Memories about our Dutch Friends

I want to write about our friends Nick Tap and Nell Tap. They were both of Dutch origin. Nell died in January 2013. I have no idea what happened to Nick. He had major health problems. There were widespread family members, including three sons.

Nick and Nell were both born ln 1933. They suffered a lot under the German occupation in World War Two. The food that the Dutch people did grow ended up on German tables. For the Dutch population there was hardly anything to eat. The children suffered severe starvation.

As I said in the previous post Peter and I liked to visit the Taps. I remember how they told us about the scarcity of food. Once a German soldier very secretly had given Nick a piece of bread. This soldier could have been severely punished for this!

Screaming

In the middle of the night, I woke up screaming.I had felt the pain. It had been very real. I was sure I had been falling out of bed and was lying in agony on the floor.

It turned out I was lying in my bed. It had been only a dream that had made me scream like this.

Soon I went back to sleep. But not for long. Waking up again I felt very unhappy for my friends had been so very silent. Why would they not talk to me? But then I realized that they had not been with me at all. It had been just a dream. In my dream, which seemed so very real, I saw the whole family: The parents Doris and Karl-Heinz, and the children Gudrun and Michael. Karl-Heinz had died years ago in an accident. Gudrun was dead too. She had died from cancer.

After all this I finally went to sleep quite well without another bad dream.

My Brother Peter Uwe

My Brother Peter Uwe

Where am I?

I am ninety. So I know that my time is very limited. But that does not matter for as long as I feel happy about being alive and maybe can also still do a little bit of writing. I very nuch care about relationships. To devote a great amount of my time to respond to what people say is important to me. Without significant relationships I am nothing. I have to say that relationships that I did have in the past do count a lot too, and I want to be able to tell about them and write about them. However I feel I should not forget to write about present relationships too!

So, where am I at this stage? Can I prioritize and devote myself to the things that are the most important to me? How can I still make the most with the time that is left to me? Even though I cannot know exactly how much time I may still be given, I can still try to make the most of every day that I still feel alive enough to be doing something at all. To be able to do something is such a blessing!

What about loneliness? It is said the feeling of loneliness can be a killer as much as any sickness. For most people it seems to be important that they have someone to hug and to kiss. How can hugging and kissing be so important? But it is. Instead of generalising I want to tell here something about myself. I think for most of my life I was more an introvert than an extrovert. Has aging changed me in some ways? Maybe yes. In my old age I find it usually not very difficult to be somewhat outgoing in communicating with people who in the past perhaps would have been very much out of reach for me. Also I find now often some increased desire to hug and kiss people.

Looking back at my longtime marriage, I think it lasted fot that long because we always had some kind of love and respect for each other. Now that I have a ‘boyfriend’ who is nearly as old as I am, we too love and respect each other. He too comes from a very long lasting marriage. It seems to me he has sometimes difficulty treating me just as a girlfriend. I like him very much, but I like him as a girlfriend, not as a wife . . . .

So, where am I? I am happy that Les and I have found each other. We have lots of fun together. Les has a wonderful sense of humour. He often makes me laugh. And he likes me to laugh a lot! 😂

Vater, Mutter, Kind; that is ‘Father, Mother, and Child’.

Some Childhood memories

Ja, this goes back to some early childhood memories of mine!

Playing with the children that lived in our street:

I spent lots of time playing with all the children in our street, Bozener Straße. One of our games was playing ‘Vater, Mutter, Kind’. It was understood, that the father had to be a boy. Luckily, there were usually a couple of boys, who did not mind acting as the fathers. If the girls outnumbered the boys, it did not matter. They could all be mothers. Each girl was allowed to bring one doll along. This doll then was a Kind, so that each girl would be a mother with one child. And all tghe dolls would be shared with the boys. We would be very proud, to see the boys showing affection to our dolls, that were our children!

I think, a game like this would probably have lasted for only a few minutes! We would quickly have gone to play any of our other games. We could play all these games in our very small street, that was hidden away from any traffic. Not that there was much traffic yet at this point in time. I am talking of the end of the 1930s and early 1940s, and Bozener Str. is pretty much in the Centre of Berlin.

We loved to play ball games, or hide and seek, or singing and dancing games. I only went up to our apartment for meals. Mum would let me know, when it was time to come up for a meal by calling down to me from our balcony. From that balcony she could practically survey the whole of Bozener Straße!

The house, that I grew up, in is still standing. It survived all the bombings during the war. It just had to undergo some renovations in the post-war period.

https://wp.me/p1Gf2e-2bK

Neighbours

For sure it is good to have good neighbours. I have about half a dozen extremely friendly neighbours, that are all well past 70. First of all there are two very friendly women who live with their very friendly partners of the opposite sex! And then there are two single widowed women that have been widowed for ages, and both of them have been my very good friends for nearly twenty years! However, we visit each other on average only about once a week.

Myself, having been widowed for close to one year now, I still often feel quite lonely. The other people in the rest of the houses I know only casually: One is a 92 year old woman, and all the others are much younger and out working every day of the week. Ayleen, this 92 year old very friendly woman, has her daughter living just around the corner.

Ayleen and I, we are the only people in the complex who do not have a car, for we don’t drive. I usually get outside help when I need some shopping done or when I have to go somewhere, or I call a taxi.

My two daughters are still full time workers and don’t live very close. However they are there, when I need them. My son, who lives in Victoria, is a lot of the time not available. So, I try to fend as much as possible on my own. Four hours help per week is provided by the government so that I can stay in my own home. Yes, I am lucky, that so far, being already 87, I have managed to stay in my own home and out of hospital. None the less, it is a rather lonely life, especially during lockdowns. And so far I have not been able to use public transport . . . .

When my husband was still alive, we would usually go on a little holiday at least twice a year. I wished I could go on a holiday now. Who wants to come with me? . . . .

Peter and I had often guests staying with us. Who wants to be my guest now for a bit more than a couple of hours or so? . . .

Diary

I have just been reading this blog:

Memento Mori – The reason I started this page

Jul 12, 2020

I wanted to reblog it, but unfortunately this did not work. This is what it said:

“

`ZANFERS.COM` ISN’T WORKING! OH NO!

“Zanfers” is not available at the domain zanfers.com right now. There’s a problem with the mapping for this domain. If you are the site owner, please log into your WordPress.com account for more information.”

Here is some of what “Zanfers” says in his blog:

“. . . . For example I am an avid gamer. Coming home from work, playing a few hours before sleep was my way of relaxing and I saw nothing wrong with it. Same with binging YouTube or some series. But then again, when it becomes your only way of entertainment or activity, you start to see its flaws. I realized that it lacks any productivity. This was obvious to many even before, but apparently I was one of the slow learners and I needed this pandemic to make me wonder if I am doing the right thing for myself and for the people around me. I started to wonder, if I vanish tomorrow, what will remain after me? What will be my legacy? As for now, it would be nothing but some Facebook messages and my games library. Which was a pretty depressing thought. . . .”

I just reblogged another post WRITTEN BY TENPORATH on how the Coronavirus may have affected us. The title of that post: ‘LESSON LEARNED.’

Our Overseas Visits

https://wordpress.com/post/auntyuta.com/761

Today I wanted to write about our overseas travels. So I checked what, I had written about it before. Luckily, I was able to find quite a bit of information under the title ‘Memories from August 2010’. (There is a link at the top of this post!)

Anyone who goes to this post from 2010 is going to find out that even by 2010 we had done already quite a bit of overseas travelling. In the meantime we travelled overseas two more times, namely in 2012 and then in 2016.

Living in Australia and having some family in Germany makes us want to travel overseas as often as possible. So far we had the good fortune of being able to use all this airline travel. On top of it, Airlines do still offer low price airfares!

At least a few people must be aware by now, that air travel is extremely bad for the environment. But how many people do actually try to avoid air travel these days as much as possible?

In 1990 we did do a trip around the world. I wrote about it here:

https://auntyuta.com/2014/02/05/our-trip-around-the-world/

Our first trip overseas was in 1977. Caroline was born in December 1978. We travelled with Caroline to Berlin in November 1980 and then again in March 1986 when Caroline was seven.

In 1977 Peter and I visited my cousin Renate and her family in Munich. From Munich we did a day trip to visit my uncle Edmund and his wife Flora in Augsburg. Among other things we visited with them the Augsburg Fuggerei. For lunch they invited us to the close by FUGGEREI STUBE.

https://auntyuta.com/2015/08/10/the-fuggerei-is-the-worlds-oldest-social-housing-complex-still-in-use/

In 1977 we travelled a bit around Western Germany staying with family and friends. But most of the time in 1977 we spent visiting our family in Berlin.

Ronald Hamilton Bates and his sister Jean

Jean Marion Loneragan nee Bates

A wonderful Person & Pianist – Rest in Peace

Ron and Jean’s mother was Lola May Bates.

We knew that all three of them had Urn places at the cemetery near Sutherland Station. We had gone to the chapel of that cemetery for Ron’s funeral service. We had talked Gaby into coming with us for the funeral. She reluctantly agreed. She apparently did not want to be reminded of anyone dying. This was in May 1997. Jean was at Ron’s funeral of course. She already lived in a Nursing Home at the time and looked very frail. We thought she would not live much longer. However she lived quite a few more years. We only heard about her death after her funeral in 2002. I think Gaby was able to tell us eventually about Jean having died, for Gaby had contact with people who had contact with Jean. So then we decided to have a look to find their urn places at the cemetery. In the cemetery’s office we were advised about the exact location. It turned out there were memorial stones of all three of them in the rose garden.

http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemDetailPaged.aspx?itemID=957554

These records are at the State Library of NSW. It says in the records amongst other things the following:


				“Jean Marion Bates was a granddaughter of Daisy Bates”
				“Includes birth and marriage certificates for Lola May Bates, nee Davidson, her daughter Jean Marion Bates, 1916, and a certificate of an entry in Register of Marriages, Arnold Hamilton Bates to Lola May Davidson, 1913. A newscutting announces the marriage of Jean Bates to Frank Loneragan. A letter from Lola May Bates to Ronald Bates, 1966”

I remember Ron telling us that he once went to Adelaide when his grandmother, Daisy, was in her eighties. He tried to talk to her, but he got the impression that she was not quite aware who he really was. He said he felt he could not communicate with her properly. Apparently he left it too late to see her.

Here is something about the Bates family that I must have copied from a newspaper article many years ago. Sorry, I have no idea which newspaper it might have been in:

Peter recently published in his blog some of the drawings that Ron Bates liked to do on little cards:

Ron Bates

I found in the meantime quite a few more of these cards that Ron had given to Gaby. We kept all these cards after Gaby’s death. Peter reckons they belong to us now. He says if we publish them we have to say that we copy-rights.

But here I publish one card that Jean and Ron gave us on the 5th of April 1986 at Sydney Airport on the occasion of our departure for a trip to Germany.

End of September 2015 continued

There is still some cake left from little Alexander's Birthday. — There is still some cake left from little Alexander’s Birthday.

On Monday, the 28th, one week after my birthday, I had our monthly women's meeting at my place. — On Monday, the 28th, one week after my birthday, I had our monthly women’s meeting at my place.

The women always bring a plate along. Naturally, never everything gets eaten. Peter took this picture of us after we had already more or less finished with our afternoon snacks. We women love to meet on the last Monday of each month. Two women moved away, but still live not too far away, six of us still live in the complex, as well as some other women who go to work and meet with the neighbours only once a year for our general body cooperative meeting. Last year we also had a lovely Christmas party with all the neighbours here in our complex. We are mostly women in this complex. Only three men, all of them married, live here.

Tomorrow, Thursday, I am going to be at my gentle Exercise Class from about 12,15 pm to 1,30 pm. On Friday our Rummy Cub game and Scrabble is going to be at Irene’s place from 2 pm onwards. One week after another goes very quickly. On Saturday, the 31st of October, our grandson Ryan and Ebony are getting married in Wollongong. We are all invited. And of course, their two little ones, Lucas and Alexander, are going to be there. I am so much looking forward to it!

ZANFERS.COM ISN’T WORKING! OH NO!

`ZANFERS.COM` ISN’T WORKING! OH NO!