Like most people I do not remember anything of my first years. But I did hear a lot of it. My parents married in a turbulent time. On their wedding day, 7th May 1945, they heard that the second worldwar in this part of the world was over: Germany had capitulated. Here in Brabant, in the South, the war had already finished earlier, in September 1944, but people still had big problems. Almost nothing was for sale in shops after the war. And my mother wanted to marry in a white dress. As a matter of fact this was not decent that time in a little village. A girl should marry in black then.
In spite of everything a way was found: a piece of fabric destined for making little cigarette machines to make cigarettes out of tobacco. This fabric was brown impregnated to make it more solid, but if you put in into water the brown stuff solved and it changed into white silk. Aunt Toos, the oldest sister of my father, made a white wedding dress out of it for my mother and also a bridal dress for aunt Mien, the youngest sister of my father. She must have been about twelve years old then. My father was twenty seven and my mother was twenty two years old.
The oldest brother of my father had worked in Germany. He had gone there with a big wooden trunk, for his clothes and other things. My father had not worked in Germany during the war. He had been declared unfit because he had had a bad pneumonia or because he could not be missed on the factory where he worked. They made all kinds of elastic bands there. My grandmother had had made such a trunk of wood for my father, but fortunately he had not needed it. This trunk became the clothard of my mother to keep her linen and her crockery.
They did not have a place to live, so they moved in at aunt Mien's, the oldest sister of my mother. She had just married a widower with 5 children. She had a little girl of her own too: Willie. The children of het husband were in a children's home because he had to work and could not take care of them alone, and temporarily my parents lived in a bedroom of the little house where they lived at the Jan Hollanderstraat 61 in Eindhoven, in Gestel, Eindhoven south-west.
That is where I was born, on the 1st March 1946. My parents were very glad with me, but I did bring some problems. Then they needed a house for themselves, but it was not available in those years after the war. But the children of aunt Mient and uncle Kees came to live at home, so there was no room anymore for my daddy and my mammy in their house. Moreover aunt Mien got another baby of herself.
