One of my very first memories is the family washing day. It must have been somewhen during the late 60s or early 70s of the last century.
My father lived with his wife’s and his two kids, my younger brother and me, together with the family of his brother, my uncle, his wife and my three cousins, and with my grandma in a big house. My uncle’s family on the ground floor, my father’s family on the first floor. My grandma’s living room was on the ground floor and her sleeping room with a very small kitchenette on the first floor. Altogether we were a big family of 10 people living in this house. Across a yard there was another smaller building with some rooms on the first floor used as carpenter’s workplace and a garage, a room for parking the family’s bikes and a laundry room on the ground floor.
One day every week this room became the focus of the whole family: in the very morning, when my uncle and my father were preparing themselves to go to work, my grandma got up and lit a coal fire in an oven in this room. The huge copper vessel above the fireplace was already filled with water, closed by a huge lid with a diameter of more than a meter and slowly heated by the fire. After almost one hour the water was boiling, the whole room filled with a mixture of steam and smoke from the fire, a very special kind of smell. The three women, all equipped with rubber shoes and rubber housedresses, carried big baskets loaded with dirty laundry. The big white parts like bed sheets and linen were put in the boiling water first, together with a good portion of washing powder. Then the women used some kind of long wooden pinchers and a masher to move the pieces in the boiling hot suds. During this process none of us kids was allowed to enter the room, as due to the boiling water, the hot steam and the fire the work was very dangerous.
After boiling in the suds the pieces were put in another tin vessel with cold clean water to rinse the soap, then the cleaned wet pieces were put in a second tin bowl which was carried to another corner of the room where an electric spin-dryer was installed. It was a very primitive machine, manly a vertical rotating cylinder within another bigger round container but already the first glimpse of modern life in the archaic way of doing laundry. One piece of the laundry after another was put in the inner cylinder, lid closed, and the rotation started with moving a long handle until an electric contact started the motor. If the piece was not put in the cylinder completely in balance the rotation soon got out of control, the whole machine started to lurch and roll and needed to be kept under control with the power of both arms. Sometimes even a second person was required to help or pull the plug from the socket to stop the devilish dancing machine.
The spin-dried laundry was the put in a plastic basket, which was then carried by two women to the yard. There they already had erected two poles and pulled a thick rope back and forth between some hooks fixed in the wall and these ropes. The big white pieces were clamped to the rope and then the loaded rope was lifted with some very long wooden bars, so the pieces were hanging completely in the air. Now the yard became a no-go area for us kids, too.
The fire had been extinguished in the meantime, the water had become slightly colder, just the right temperature to put the colored pieces in the suds.
The washing, spin-drying and hanging the pieces took the whole morning, when everything was fixed on the rope and flattering in the wind it was time for the three women to prepare lunch, but they were always carefully watching the sky for clouds which might carry rain or even announce a sudden thunderstorm. Not only once I remember the women shouting „It’s starting to rain“ while running in the yard again to quickly pick the pieces from the rope and keep them safe from a rain shower.
A few years later, after the family had bought the first washing machine the hard work became way more easy for the women, the fire below the copper vessel was incensed only occasionally and finally the weekly washing days were history, only vivid in the memory of the guy who had witnessed the hard teamwork of the three women when he was a small kid.
Image by planet_fox from Pixabay
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