In front of a bottling-room in The Hague/Den Haag in the Netherlands , appr. 1908

This old and somewhat battered picture was taken about a century ago in the city of The Hague in the Netherlands , in the Wilhelminastraat in the well-known quarter of Bezuidenhout .

Depicted here are , among some other people , my late grandmother and my late great-grandfather .

They are standing in front of , what was then called , a bottling-room (in Dutch : bottelarij) , but nowadays we would simply call it 'pub' or 'café'.

My grandmother is the woman on the right holding a dog and my great-grandfather is the man in the middle standing in front of the window .

My great-grandfather owned this café and his daughter , my grandmother so , worked here as a waitress , most certainly nót to her satisfaction ....

Shortly before my grandmother had been living in the town of Arnhem , but after the tragic and early death of her mother , her father had forced her more or less to come to The Hague and work in his café as a - cheep - labourer ; and besides , unlike his daughter , my great-grandfather can't have been a very pleasant and easy-going kind of person ...
Years later my great-grandfather found an other occupation elsewhere in a heighbouring town , and my grandmother started up her own life , (far) away from her strict father .
The shop and all the other premises on this side of the Wilhelminastraat in Bezuidenhout were completely laid in ruins as a result of a both very tragic and unnecessary bombardment during World War II .