“I found this photo from 1957 after my mother died. It was taken in Dordrecht on the Korte Engelenburgerkade. They just got married and completed the training school where they met. They lived with my maternal grandmother on the Hooikade, not far from that gate, along the Oude Maas.
They were fiercely anti-militarist after the horrors of war in their childhood. My father was given the opportunity to perform alternative military service as a teacher in an ’emergency area’; a two-person school in Callantsoog where he taught classes 1, 2 and 3 (15 students!). They were assigned a council house with a huge vegetable garden, to be partly self-sufficient. There were hardly any shops. His duties also included treasurership of the rescue company. My brother Rolf (1961) and I were born there on the Zeeweg, five hundred meters from the sea.
My mother was sickly and had a serious illness due to pre-eclampsia while carrying my brother. My grandmother came to live in to keep the household running. From the time I was two years old, I knew no better than that our family consisted of three adults and my brother. Friends asked if I had two mothers, but it didn’t feel that way. I had a grandmother and a mother.
In the early 1960s we moved to Utrecht, where my father became a mathematics teacher at the IVO-MAVO on Notebanenlaan. He worked there until his early retirement in 1994. In the meantime, my mother had obtained her Dutch MO certificate and worked as a teacher at the ROC (tourism) while my father took over the household without grumbling.
In the late 1990s they moved to Haarlem to live closer to my brother and his young children. My father died there. A great sadness was the death of my brother in 2020, he was granted euthanasia due to unbearable suffering due to Parkinson’s. It literally left my mother heartbroken (takotsubo cardiomyopathy). She died four years later in Utrecht.
I am now the last survivor of that warm teaching family. I look with joy at those two young people in 1957, so far away and so close.”
