In Friesland many kids and also the adults wore clogs, especially in the winter.\u00a0 I liked walking in clogs, no wet feet, in the snow we made long sliding paths, which was much easier with clogs than with shoes.\u00a0 Sometimes a thick layer of snow would stick under the clogs, than it was difficult walking, but we also tried to get as much snow as possible, that was a fun game.\u00a0 If you managed a lot of snow, you sometimes lost your balance and you fell in the snow.\u00a0 Of course that was not at all bad.\u00a0 Sometimes the top of the clog broke, a metal thread was wrapped around it then.\u00a0 But usually we got new ones pretty soon, black ones with some \u201cgold\u201d dots and stripes.<\/p>\n
At school we had to take them off, neatly lined up under the coat rack.\u00a0 Every child had their own hook for their coat and hat, or jacket and cap.\u00a0 That stayed the same the whole year.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember if ever there were clogs lost or exchanged.\u00a0 If you forgot your hat or scarf, that was no disaster, the teacher knew which child had which hook.\u00a0 In the clogs we wore black socks over our hose.\u00a0 Those socks had leather soles, to be stronger.\u00a0 The shoemaker sewed the soles under the socks.\u00a0 When I was a bit older rubber boots came into fashion.\u00a0 Those we could keep on in class.\u00a0 I really loved my black boots.\u00a0 A beret, a dark grey raincoat and my black boots.\u00a0 I looked like a boy, I loved that.\u00a0 The raincoat was made from an old coat of my father\u2019s. I really loved it, also because it had nice deep pockets to put my hands in.<\/p>\n
In those days there were many people who had no job, even if they had learned a trade.\u00a0 The tailor, who had made the coat, was also hit by the crisis [Translator\u2019s note: This was the same time as the Depression].\u00a0 We had a baker, whose assistant delivered the bread to the customers.\u00a0 One day he told my mother, that he had to leave his boss, because he couldn’t pay him anymore, but he had found a job with another baker.\u00a0 And now he asked my mother to buy her bread from the other baker.\u00a0 My mother did not really like it that he asked her that, but she also pitied him, as he also had a family to support.\u00a0 So she decided to buy one week from the one and one week from the other baker.<\/p>\n
I have come out a bit different than I planned, so now a bit more about the clogs.\u00a0 Some children in school had to walk really far, sometimes an hour or longer, and they had no bikes, and the sand path were very muddy after a rain, and the snow did not get shoveled, so sometimes these children had very wet feet when they arrived at school.\u00a0 Sometimes their clogs were even broken.\u00a0 They were allowed to sit a while near the big stove in the corner of the room.\u00a0 (There was no central heating in our school).\u00a0 The stove burned coke [Transl.\u00a0 note: a kind of coal], and the janitor of the school (Liewsma) had to light all the stoves early in the morning, because of course, it had to be warm when school started.\u00a0 It was a big job, dragging the big coal buckets from the storage bin outside behind the school to the classes.\u00a0 And a full bucket of coal had to be near each stove, so the teacher could fill the stove if necessary.\u00a0 Nowadays people have again wood stoves, so the children can understand how nice such a big stove in the room was.\u00a0 When it became early dark in the winter, the lights had to go on.\u00a0 These were not electric lights, but gas lights.\u00a0 Under the shade there was no light bulb, but a gauze \u201cmantle\u201d as they were called.\u00a0 They hung from long tubes, through which the gas ran.\u00a0 The gas cock was opened, a match was held neat the \u201cmantle\u201d and with a soft plop the gas ignited.\u00a0 It whistles softly and the light was a bit bluish yellow.\u00a0 If you pulled on a small chain, the flame became higher.<\/p>\n
In those days the children learned to write on a slate.\u00a0 At home we had a slate and slate-pencil, but just as I went to first grade they were no longer used.\u00a0 There were loads of them in the closets, but I don\u2019t remember what was done with them.\u00a0 I had received a beautiful sponge-box, that was a box in which you stored a wet sponge to clean the slate.\u00a0 But we did not need that anymore.\u00a0 Instead we had to bring an ink rag, with which we could wipe the crown pen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Friesland many kids and also the adults wore clogs, especially in the winter.\u00a0 I liked walking in clogs, no wet feet, in the snow we made long sliding paths, which was much easier with clogs than with shoes.\u00a0 Sometimes a thick layer of snow would stick under the clogs, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","tag-stories","column","onecol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dutchgenie.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}