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.
12 comments:
Lots of memories there! Although one place we lived had a horse and cart that came around to collect the pans. The horse just walked along slowly and the guy collecting had to keep up with it.
We never had an outhouse, growing up we always had a toilet and toilet paper. However visiting relatives in Saskatchewan we did get to use an outhouse every summer (or every second summer).
Now, my children had never seen an outhouse until we went to the cottage for my Grandpa's birthday. The youngest was still in diapers, so no problem there, the oldest thought it was amazing not to get in trouble for going to the bathroom "outside". It was our middle child, our fearless daughter who had the problem. It seems she was afraid she would fall down the hole and never be seen again. I had to go in with her and hold on to her so she wouldn't "disappear forever".
God bless.
I don't recall that I ever lived in a house where all we had was an outhouse - but I was in Sydney in the 1950s and I suspect Sydney was a bit further advanced than Brisbane - thankfully!
My Aunt did have an outside toilet - though I think it flushed.
It was a place up in the Blue Mountains where I experienced a true outhouse - mmm can't say I was very impressed about using it.
And by the by - I never used a slate at school either. I think that was common in BNE in the 50s.
My husband and I come from different financial backgrounds. Every now and then he talks about how things were when he was growing up. An outhouse is always in the story. No TV, but listing to stories on the radio. He talks about so many other things that were not in MY childhood memories. Today I am definitely grateful to have toilet paper.
xx, Carol
What a wonderful story, Maria!
Did you have Izal in Australia Maria? It was so hard and scratchy - thank goodness for soft paper. And yes, my grandparents used squares of newspaper. xx
Love your story, especially your mom having special toilet paper for company and the photo of the modern homes with matching little houses in the backyard!
My parents grew up using outhouses and as a child i was pretty familiar with the fear of falling in because wherever we went camping, there was only the little house with the moon cut in the door. When Paul and i built our log home in the mountains of Appalachia in the 1970s we had an outhouse for years, one with an incredible view of the Smoky Mountains to enjoy while you “did your business”!
I remember the newspaper hanging on a nail. LOL! We used to have an outside toilet but it wasn't a thunderbox like my friends who lived on a farm had. How I hated staying at their place and having to go to the loo after dark. Thankfully we have all the mod cons these days and I doubt that young people would have any idea of how life used to be when we were growing up.
Such a fun story and memories. Thankfully we didn't ever have to use newspaper but we used Izal toilet roll which scratched your bottom...it certainly wasn't tissue.
I grew up in hawthorn so we had flushing toilets. Luxury!
But an aunt moved to Epping when it was a new way out of town suburb.
They had the man who would come and take away the dustpan! We all thought it was hilarious when I was young lol
Hello Maria, I enjoyed reading your post and, yes, you did well to find a single roll!
The way you describe the outhouse situation was exactly what my grandparents had. We'd stay for school holidays and it was the old newspaper squares on a nail... I don't have any recollection as to what I thought, probably a novelty in that case ;D)
Things were so different to nowadays for sure!
Good cheer to you
We had a two hole outhouse which was very convenient at night when my sister and I would go out together before bedtime. Having no electricity meant it was awfully dark out there and we were afraid of meeting coyotes on the way to do our business. The Sears catalogue hung in the outhouse and if we crumpled the paper well, Mom said we wouldn't notice that it wasn't toilet paper. Wrong! We used toilet paper when we visited our city living cousins.
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