it. My four children have arranged for one of them to come every day. All loners live in this complex, many elderly people who have lost their partners. We have good contact with each other. I exchange newspapers every day with the neighbor. Then he gets early afternoon from me BN De Stem and me from him The Financial Daily and de Volkskrantbut not before he has completed the puzzle.’

That’s a lot of reading in one day

‘I also read a lot of detective and historical books, I just finished an interesting book about Napoleon. That was one of them, too, a land grabber. I like to stay informed about what is going on in the world, especially the financial and business news. There are mean companies, such as large supermarkets that suck suppliers. You have to pay attention to offers, because there is always a catch. Everything is big these days and it’s all about money, money, money, to earn as much as possible, sometimes at the expense of the community. That used to be different. If you had your own business, like my husband and I, it was all about helping others. And you didn’t want to charge more than you were due. You hardly see that now. The little ones have almost no chance of survival anymore. †

Do you only do your shopping at small shops?

‘As much as possible: I get bread from the bakery, meat from the butcher and vegetables from the greengrocer. You also have a grower in the area who sells at home, which is a good initiative because it gives them a fairer price than through the supermarket, which plays growers against each other for the lowest price. I avoid the supermarket as much as possible, with their cheese department as big as my living room. What should you choose then?’

What kind of business have you had?

‘My husband Jos was an electrician. I met him in the carousel at the fair in Dongen. It clicked right away. When we started dating during the war, he soon announced that he wanted to start his own business, and asked what I thought of it. I was immediately enthusiastic, so he knew he had come to the right place. We shared our entrepreneurial spirit. After our marriage in 1944, we decided to start a shop with small electrical items, such as plugs and cords. I ran the shop while my husband went out for repairs and equipment installation. We started in the front room of the house we rented after our wedding. In the early years, my husband was even called when a farmer’s light bulb broke. People were still so afraid of electricity that they did not dare to screw in a new lamp themselves. After the war things started to improve. Jos repaired many radios that had come out of the hiding places broken. I didn’t have that much stuff in the store at first, but with the economic recovery and the increase in prosperity, came the three-headed shavers – those electric razors – and irons, spin dryers, washing machines, refrigerators and televisions. Our range became more and more extensive and it became busier and busier. At one point, we employed as many as twelve technicians. We had it right, but we always had to work hard for it.’

Were you also running the store alone when the kids came?

‘Naturally. I have always worked full time. I loved it, working with customers every day. There were also sometimes headwinds, when a customer was difficult, did not pay his bill, or something went wrong with the tax return. But we’ve never had any major setbacks.’

A full-time working mother was special in those days, when a ‘good’ mother should be close to home.

‘At that time you weren’t even hired if you applied for a job as a woman with children. You could do paid work with your own business. I had it in me to be an entrepreneur, I’m spicy, a go-getter. My children have lacked for nothing. Sundays were always for the family and in the summer we went camping for two weeks, first in Zeeland and later in France. Our busy life has not given me any difficult children. All four were independent early on and they all ended up well. We’ve taught them to be tough.’

How did you teach your children to be tough?

‘Once we went camping with the whole family in the south of France. We were by the sea and the weather was so bad that we decided to go to Paris. Our oldest daughter just got her driver’s license. My husband said to her, “Ans, you can drive us to Paris.” He gave her the confidence. It has made her a good driver.’

‘I am tired’ you should never say, your youngest daughter said.

‘No, I don’t want to hear about fatigue, unless there is something very serious. You should always persevere, keep going, don’t give up. Thinking ‘I can’t do it anymore’ doesn’t help. The mind rules the body, that’s why you should never sit in a corner sad.’

Have you ever received comments as a working mother?

‘New. Why shouldn’t a woman be in paid work? When I used to see the neighbors on the street chatting with their arms folded as a child, I always thought: don’t you have anything better to do?’

Childcare or after-school care did not yet exist, how did you do that?

“We lived above the store, so I could keep an eye on things. The children often came by and at one point also helped. Now I have to say that we had a girl in the house. Nellie, her name was. Her father had died young and as the eldest daughter of the family of seven children, she had to earn a living. At that time there was no support from the government, at most some from the church. Once she got married, her husband allowed her to continue working with us until she gave birth to her first child. But she didn’t get pregnant, so she stayed.’

In what kind of a family did you grow up?

‘A small family for the time, with two children, my brother and I. My parents were sweet, good people. Father worked as a civil servant for the municipality. He always had a job, we did not know poverty. It was around us, because unemployment was high at that time. When I went to the market with my mother, people would stand in long lines waiting for support. Twice a day they had to stamp to get 8 guilders a week, humiliating. I remember that the unemployed had to build a swimming pool in Oosterhout as an employment facility. My father was a good Catholic, prayed before dinner, went to church on Sundays and read de Volkskrant, that was part of it then. There should be no crease in the newspaper. Faith was not so important to my mother. She was a little looser. During the war she kept a pig.’

And you, are you religious?

“It’s watered down. The great belief no longer fits in this time, people no longer want to obey church leaders. They meddled with the families in my youth: the more children the better, because the more Catholic souls, the bigger and more powerful the church. People have become smarter and more independent and prefer to decide for themselves what they do. In the distance I still believe that there is something, nature will not just have emerged. But whether God exists cannot be proven. I don’t take it lightly anymore like I used to. And you don’t need the church to be good to your fellow man.’

Have you been able to keep up with digitization?

‘I have a computer. When I read an interesting article in the newspaper, and there is a link to the internet, I sometimes type www, for more information. Other than that I don’t do anything with it. My kids do my banking on the computer, because I’m afraid of hitting the wrong button. I would really like something like that that you can take and send pictures with. That sounds like a lot of fun to me, but my kids say it’s way too complicated for me.’

That’s not too bad. There are more 100 year olds with a smartphone.

‘Oh yeah? You would say that if a 12 year old kid can handle it, so can I. Shall I push it through anyway?’