What did your parents do for a living?

Dirt poverty runs through my family tree on my mom's side. I got the dyslexia from her. Not that I'm complaining and there's indeed some pride also about the history of six generations of poor textile labourers who provided just enough for their families nevertheless. My mom worked as a factory labourer canning fish in extreme cold temperatures till she had me. On my dad's side there was a farm on the top of the hill. Nothing fancy, just surviving the times there too. Farms were little hubs of vital self-sufficiency at the time of two very long military occupations by the Germans and equally long periods of economic downturn, especially in the 1930s and early 1950s. My dad got an education till his fourteenth year after which he started to work for his uncle's bakery. Because of health issues he was advised by an officer who knew him because of his bread round, he joined up the Belgian army at the age of seventeen in the mid-1950s. He served as a NCO for a very long career amongst other places in Germany during the Cold War, etc., etc.