She would also give me a plastic bag with food: a few onions, sweets, nuts, a bag of mandarins or oranges, sometimes a leek, some smoked chicken, a glass jar of chicken soup and always a roll of toilet paper. A small emergency supply for the journey, because you never knew when famine might break out on the A2 from Den Bosch to Amsterdam. 

After that Christmas dinner, she gave me some chocolates and a cake. A few years after she died, my son was born; three years later, my daughter. We have endless Christmas dinners. A few years from now, I'll be giving my children food parcels. For the journey. Against the hunger my mother lived through. 

My father died a few days before I turned 11, and I remember little about him. Like my mother, he came from a penniless Jewish family. Like my mother, he started work when he was 13. He went with his father, my grandfather, trudging the streets where people were so affluent they could afford to throw away clothes. At the age of 13, my father began his career as a rag-and-bone man. 

A rag-and-bone Jew, they used to say — Jew was synonymous with a cheap, not entirely honest dealer in things that were ostensibly worthless. I have a photo of him, taken at the market in that tiny Catholic city where he and I were both born, which was printed by a local newspaper and fished out of the archive many years later by the person who sent it to me. He must have been around 18 at the time, standing beside various boxes and holding up a bunch of grapes for passers-by to admire — expensive fruit in those days. My father had apparently made it to market vendor and no longer pushed a cart through the streets. He looks well, a "handsome boy", my mother used to say. He was getting ahead.

After the fruit came rolls of cloth. He sold fabrics at the market; in those days many people sewed their own clothes. He met my mother and for a few years they were courting. 

My father's family was considered even poorer than my mother's penniless family, so my mother's parents objected to the match. "He had someone else at the time," I recall my mother saying. But they got back together at the start of the Second World War. 

A few years after he died, I found some boxes in the garage where his car still stood, containing correspondence courses he had taken. He wanted to improve himself. He read. He subscribed to four newspapers. He knew what was going on in the world. After the war, he turned his rag-and-bone business — not new rolls of cloth, there was none after the war, nor was there any fruit, so he went back to trading in rags and scrap metal — into a flourishing firm employing dozens of people. His breakthrough came with the Korean War. It changed his yard full of wrecked cars and broken tractors into a goldmine; the war had sent the price of scrap sky-high.