"How it All Started"

Jacob Poulain (Snr) and Aaltje Poulain (nee van den Berg) 

on their wedding day in Wormerveer

This is my father and mother Jacob Poulain (Snr) and Aaltje Poulain (nee van den Berg) on their wedding day, 28 July 1938, their eldest child was born in 1942.  They were married in the registery office of Wormerveer.  Wormerveer is where my father lived at the time, he worked in a timber-yard.  He was 33 years of age and my mother was 29 and she lived in the village of Zaandijk only two kilometres down the road.  While they courted mum and dad would visit each other on their push bikes.  Later when we came along they both had two seats, one on the front and another on the back for us children, that was our transport.  On Sundays after church we would travel to visit family in the village next door on the bikes of our parents.  Calamity would strike if we had a flat tire, mum and dad would have to push us all the way home still sitting in our seats!  At the age of 7 or 8 years we would ride our own bikes. 

My mother would go to the weekly market to buy the vegetables, she had side bags on the back of her bike for her shopping.  There were no supermarkets or dairies in those days we had a grocery shop only for the basics, sugar, salt, flour and everything was wrapped in brown paper bags.  We had a special butcher that sold only horse meat which is a national staple diet still today.  Every village and town had one of these butchers that specialised in horse meat, as well as the butchers that sold other meat products.

Dad would bike 3 km to work at his timber-mill, I remember him pulling splinters out with a hot needle.  I can almost feel the splinter coming out myself.  We would watch him around the table, we all lived around the table, there was no television and we couldn’t go outside in winter so we took great interest in anything going on.  Dad had a bowl of hot water, with disinfectant and soda to soak his finger with the culprit splinter in.  When the splinter after much probing and squeezing  finally burst through we were always happy because our father would not be losing another finger.  It was a break from the monotony of playing Snakes and Ladders, Ludo or reading comics, so, that would be another nights entertainment over.  When dad was younger a splinter infected one of his fingers which was amputated, it was his ring finger because he could never wear his wedding ring.  In those days it was unheard of to wear your ring on another finger, so he never wore it.

At the age of 13 years he started working in the windmill called Herderskind which means the Child of a Shepherd.  To get to work he had to walk through paddocks, he had no bike and there were no foothpaths.  It was a bitterly cold job especially in the winter, he wore very thick clothes to keep him warm.  He worked there for more than forty years, and received a Long Serving Medal from Queen Juliana of Netherland, my nephew Alain Poulain, the eldest grandchild has inherited this medal.  Later the mill burnt down and became a large timber-yard.  My brother Felicien also worked with our father at this timbermill until he moved to live in Australia. 

My mother rode a bike similar to this one that sits in my front garden