Of Shared Baths And Frozen Crappers

In my last foray into recycling in the old days, I reminisced about the second life of cigarette butts. This time around, I want to reflect on how you can reduce your carbon footprint by re-using your bath water and address alternatives to toilet paper that were the norm in post-war Germany and which you might want to consider, should the need arise. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

We lived in a house that had been built in 1349 and it showed its age. This was a massive three-story stone affair with walls six feet thick and one toilet that emptied unto the steep hill behind the house and down into the creek in the valley below. There was no septic tank, no drainage field, no formal sewage system at all. Over the centuries, the back wall had sprung deep cracks, some of them big enough for birds to nest in them. My parents and I shared this house with four refugee families. There were 15 people in all, including the three of us.

We occupied half of the second floor. Our bathroom was not a bathroom in the North American sense of the word. It lacked a toilet, only contained a washstand with running cold water and an old-fashioned claw-footed metal bathtub connected to a wood-heated hot water tank. This meant that if you wanted to take a hot bath, you had to lug up armloads of firewood from the shed in the yard downstairs, light and tend a wood fire underneath the tank to heat the water and wait for at least two hours for that water to be hot enough to use.

There was no shower. Showers were not a German thing then. Real men didn’t use deodorant. Most women didn’t either. Women also didn’t shave their armpits or their legs. B.O. also was not a bad thing. Everyone stank equally, which cancelled out the discomfort of objectionable smells. You simply didn’t realize that you reeked. I discovered this secret only when I stepped off the boat in Hoboken, New Jersey, and suddenly found myself isolated with my peculiar, and I‘d say, dank bouquet.

Naturally, baths were a luxury reserved for every other Saturday evening, whether you needed one or not. The first one in, usually my mother, had the luxury of clean hot water. My father came next, using the same slightly less-hot bath water and, finally, it was my turn in the by now lukewarm, twice pre-used, grey water. The refugees, who shared this house with us, did not have access to our bathroom. I don’t know where or whether they bathed.

You might want to consider this method of saving and reusing water in view of the rising cost of water and our recurring water shortages on Saturna. Try it. I can truly recommend it, if you’re not the squeamish type. It’s cozy. It brings the family closer together. It also creates an urgency to get on with it, before the water turns cold, with the result that you waste less soap. And, in case you’re worried about the effects on your general health, nobody came down with boils, suffered excessive hair loss or broke out in a debilitating rash.

And speaking of the importance of water, let me acquaint you with a German invention with which you may not be familiar. This was at a time when there were few of the amenities we now take for granted and those that existed were rather basic. And yet, the idea of recycling and re-using was front and center, even under those dire circumstances.

One of the doorways off the hall on the second floor of our abode opened to the only washroom in the house. This was a tiny tiled space, maybe five feet square. It had a 12-foot ceiling and a tall, very narrow opaque-painted window. None of the windows in the house had storm windows. In the winter, the wind usually whistled right through, causing the curtains to ghost out into the room. It was freezing in there. This comfort station contained one of those truly German crappers, which sports a presentation shelf inside, so that you could inspect and admire your creation before flushing it down the drain. About seven feet above this contraption hung a white enameled metal cistern, which held about a gallon of water and a chain pulley. A pipe connected it to the toilet bowl below. You pulled the chain and the water would rush down through the pipe, hit your production – patiently waiting on its ledge – with full force, splatter everything against the inside front of the bowl and on down the chute and out the wall in back and down the hill. There was no water faucet or washbasin to wash your hands. Obviously, the back of the house was not a good place to be at any time, but especially not in the summer when it got hot and putrid back there.

If you wanted to use the toilet in winter, you’d better bring a large pot of boiling water to thaw out the ice in the cistern and pipes. Even then the process was iffy and the water could be slow making its way down the frozen pipes. Sometimes, on very cold days, you could pull all you wanted on the chain and nothing happened. I used to forget the hot water on purpose sometimes, just to listen to the pleas and, more likely, multi-lingual maledictions of the refugees, who were left to clean up the mess, if they didn’t want the bowl to overflow.

Keep in mind, the water had to be brought to a boil on the kitchen stove, before you could take it to the toilet. The refugees, other than Frau Smetma, who lived downstairs in the old feudal kitchen, did not have kitchen stoves, only electric cooking coils. In other words, going to the bathroom in our house in winter had to be, by necessity, a thoughtful and well-planned process, never spur of the moment. It required timing to avoid the queue outside the door.

The other thing about this john was that we’re talking about a time that was pre-toilet paper. Maybe there was toilet paper available elsewhere, but not in our village. There was no such thing as Charmin or soft 4-ply paper available in our stores. The tool of choice was the weekly newspaper, with each page meticulously cut into eight equal pieces, each about six inches square and stuck on a nail in the wall. You had to crumple it before use. I don’t get nostalgic about that, because newsprint is rough on your behind, it tears easy and the ink comes off. It also tends to smear and could be painful, even distressing, if God forbid, you suffered from piles or hemorrhoids. It also doesn’t clean very well.

Then there was the German hang-up about wastefulness. The use of multiple squares of paper was frowned upon as a waste of scarce resources. There was after all only one newspaper per week for the 15 people in the house. Our local broadsheet was a thin affair, sixteen pages at most or 128 squares for the paper spike per week. That meant 18 squares per day for 15 people. That also meant that you were pretty much restricted to at most one visit per day. How German is that! Not much room for error either. God help you, if you were afflicted by “the dreaded diarrhee,” as some of the refugees used to call it.

The refugees never contributed paper to the communal toilet. Their only involvement in this process, other than the actual use, was that the sisters Baerenklau, three spinsters who lived on the third floor, collected the paper from my father each Monday, read it and then cut it up into appropriate squares for spiking. They were also the ones who supervised the daily count of the spiked paper squares to make sure no one took more than their share for their ablutions – one per visit. They’d confront and berate the miscreant who didn’t stick to the prescribed number. That usually was me.

I did like the educational aspect of using newspapers on the crapper. I loved to read. Sometimes I got so engrossed in trying to read a particular story and piecing it back together from the squares spiked on the wall – they were never in the right sequence - that I forgot about the time and would be rudely interrupted by pounding on the door. This cozy arrangement led to line-ups and to sometimes-loud arguments that only ended when my father shouted from his office that if they didn’t shut up, he’d shoot them all.

Think about all the trees that could be saved and the impact that would have on global warming, if we forsook toilet paper and re-used the Times Colonist, for example. It would probably delay the catastrophe everyone is predicting by at least a year or two and give that particular newspaper a use it deserves. Food for thought. I’m hoping, though, that for hygienic reasons we’d be able to agree on more than one square per person per use.

In future issues, I will endeavor to teach you how to make shampoo out of undiluted birch sap, how to re-use paper towels, thus doubling their lifespan and how to use a wool sock to drive off trespassers. I plan also to let you in on the secret of how to raid your neighbor’s chicken coop, without getting fingered as the culprit, share a recipe for the use of deer innards in a gourmet meal and give you some well-tested pointers on ways to re-use a beer stein, once you emptied it of its contents.