HOW WE GOT OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE IN HOLLAND 1947.

HOW WE GOT OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE IN THE NETHERLANDS

How we, our poor and displaced family from the tropics, got our beautiful house on one of the nicest places in Wassenaar. The mother of my father was a Hammacher, the daughter of one of the notaries from Groede. She had five brothers and sisters. One of these brothers had a son, a cousin of my father, who circled in the art world and lived in a wonderful house in Wassenaar, wich he had bought in the most luxurieus and beautiful area of Wassenaar, with a park, trees and a great lake behind the Townhall. In Holland my father got his old job back in life- and mortages insurance. He had asked for the district Aalten and surroundings, but providence had determined otherwise. To his chagrin he got The Hague, Wassenaar, Voorburg and Rijswijk, one of the toughest districts. He went to his cousin in Wassenaar and heard that he was appointed director at the Kruller Muller museum on the Veluwe and that he had to live there, he also had to travel with the Van Gogh’s to America. My father wanted very much to rent his house in Wassenaar and his cousin, feeling deeply sorry for him for everything he had endured, offered him the house for a very reasonable rent, with the understanding that my father could buy it from him when he was doing better. A great offer. Unfortunately then a problem arose, something they had not foreseen. At that time the council decided who was to live where, it was not up to the owners of the houses. This was due to the extreme housing shortage in 1947-1948. The council had other plans, they assigned the house to the director of the Rijnland Lyceum and certainly not to the poor cousin from the tropics.
The cousins in their turn wrote a long and very convincing letter to Prince Bernhard, my father’s cousin probably knew him already a little bit I guess, because The Prince's aid had called the mayor and it was arranged that we could live in this beautiful house after all.
We arrived, using orange crates as chairs and tables, in this big lovely house among the trees and around the corner the magnificent Townhall and all the woods around it, we were very happy. A dream came true.
Since both my parents were from good families and had a luxurious taste, they bought beautiful furniture at auctions for little money, later the furniture was worth a lot.
I would not forget our first St Nicolas (a Dutch holiday on the 5th of December) and our first Christmas there. My mother had knitted hats, mittens, scarves etc. There was not much money to buy things for us at that time. Then suddenly the doorbell. Not knowing anybody in Wassenaar, we were very surprised, when we opened the door, to find a basket filled with jam, fruit, nuts and cans on our doorstep. If that was not enough there was also an envelope containing 150 guilders, which was a lot of money in that time. There was no note, no name, nothing, so we didn’t know who had sent it.
This was not all, because at Christmas again the doorbell rang and again we found a basket full of things, even a Christmas pudding. It made my mother cry. Since then we always eat Christmas pudding with flaming rum over it at Christmas. We never found out who had given us these wonderful gifts in a time that was our most poor period in our lives. Dinkie.
Dinkie