And so it was recently in country Victoria. Apparently the woman who was employed to service the rooms at the motel we were staying at, had given notice and left the day before we arrived. The young couple running the motel were trying to get the rooms ready as we drove up. By the next morning it became obvious that we were running out of toilet paper. A walk down to the office drew a blank as there was no one there. So I rang the mobile number on the door and left a message asking that toilet paper be taken to #16!
DD1 had some in her room so gave us half a roll. But when we went into town, just in case it was needed, I bought a single roll of paper; something you don’t see often in a supermarket these days.
Well we ended up not needing it as our room’s supply was replenished, so I brought it home.
So what about this memory? First of all, I’ll share another anecdote.
A few years ago, a friend in her early 90s gave me a written piece to read. After her great grandson had asked her whether she had had a pet dinosaur when she was a girl, she decided to write about her childhood and what life was like then. 
They weren’t flushing toilets though...
She wrote of lots of things that are so different to life today but one particular memory concerned ‘toilet paper’. I’ve used quotation marks because this paper bore little resemblance to what comes to mind at the mention of toilet paper 😉😜
Firstly Ailsa wrote about the backyard outhouse. These were still around here in parts of Brisbane when I was a girl.
Here’s a photo of a tract of public housing in Norman Park, Brisbane, in the 1950s...note the outhouses all in a row!
They weren’t flushing toilets though...
Yep! Those tins/pans had to be emptied and there were men and trucks who took the filled cans away and replaced them with empty ones once a week.
Now the quality of the paper didn’t matter as there weren’t any pipes that could get clogged. My friend wrote about how people used cut up sheets of newspaper as toilet paper; I kid you not! The cut up sheets would hang on a nail.
But as suburbs were sewered people had to stop using newspaper as it caused blockages in the system. Even when my parents had the outhouse before our suburb was sewered, because my dad was a fruiterer, he brought home bags of tissue paper which apples had been wrapped in and that was our toilet paper. So we had a hessian bag of screwed up tissue paper on a nail.
How embarrassing to be a kid whose family used tissue paper!! Wink wink!!
Maybe my mum was embarrassed too as when we were having visitors, she would put out a ROLL of toilet paper which she had purchased; just the one roll no multi packs then!
When the visitors left, she would remove the roll and put it away in a cupboard until the next time we had visitors. And our family would use our tissue paper from the apples again! Lol
When I related that story to my friend Ailsa, she laughed and laughed! And apparently she’s been sharing my story with lots of her friends. Life was tough when Ailsa was a girl in the late 1920s and I guess in the 1950s life still could be tough for my parents who were also growing up in the late 1920s.
