Hygiene

Part 8
What I remember of my childhood and the sanitation of that time was that it was virtually non existent; the old terraced houses that we lived in had an outside shared toilet, which was non to clean. Toilet paper was unheard of for the lower classes, newspaper was the only thing we had; and sometimes not even that, there was no hot running water you would have had to boil a kettle for that; which people didn’t do. I remember that almost all the children of that time were pretty dirty; they even got put to bed in all their dirt, the saying was it’ll all come off on the sheets. Usually once a week it was bath night and all the kids in a family would be bathed in an old tin bath that hung outside on a nail in the yard; usually in the same water. Sometimes on wash days you would be put in the wooden poss tub as it was called, with the rest of the washing, I remember a cousin of mine lived opposite and we used to look over the rim of the tub while he sloshed around amongst the washing. Children in those days used to have a lot of head lice, just like children today, and a small tooth comb was a standard item then in all households; some kids used to have ring worm and a lot of us used to get worms, which meant going to the chemist to get a worm cake. Later when we moved to that country mining village we had midden toilets where you emptied your ash and household waste, sometimes you would be sitting there when the trap door opened; and the midden man would start to shovel your fresh deposit in to his cart. Rats where always around and people used to put down poison to try to kill them but to no avail, there was a man who had a Jack Russell he often came round and killed a few rats; his little dog was like lightning. It often makes me wonder how we managed without all the mod-cons we have today, kitchen roll, toilet roll, cling film, foil, and every thing we have at our disposal now. Soap was on the ration and it did not last long so we never bought toilet soap, we used to buy a block of Fairy soap which went a lot further we use to slice it into toilet size bars to wash with, Carbolic or Lifebuoy soap was preferred by some people; I liked the smell and you felt really clean after washing.I can’t remember now if you could get soap powder, I can’t remember seeing any I think it was all done by soap and scrubbing, Oxydol was the powder before the war but my grandmother used a blue dolly to get the clothes white. Sunlight soap was I remember the preferred washing soap by the women, but I never liked the smell, when we came out of the bath my young cousin and I would be all gleaming and clean until the next day when we would be doing what kids do best; getting dirty. There used to be another soap which wasn’t rationed it was grey coloured, it was called Lava soap but that was for washing floors, people did a lot of that then, they would always holystone their doorstep.Women in those times used to sweep the front of their pavement and gutter, this was usually an excuse to meet and gossip, there would be a group of them brush in hand talking about all the scandal that they new of.