HARTLEY NEITAI SAT, twice each day, on a latrine seat for the first 10 years of my life. The latrine was in a outhouse. It was disinfected with Jeyes. We did not have toilet tissue paper then, so my father tore assorted paper into squares and hung them on a nail in the wall behind both seats.
The kitchen was also part of the outhouse. There my mother baked the best bread pudding I have ever eaten in my life. The pan with the ingredients was placed on coals in the fireplace, and on top of the pan was a sheet of tin with coals. Sometimes she also baked cornmeal and potato puddings, but these were never my favourite desserts.
Some of the cooking, however, was done in the backyard. My father bought a cord of wood from a drayman, and what a "cord" was I have never known. Every Saturday morning he sharpened his axe and split one or two of the pieces of wood to enable my mother to stoke a fire which blazed in a triangle of three large stones. Over this fire she cooked beef and vegetable soup in a large iron pot which was our lunchtime staple on alternate Saturdays.
BATHED IN A BATH PAN
A bathroom with a toilet, and a kitchen, were not built at our house until running water came to our village. Before, we bathed in a bath pan in the yard. We could not use much water, as this was scarce. Our best baths then was when it rained in May and October each year. My brother and I took off our clothes and ran into the rain when it was pouring at its heaviest.
The rain also rolled on the roof into gutters which emptied the water into barrels at each corner of the house. So this was water which augmented the irregular supply we got from a well which served the village.
With running water also came electricity. My parents bought a refrigerator. We could now have iced water. My mother did not have to buy mutton and fish and beef each day anymore. We also stopped drinking water from a monkey jar, an earthenware urn which kept the water cool. And with a bathroom inside the house we no longer had chimmies under our beds, and a goblet and wash basin in our parents' room to wash our morning faces.
This, of course, was the village life in most of Jamaica. Towns like Kingston, Montego Bay, May Pen, Savanna-la-Mar and Spanish Town, had running water from long before I was born, and electricity beginning in the 1930s.
Because we had family and friends in some of these towns, we knew of toilets in houses and how to flush them. We also knew of showers in bathrooms which we enjoyed using, in the same way that we splashed ourselves in the rain in our village.
There were some country villages where these modern amenities were unknown, and so when the then Department of Housing built a housing scheme in southern Manchester sometime in the 1950s, purchasers refused to occupy them because they did not believe that toilets should be inside their homes. It took months of orientation by the Jamaica Social Welfare commission to convince them that it was sanitary.
It was, of course, not only the kitchens, bathrooms and toilets which were in outhouses. So, too, were many garages for motor cars. And there was a narrow walkway from the road to the verandah, and a wide driveway from a wider gate to the garage. These garage doors were usually closed, and interestingly many a household did not have a car. The garage was, in fact, a status symbol.
Today, we buy and use delicate toilet tissue, and instead of Jeyes we now use Dettol or Lysol which are more expensive and have a more pleasant odour.
Another reason for the increase in the cost of living.
