Featured in the family album.
At the moment of writing this I am still enjoying my ” five minutes of fame ” , being featured in the Redbubble group, called: The Family Album.
Featured in the family album. belongs to the following groups:
The Family Album, (Pics From the Past ONLY)Take this subject in two different ways.
Yes. I am featured in the family album, i.e., the one that I have gradually destroyed since finding the internet, in 1996, by pulling out photos, many so carefully inserted by my mother and scanning them and never putting them back properly.
At the moment of writing this I am still enjoying my ” five minutes of fame ” , being featured in the Redbubble group, called: The Family Album.
It occurred to me that SHOULD someone click on my avatar there, they ought to see some more input regarding the family and the album.
I have agreed that I shall not ‘expose’ my son, daughter and their mother to the gaze of the internet surfers, so this concerns the family that I grew up in, when I was born, just, 65+ years ago, in Gouda, the Netherlands.
After my birth the doctors informed my father that, unfortunately, there was a problem with my stomach and I was not expected to survive.
As this was 1943, in the occupied Netherlands, things did not look too good.
My father claims that not the medical doctors but someone whom people would call a ‘quack’ gave my desperate father advice and it worked.
There were reflux or regurgitation problems. My father reports that he took this alternative medical advice and that that fixed it.
After this the hunger winter came to our part of Holland and he had to go begging farmers in the district for milk for me, while he and my mother went to bed without food.
After that things picked up. The war was over, May 5th, 1945.
My mother loved children but the next boy was still-born.
All I remember from that was being minded by my aunt (Seen in one of my pictures, when I was trying out my first bike.) walking me to a street, below the hospital and pointing up and saying: That is where your mother is.
The next boy survived birth but died a few months later. He was named after my mother’s favourite sister. I do not know what caused his death.
The photos help me to remember holding him and walking the pram but I clearly remember the wake.
The same aunt, my father’s half-sister, Mien, had minded me, at home, until everyone returned from the funeral and the sad faces of the people, sitting around the table in the living room, is a clear personal memory.
It is not surprising that my parents were extra careful about looking after me but being spoiled would still be an exaggeration.
Teachers at the preschool noticed that my back was out of whack and the paediatrician recommended daily sessions of walking around with a stick hooked through my elbows, behind my back.
So, upstairs, in the attic where our bedrooms were, my mother sang and I marched around for a year or so.
The principal of the pre-school (De Zonnebloem = Sun flower), would regularly praise the cardigans and jumpers that I was wearing and that my mother had knitted, meanwhile stroking my back and feeling for progress.
Inserts in my shoes worked on the shape of my legs, which, were noticed to be what in common terms were described as X-legs.
But, really, there were no major problems growing up, in Gouda and I thrived in primary school, where the Indonesian-born teacher was my idol, who left me to look after the class, once we were sixth grade, on Wednesdays, before lunch, as he hurried off to teach in Rotterdam, in the afternoon. (Wednesday afternoons were free, for primary school children.)
By then, my parents had swapped residences with a younger couple and had got to know them well enough to migrate to Australia together.
After being separated in various migrant hostels, at first, after we arrived, in Bonegilla, in May, 1956, we eventually shared an old house and for a little while were like an extended family, and I felt responsible for their 6 year old daughter, when our parents went off to the factories to work, as I was 12. So on the few occasions we make contact, now-a-days. (They returned to the Netherlands, in 1968.) she and I call each other half-sister and -brother.”
......
But that takes us way past the pictures of my parents, in their younger years, when they became the foundation of this little family.
madworld
Mr Joop what wonderful writing and a wonderful story you have to tell. Your photographs and family history are a delight to read and I love it when you upload something new to The Family Album. You are exactly the sort of person we had in mind for this Group when we first bubblemailed each other about it. Thanks so much for sharing your life with us!
MrJoop replied
Thank you. Gave me an excuse to read my own writing again. I may not talk that way, in normal conversation but it certainly is all true.
So good to have the opportunity to write it and to know that it’s being read by someone (s) instead of being in a private diary with a lock on it. :)