We went to live in Holland with relatives for about 9 months. when we first arrived we stayed in the flat above my mothers mother (Oma Co) and grandmother (Oma Kemp, my greatgrandmother).

Oma Kemp was a spritely old woman of about 87 at the time. She often had us in stitches with her stories and the way she insisted on calling her daughter(my grandmother,Oma Co ) ‘Child’. Oma Kemp would call me in to her room to go to the shop for her or to the butcher and always give me a few cents to buy a sweet. She would always give us a sweet when we came down to say good night, much to my mothers frustration as we had just brushed our teeth.

Oma Kemp liked to watch tv, but her eyesight was not so good and she would sit 3 feet from the tv with a big Magnifying glass to see the screen. She would bussle about the apartment to make coffee and regularly burn things.She liked to keep her hair done in case of visitors and used a curling iron to curl it. This required heating it on the stove and she would regularly have singed curls.
She was very popular as she was quite cheery. Mum said she had a regular gentleman friend who visited who was quite a few years younger but Oma Kemp thought he was such an old man

I think I learned how to speak dutch at the time, chatting with Oma and running errands to the shop for her.

In a previous blog I pasted an old photo taken in Indonesia of Oma as a young woman with her family, she married a second time later and and had 3 sons. Her youngest son also came to Australia, I knew him as Uncle Rudy and he always gave us kids a magic show. Years later when he was an old man in his 70’s he came to visit and I was amused and delighted to see how much like his mother, Oma Kemp, he was. The gestures and the wit were so familiar.