Telling a story

Theodora Margaretha Wilhelmina Johanna Bol.

A sepia family photograph and what follows

A sepia photograph shows a strikingly handsome woman with her two children: a smartly dressed lad approaching adolescence and a pretty blond 3 year-old girl. All three are well dressed and in a formal pose. The little blond girl is my mother, who is still alive and whom I am and have always been close to. The boy is my uncle and the tall attractive woman is my grandmother, whom I never met.

The photograph was taken in Eindhoven in, Holland, on 5th July 1941. The suggestion of an idyllic family life inherent in this picture is supported by similar good quality photographs of my mother at play or simply posing for the camera in 1939 and 1940, in which she is very smartly dressed. She has a large bow in her hair in each picture, clearly indicating that she had been dressed to show off her prettiness.

The earliest of these photographs was taken on 26th August 1939; 22 days after England had declared war on Germany. The latest, including the family portrait, are dated 5th July 1941 – one year and two months after German tanks had rolled into the Netherlands on my mother’s second birthday, 10th May 1940. There is no hint in any of these photographs of the violent, destructive forces of war that raged all around and which would ultimately disrupt this family idyll and spark emotional shockwaves that would permeate the lives of all those involved and through generations to follow. My mother was caught up in this world-changing upheaval and it is the continuing tremor of these shockwaves that underpin my quest to find ways of expressing the pain and what contributed to the brutal separation of mother and child and its continuing impact.

My mother was taken from her own mother at the age of five and was given a roof over her head by devout catholic relatives while her mother served a two year prison sentence for fraternising with the enemy. My mother was mistreated by these relatives and by the church. At this time her father was a soldier fighting in France.

After the war my grandfather divorced my grandmother and my mother and her brother were brought to England by their father and new stepmother. They were forbidden to speak Dutch because their stepmother didn’t understand the language.

My mother’s home life was miserable and at the age of eighteen she married and went on to have five children with her English husband before he left her in 1968 to start a new life in Australia with his new family.

I grew up knowing the bare bones of my mother’s story, including how she came to be living in England as a Dutch national[1], but have always wondered what lay behind this narrative and why she was reluctant to tell it. This study is an attempt to clarify my own thoughts and feelings about my mother’s story, to examine the complex historical, political and cultural forces that lie behind it and convey the emotional impact on her of enforced separation from her own mother and homeland.

[1] My mother has a Dutch passport and has never become a British citizen.