We had three toilets in my
house when I was a kid.
Not because we were
rich. We weren’t rich. Not money rich. But we WERE toilet rich. We moved into a newly built 3-storey,
3-bedroom, 3-bog, terraced house in a leafy London suburb in 1976. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to
discover a toilet on each floor.
Exciting and perhaps rather pointless.
However, each lavatory had
a character of its own. The ground floor
one was used mostly by my brother and myself, because it was the most
convenient convenience when you came running into the house, having been
playing outside. (For those of you born
after 1985, I should explain that “playing outside” meant social interaction
and physical activity for prolonged periods external to your place of
dwelling.) It was a judgement call
whether we’d even bother coming home for a piss, as the local area was
well-populated with a resplendent array of foliage and other concealed “natural”
urinals; but if we were close enough to home and required a poo, then we’d hold
it in until the tortoise was chomping cloth and then make a late dash for that
lower-ground lavvy. (OK, fair enough, if
you’ve read other blog posts here, you’ll know that the occasional poo was
dealt with al fresco.)
Perhaps because our
parents tended not to use this toilet, my brother felt confident in applying
some cheap biro graffiti to the painted wall.
“Boy oh boy” and “Matthew, King of the Poos” it read; much like the
brown, personalised t-shirt I sent him for his 38th birthday. This graffiti was never washed off. Nor was the brown stain next to it, which was
the inevitable fall-out of an 8 year boy in a rush in a confined space.
The middle-landing toilet
was the family shitter, next door to the lounge and housing with it one of our
2 baths. The one we used. So, our mum kept this room spotless. You could eat Angel Delight out of that bowl,
it was so pristine. But scratch beneath
the surface of anything so suspiciously clean and glorious and you’ll uncover
some grimy truth. In this case, it was
the ubiquitous pair of heavily stained white y-fronts cast by either me or my
brother behind the sink. It tended to be
the sink, because we kept a wire coat-hanger behind the loo itself, an
essential tool in helping to “break up” anything that wouldn’t flush first
time. We were too embarrassed or scared
(or perhaps responsible) to risk dropping such a toxic item into the laundry
basket, for fear of cross-contamination, so this furtive strategy was demanded. Mum usually found them within days, but by
that point the offending soil had hardened like the lava over Pompeii and a blowtorch
and chisel were called into action with the next washing machine load.
Finally, this tour of my
childhood home’s triptych of turd-tanks takes us up to the top storey, the
twilight toilet. This room had no
external walls, as it was between the two upstairs bedrooms of this terraced
house and consequently windowless.
Therefore, it contained an extractor fan, which turned on automatically
with the light. A very noisy extractor
fan. Which would wake everyone if turned
on during the night. So we tended to
piss in the dark in this one.
Now the universal insanity
of having a carpet in any toilet is a problem magnified many times when you add
into the mix the challenge of pissing in the dark. You might use your knees to locate the rim of
the bowl, but (given that we were all cavaliers and not roundheads in my family)
there was no telling what angle that jet of slash would come out at. So, you’d start away and hear nothing. A terrible silence that meant you’d
missed. By the time you’d swung your
body left and right until you could hear the relieving sound of water upon
water, you’d already broadcast a litre of long-stored, night-time concentrate
all over the carpet.
We weren’t money
rich. We never replaced that carpet in
the 6 years we spent there. By 1982, the
fumes were enough to burn your retinas.
