Aart Janszen (1938): “In this photo from 1927, my parents are on the road together for the first time. Mathilde and Laurens, then 23 years old, cycle all the way from Amsterdam to Veere, in Zeeland. They both still lived at home and worked in education. They had met a year earlier at the NBAS, the Dutch Association of Abstinent Studenden.
“Abstinence meant not only no alcohol, but also vegetarianism, no smoking, ‘pure living,’ pacifism, and a firm ‘saying no to routine, convention, bad habit, vulgarity, and decadence.’
“Between ‘Tilly and Lau’ it was right on. In 1930 they married. Tilly then had to stop teaching, because married women were not allowed to teach. She was jealous of her husband, who walked whistling to his school, opposite their house in a courtyard in Amsterdam’s Betondorp.
“They had children one after the other, but with the fourth (that was me) they moved outside the ‘red village’. Not much later, the Netherlands was occupied, losing their very best friend in one of the camps in the east. A loss that neither of them got over well.
“As soon as that silly rule about women in education was lifted in 1948, Tilly went back to work. At a primary Montessori school, where she later even became a deputy. In the meantime, Lau had exchanged primary education for an agricultural home economics school and also became a deputy. So – very unusual at the time – a double income came in, but sobriety remained the motto. We, the five children, have sometimes suffered from this, especially in our adolescence; buying nice clothes was not allowed, and lipstick and make-up were decadent.
“My parents were together for more than fifty years when Tilly died suddenly, in her 75th year. Lau has almost made it to 100. All those years there hung in the living room a large photo, shot by Til himself, of the gloomy church tower of Veere, but she never revealed anything about their fledgling, unmarried Zeeland romance. I didn’t find the negative of this photo until years after Lau’s death.”
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A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on June 13, 2023.