« My mother was looking for adventure, that’s how she came out of my father ‘

‘My Irish mother left around the age of 19 on her own from the Ireland countryside to Dublin. It was 1953, she was the second youngest in a family of ten children. And she didn’t feel like marrying a man from one of the surrounding villages: she was looking for adventure.

In Dublin she gathered money with a few jobs to go to England, where she went to work in Liverpool at the Pilkington company. When she walked on the street one day, she saw a poster of a beautiful woman in uniform in a window. She found the photo like that glamorous That she walked in. When she came out, she was employed by the Royal Air Force. Soon she was broadcast to Germany.

My father, from Hellevoetsluis, joined the Air Force at the age of nineteen. He too was sent to Germany. There, in Gütersloh, they met. They fell in love.

They were turbulent times. Russia invaded Hungary in 1956. Soldiers did not know where they would be stationed. My parents were married in 1957, so that they would certainly not be separated. This photo was taken two years later in Hardegarijp. My father was then working as a professional soldier at the Air Force Base in Leeuwarden.

The family in Ireland was not happy that my mother left for England, went to work in front of the Raf and went to live far from home, where she also married a foreigner who was not Catholic. The family in Hellevoetsluis was also not happy with the foreigner with whom my father came home and who could not be understood for them.

But they maintained and with the family ties it worked out well later. They had a good marriage in the Netherlands for 67 years, blessed with three children. « 

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