Our House
Our house, like nearly all Dutch houses, was built of tiny bricks on a deep, firm foundation. It was by far the oldest house in and around our village, and…
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“Our House” from When I Was a Girl in Holland by Cornelia De Groot.
Our house, like nearly all Dutch houses, was built of tiny bricks on a deep, firm foundation. It was by far the oldest house in and around our village, and one of the gables was covered with ivy.
Like all the farmhouses of our province, the rooms and barns were built under one high, steep roof of tiles. The part containing the rooms was supposed to be about three hundred years old; the rest had been rebuilt in the year 1780. Yet in spite of the venerable age of the house, the windows were larger than those I have seen in many cottages of rural United States. We had two cow-stables, one had stalls for twenty cows with two standing in one stall, and the other could contain twelve cows and heifers and two horses.
That part of the house which was the barn proper and which we called "schuur" was used largely for the storing of hay, but it also contained the family carriage, the tilbury (which is a vehicle on two high wheels and with a seat for two persons), the work-bench, tools, harnesses, two hay-wagons, a churn-mill, two maize and lin-seed and bean mills, one horse-stable, spaces for calves, etc. The carriage and the tilbury were covered with big pieces of heavy muslin to protect them from the dust.
Some farmers had separate coach-houses, but we were not quite so fortunate. Only a small part of the floor of the schuur was brick-paved; the rest was of earth. The dairy contained the big churn, which, through the wall, was connected with the churn-mill in the schuur. There was also a large cellar for the milk.
Our living-room was big. Three of its walls were covered with white, glazed tiles, which were washed off once a week, and once a year the mortar between the tiles was whitewashed. The fourth wall was wainscoted; two wall-, box- or closet-beds and a china-closet were built into this wall. Beneath each closet-bed was a cellar with doors. The closet-beds had doors, too, which during the day were always closed, and behind the doors hung colored and flowered curtains. At night we opened one of the two doors each box-bed possessed, but the curtains were seldom pushed entirely aside, for fear of draft and cold. Even in the modern homes in Friesland one finds these unhygienic closet-beds.
The enormous fireplace was built against, and not inside, one of the tiled walls. The wooden base of the very wide chimney stopped a couple of feet below the ceiling; it was about three feet by six and ended in a mantelpiece. This mantelpiece was adorned with pretty plates and bowls of old china. But below the mantelpiece, over a slanting board, hung, in the winter, a sort of curtain about a foot in width; it was part cotton and part leather and on it were printed landscapes and people; in the summer a more pretentious curtain of printed muslin stiffly starched and accordion-pleated was fastened around the mantelpiece. Farther up, the chimney narrowed until it changed into a brick top on the roof. Inside the chimney, at about the height of the ceiling, were laid some yellow-painted boards so as to make the opening smaller and keep out the draft.
The floor beneath this big chimney was covered with an iron slab painted black. Against the tiles, some of which were decorated with pictures of fat cherubs blowing trumpets, stood a black-painted iron slab about three feet by four and rounded at the top. It must have weighed somewhere between two hundred and three hundred pounds. My father told that once his mother employed a young girl who carried the slab back and forth as if it were a toy. Years ago a fire burned on this hearth, but long before I was born stoves had come into use and increased the comfort of the people.
We washed the woodwork of our living-room once a week with warm soap-suds, and cleaned the windows inside and out, and the window-sills and the casements inside and out, with fresh water, so that they always shone as bright as bright could be. All the chairs, tables, wardrobes, etc., were polished on Saturdays. The ceiling, painted dark red, as was the other woodwork, and washed off every few weeks, was supported by very heavy beams. The paneled wall, above the box-beds, was decorated with a row of very large, heavy, blue and white plates of old chinaware, and some pretty, old, china bowls.
When I was a baby, the floor of this room was of green, glazed tiles; these being rather cold, even though always covered with matting and rugs, were later taken out and a wooden floor was put in. This floor was painted a glossy red. Each day we mopped it with a large, square piece of heavy cotton, called a "dweil" and a bucket of water fetched from the moat. After that, we polished it with wax. A large rug lay under the table, and this was taken up and shaken once a week. A strip of matting lay the length of the room in front of the paneled wall, and over this in front of the doors of the closet-beds and the china closet, as also in front of three other doors, lay small rugs. The latter were shaken each day; the matting was taken up and beaten as well as washed off on both sides with hot soap-suds every Friday. Of the Frisian housewives may truly be said that their work is never done.
The immense front-room was wall-papered instead of tiled, but its floor had retained its glazed tiles, which were covered with a carpet and over this lay one large rug and several small rugs.
The paneled wall, the doors and ceiling were painted light green. The chimney was even bigger than the one in the living-room. In the center of the room stood a mahogany table. This front-room was so cold and damp that even during the summer we often had to build a fire in the stove to prevent the furniture and other things from being spoiled. In fact, the whole house was very damp; shoes and clothes in the closets would become thoroughly mildewed and even the bread in a very few days would become thoroughly spoiled by mildew. We had to wage constant war against moisture.
Our house being so very old, in some places the ceiling was not strong. My younger brother, discovering such a "weak spot," just for the fun of it, as boys will do, jumped on it. Suddenly, to his great surprise, down he went, in a cloud of dust, and fell on the floor of the little cow-barn. Unlike the Katzenjammer boys, he needed no tools to break through a ceiling. Fortunately, he was not hurt.
Besides, the house was not only too small for us and our belongings, but the builder evidently had had only one idea in his mind, and that idea was to make it as inconvenient and unpractical as possible and to make housekeeping as hard and laborious as it could be made. When I was no longer a child, the whole house was taken down and in its place erected an up-to-date Frisian farmhouse, much larger and far more convenient than the old one; roomy and with many large windows.
It was no more than natural that we should possess many queer, old-fashioned utensils. We had several brass and copper kettles, and two brass lamps in which we burned strings of twisted cotton with rape-seed oil. One of these was a hanging lamp and was used in the cow-barns together with a modern lantern; the other stood on a brass foot and was used for carrying around in the house, being safer for that purpose than kerosene lamps. The rape-seed oil was kept in a brass can. All these brass and copper utensils were polished every Saturday.
One of the attics contained such queer things as high silk stovepipe hats, old-fashioned swallow-tail coats and knee-breeches of black satin ; large, old man's shirts of home-made linen; these things had once been worn by some of our an- cestors; there also was mother's hoop-skirt, worn by her when she was a young girl. We children always played with it, when, during the spring house-cleaning, it was taken down into the yard for an airing.
In the attic were also a couple of brass bed-warmers or warming-pans with long brass handles; and there was a bowl and pan which once had been used for the making of mustard. In our front-room we had quite a collection of dainty cups and saucers, teapots, creamers, sugar-bowls and such things; these had come down to us from former generations. We never used them. They were taken out of the shallow closet with its glass door only to be washed off once in a while by mother herself. Often we were offered high prices for them by travelling merchants, but my parents did not want to part with them for any amount of money.
Paper window-shades were unknown in Holland. We had wooden blinds for our windows; some on the inside, others on the outside. In the summer, we had lace curtains; in the winter curtains of a heavy cream-colored cloth, the bottom part of which was embroidered in a pretty design and edged with fringes or crocheted point-lace. The latter could be lowered or rolled up at will, but they were usually hanging a little below the middle of the windows, and the interior of the room was protected from the curious gaze of strangers by a row of flower-pots.
Outside, in front of each door, was a pavement of from three feet square to four or five times that size. These pavements, made of small, white bricks were scrubbed every day or once a week and kept as clean as possible. We were not allowed to walk on them with our wooden shoes. When we wore leather shoes, we first had thoroughly to rub them clean on rather thin, white, cotton "dweils"; one of which lay in a corner of the pavement and another in front of the door. And around these pavements one might see stationed the wooden shoes of all the members of our family.
For fuel we used mostly turf or peat, but in the winter also quite a lot of anthracite coal or coke. Turf, however, we always used for cooking. We had modern heating stoves, which, in comparison to their small size, gave a great deal of heat, took up little space, were very neat and of nice appearance, and were of no danger to little children. In these we could not burn peat.
We bought our turf from the turf-skippers. There were two kinds; one, soft, fibrous, brown, much longer than it was thick and wide. We called it long turf and it had been dug out of the soil. The other was dark blue, almost black, as wide as it was long and two or three inches thick. We called it hard turf and it was dredged out of pools, laid to dry on the fields and cut into squares. It did not ignite half so quick as the long turf, but it lasted much longer, and when it became all aglow, it was often placed in a small stone pot called "test" in a foot-warmer, or underneath old-fashioned copper coffee-pots; even kettles of water were heated and often food was cooked on these hot coals. They were very unhygienic, taking the oxygen out of a room and replacing it with carbonic acid.
We also had a "doofpot," which was a copper vessel with a brass lid. When after dinner or supper we no longer needed a big fire, we put the remaining hard coals, be they entirely or partly glowing, in this receptacle. The replacing of them in the stove, a few of the softest fibres of the long turf, and a burning match, were all that was necessary to start a new fire in a few moments. This contrivance was not only a great convenience, but it cut down household expenses. It prevented waste. The lid on the doofpot was very tight-fitting, so that not a bit of smoke could escape, nor could any air reach the coals to keep them burning.
The little foot-warmers called "stoven" and used so much by the women, were wooden stools perforated on top and one side was missing. Inside was a "test" containing a glowing hard turf. The men-folks and we children used foot-warmers that were much longer, flatter, and wider and covered with an iron slab. The one we children used was large enough for three pairs of little feet, and with room to spare. It was a very welcome article on winter evenings and mornings.
The house, yard, and orchard were surrounded partly by a moat or narrow canal and for the rest by a corral, a fence and a hedge of hawthorn. In the yard stood, part of the time, one or two high stacks of hay, for lack of space in the schuur; also a wooden outhouse for two cows and a brick pig-sty. On one side of the sty, by way of a lean-to, stood a brick chicken-run with windows, while the roost was over the sty. There was a wooden chicken-house in the orchard.
This orchard was bordered by rows of pollard willows, plane trees and poplars and ashes; it contained forty apple and pear trees and one plum tree, all for home use. The grass grew luxuriously among them, and there were also a small flower garden and rose-bushes. A large lawn was hedged off for the bleaching of the family linen. For each week, when the clothes had been washed and boiled, the white pieces were bleached on the grass for two days, after that rinsed and hung on a line or racks to dry.
We had a lot of tame ducks, and wild ducks joined them once in a while. As early as February we placed baskets of braided straw, in the shape of an hour-glass but with one end closed and rounded, the other open, in the trees; some in the pollard willows about four feet from the ground; others in the poplars and ashes about twenty feet from the ground.
To reach these baskets in order to gather the eggs, we had to climb on a ladder. Now, I have often told people in this country that our tame ducks laid their eggs in these baskets and they would laugh and say that tame ducks cannot fly. But our ducks did fly a little. They could fly high enough to get into these baskets. Sometimes chickens, too, would get into them. And sometimes the cats, but then there was trouble. And once in a great while a skunk, and then there was still more trouble!
De Groot, Cornelia. When I Was a Girl in Holland. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
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