For a while Mum had a housekeeper, seen here on our walk in Mariendaal
We called her 'Tante Marie', but she was no relations, to be honest we didn't like her at all, she had no warmth, not friendly. Perhaps she had her own problems and worries too, about the critical situation across the border and uncertain times ahead.

Just before the war food was rationed, it started with sugar. Every family was provided with a distribution card with which one could obtain coupons, which in turn gave you the right to buy certain goods at a certain quantity. After receiving, the shopkeeper had to stick the coupons on a form, so with which he could buy new stock. Very soon after the German invasion, more and more articles were hard to get or not obtainable at all. Coffee, tea, tobacco and soap were substituted with surrogate articles and even those were soon ‘op de bon’, on coupons too.
Advertisements in the newspapers informed us which numbers were valid.
The raw materials became scarcer by the day. In course of time for example, soap was only available if you could hand in some bones from the soup. Before the war 24 million kg of soap was produced, reduced to 2 million four years later and none at all soon after.
In 1940 around 5.3 million cigarettes went up in smoke in The Netherlands, four years later that figure was down to below 900.000 surrogate cigarettes.
Can you imaging how our parents had to struggle to keep their loyal customers happy, an impossible task.
Anything useable at all was saved, dress-and packing material as glass, corks and tubes, all were collected for re-use. Adults could buy 4kg, of potatoes, 2 loafs of bread, 145gr of butter and about 2 litres of skimmed milk every week for the first three years of the war, but clothing and shoes were very difficult to procure soon after the German assault.
As the invasion went on, not only the quantity decreased but also the quality lessened dramatically. Bread was a good example it degenerated to a dark brown hard substance; it didn’t look normal bread any more.