With the exception of one omniscient Ulsterman, I do not suppose regular readers of this column will have seen the remarkable old Victorian urinals in the Gents' lavatory at the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle, County Down. Talk about grand designs; these sleek and shiny marble architectural features, had they been on view three thousand years ago, would have competed with the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Statue of Zeus at Olympus for a coveted slot in the Ancient World's wondrous list. They took your breath away; as you marvelled at their impact, you quite forgot why you had visited that facility in the first place.
We will return to urinals but meanwhile what of priests' holes and by now you will understand that this is set to be a somewhat earthy blog. I had little direct experience of these intriguing hideaways for recalcitrant, hunted Roman Catholics until we went to Gordonstoun which boasted three in the main building plus an oubliette -- a below ground, damp, single stand-up gaol where errant tenants of former times learnt a bit of respect for a cruel master with wizardly powers. The priests' holes themselves -- marvellously sinister for the young of the current age -- were full of character and pungently odoriferous so they suited a boarding school environment admirably. We discovered the skeleton of a cat under a trap door which had not been opened for fifty years -- had the poor creature perished there or had it been carefully positioned as part of a mystical superstitious rite -- shades of the Knights Templar perhaps and their hallowed Baphomet. It might just be the sign of an advancing civilisation that we no longer need priests' holes or not for religious purposes anyway.
And how about churches? Much is known, written and appreciated about the glorious monuments that are cathedrals but what of the delightfully diminutive places of worship? If you're looking for your inner soul or the God who is equipped with a still small voice as well as blooming grandeur, you could go to Culbone in Somerset which claims to have the smallest ecclesiastical edifice, although this is contested by the tidy little Lullington Church, not far from the Long Man of Wilmington [ does he carry ski poles or has he been artistically framed? ] and celebrated by Dirk Bogarde [ how he hated the soubriquet ' matinee idol ' ] in his charming autobiography A Postillion Struck by Lightening. Sometimes chapels in graveyards do the atmosphere business even better; that at Lelant in Cornwall and now a visitor centre is a good example and, although it is not everyone's cup of witches' brew, the Michael Kirk at Gordonstoun has an atmosphere seeming to entice and entrance those looking for one of the signposts in life -- birth, marriage or eternal rest.
Some of the smallest rooms you will see are the old fashioned telephone kiosks, now almost redundant with a few imaginatively given over to libraries or floral displays. However, not long ago I found myself in an operational phone box in Woodstock [ Oxfordshire not the setting for the ' three day ' festival in 1969 ] and there reassuringly in time honoured fashion were piles of cards advertising various services. I noted ' The Light of the World ', complete with Holman Hunt's picture, nestling between the scantily clad ' Lady of the Night ' and a 24 hour taxi service. Now what do these three have in common, I mused? The Light of the World pronounced, slightly pompously some might say, ' Behold I stand at the door and knock ' and I daresay the Lady of the Night knew something about knocking, while both of them might occasionally require the service of a nearby cab. After all, both Lady Godiva and the Good Samaritan would have been in big trouble had they not had access to a reliable horse.
Then there's my shed in the garden, a spare bedroom in extremis and a hideaway for composing whatever you call these ramblings. I wanted to name it after the Long Room at Lord's but boxes of face masks, packages of poo bags and countless files to do with school governance not to mention twenty one years' worth of speeches and thank you letters from Gordonstoun [ it must be almost time to consign that lot to the tip ] mean that I am now sitting in a latter day version of Room 101 [ George Orwell's original not the glitzy TV version ]. The redeeming features are the pictures; those delightfully crafted pictures by Willow and Clarrie and two photographs of boys about the same age as they, taken in bombed and burning housing estates in Belfast in the mid 1980s. The latter would be about forty now and I hope they made it through the first half of their lives reasonably unscathed; what a fearful lottery it all is. Whatever happens, look after the young ones, not because they're the future of humanity, although they may well be, but because they have a right to a decent life. And meanwhile I'll try to remember to thank God for very large mercies and never simply keep calm and carry on [ that's such a dull way of life ] unless I'm listening to a Test Match commentary.
' The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus '. You will know the opening words of The Acts of the Apostles [ written by St Luke and referring his old friend Theo to his recently written Gospel ] and, when you're doing this blog thing, you have to be careful not to repeat yourself. Almost a year ago, when writing about prep schools, I mentioned some of the stranger names given to the lavatory although I did not mention the requirement from my own young schooldays and still in practice when I started teaching, for all pupils to go in a particular order to a particular lavatory after breakfast to complete their business for the day. The young then had to return to the main schoolroom and demonstrate by tick or cross whether they had been successful. It all rather depended whether this part of your existence was dominated by supply or demand. I do remember in the late 1960s, at the height of the Beatles' era, a pupil named Michael, in clearly satisfied excitement, returning to scribble ' Yeah, Yeah, Yeah ' right across the middle of the beautifully designed chart of lavatory behaviour. Anyway, leaving the previously mentioned esoteric veniam and foricas behind, you could employ ' toilet ' [ slightly frowned upon in sophisticated society alongside settee and serviette ], lavatory or loo but I settled on the smoothly pretentious ' small room '.
And how much time do you spend in the small room, when on average we are in bed for 26 years and three months. And what else do you do there? If you went for a sit in Pompeii, or even more Hampton Court, you would find up to twenty stations in a line on a bench without doors or partitions so you were well kitted out for conversation. At Winchester College we had partitions but no doors; this apparently reduced nefarious activities and made essential cleaning more effective. Some would have you believe that it was these and other similar aspects of a boarding school preparation for the world that enabled the 1980s hostages held for years in the middle east to survive relatively unscathed; Ah, that's what you pay those exorbitant fees for.
One could read of course. In 1960 behind one of the cisterns in my boarding house at school was a copy of D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, recently published following twenty years of being banned for obscenity and a celebrated court case. Sixty years later I recently gave that copy, which had started its life in such interesting circumstances, to one of the next generation as a birthday present. Inevitably it has a somewhat soiled look about it but it is a first edition so should be worth something one day.
Branching out a little, you can spend time philosophising; after all, old man Diogenes did a lot of that in a tub or be done to death as the French revolutionary Marat was in his bath. Or you can just pass peacefully away. Evelyn Waugh returned from church on Easter Sunday to his home at Combe Florry in Somerset. As a staunch catholic he was pleased to have taken communion and he was ready for anything. He went into the downstairs loo and he expired without fuss although I daresay he might have been sorry to miss the excellent Sunday roast that awaited him. It is strange to ponder incidentally that three of the towering artistic figures in the middle of the twentieth century all died relatively young; Waugh at 62, Benjamin Britten at 63 and W H Auden at 66. What might they have achieved if given a few more years? Perhaps nothing.
But back to the urinals and enjoy them gentlemen while you can. With so many genders to cater for nowadays, there is a move to multi-sex cabinets for all and the ranks of men standing in a line may soon be a thing of the past. And when they go, you will no longer be able to ask yourself ' Do I look up or down? Shall I start a conversation or not? '. I have three hugely significant observations on this topic. For the first the scene is the Oval Cricket Ground in August 1970 for the Fifth Test Match between England and the Rest of the World -- a tour by South Africa having been cancelled [ well done young Peter Hain ]. It was the after tea period and two of the greatest left-handed batsmen the world has seen -- the gracefully effortless Graeme Pollock and the stylishly aggressive Garry Sobers -- are together, putting on a brilliant 165 runs in two hours. Between overs I went to the loo and there, a little way from me, was a giant of a man; I suspected he was of West Indian origin. He was standing a distance from the porcelain, his head was tilted back and he was pouring the contents of a can of beer into his mouth from some distance above. At the same time he was doing at another part of his anatomy what one lines up at the urinal to do. The result was what appeared to be liquid entering and leaving his body simultaneously, a study in perfect perpetual motion. That day there was exquisite harmony on the field of play and in the Gents' loo.
Secondly, I wonder if you remember a well known sketch from The Frost Report in the mid 1960s, with Ronnie Barker, flanked by John Cleese and Ronnie Corbett, defining the notion of class difference ' I look up to him, because he is upper class but I look down on him because he is working class '. At about the same time there was now forgotten guidance on discerning these important distinctions from how gentlemen went about the delicate business of micturation at a urinal. If the exponent had his hand in V formation [ thumb and fingers ] over his member [ is that a permissible term in polite society? ] in an apparently shielding [ a good word for 2020 ] position, he was working class. If his hand was supporting the said body part from underneath, that was a classic reflection of the middle classes. If he stood nonchalantly doing his business with hands on hips or in pockets, he was definitely upper class. So now you know, if you didn't before, and this too [ loo or Cleese version ] may be a sign that we have shuffled forwards a few inches in my lifetime.
Thirdly, there was an aspiring politician -- let us call him Gerald -- who produced a surprise by winning a by-election in Kent in 1962, bringing hope of yet another Liberal revival in the House of Commons. He was not an MP for long before he succeeded to the title of Earl of Suchandsuch but it was long enough to sample the small room in his end of the Houses of Parliament. [ Incidentally I have had occasion to use both those facilities and those in the House of Lords and I recommend the latter ]. One of Gerald's distinguishing features was that he had only one testicle [ shades of Hitler having only got one .... whatever ]. There was another Member of Parliament at that time who miraculously had been born with three testicles. He was wont to sidle up to fellow MPs in the urinals and surprise them by saying ' Do you know, we've got five balls between us? '. He tried this on with Gerald who calmly replied ' Well, here's my one, so let's see your four '.
I am tempted to tell you about my brief spell of membership of the Liberal Party but that will have to wait as I am conscious that any ladies who embarked on this blog may have given up or died in the attempt to finish it as there has been nothing in it for them. I do apologise and will rectify this now by asking myself the question; Have you ever been into the public lavatory of the opposite gender? The answer is, I regret, positive, three times in fact and all occasions have been abroad. I am not a strong linguist and find the distinctions between Ladies and Gentlemen in 73 different languages very hard to fathom and, as far as those silly little blue pictures are concerned, what am I to make of a one-legged nondescript person wearing a kilt?
A young man was seeking the closet;
'Ah, here's the Gents' entrance' or was it?
Sharp looks he received
From ladies most peeved,
Meant no time to leave a deposit.
Except once and only once; that was in Rio de Janeiro in the middle of the night when no-one was around. The Ladies loo seemed much more salubrious so I just got on with the job.
One of the challenges with lavatories is that they need to be cleaned regularly and frequently -- the latter particularly so if they are experiencing hefty use in a communal setting. When I was a Housemaster at Sevenoaks School in the 1980s, it was excellent that the cleansing process happened every weekday morning from Monday to Friday [ and very expertly done it was ] but no purifying took place from Friday to Monday, three complete days in the lives of an extended family of fifty five active young people. I pointed this out as a health matter to higher authority but the receiving ears were strangely deaf so direct action was needed. I decided that it was my responsibility to undertake the necessary beautifying with brush, cloth and sundry liquid agents.
The problem was that I was also the School's Registrar, responsible for admissions and Saturday morning, the most suitable toilet cleaning opportunity, was also the prime time for prospective parents to visit the School. After a time the Headmaster noticed my tardiness every week and asked my associate what had happened to old Mr Efficiently Punctual. She spilt the beans over my purification work and I confirmed this to be the case. Within a month all boarding houses had their lavatories cleaned on a Saturday morning -- result, as they say!
Mind you, the move wasn't universally popular. Those asked to come in to do the work were not always ecstatic and the Finance Department didn't like paying them. However, the degree of disapproving sentiment didn't come near the level of reproach expressed and felt on three occasions when the student body sharpened their knives in loathing: the abolition of Morning Run and Penalty Drill at Gordonstoun in 1990; the complete banning of football [ even talking about it ] at St Wilfrid's Prep School in the summer of 1970 when England were defending the World Cup in Mexico -- the young ought after all to be developing their skills in the glorious game of cricket in every spare moment; and back to Sevenoaks in 1988 for the alteration of the time of lunch for 6th Formers to suit some sort of permanent lesson change. This was only a fifteen minute shift but it had the devastating effect of depriving that generation of the lunchtime showing of a new TV soap opera called Neighbours. I am afraid these dictatorial decrees have not been forgotten.
Forming sound habits is an important part of life and, when I was assailed by the blessed state known as retirement, I knew where my future perfect lay. The prime feature of our diminutive house in Oxford is that it has a small room on each of three floors and every Saturday morning -- for old time's sake -- I take up the brush etc and I set to work with a will of steel and an elbow full of grease so that, even if I cannot see my reflection staring back from the newly burnished bowls of glory, by gosh they know they've been polished.
And when I line up at the gates of pearl and Peter asks if I have achieved anything worthwhile in my life, I will not be humming along with Jagger ' I can't get no satisfaction ' but with pride and confidence I shall give a firm rendering of a 1960s TV advertisement ' The job's well done, you're really satisfied when you clean with Vim, Vim,Vim '. I guess I'll get in as there is an increasing number of loos in the Elysian Fields and not many people who find cleaning them a therapeutic experience.
22nd August 2020
