Would You Pee Down a Hole?
We had to — back in my childhood days
Goodness me - how life has changed in the 67 years since I’ve known it.
It feels like I’ve slipped into another dimension, one where technology rules all and convenience is the norm.
I was born in 1953 in the North of England. My mother gave birth at home in a small two-up, two-down house. It literally had only four rooms — two bedrooms, a kitchen/living room and a ‘posh’ front room which was rarely used. It was the end house on a terraced street alongside a string of similar houses; all joined as if they were a single building, with internal walls dividing one house from the next.
You’ll notice the lack of a bathroom. I’ll come to that later.
The house had no heating of any sort, apart from a fireplace in the living room. I remember the smell of charred paper and wood as my mother tried to get the fire to light. On chilly winter mornings, no one wanted to get out of bed. In the coldest weather, ice crystals made crazy patterns on the window panes — on the inside! So you had to get dressed in a hurry.
We used the local shops which were close by. There was no such thing as a supermarket. Dad would wander down to Doris’ bakery to buy an uncut loaf every day. My sister and I each had a thick slice of it toasted for breakfast. I don’t recall having a toothbrush or a morning wash, which is gross, and off we went to school.
In those days, you walked nearly everywhere. We didn’t have a car. Most people didn’t. Our school was about five minutes’ walk away and very small with around 120 pupils crammed into three classes. Lessons were basic ‘chalk and talk,’ and juniors learned their alphabet and easy sums.
As we progressed through school, we were taught History — in the correct order, so it wasn’t confusing; we learned all our times' tables by rote; we knew Geography as a study of the world and its different countries, products and societal structure, not by counting how many cars passed along a certain street in half an hour — and to be honest, it was a decent education.
Producing legible and neat handwriting was another skill — quite difficult to master with a nib pen dipped in ink. (Gosh, we were almost in the Middle Ages when they used feather quills.) Blots occurred frequently, and our ink monitor would scurry around, filling the small inkwells at the end of our desks.
Back home, our food was simple and quite plain — though in my case, as my parents were Italian, it was always either pasta with peas or pasta with beans. Other households might prepare a stew with dumplings, Shepherd’s Pie or Toad in the Hole. Most people had never heard of ‘foreign food,’ so Pizza, Chow Mein, Curry and Kebabs were unknown. The only take-away meal was fish and chips.
In good weather and especially during the Summer, we would play out on the street, unsupervised, until darkness fell. One of our favourite games was rounders — a kind of baseball. We’d mark our bases with cardigans or sweaters on both sides of the street. As there were so few cars — sometimes none for hours on end — playing in the road was safe enough.
We might come home dusty or a little sweaty, but we only had a bath once a week. The bath was an oblong vessel made of tin, about three feet in diameter across the longer length, and it hung on a wall outside. Sunday evening was bath time. My sister and I sat in the tin bath, and Mum scrubbed us with a flannel and carbolic soap. While we were drying ourselves, she would have to heave the bathtub outside and empty it down the drain.
What did we do for entertainment since we had no TV?
Jigsaws. Dominoes. Card games. Radio. For children, there was one radio programme I loved. It was called ‘Listen With Mother’ and consisted of fifteen minutes of songs and stories for children. I used to cry at the end of each broadcast.
Very few people had a washing machine. Washing was done by hand in a large tub in the backyard. The yard area was tiny — about ten feet by eight — and completely paved. We had no plants or any semblance of a garden.
The water for the tub was heated on the stove. Dirty clothes were thrown into the water along with soap flakes or sometimes rubbed with a bar of green soap. A thick wooden stick was used to pound the washing. It was then rinsed and squeezed of excess water by being fed through a mangle — a contraption consisting of two rollers manipulated by a handle. The washing would then be hung on the line to dry.
Now, this backyard contained an essential convenience.
Lurking in one corner, in a brick building around three feet square, stood the long-drop toilet. Essentially, a hole in a horizontal plank of wood covered a shaft around six feet deep connected to the sewers. But, unfortunately, we had no such thing as toilet paper.
Instead, torn-up pieces of newspaper hung on a nail had to serve the purpose. No washbasin, so we didn’t wash our hands after going to the toilet. Again, it’s gross to think of this now, but we knew no different, and it didn’t seem to affect any of us adversely.
No one wanted to go out there at night, though, especially in Winter, so we each had a potty under our beds if we needed a pee. Of course, it would then have to be emptied into the long-drop next morning.
Now every house has two or three bathrooms, a washing machine, a dishwasher, computers, mobile phones and a TV in every room.
It’s a different world and better in many ways, but there is something attractive about that old simple life that still appeals.
