‘My sister and I got scarlet fever, we were taken to the hospital in a carriage with horses’

Lei Simons woke up this morning thinking: ‘Why did I take all that in the past?’ Suddenly the question popped into her mind. She remembered a beautiful summer’s day when, as always, she was up early with her five young children. She had taken them to a lake near their hometown of Berg en Dal. Once home, at the end of the afternoon, she could go straight to the kitchen to prepare the food. ‘Meanwhile, my husband came home from work and, as always, sat down in a chair with the newspaper. And I could also put the children to bed after dinner. Nowadays fathers also cook and parents share the care of their children, that’s better.’

Lei Simons speaks softly and is modest, but talks endlessly, most extensively about the moments when her life turned upside down.

What childhood memories have always stayed with you?

‘I grew up in Nijmegen, in a family with nine children, four girls and five boys. We were not poor, but it was meager, luxury we have never known. My three sisters and I slept in one room in two double beds. We shared one doll.

‘In the late 1920s, one of my sisters and I contracted scarlet fever, a highly contagious disease. We had to quarantine for five weeks. We were 5 and 6 years old and were taken to the hospital in a horse-drawn carriage, can you imagine? On December 5, Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet visited the hospital and we each received a doll. Oh, how happy we were with that, both having their own doll! When we were allowed to go home, we had to leave our dolls at the hospital. The sisters said they were infected with scarlet fever. We believed that, but of course it wasn’t true. It was my first trauma.

‘I also remember that we were often cold in the winter. In the morning we scratched the ice flowers from the windows. When we went skating, we put a newspaper under our clothes against the cold. Nowadays they wear expensive thermal clothing. Those newspapers helped too.’

Did you get the chance to continue learning after primary school?

‘I made a wrong choice. In primary school I got the best grades in the class. The nuns said: she can study so well, she should go to secondary school. But I chose home economics school, probably because almost all girls did. While I’m not a cleaning lady at all, I hated it there. I was planning to do the mulo afterwards, but that didn’t happen. I was 14 years old when I had to go to work, I found a job as a saleswoman at C&A. My three sisters started working as a maid for a lady at the same time. Our father had an accident at work. He was a shunter for the railways, he coupled trainsets together. Due to a wrong signal, one leg of his has been driven off. Then he was finished. He received a benefit from the national insurance, but that was not enough for a family of eleven, so we daughters had to provide income.’

Didn’t your brothers have to work?

‘They were younger than the girls. As soon as they graduated from primary school, there was more money. They were all able to continue their education and got good jobs.’

Have you regretted not being able to develop further?

‘I could live with it and tried to gain knowledge myself by reading a lot. As soon as my kids were in high school, I learned from their textbooks so I could have a little say in the conversation. When they started studying, we had central heating installed in the house so that they could study in their rooms.’

Does the war in Ukraine bring back memories of 1940-’45?

‘If on it Journal images appear from Ukraine, I quickly look the other way. Our luck during the war was that there was no TV, so you didn’t see all that misery. I have twice experienced a bombing at close quarters and narrowly escaped death both times.

‘The first time, February 22, 1944, was a bomb on a tram stop, where shortly before I had been waiting for a long time for the tram that didn’t come. That day, 800 people died in Nijmegen. The second bombing was in September 1944. There was a dogfight going on and we all stood there in the street watching – very stupidly – ​​except my mother, who was hiding in the cellar. Suddenly we saw a bomb fall above us and fled into our house. Everything went black around me, I heard a huge noise and felt stones flying around. The bomb had hit the front of our house. Five of us were injured, I had a hole in my head, blood poured down my face. In the panic that had ensued, we all fled in different directions. I ran to a boyfriend, where I could spend the night in the basement, my head bandaged, a soldier had done that. The next day we went looking for each other and discovered that our house was uninhabitable.’

Where did the eleven of you go to live after the bombing?

‘As soon as we found each other, we walked to an air raid shelter under an old people’s home. At first they didn’t want to let us in, while we saw that neighbors whose houses were still standing were inside. We lived there for seven months, with fifty people huddled together in a dark room the size of my living room of about 6 by 3.5 meters, with one door. You could only lie or sit on a bed. There was no privacy at all, you had to get dressed and undressed under the covers, but we also laughed an awful lot.’

Was this the most traumatic episode in your life?

‘No, that was the death of my eldest son, he was 20 years old. He died in an accident on July 19, 1971. Henny was on holiday with his girlfriend José, who called herself Jos, on a moped. They had been to Yugoslavia and were driving their Zündapp over the Brenner Pass in Italy on their way back. One morning the police showed up at our door, then you know something is very wrong. My husband and I immediately traveled to Italy to identify our son. Fortunately, Henny and Jos still looked cool. Workers said there were roadworks on the Brenner Pass and they were probably hit on a bend. Henny was a helpful, easy-going boy. He wanted to become a physiotherapist and had just completed his first year of training, so he had put in a lot of effort.’

How did you cope with this grief?

‘That is very difficult. The three boys slept in one room. I couldn’t bear to get rid of Henny’s bed and clothes. But the children confronted me with the facts: ‘Why would you leave that bed? And we don’t fit his clothes.’ When I said in December that I didn’t want to celebrate Sinterklaas, my other four children said: ‘But we are still here.’ And they were right about that.

‘At first I thought: I’ll never get over this. If I lay awake in bed for a long time, I would pray, then I would fall asleep automatically. My faith helped me a lot. It was comforting and helped me accept the loss of my son. That allowed me to move on with my life.

‘None of my children still believe. That’s a pity, but you can’t force belief. If you do your best to be there for others, then you also lead a good life, you don’t need faith for that, do you?, they reason. I understand that and it is true.’

What do you think about the fact that fewer and fewer people believe in the Netherlands?

‘I find it difficult that one church after another is closing. In February, the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church in Berg en Dal, where I sang in a choir for fifty years, closes. I stopped three years ago. The people who still go to church on Sunday lose their meeting place and the singers lose the choir in which they have been singing for so long. That saddens many people. With the closing of churches, meeting places where people find friendship, comfort and support disappear. They go to church not so much for the gospel, but to be with others. With the disappearance of those meetings, the solidarity between large groups disappears. A person should not think that he can figure it out on his own.’

There’s something about your first name

“I was named after my father’s mother, Aleida. As a child I was not happy with that name, I thought the a at the end sounded so nagging. My name didn’t suit me. I complained about it, but my father said: you can be proud of your name, because you are named after the sweetest woman in the world. I was called Lidy, later Loes, at a certain point it became Lei and that’s how it stayed. That’s what my husband called me. Now I can’t lose any sleep over it.’