Cherry Rogers relives the time her world changed with the introduction of a modern toilet, something we take for granted today…
“We lived at 50 Thetford Road and like a lot of people had an outside privy, with a visit from Jack Ollie with his honeycart for toilet emptying. I nearly said every day, but thinking about
it, it couldn’t have been daily because he did all of Brandon.
We eventually got a flushing toilet which was tagged on to the back of the main hallway, so basically it was still outside and only the door to it was inside, but was a vast improvement on what we had. There was no hand wash basin and no hot water, just a toilet. We still had to boil the copper for water for baths and laundry. My Dad would come home from the fields working in the dirt and chopping out sugar beet or working on the harvest fields where dust was flying, sometimes black with dust. Water was boiled for him to wash, we couldn’t heat enough for a bath every evening, it had to be filled and then emptied. You needed another bath by the time you had finished! But my Dad was never dirty and our house and washing was spotlessly clean, I can’t imagine how hard our parents and grandparents worked.
Anyway because we had to come down a dark winding stairway into a long corridor, through the living room to the front hallway, if the toilet was needed in the night a chamber pot was kept upstairs.
My mum and dad were on the council list for a house when I was born in 1944 and had no luck. My mum who was not backward in coming forward had badgered the councillors for years and was once chucked down the rectory steps. When I was about twelve, I came home from school one day and my mum was in a high state of excitement. She grabbed me and danced about a bit and said, “We have got a house!” She said it several times. She hadn’t been able to tell anyone all day, no mobile phone, so she was bursting with it. When my dad eventually came home, he just stepped into the yard and mum leaned out of the bedroom window and hollered at the top of her voice “JACK! WE HAVE GOT A HOUSE!” She then hurled the chamber pot out of the window. It broke into a thousand pieces about four inches in front of him. I do remember the handle being in one piece. My dad looked up at her and said very quietly, “Bloody sorft thing to do” and then we all fell about with laughter. What luxury when we moved into 29 Elizabeth Road.”