Fields of Orange

More about the book

Johanna Francis (née Dooyeweerd) was born in Amsterdam in 1936 to an extremely well-to-do family, daughter of one of the most famous philosophers of all time. She watched the German tanks roll in as the Nazis took Holland and the family was active in the resistance to the occupation throughout the war, sheltering a Jewish family and running an underground newspaper which Johanna hid in her underwear – even though the Gestapo headquarters were just across the street. They went through the privations of Hunger Winter when they had to eat tulips, and the Gestapo interrogated her father four times.Coming to the UK in her late teens after the war, she met a penniless Welsh farmer and within two days, they decided to get married. They had a huge society wedding in Amsterdam, but her new husband Bob was so poor that on their first night together on the Welsh farm, in a freezing tumbledown house, she cut up her wedding dress to make curtains. Despite their financial difficulties, they only grew closer and more inseparable as the decades passed, and the story of their life together is a beautiful love story. Johanna died in 2021, after a singularly devoted and extraordinary relationship.