Column Pia de Jong: The messy time
Pia de Jong obtained her bachelor's degree in Dutch language and literature in 1983 and her master's degree in psychology in 1989. Her debut novel Lange dagen (Long Days) won the Guiden Uil public award. She has published several other novels, including the memoir Charlotte.
A jump off of the deep end without a life jacket. That is how the student life felt which I found myself in in 1979. A time which had its own rules, if there were any rules in the first place. My mentor was a boy with shoulder-length hair who was entering his 10th academic year. He had just travelled through Afghanistan for a year, "with an old VW van", he told with a nonchalant attitude, as if he was talking about going camping for a weekend.
As a decent Catholic girl from the south, the first activity of my mentor group is still fresh in my memory. Before we were told anything about studying, we headed off to the COC. There, senior years advertised the love 'from the wrong side'. Woke was still very far away. It was an expressly recommended, correction, a necessary to explore variant on the menu of our sexuality.
And that was even before break week had started. Shocking, but endlessly fascinating were the stories we heard about it. Students and lecturers were doing it with each other there, in all kinds of combinations. In a full dormitory, no less. Bishop city Utrecht as Sodom and Gomorra, that was something my parents could not have suspected when they forbade me from going to the immoral Amsterdam.
Pretty soon, nothing surprised us anymore. Not even when after a party, a lecturer invited the best-looking student, who risked missing the last train, to 'sleep over' at his place. The expression me too meant something very different at the time.
Graduating was far beyond the horizon. I cannot remember anyone mentioning the word cv even once. It was not needed anyway, because we from the 'lost generation' – oh, the irony – would all be unemployed anyway.
If you were doing anything besides your studies, it was purely for fun. And it was often even the opposite. Fomo? I did not know that, because there was not much to miss out on. Nor were our lives instagrammable. All my photos from that time are out of focus or overexposed, by the way.
Luxury was a tartarty at the butcher's. You were given your mother's old bicycle, you boiled water in a whistling kettle and your clothes were washed once a week at most. The shower in my student building: a garden hose which ran from the tap to a plastic bathtub. When I splashed around in it with my lover a bit too wildly one day, it fell through the floor, much to the landlord's dismay.
Everything was not better before. And not worse either. It was mostly messier. Transgressive behaviour, social safety, mental well-being, binding recommendation on academic advancement regarding the continuation of studies - students and lecturers were still far away from ever hearing of those things.
But oh well, everyone from the past scores a failing mark for the exam of today.