I grew up in a small second-floor flat in The Hague. I was four when my parents and I moved there, and my earliest memories are of playing in the ruins that surrounded our block of flats, an area heavily bombed towards the end of the war and not yet rebuilt in the early 1950s.
Other memories from that age are also vivid. Not long after we moved, I spent a long time in the hospital, and when I came home again, I remember I was suddenly presented with a younger brother, who appeared from seemingly nowhere. No one told children much about such matters in those days.
Life after the war was difficult for everyone. There was still not much food around, and I remember sweets and fruit were real treats. Winters were so cold my mother put horse blankets in front of the windows to keep the frost out. We had two small stoves in our flat, which were only lit if we had coal. It is hard to believe now that the coal man came once a week with a horse and cart carrying his deliveries of coal, wood and paraffin.
They were lean years just after the war. How lean I only realized once I had grown up myself.
I was always aware, though, even when young, that my mother seemed different from other mothers. She had no money, and yet she was always beautifully dressed and so glamorous. She seemed to have an indefinable aura. My friends, young as they were, were in awe of her. People seemed to go out of their way to help her.
But I also knew another side of my mother. One she never showed to the outside world. She often cried and spent most days in bed with the blankets over her head, leaving us in the care of her cleaner, Tante Cor, who came several times a week to help out (mostly unpaid, I later learned). Nighttime was obviously very difficult for my mother. Perhaps nightmares haunted her, as she usually only got up when everyone else went to bed, and then she would roam around the flat until the early hours, much to the annoyance of the downstairs neighbors, who would bang on their ceiling with a broomstick. But despite this sad side of her, there were plenty of girlfriends around, and she never lacked male attention. On evenings when she went out, she would be at her most glamorous, and no one would guess she had a care in the world. I loved seeing her dressed up and smelling her perfume.
She could be a loving and fun mum, but she could also suddenly burst into uncontrollable rages, tearing drawers out of their cabinets, throwing things around and punishing us for some minor misdemeanor. Her mood swings were a source of fear and mystery to us.
After years of starvation and an appalling diet, her digestive system was ruined and never really recovered. She was almost permanently ill with diarrhea and vomiting. Many types of food had a disastrous effect on her. And then there was the teeth-grinding when she slept. So bad and so loud we could hear it in the next room. Her already poor teeth, ruined in the war, eventually became little stumps. She hated it but could not stop doing it.
My father spent little time at home. He was always away for work and sometimes disappeared for weeks, leaving her without money or a contact address. When he was home, there was always a lot of arguing.
It was many years before I realized that these were all aftereffects of the war, and that her recovery was not helped by the poverty that was also part of our daily life and the disaster that her marriage turned out to be.