How my mother met her husband

Restored on April 22nd, 2026, from a copy without photos. I

I’ll tell you about my mother and how she got to spend the War years in a Perth suburb called Bassendean by the Swan River in Western Australia. As for my father, he lived there already.

She was born on 31st August 1909 in East Sussex, England, to Vincent and Gwendolen. Her life spanned two world wars. She was 4 in 1914 and 37 in 1946 when we came to England in  on the ss Rangitata after it had finished repatriating troops who’d been fighting the Japanese.

Vincent was a smallish man. He looks pleased with himself in photos. He was proudly descended from Archbishop Sumner whose marble effigy lies in Canterbury Cathedral. I knew him as a retired schoolmaster who spent his days in a booklined study, its ceiling and walls stained yellow with decades of pipe-smoke. He’d coach a pupil in Latin in the morning, then complete the Telegraph crossword, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. In the afternoons he’d go to his gentlemen’s club. For exercise, he’d potter round the garden pruning fruit trees or maintaining the compost heap. But the real garden-lover was my granny. Crippled with arthritis, and not able to afford a jobbing gardener to keep things tidy, she would hobble about poking things with her stick, or painfully get down on her knees to tend flowerbeds, or persuade her grandchildren to pull up weeds. She was full of creative energy despite her pain. She’d even take us (my cousin Mark and me) on long country walks, waving her stick at cows to scare them away and instructing us in many subjects as we went.

These were my mother’s parents as I knew them: proud strangers sharing an apartment, with separate bedrooms and lives. They would eat together and he would drive her to shops and church, but that was it. There was no evidence that they even liked one another. Emotionally, he was content with his own company, a “cold fish”. Local tradesmen called him “the Professor”, and you could see that pleased him.

My mother was the eldest of their two daughters, and the most adventurous. Peggy’s life was a more level-headed imitation of her elder sister. (Both emigrated to the colonies, had three marriages and were unmaternal. They thought nothing wrong with farming out their children for others to look after.)

When my mother was 21 she received an letter of invitation from her former dancing teacher, Miss Doris Holdsworth, who had gone out to Singapore to start a Dance Academy. Free at last from parental restraint, she took the next boat out. Together they taught Englishmen, Dutchmen, daughters of Chinese millionaires and sometimes the millionaires themselves.

This is how she met her husband, Jan Jacobus Mulder. I never met this moody and impetuous man, whom I’d been taught to regard as my father, for he died or at least disappeared before I was born. In his native Holland he had been engaged to a young lady from a high-born family. To prove his own worth and substance he had started up a tulip business and planted fields of those bulbs for which Holland is famous; but they were ruined by blight. He went bankrupt and lost the girl. This at any rate is the explanation my mother gave me for his emigration to the East Indies.
Together they lived the high colonial life of the ‘Thirties, as celebrated in the plays and songs of Noel Coward. Jan made her give up being a dancing teacher. They ran a branch of Ciro’s, a chain of stores which still sells cultured pearls; and then a fashionable Roadhouse. This was in her glory days, in Singapore. She remained a flirtatious blonde till she died. But as she reminisced to me and her subsequent husbands (my stepfathers): “That terrible war, those Japs—we lost everything. Everything.”