My Armenian hosts mentioned that they had a gas water heater “just as it was in Saint-Petersburg in old times, do you remember?” I told them – not really, but actually, I do remember. It was very different from what they had in their house, so I thought that this was one of the fun facts I should share in my historical posts, because nobody would ever ask!
In this post, I described what my childhood apartment looked like, and in that post, I talked about the heating systems. To reiterate: you had to light a match to start a pilot in the water heater, and then you had to keep the water running; otherwise, the flame would die off. Since you had to light a match each time you needed hot water, you had to have “something” to discard the burned matches. This “something” was a tin mug which worked perfectly for that purpose as long as I remembered. Many years later, when I was about 14, I finally noticed “1915” scribbled on the side of the mug and realized it was an army mug from WWI.
There was a large washing machine in the bathroom; for the life of mine, I couldn’t tell the brand, but it was the size of a small table, and that’s how it was mostly used :). I hardly remember any time it was operating, and I am not sure whether it was not working properly, or at some point it broke and no one fixed it, or whatever the deal was. All I know is that it was there and not working, and I washed all my clothes in a washing bowl in the sink using the laundry soap.
The kitchen had no hot water at all. There was a gas heater as well, but I can’t remember why it was not used. To wash the dishes, I had to do the following:
- boil a kettle of water
- put a washing bowl in the sink
- pour some hot water from the kettle and mix it with cold water from the faucet to make it warm
- wash the dishes
- rinse the dishes with cold water
- put all the dishes back into a washing bowl and pour the remaining hot water from the kettle over the clean dishes
- dry the dishes with the kitchen towel
There was a gas stove in the kitchen (as I mentioned, the old wood-burning stove was not operational), but you still had to use matches to light a burner. For some reason, I was afraid of lighting matches until I was eight or nine years old, and my mom yelled at me for it. Upon returning from school, I had to warm up my dinner, and for me to be able to do that, my mom had to leave a burner on low since the morning (again, no idea why; my grandaunt was there, but that’s something in their relationships I was never able to figure out). I was very proud of myself when I finally overcame my fear and learned to light matches.
It’s good to remind myself how things used to be; humans become spoiled very fast and are miserable when there are problems with hot water, or when a washer breaks!
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
Hettie's Reflections 