1960’s Out Side Loo

How often do we take for granted the comfort of the things we have in 2020? I remember my childhood and visiting my aunty and uncles with my Mam. I also have memories of living with my granddad in an old two-bedroom terraced house, the worst memory being the outside toilet (the loo to the younger readers). In some places we would visit, Mum would tell me beforehand, “Don't ask to go to the toilet; it's bloody filthy in there. You will catch something.”

My Mam’s two brothers, who were elderly, lived in a terraced house with such a privy—or loo, if you want to call it that. One day she went out back, and when I realized she was gone, off I went, after being told she was down the yard. Like most six-year-olds, I ran at 100 miles an hour, burst into the little brick house, to see a sight that has remained with me for 55 years. My Mum stood there, knickers—or bloomers—around her ankles, legs wide apart, having a stood-up wee. “Oh, heck, Mam! Why are you standing up? Just sit on the seat.” “No,” she said, “it is full of piss stains and shit.” Then came the one thing she dreaded me saying: “I want to wee too.” I was much too small for standing like her, so she somehow lifted me in her arms over the toilet, doing her best so I would not come in contact with the seat. Job well done.

At home, we were lucky. We had a pit house with a flushing toilet inside. We also had the softest toilet paper in pretty pink—not like my uncle's, who had the Lancashire Evening Post and the Daily Mirror on a string. The smell in that toilet was so strong it made me want to be sick. Imagine in the 1800s—yuk, stinky, lol. My dad told me how, when he was a little lad, at night you had to get up and go outside, slipping and sliding if it was cold and icy. Cold seat under the bum—good, we take so much for granted. He said they would take a candle and matches on a saucer to light the way down the yard. Also in the morning, knee-deep in snow, freezing your nuts off, trying to hurry the three other people out there in front of you. Sometimes the snow would turn yellow, if you know what I mean. If you were lucky, you got a piss pot on landing or under the bed. That was okay as long as you didn't share your room with lots of siblings; I suppose it could get full faster. The full pot meant out you go down the yard.

I would have been useless in those days; I am terrified of the dark. The consolation was everyone was more or less piss-poor, and there was nothing to take—no robber men out there, well, not many. They didn't need to spend lots either decorating as it had all been brick, so just a tub of whitewash, job well done in five minutes. Imagine what it was like in the 1800s when the end of the week came and the man came with his faithful horse to empty it. What a bloody stink then, the poor bugger walking around in the summer heat, with barrels or tubs of all that crap needing to be disposed of.

No wonder the death rate in those times was high.