Nappies and better worlds in experimental Amsterdam

She started her day-nursery life in the large office room of a professor. That was sociologist A. den Hollander. He had an authoritarian personality and could not cope with the democratization at the University of Amsterdam in the late 1960s.

He refused to teach anymore and left his office unused. With a group of assistants and students I encroached his room for our infants. Each long morning two parents too care of the children.

The nursery got a permanent status when the professor came to collect a book and found a bunch of undisciplined, shouting infants crawling over and under his desk and smelled some dirty nappies in one of the corners.

But, alas, the remaining authorities at the university wanted to get rid of us. Right in the city center of Amsterdam we found shelter in a monastery of nuns that ran out of nuns and needed some extra income.

The culture gap was not much of a problem. The aging nuns were tolerant and appreciated our attempts to behave. But the noise level produced by our infants became too much for the nuns in the otherwise so silent monastery.

With decency and determination they told us we were out again. That was in the summer of 1972.

One of the mothers knew another group of parents who had run a nursery under the bridge on Vondelpark but were also ousted. As a compensation, the municipality had offered them a place at the workshop of the park, next to a pathway called Kattenlaan. That is where I live now.

Their group was too small. They merged with us and we settled at the workshop for a long summer. In the construction shed on wheels we could keep some stuff and find shelter during rain showers. A large pile of white sand was the children’s paradise.

After bringing our children to the improvised nursery, many of us met again at the terrace of Groot Melkhuis café. We had horror conversations about stinking nappies and dream conversations about better worlds.

We even stayed at the terrace until it was time to pick up the kids again. Some returned to the terrace to let the children play in the bordering playground until tiredness turned into crying and it was time to go home.

In the evenings we had hippy-styled barbecues in the park, with the children running around in the grass and weeds clouds hanging in the bushes. At home we held meetings to brainstorm about new ways to raise children, communicate among parents and change wider society.

I loved the experimental, creative mood but was too pragmatic about organizational and financial matters for some. Friction between the goals of solidarity and idealism arose.

One of the fathers said he came from Yugoslavia and wanted to go there with a group of parents. I was to be the anthropologist explaining the Yugoslavian collective enterprises that had been started. But the father appeared to come from Amsterdam and the expedition was called off.

By the end of the summer the Vondelpark manager had enough of our nursery. For our daughter we found the nursery in the wooden barracks of the Theosophical Society, in the garden behind their former temple. There we stayed until our daughter reached pre-school age.

I don’t think she was much aware of the societal upheaval of those days. But from the nurseries she kept two girls as friends, likely because the parents got along quite well and agreed on a certain balance between dreams and nappies.