Tag #135706 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

The house in Bethlen where my paternal grandparents lived must have been quite a big house, five or six rooms, but they lived rather crammed because they had six sons and four daughters. The boys usually slept two in one bed, but they all left their parental home one after the other. The house also had a big garden with vegetables and big fruit trees. In the fall they usually made jam in huge quantities for the winter. Like poor people in general, they also made plum jam because they didn’t need to add sugar to that and this way they could save the sugar. Instead of putting bacon on the bread, they spread plum jam thickly on it. As I learnt from Aunt Margit, my father’s younger sister’s recollections, my grandmother loved flowers very much and she had a most beautiful flower garden. I think that they always had one or two servants around the house because they had many children. General laundry was a reoccurring event every month, and it wasn’t an easy job to do a general laundry for twelve people. During this time the whole household was upside down, and they hired some women to help with the laundry. My father was fluent in Romanian, so I think that apart from having had many Romanian friends as a child, he must have had some Romanian employees as well.