The legs of the bed are in Bakelite caps to prevent an impression from being left in the sail. Small cares that testify to the care to keep everything intact. In the Sloëtjes house you enter a different time, the 1950s and 1960s, a time when taking care of things was important. “Every object was worth being treated with love and maintained, repaired if necessary. As an indictment against the consumer and disposable society, that’s how you can see this house,” wrote Dick Wittenberg in NRC (28-10). The terraced house in Hilversum, which has been more or less unchanged for almost 70 years, is now open to visitors.
The strange thing is that it is very easy to think that you are also stepping back into your own time. But my parents didn’t have a house like that with such furnishings, those heavy armchairs, a tea table, and neither did my grandfather and grandmother – did they? Do I remember exactly how the upstairs apartment on Amsterdam’s Krügerstraat was furnished? No, not exactly, but I do remember something of the atmosphere and maybe I will recognize it. A cupboard with crockery in it and where you can also find a tin box with a sweet that you don’t get at home – it’s made of candy and looks like a very small fried egg. The kitchen with the geyser above the tiled sink and the curtain below. My grandmother washed at the kitchen tap, the only tap in the house, and as a small child I watched with interest. She lifted her breasts to wash under them, my mother didn’t have those.
In the Sloëtjes house you have the feeling that the time machine exists, but at the same time you don’t really know where in time you are being transported. The memories keep coming back and make you remember things that you may not have known so closely. The telephone hung in the hallway, in a fixed place, I seem to remember, both the model and the location – but in our flat in Amsterdam-West there was no telephone in the hallway.
It is a wonderful sensation to walk through that house that son Henk Sloëtjes has left completely intact, even making some restorations here and there to preserve the way in which his parents lived in such a house, and so did other people. Perhaps Henk Sloëtjes also wanted to preserve his own youth – who never thinks back to the undiscoverable children’s rooms in which you woke up every morning, the light through the curtains (what kind?) the wallpaper on the wall (what pattern?), the sail (was there tarpaulin?) on the floor.
Fortunately, there are also books that are sometimes still exactly as they are on their own shelves. Just the idea that you would pick up another book from the shelf and settle in the living room seems like the height of comfort. No mobile phone to be seen anywhere, no unrest, just sitting engrossed in reading and when you look up you come from a completely different world, not just from the world of Diet Kramers The tough guybut also from that imagined world of your youth, which now in retrospect offers peace, security and perhaps a small bowl of peanuts.
Perhaps it doesn’t really matter to the time machine feeling which time someone is transported back to, as long as you get the feeling that you remember things, that you see things that you had forgotten, but that nevertheless retain the familiar fabric of be your inner world.