"Water in the bathroom" - Re: Beckfoot


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Posted by Ed Kiser on March 11, 2006 at 00:25:10 from 64.12.116.6 user Kisered.

In Reply to: Re: Beckfoot posted by Jock on March 10, 2006 at 21:21:40:

PM-CH5

"What flowers shall I pick?" said Dorothea.

"Deadly nightshade would be best," said Nancy. "Only there isn't any. Or garlic... that's got a lively smell. No. The whole thing is to keep her happy. Better give the beast roses."

Dorothea came back with the roses and met Nancy staggering across the hall with a bundle of brown netting.

"Hammocks!" said Nancy, and dumped them on the floor. "I'll get you some vases. Hi! Peggy! Take down the Jolly Rogers from Dick's bed. She's bound to poke her nose in and want to know what Uncle Jim was doing with them. I say, Dot, when you've plunked the roses in her room... Some on the dressing-table... Some on the mantlepiece and some with the biscuit tin by her bed... just make sure Dick's got all his things. ... Coming... COMING! Jibbooms and bobstays! We've only got four hours left..." She was gone and back again in a moment with three glass vases for the flowers. "Water in the bathroom," she said. "I've got to keep an eye on Cook and the stores."

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As John Nichols suggests, the meaning could very well be "Water is available in the bathroom."

This does not however describe how the water got there.

It could come from some pipe, whose source is perhaps somewhere upstream, or it could mean that there is a big pitcher of water on the commode, and that Dot can use some of that. Now somebody had to have filled that pitcher previously, from some water source.

We assume that the kitchen had some sort of water source, which could be a manually operated hand pump, a "pitcher pump" drawing water from an underground well. This is not specifically mentioned in the text, but there is nothing in the drawings to show any external source, whereas a well going straight down from the kitchen would not have any external evidence to show.

I spent the first 7 years of my life in such a house, where the only water source was a hand pitcher pump in the kitchen, drawing water from a pipe going straight down to the underground well into the water table. Any water used in that house was hand pumped. Bath water was heated in several buckets on the wood stove in the kitchen, and then poured into a washtub there in the middle of the kitchen floor, where it was nice and warm there in front of the kitchen wood stove. Ok for us kids there, but don't recall seeing either of my parents bathing in such. Perhaps their bathing was done after us kids were asleep. Waste water was carried out the kitchen door and tossed into the back yard. There were those moments when having done so with the dish washing water, I would be sent out to the yard to recover some spoon that was accidentally still in that dish washing basin and got tossed along with the water.

For most of the time in that rural house, there was no electricity, so we used kerosene lanterns. (Kerosene is a USA English name, what the translation into UK English I can only guess - maybe parafin?) The last year we were there electricity caught up with us, but house not wired for it, so there were drop cords (flex) all over the house from the fuse box, the wires just tacked to the walls.

The toilet was an outhouse, a tiny building, with a wooden seat perched over a 15 foot deep hole. In the Winter, that made for very fast Business. Did not care for the spiders visible there on the underside of that wood seat either. Even Faster Business.

Goodness, that was a way of living that I'm glad to have improved on in subsequent years.

Yet for some reason, I picture BECKFOOT to be somewhat along the model of that early home of mine. Even the kitchen in my early home was like an extra room, as if added after the main building was made, again like Beckfoot. I believe that used to be the back porch until it was enclosed and made into the kitchen. Before that was added, the cooking was done in the fireplace using a large iron kettle hanging from a hook that swung on a hinge fastened to the side of the fireplace. Now that sounds very much like the Dogs' Home. Did not have a slate roof however, but sheets of corrugated iron, referred to a "tin roof" even though it was not made of tin. It made a great clatter during hail storms. Try sleeping through THAT.

"Let us not scorn the base rungs by which we did ascend."

(can't remember what that is a quote from...)

Ed Kiser, South Florida


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