In the decades after the war, many houses still had outside
toilets – not in addition to a WC on the inside of the house, but as the only
one. What did that mean? It meant that you had to go out of the back door and
go to a little room which was either attached to the house or, in some cases,
at the bottom of the garden. To keep it nice and fresh, the door usually had a
6” (that’s 15 centimetres) or greater gap at the top and the bottom; there was,
of course, no heating in this little room; if you were lucky, you had a light.
If it was winter, you shivered as you did what you had to, comforted at the end
by the not as good as now toilet paper and, having finished, if it was raining,
you might be rewarded by a soaking on the way back to the house. I think it was more likely to be referred to as the outside lavatory, or lav or sometimes even privy.
1 comment:
For the first five years of my life we had an outside toilet at the top of the garden, two toilets shared by a terrace of four houses. At night we'd use a bucket and then dad would empty it in the morning. It was a brick built block with a hinged wooden seat and the houses took it in turn to empty them.
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