the outside loo

Once a normal part of the ordinary working class household, the outside loo was a part of our lives that has many memories attached for me. There are still thousands of little brick or stone built outhouses standing at the bottom of the yards of the small terraced houses around the country. They are very much associated with the hard working Northern towns and cities. I suppose they were in some ways a more hygienic and healthier arrangement than the soft option of modern housing with centrally heated bathrooms that germs and bacteria probably thrive on, and that we all enjoy the luxury of these days. The lead pipes and overhead water cistern did tend to freeze up in winter, though a bit of hessian wrapped around the pipe and a small paraffin lamp glowing away in the corner, kept the temperature just enough above freezing point to stop it. The lamp would also provide just enough light so you could see where you were peeing too. When there was severe frost it was a common sight to see icicles hanging from the overflow pipes outside. We would snap them off and mess about with them. Sometimes we would suck them like iced lollies! Kids huh?

There was a small obscure glass window in the door of our toilet, which let enough light in during the day. I remember finding numerous faces and figures lurking in the pattern whilst sitting there “waiting for something to happen”. My favourite was a Red Indian with full head-dress. I somehow felt that he was watching over me in a sort of protective way. The outside toilet seemed quite a threatening place to a young child. I was always slightly uneasy at the thoughts of large spiders lurking above me. Constipation was a rarity for me.

Another strong memory was the shear logistics of going for a poo. I used to wear little short trousers held up by a pair braces, as most boys did then, (although I think I was pretty lucky in having a pair of Dan Dare Braces). In winter I would have a jumper over the top, which meant that I couldn’t drop my braces down without taking it off first. There was nowhere to put your jumper in the toilet so it had to come off first whilst still in the house. The downside to that was, first it announced to the rest of the family that you were going for a poo and secondly it was damn cold in winter.

Toilet paper was something of a disappointment then, thank God for Andrex and the soft, multi layered, absorbent stuff we enjoy now. In those days it was usually Izal or Bronco, a sort of tough, greaseproof type of paper on a roll that smelled of disinfectant and absorbed nothing. It merely spread things around but at least your finger didn’t go through the paper! Often we would run out of it and have to put up with torn up pieces of newspaper hung on the back of the door. That was even worse than Izal as the print would rub off onto your bum. At least there was some reading material to hand for those long visits, except you only ever got a quarter of the story.

Having no inside toilet was a problem at night so most people would have a “gerry”, “Po” or “Gazunder” under their bed. The gerry was a sort of gigantic porcelain teacup that was really only intended for peeing into but also proved useful especially if there were young children in the house. As every parent can testify to, they have a tendency to want to throw up or get unexpected bouts of diarrhoea at the most unearthly hours of the night, so the gerry under the bed was quite a handy thing to have. One memory that still lingers is finding a cardboard circle, about a half-inch in diameter, floating in my gerry one morning. It was out of the top of a bottle of “Buttercup Syrup” (a popular cough medicine that was ever present in our house over winter). I remembered my mum giving me a dose at bedtime and I was most puzzled as to how I could have possibly swallowed it without realizing and even more puzzled at how I had passed it without doing myself some serious injury. On reflection in later years it became obvious it had simply dropped out of the bottle and into the gerry.

On the whole I am glad of the cosy bathrooms we have now to perform our ablutions, as they were a mixed blessing at best. Let’s consider some other final advantages though. They were more private than a bathroom, standing at the bottom of the yard you could let rip with as many loud farts as you needed without the fear of embarrassment from being overheard from your family. The postman may have had the odd fright occasionally mind. They were well ventilated (draughty as hell) so there was no need for those aerosol air fresheners that simply announce the fact that someone has just had a good clear out and probably account for the hole in the ozone layer. They took little in the way of decorating, the occasional slap of whitewash on the rough walls usually sufficed to freshen it up and clear out the spider’s webs.