There was a war (the Second World War of 1939-45) going on during the first few years of T’s life. Her father, for whom it was impossible to work as a goldsmith, tried to survive these fearful days together with his wife and four small daughters (T was the third). In recent years T experienced a sense of dread when she watched television news programmes showing bombers on their way, first to Kosovo, then to Afghanistan and Iraq. The 1943 bombardments of Schiphol Airport, situated very close to Randwijck, no doubt had left an indelible impression on the child’s memory.

As a two-year-old girl T found a safe spot under the round table in the centre of the living room. The table had a central leg ending in three horizontal feet. Sitting on one of these feet, hidden by the overhanging tablecloth she overhears the conversation of the grown-ups. They are talking to each other in anxious tones using words that are quite incomprehensible to the little girl. The parents have totally forgotten about the child, as the problems are apparently too big. Silent and motionless T spends hours in this position.

The treasure she always carried with her in those days was ‘the pencil box,’ a wooden cigar box with coloured pencils, which her father encouraged the children to use for drawing. No other toys were available in the house. At the age of three and a half T had the task of caring for her younger sister Adelheid when they walked to kindergarten hand in hand. At this Roman Catholic kindergarten in the basement of the parish church she is taught how to build an altar of wooden building blocks, an art she masters in no time. She does not remember having been taken there or picked up by either her mother or her father. Her mother had a baby to look after at home and her father was trying to earn some money.

In the month of T’s fourth birthday, February 1946, the youngest member of the family fell ill with diphtheria and whooping cough and died. The parents were overcome by grief. As a small child T witnessed this tragedy, but in no way did she understand what had happened. In December of the same year a new baby was born.

When T was five years old, she still did not talk to her parents at all, which started to worry them. She was taken to a doctor who made her do increasingly complicated puzzles to test her intelligence. She solved them faster each time. This experience probably lies at the bottom of a tendency T was to show in later life: first to analyse a problem at her own pace and then find a quick and clever solution.

At primary school T dreamed away much of her time in class. The headmaster, who soon noticed this, often took her out of the classroom and invented all sorts of odd jobs for her in his small natural history laboratory. All on her own in there she finds herself in a world of wonders. She likes the feel of the natural sponges, marvels at the great variety of shells and picks up many strange-looking objects, which she dusts carefully before rearranging them in the glass showcase.

“O, o, o, … ” this is Okkie talking to himself. Okkie is a dwarf, the main character in Okkie in the Cold, a book for children by Leonard Roggeveen. Okkie is the person T -now six years old- identifies with, when she is on her way to school, walking in all weathers past the farms along the Amstelveenseweg.

T cherishes happy memories of the family holidays in Castricum, when for the first time she experienced a sense of wellbeing and freedom. The war was over and her father had decided never to mention the subject again, a period of brighter days has started. All the family’s clean summer clothes were packed into a large cabin trunk, the one Uncle Jan used as a soldier. One of her father’s apprentices, Jan E., has painted it green and lined the inside with red and white checked kitchen paper. Off they all go now to Castricum, a village on the coast of North Holland. There they have rented the house of the Praat family, who themselves will spend the summer in a shed in the back garden.

T remembers the long walks across the dunes, the wonderful views of the infinite, the eternally moving sea, the fresh sea breeze, the broad sandy beach. She also remembers the holes the children would dig so that their mother could do her knitting sheltered from the wind, the gritty sandwiches they used to eat, but most of all the warmth and brightness of everlasting sunshine. The children competed to see whose skin was most sunburned. Their father taught them to swim in the sea. Never before had T seen her parents so relaxed and cheerful, only worried when they thought they had lost sight of one of the children.

T also clearly remembers an elder sister teaching her how to deal with those creepy jellyfish. When they found one washed up on the beach they started cutting it up meticulously into small square pieces with their sharp little spades. The small girl regarded the result with great satisfaction: a geometric pattern of squares within the circular contours of the jellyfish. A greater and more beautiful world than the beach of Castricum is nowhere to be found, she thought.