Size matters when it comes to baths
First one, then another. Something I had that other boys didn't
I spent the first 22 years of my life in a Edwardian semi-detached house off Wembley High Road. With the exception of four months when I was twelve and I made the mistake of going to live with my mother and step-father in Swindon, before returning to my maternal grandparents Pop and Nanna, who lived on Swinderby Road. Let me say right away my step-father was an okay guy.
Wembley was my comfort zone, with so many places to escape to alone and I had a job which I missed, and the money that came with it of course. Not a lot, but 10/- (ten shillings was something in 1956). My bedroom had been let to a lodger by the time I went back, so I got the put-u-up leatherette sofa in the downstairs front room, which is where I stayed for the next four years before I got back the upstairs back bedroom. I was lucky. Uncle Joe on Ealing Road, couldnât give me my newspaper boy job back but he told me that W H Smithâs on the High Road were looking for a newspaper boy. So I went up there at 6am the next morning, got the job, and started on the spot, plus an extra half-crown (2/6d) a week.
The house on Swinderby Road had two toilets. One outside in the backyard. The other on the upstairs landing. It really was âthe small roomâ, as toilets are often called. The door on the landing opened in onto a space six foot deep, with the lavatory pan and seat at the far end against the exterior wall, with a sash window above looking out onto the backyard aforementioned. It wasnât that high because above the window was the cistern from which a pipe ran in front of the window so you could flush the toilet. And the walls were a montage* of pictures I had cut from magazines and pasted on, a good few of which were scantily clad film actors from Picturegoer and ABC Films Review (*I was an adult in my mid-twenties before I saw âa montageâ and so discovered the word). By the time I was twelve, there were a few layers, as I used a paste I made from porridge to hold them in place. My Auntie Molly, Nannaâs sister, when she came to stay wouldnât use the upstairs toilet because, as she said, âI donât like all those faces looking at me.â
Next to the toilet on the landing was the bathroom. It was a little deeper and wider, with a door that opened out instead of in. The floor, like the toilet, was tiled in three inch black and white tiles, most a little loose, so they wobbled under of your feet. There was sash window in the exterior wall which also overlooked the backyard, which was set to the right with the lower pain frosted just like the window in the toilet. They were same size. The walls were covered in light blue distemper paint because the bathroom could get hot and steamy, so sticking pictures from magazines didnât work (I tried but soon gave up).
The space between the bath and the lath and plaster wall separating the toilet and bathroom was 24â (two foot). On the exterior wall was a sink over which there was an Ascot hot water cylinder, which provided hot water for both the basin and bath when the fire in the kitchen wasnât lit, which meant there was no hot water, so Pop had fitted Ascots long before my time in the scullery, the bathroom and the upstairs front room, which was always occupied by lodgers or my mother, step-father and two sisters, and when they were about I got turfed out of my back bedroom (which I sometimes shared with lodgers) and onto the put-u-up in the downstairs front room.
Looking at what I have written so far, I started out wanting to tell you about the six foot (72â) iron enamel bath in the bathroom and went in search of an image which could help illustrate the scene I am trying to set. Sadly I have not found one. Hence what seems like a ramble really isnât. Why does this matter? It matters because this large old white enamel bath played an important in my growing up from the age of three or thereabouts. I was to know that bath from 1944 until 1966. I could lie down in it flat and, because of its length, width and height, be covered in water if I wanted. It would be 1979 before I again had a bath as big, when Susan and I bought a large Victorian semi in inner-city Nottingham. That bathroom was very large, though the adjoining toilet was as cramped as the toilet in Wembley. Right now, I canât remember the last time I had a bath. Maybe twenty years ago. I have been a shower man since 1975.
My first memory of the Wembley bath probably dates from when I was four (1948) and my Nannaâs cousin Auntie Floss, her husband Uncle Arthur and their daughter Callie were staying with us, as they sometime did. Callie was a year younger than me and we always shared a bed. My head at the bottom, her head at the top, back in those days our feet not quite touching. And we shared a bath and it was on one of these occasions when we had been left alone that she pointed at me and said âMy daddy has one of thoseâ and I realised it was my willy, then she stood up, and said âI have a pee peeâ and that was the moment I knew there was more to boys and girls than just dressing differently. Callie and I went on to become âkissing cousinsâ and I will tell our story later.
All my friends and relatives lived in houses with electricity** and more up-to-date bathrooms, most with the toilet in the bathroom. For them to be separate like ours was the exception and all of them had titchy baths compared to our house. They all seemed much cleaner than ours, but I now realise that tiled walls and large tiles on the floor make a big difference, but by the time I was getting to know girls a little better and they were coming back to my house they all fell in love with our very large bath, which they discovered when they went upstairs to use the toilet and wash their hands in the bathroom. Without fail, they commented on the size of the bath.
A girl called Oonagh was the first one to use it. We worked together and she got in the habit on a Friday, after work, of coming back to Wembley with me, by which time I had the back bedroom back and it had a double bed my mother and step-father left behind, so she simply got in the habit of sleeping with me. Nothing happened. I was too fearful of the risks of sex to take any chances. I was also still a churchgoer and she was a Catholic. It didnât stop us from indulging in some heavy petting, but she would have a bath and came armed with bath crystals which filled the bath with bubbles.
At this time there was just me and Pop in the house. Nanna had died in early 1960 and my Irish aunties had retired and moved to Tooting to be nearer their niece Teresa. Pop went to his Fairview Club by the fire station on the Harrow Road to pay snooker and hustle, which he was good at. He always had a wad of banknotes in his pocket and he quite liked the odd girl like Oonagh in the house and my mates, usually on a Friday and Saturday night. My Nanna had an left us an airing cupboard full of towels and Pop never had a bath. He used to stand at the scullery sink and strip wash and shave after lunch. He was not an early-riser but we got along fine and that was what mattered at the time.
It was probably Oonagh who put the word out there about our very large bath with its never ending supply of hot water, thanks to industrial size Ascot water heater. It took an hour to fill the bath, but it was worth the wait and I started using her bath crystals and soaking and reading in the bath on an evening when I had the house to myself.
Oonagh was into touching and thanks to my cousin Callie I knew a good bit about that, which I think came as a surprise to Oonagh, but she loved it, especially in the bath when it all about touch. Sadly, Callie and I never shared the bath as teenagers.
It was Sigrid, a half-Swedish girl in the Wembley Young Liberals, who asked if she could have a bath and came prepared. She lived in a large three bedroom apartment with her Swedish mother and brother which had a tiny bath, but the first proper walk-in shower I ever saw. All the others were either rubber hosepipes that fitted over the taps with a fine spray at the other end. Some were actual fixtures on the bath, but Sigridâs was the only shower I knew that you could stand in and get wet. She didnât mind being seen naked as she posed for glamour photographs in the nude which appeared in magazines and she was only 17, but her mum was very proud of her daughter and was the one who showed me the glamour magazines she appeared in. Again, another story for another day. She liked to show off; to be looked at naked and told me not to get any ideas because I was too young! âYou can look but not touchâ (when we met I wasnât yet 16). Later there was the one and only party I had at Swinderby Road when Pop had gone to stay with my mother. It is a story in itself and probably made me wish I had had the courage to jump Oonagh, who told me âYou donât have to ask.â That night is a story in itself, which I will tell later.
I never saw our bath has something I could pull girls with; that it was something I had that other boys didnât. It just happened.
In truth, that was it when it came to girls and our very large old bath, apart from Donnie, who stayed whenever her parents were having fights and she didnât want to go home. As far as her mother was concerned she was staying with a girlfriend. She loved the bath too and would spend hours in the bath when she was low. It was its size that the girls loved and enjoyed. My other bath story involves a different bath and a girl called JoyâŠ
Until next time, I wonder how many of us enjoy a long soak in a large bath, with someone on hand to take care of us in unexpected waysâŠ
O L O Bunnyđ°
© Robert Howard
August 2024.
A FOOTNOTE: **We didnât get electricity at Swinderby Road until 1958, when I was 14. Before that is was gas lights, candles and torches.
My "bathtub" was a washtub until I was 8. We all had baths on Saturday night, same tub, same water (ick). Dad was first, then Mom, then me, then baby sister. It wasn't until after Dad died and I got a stepfather that we got running water and a bathroom. My stepfather did that (same house). He built on an extra room for the bathroom, dug the trench and hole for the septic tank, which he built himself from concrete blocks and concrete. He was amazingly handy. If he had lived longer, who knows what improvements he could have accomplished. But we only had him for two years before he died of cancer.