Toilets of My Childhood

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 38^th 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.