Anneke Feuilletau de Bruyn, 1923–2020

Anna (Anneke) Feuilletau de Bruyn

Anna (Anneke) Feuilletau de Bruyn passed away on October 30, 2020. Anneke spent her last years in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with her son Marc Herant and his family, ending there a life of international travels that only saw her return to Holland, her country of national origin, on a handful of occasions.

Anneke was born on October 15, 1923 in Bogor, a sleepy agricultural town in West Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. She was the youngest of three sisters. Her father, Willem, was a third-generation Dutch colonial army officer who had led a number of expeditions in unexplored areas of west Papua, while her mother, Henriette (née Mulder), was from a family of estate owners. Anneke grew up in Bogor in the twilight of the Dutch colonial years, acquiring a sense of place in society that would last a lifetime.

The family returned to Holland in the mid-1930s and settled in The Hague. The dark years of World War II would soon follow. Anneke’s father was interned by the German occupying force along with other Dutch notables, essentially as hostages to ensure the good behavior of the population. In 1944-45, now based in Amsterdam and working for the Ministry of Social Affairs, Anneke endured what the Dutch would call the Hunger Winter. She would often recall these times with tales of hardship and misery. From then on, Anneke staunchly refused to speak German, which she had mastered quite well. Trained as a secretary and typist, she went to London at the end of the war where she worked at the Dutch Royal Navy HQ as a Wren (Women’s Royal Navy Service).

Anneke then joined the Dutch diplomatic service as a clerical worker. This was the start of a travel spree over a decade long that saw her first posted in Kenya, where she found a world much akin to that of her childhood in now-independent Indonesia. Portugal followed, then Mao’s China, which at the time was completely closed to Westerners except diplomats, and finally the Shah’s Iran.

Anneke inherited from her parents a keen curiosity and a spirit of exploration that would lead her on many adventures in all of these countries, whether on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, on the grasslands of the Maasai Mara, along the Great Wall, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, or through the deserts of Iran. Anneke loved road trips and took her battered VW Beetle on solo journeys from Tehran throughout the Middle East and eventually back to Europe — highly adventurous endeavours at the time.

In the early 1960s, during a holiday cruise in Greece, Anneke met Gilbert Herant, a French marine surveyor. They would spend the next 40 years together and have two children, Marc and Gilles.

In 1974, the whole family moved from Paris to Greece, where Gilbert had founded a small shipyard that tended to the nascent yachting industry in Rhodes. Athens would become their residence for the next 25 years. They brought up the children there within the French expatriate environment to which Anneke would remain anchored until the aging couple’s return to Lorgues, a village in the south of France, in 2003.

After all these years abroad as a staunch expatriate and outsider, Anneke found home and kinship in Lorgues and, probably for the first time in her life, fully embraced the community she lived in. She was socially active, volunteered in a large number of local charities, and finally found where she belonged. Her declining health prompted her final move to Lincoln, where her eldest son Marc sheltered her for the remainder of her days.

Anneke leaves two sons (Marc and Gilles) and five grandchildren (Joshua, Servanne, Sophie, Margaux, and Camille). Perhaps her biggest legacy to these subsequent generations is a sense of independence, in which belonging remains secondary to being one’s true self, and a huge love for mountains and the outdoors.