Letters to America Letters to AmericaJoan finally returned to her parents and family in August 1945. This is what she was able to remember of the journey.
"Because of my accident(1) I wasn’t able to travel home with the rest of the Kodakids. I think they sailed in June or July, when my arm would still have been in a sling.
"However Kodak arranged my journey, I’m pretty certain I was unaccompanied. Well, I could hardly get off at the wrong stop, could I?
"Mary took me to New York. I stayed overnight at a hotel in a room with 3 other older girls before boarding the Nieuw Amsterdam for the voyage to Southampton, docking there on August 30th 1945.
"When Nazi Germany collapsed in May 1945, the Nieuw Amsterdam was in the Mediterranean en route to Australia via Suez. She was carrying homebound troops while her subsequent homebound voyage represented yet another political urgency: the evacuation of troubled Indonesia, the former colonial Dutch East Indies. So after that she must have sailed to New York from where I embarked to return to England."
"The weather was perfect for the week-long voyage and I had a wonderful time. It was the best week of my life up to that point. I was free to do exactly as I wished. Every day I took a blanket up onto the deck and lay watching the ocean. The sea was smooth and the sun shone all day. I made friends with two soldiers who were on their way home to England. It was all very innocent, but fun. Obviously there were mealtimes and sleep in a cabin, but I remember nothing of such mundane things."
SS Nieuw Amsterdam was a Dutch transatlantic ocean liner that was built in 1938 and scrapped in 1974. She was the second Holland America Line (Nederlandsch-Amerikaansche Stoomvaart Maatschappij, or NASM) ship to be named after the former Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now New York.
When new, Nieuw Amsterdam was the largest and swiftest ship in NASM's fleet, the largest ship in the Dutch merchant fleet, and the largest ship ever built in the Netherlands. She succeeded Statendam as NASM's flagship. She was the Netherlands' "ship of state", just as Normandie was for France, Queen Mary was for the United Kingdom, and Rex was for Italy.
From 1940 to 1946 Nieuw Amsterdam was an Allied troopship. She served mostly in and around the Indian Ocean, but also in the Atlantic, and occasionally in the Pacific.
Joan's father, Sydney Farman, wrote in his memoires of the difficulty some of the returning children had when they rejoined
their families:
"In 1940, with invasion of the country by German troops a more than likely event, Joan was sent off to a foreign land for safety, not to return for five long years. Many people believe that such experiences leave their consequences and are responsible for all the ills that follow, but Joan came back a happy young woman, and was never a cause for concern to us her parents, who had wondered for so long and so helplessly whether we had done the right thing or whether we had harmed our child for life. I have never dared to ask her if she has forgiven me for my share in the decision to send her away."