Dirty clothes were piled up for the designated washing day, always a Monday. A formidable task compared to the push button approach of today. Then Mum and later Jacqueline stood behind the tub on the wooden stand slivering a bar of Sunlight soap into the hot water, the rubbing can start.
Not such a simple procedure as we didn’t possess a washing machine. The large galvanised tub was fetched from the shed and placed on a 3-feet high wooden stool. In the meantime three kettles of water were lustily whistling their boiling tune on the hot kitchen stove. If the weather were kind the washing would be done just outside the backdoor on the paved area, otherwise it was make shift in the kitchen.
I can still hear the sound of Mum’s hands going up and down rubbing the clothes over the ribbed surface of the washing board. Often we had to give her a helping hand with pushing the larger pieces like bed sheets though the hand operated clothes wringer.
The new sheets were very starched and had to be first washed so to get rid of the ‘nieuw pap’, the starch.
After the rinse all by hand, the clothes went through the wringer, again handdriven. It took most of the day to get through all this. And we haven’t mentioned the drying bit, very cumbersome in the capricious Dutch climate.
Easier to understand now, why mothers grumbled a lot when kids rough their clothes.
Bathing on Saturdays must have been under the category of hard labour. Having no bathroom, a large zinc tub was put on the granite kitchen floor. Several kettles were boiling on the stove while one by one we undressed to step into the tub filled with water. The first one had a fresh clean start, but the next one had to put up with soap scum from his or her predecessor. The third person really copped it sweet, unless Mum or Dad decided it was time to refresh with some more hot water. We really felt scrubbed clean, glowing warm in our laundered pyjamas, ready for a dive into bed.