Her dreams
and what she learned about the outside world fed her intelligence and kept here
alive under restricted circumstances. As most housewives, she had to manage
with the modest income her husband earned.
She worked very hard in order to bring up her seven children in style. And she inspired them with ideas about the wider world that she found tremendously fascinating.
The information had started to spread in the middle of the nineteenth century already. Newspapers and books appeared, and photos, and stories by the rich who could travel by train. In the twentieth century movies and radio increased the flow of news from far away.
She felt it became within reach for common people to go out and discover the planet. Her eldest daughter, my mother, got infected by her travel fever and did what her mother could not have done.
In the 1920s she and her girlfriend boarded a train to a completely different country. It was Germany. Back home she found an eager ear in her mother who wanted to learn about what happened abroad. It was more than that. My mother extended the life of her mother into foreign lands.
Next summer the two young women took a train to Belgium and in another year to Echternach in Luxembourg. In the 1930s they crossed the North Sea on a steamboat to London and proceeded by train to the beach resort Torquay. Next year, at a London hotel, she met the Dutch man who became my father.
‘You have a karmic link with your grandmother,’ a perceptive person once told me. The thirsty drinking in of knowledge and the wanting to understand the wide world is certainly mine too.
She worked very hard in order to bring up her seven children in style. And she inspired them with ideas about the wider world that she found tremendously fascinating.
The information had started to spread in the middle of the nineteenth century already. Newspapers and books appeared, and photos, and stories by the rich who could travel by train. In the twentieth century movies and radio increased the flow of news from far away.
She felt it became within reach for common people to go out and discover the planet. Her eldest daughter, my mother, got infected by her travel fever and did what her mother could not have done.
In the 1920s she and her girlfriend boarded a train to a completely different country. It was Germany. Back home she found an eager ear in her mother who wanted to learn about what happened abroad. It was more than that. My mother extended the life of her mother into foreign lands.
Next summer the two young women took a train to Belgium and in another year to Echternach in Luxembourg. In the 1930s they crossed the North Sea on a steamboat to London and proceeded by train to the beach resort Torquay. Next year, at a London hotel, she met the Dutch man who became my father.
‘You have a karmic link with your grandmother,’ a perceptive person once told me. The thirsty drinking in of knowledge and the wanting to understand the wide world is certainly mine too.
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