Annie's father was the minister of the village of Kapelle in Zeeland, a province in the southwest Netherlands. The family lived opposite the church in the parsonage. "The street was paved with big cobblestones that made the farmers' carts rattle. They always left a few steaming fresh horse droppings behind," wrote Annie in her book What I Remember. "It was the days of the horse and buggy. No cars, no radio, no television. Only the village worthies got the newspaper. The sexton, who doubled as undertaker, came to tell us when someone had died. That was all you needed to know." The other children in the village thought Annie a bit odd: she was the minister's daughter, she didn't speak the local dialect and she wore "city" clothes instead of traditional costume. She was a solitary child and almost never played outside. "No, we weren't outdoor people," she recalled, "we were homebodies. The parsonage was our castle, and inside it we thought we were safe from the farmers' harsh world."