‘My parents had an eventful life. They married in the Dutch East Indies in 1929, in the photo (from 1930) we see the apparently happy couple during a trip, just after their first child had died at birth.
The marriage had been preceded by six years of engagement. Father sailed as first mate for the Royal Java-China-Japan Line; a job on shore was a condition for marriage. Both were prisoners in a Japanese camp during the war, my mother with her six-year-old daughter and pregnant. After repatriation they chose Heemstede, where many of their father’s relatives lived. Not an easy period: mutual misunderstanding, an unstable mother, traumatized children; only after a few years were they able to move into and furnish their own house.
They were not together much: father traveled all over the world. He supervised the construction and maintenance of molasses tanks. There was silence about the camp. He earned well and was mostly away. She ran the household, with an ‘everyday girl’, and was the hostess. She enjoyed many visitors, an Indian rice table regularly passed by. She was sickly, she couldn’t handle much.
I was born in 1949, the youngest daughter. My father was also abroad at that time. A move to England in 1955 brought some peace and regularity, six years later we returned to the Netherlands. Finally, a few more years followed in England, near Liverpool, for an advisory job for my retired father.
Despite dozens of moves, adjustments, hardships and physical and mental difficulties, both died after the age of 90.”