Indoor plumbing (from my mother’s stories)

I remember very well that in Drachten we did not yet have running water, but we had a pump.  A copper pump inside and a big wooden pump outside.  You had to swing the handle back and forth and then the water appeared.  That was real water, right out of the ground, without all the chemicals that are now added to the water.  But it could happen that in certain areas of the Netherlands the water was not quite right, and people had a lack of certain needed chemicals.  A well known example was an enlarged thyroid from lack of iodine.  When that was discovered, they started adding iodine to salt, which improved the health of many people.  Many people had bad teeth because of a lack of fluoride.  All that has improved a lot.  And the piped water gets checked for quality all the time.  One day we also got indoor plumbing.  Days in advance big pipes were put into the streets, and after that smaller pipes to the houses.  We had a rather large front yard, and a ditch was dug straight it, in which the pipe was laid.  Straight through the snowdrops that were flowering there.  I was very upset, the snowdrops were all gone.  In later years they never came back.

We also had no toilet with running water. We had an old-fashioned privy, with a cover, that was the way it was in that time. At school too there were privies. If you had to go during school time, you had to put your hand in the air and ask “Teacher, may I go in back?” Sometimes you were allowed, and sometimes you had to wait until recess or until after school. Because my mother always made sure that I went “in back” before I went to school, I never had to go during school. My mother didn’t want me to go at school, because she was afraid of infections. But we did get worms anyway.
At home the full barrel was exchanged twice a week for an empty one. This was done through a door in the outside wall. Two men of the town sanitation department did that job together, and we didn’t really notice when it happened, just a bit of noise. It was only annoying if you happened to be in the privy. It happened to me once, the cover was pushed up. I couldn’t get off fast enough, and panicked I heard the noise under my feet. Fortunately the exchange was quick, the men left and I could go on, albeit shaking. (This is really a piece of “the old times,” when things were different!)