Tag #133772 - Interview #78503 (Katalin Andai)

My grandfather had a street room, from which a so-called sitting-room opened. My cousins [the daughters of uncle Gyula] saw their suitors there. The sitting room had also a double glass-door, which opened onto the veranda. This was a big porch, L-shaped, onto which the kitchen opened from the longer side. There were two kitchens: a summer kitchen and a winter kitchen. The summer kitchen was closer to the porch, and I never saw anything going on in the winter kitchen, because I was there only in summer. In the back of the kitchen there were other rooms; those which had windows onto the porch were rather dark. And at the very end of the porch there was the outhouse. There was no water in the house, but there was a wash stand in every room with a washing dish and a pitcher, and a servant always made sure that there was fresh water in the pitcher. My grandmother had wonderful furniture. It was beautifully carved, and the year was on every piece, eighteen hundred and I-don’t-know, forty or something. If you stepped off the porch, there was a yard, and two tiny flower-gardens (enclosed with wire-fencing) opened from there, one to the street, the other one to the yard. And at the back of the yard there was the pigsty.