‘My parents met when my father went to stay with my grandmother in Lisse. Grandma was widowed at a young age. She earned extra money with boarders in her large house. My mother was the eldest of her four children. My mother worked as a chemical analyst, she was already approaching thirty. She was blue and kept men at a distance.
As the son of a small farmer in Groningen, my father had drifted far from his familiar environment when he went to study in Wageningen in 1949. Intelligent and not needed on the farm, he went to the Agricultural College via secondary school and high school. When he arrived in Wageningen, he had never been outside the province of Groningen before. He had never seen the sea before. To his surprise, Wageningen was located on the Rhine. That was also his first visit to the dentist.
After his studies, he went on to obtain his PhD at the Laboratory for Flower Bulb Research in Lisse. He was hesitant about the boarding house. A lot of young people came over and it was fun. That would just get in the way of his promotion.
Everything accelerated when my mother turned out to be pregnant with me in 1958. Consternation arose in both families. My grandmother from Lisse suggested to my mother that we should raise the child together. When the family in Groningen heard the news of the pregnancy, my other grandmother and my father’s sister burst into sobs. They had never met my mother before.
They got married anyway, my mother was three months pregnant at the time. They also had sons Jaco (1960) and Allard (1964). Their life together largely revolved around us. My mother volunteered at school, church, with the elderly and with the Union of Volunteers. My father went into service, was promoted, made a career and worked as a volunteer at De Hoge Veluwe National Park for a long time.
They celebrated their sixty years of marriage together in the Oranje Nassau’s Oord care home in Wageningen. My mother could no longer live at home due to Alzheimer’s. My father followed her to the nursing home after an unhappy year at home alone. He deteriorated much more quickly due to vascular dementia and died well before my mother.”
NEW: Give this item as a gift
As an NRC subscriber you can subscribe every month 10 items give as a gift to someone without an NRC subscription. The recipient can read the article directly, without a paywall.