Introduction

My fascination with older women began when World War II began in Holland in 1940 while I was on vacation, staying with my Tante Helena Linderstrom in Rotterdam.

My father Marius and mother Sofie sent me to a private school where I studied French, English and German amongst other subjects, and I also played Soccer.

My father comes from an Old Dutch middleclass family and it was his intention that I would attend a university. He wanted me to study law but I didn't like that idea. I wanted to study the Arts, the Humanities we call it today, but my father didn't understand what that was all about.

He was a baker and owned a four-storey building that he had inherited from his father. His sister was the only sibling and she inherited a large sum of money from their father.

The building that my father now owns, 596 Olympische Weg overlooks one of the eighty-eight canals that arc through the city. The canals get their water from Amsterdam harbour and the canal water is refreshed every day.

The ground floor of my father's building is divided into a bread shop and a bakery, which has wood fired ovens. The bread that my father bakes is delicious.

A separate street entrance allows access to the rest of the building. We live in the apartment on the first floor and a Jewish friend of the family lives with his wife and two children in the apartment above us, the top floor my father uses as a storeroom.

My father is six feet three inches tall. He has blue eyes and brown hair; his face is unremarkable except for his large puffy lips, the bottom lip always sagging. It is his arms that are his most noticeable feature; they are large, the muscles heavily developed from kneading dough for many hours each day.

"Your arms make you look like a crab with big pincers," I jokingly told him when I was younger; he cuffed me playfully around the head and told me not to be cheeky.

I do not look like him or my mother because I have dark hair and brown eyes. My father told me that my dark hair and complexion comes from his mother, Oma Resson, grandmother Resson, who was French.

On May 1st 1940, I was sixteen and my father successfully obtained a Government work permit for me to become his apprentice baker. The clouds of war that were rapidly drifting over Europe worried him and he wanted me out of school and in a protected industry fearing that the worst would happen and that we would soon be at war with Germany. At the time I did not know how right he was but I was dismayed that he was pushing me into a trade, squashing my ambition to attend university.

Because my schooling had been terminated prematurely, and my father knew how disappointed I was, he wanted me to have a short vacation before commencing work with him. He told me that it could be many years before I would have another holiday. So it was that he arranged with his sister, my Tante Helena who lives in Rotterdam, for me to spend two weeks with her. I should explain that Tante is Dutch for Aunt with the 'e' pronounced as 'a'.

I was farewelled on my vacation by my family from Amsterdam Centrum, our central railway station, at eight a.m. on May 2nd.

The train to Rotterdam passes through monotonous flat country with wheat and tulip fields, potato farms, occasional windmills, thatched roofed farmers cottages and dairy cows breaking the tedium. All of the fields were surrounded with drainage canals and some of the larger canals have fish in them.

The steam train's whistle blew as it entered into the outlying villages and suburbs of Rotterdam; with its deep harbour this city is the commercial trading hub of Europe and has been so for more than two hundred years.

My name is Gerard Raymer, my nickname is Gerry, and I was born in Amsterdam, Holland in 1924.

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