‘My mother was born into a large Catholic family in Scheveningen, on the Kanaalweg near the chic Van Stolkpark – but they were not rich. After evening housekeeping school, she had her first job at a workshop for women’s hats. She was trained there as a milliner: designing and shaping beautiful women’s hats. She not only worked in the studio, but also in the business selling hats. This is how she developed in the women’s hat industry and in the early 1930s she opened her own business.
At that time she met my father, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler. He was not successful in building up a business with this, but things went uphill with the millinery business. Father then also started working in the business and learned the trade from my mother. He also took care of the household, so he was also a real houseman. At the height of the trade, my parents had three businesses, one in The Hague, two in Scheveningen.
I was born in 1941, I am an only child. During the war we had to evacuate and ended up on Paul Krugerlaan, in a real working-class neighborhood. Not a good area for the millinery business, but later it was for bartering – my father often went on hunger trips. In August 1945 we moved to Laan van Meerdervoort and there my parents opened another women’s hat shop.
In the 1950s, ladies started wearing fewer hats or bought simple factory goods or a scarf. That’s why my parents decided to emigrate to New Zealand, but because they didn’t have any permit unfortunately that didn’t happen. The business closed in the mid-1960s. Renting out rooms to bathers brought relief. After two active lives, they passed away in the 1980s.’