Trusting each other

Look at the picture at the top of this blog. It shows a part of a wall with a house number and a letterbox. A cord with a clothes-peg is hanging from the letterbox. It looks quite banal, but actually it is a very meaningful and also intriguing picture. For why is the cord with clothes-peg hanging from the letterbox? I don’t know how it was or is in other countries, but I think that most Dutchmen will know the function of the cord: It is connected with the lock of the door (left; outside the picture) and if you pull at the cord, you can open the door and you can go in (it works only for certain types of locks). The peg prevents that the cord slides back through the letterbox.

Cords hanging from letterboxes was something you could see quite a lot in the past (in the Netherlands, at least, but I assume also elsewhere). It made that an occupant of the house could easily go in and out without using a key. In addition, neighbours and guests you were expecting could use it, so I read on the Internet, but as far as I can remember this wasn’t common. As I remember, it was mainly used by children playing in the street, who could go in and out this way without ringing the bell each time, so that their mothers didn’t need to open the door. As for others, people don’t easily go into another house, for by doing so they enter a private zone. Therefore, neighbours and guests at least would ring the doorbell or knock on the door before going in.

As said, hanging a cord through a letterbox was much done in the past; I guess until about the 1970s. It was like laying a key under the doormat, so that you didn’t need to take it with you and everyone in the house, especially the children, could easily go in and out. This was also often done. Or you hung a key on a nail in the shed. Although you couldn’t see the key from the street, everybody knew that this was much done, so actually it was not different from openly putting a cord through the letterbox. Weren’t people afraid that burglars would go into the house? No. Everybody trusted that it wouldn’t happen. Indeed, criminality was rather low in those days so it seldom happened that this trust was violated.

However, times were changing. Criminality increased, and people got also more and more expensive possessions, so it became more risky to keep an outside door unlocked. Therefore, people no longer let hang cords through letterboxes, no longer put keys under doormats or hung keys on nails in barns. People trusted each other less and less and these practices disappeared.

Or so I thought. For a few weeks ago I walked through the town of Delft. And suddenly my eye was caught by this old, almost forgotten, scene. It wasn’t a quiet suburb where I saw it. It wasn’t in a back street. No, I saw this cord hanging from a letterbox in a busy street near the centre of Delft, where many people continuously were passing by. I thought that trust in other people in general had gone and that it had become restricted mainly to relations with family, friends and acquaintances, and to relations where you have sanctions (like often in business relations, for instance; and actually you cannot speak of trust then). Trust in general in people you had no relation with and that you didn’t know or had never seen or met had gone, I thought. I was mistaken. Trust in unknown people still seems to exist, or, if I am optimistic, maybe it has even increased. Trust does still exist, for people are still hanging cords through letterboxes, so that everybody can come in, knowing that it will not happen.

Older blogs on trust

- Every citizen a criminal, 12 September 2009

- Trust, 15 November 2010

- Trust (2), 30 June 2014

- “He that injures one threatens many” (Francis Bacon), 22 December 2014

- The cement of society, 12 June 2017

- The cement of society (2), 19 June 2017