Anton van Duinkerken was actually called Willem Asselbergs and was a real Bergen resident. He lived from 1903 to 1968 and was a poet, journalist, writer, correspondent, scientist and orator.
Anton was the eldest of nine children of beer brewer Toon Asselbergs and Cor van Loon. As a young boy, the Bergen resident studied to become a priest at the seminary in Hoeven. During that training he started writing, but apparently the priests did not like it: Anton was banned from writing. In order to be able to write, he chose a pseudonym for his first publications: Toon (later Anton) van Duinkerken, under the assumption that his Asselberg ancestors came from Dunkirk in Northern France. He carried that name all his life.
As literature became increasingly important to him, he left the seminary. In 1927 he attended carnival in Bergen op Zoom for the first time, together with a girl Leonie Arnolds, who later became his wife. On September 8, 1930, he married Leonie Arnolds in Bergen op Zoom and moved to Amsterdam, where he became editor of the daily newspaper De Tijd. After one evening he was so impressed that he wrote his first major essay, Defense of Carnival, in just a few days.