Mum thought her husband Antoon was too lenient, especially in his dealings with his older brother Jacques who also ran a tobacconist trade in busy Steenstreet, a couple of kilometres from us.
As we got to understand much later in life, Jacques was heavily in debt and apparently owed Antoon quite a sum of money, never to be recovered.
Dad and ‘Uncle Sjaak’ as we called him, used to order stock together, for the only reason to have stronger buying power.
But it became a fiasco, it put an extra financial burden on our struggling parents.
Jacques at times was unable to pay for his goods, so who did?
This street was more or less destroyed during the battle of Arnhem in 1944 and after the war we never saw the trams back on the rails again, the infrastructure blown to bits.
So instead Arnhem became a trolley-bus city.