I can still remember the coal oil lamps we used and the flickering shadows dancing like grey ghosts over the walls. I remember going outside to use the outhouse and the ripped up squares of National Geographic on the nail in there. I remember pumping cold water into the sink and the fire that heated the kitchen range. I remember Grandma Watson in her house dress, mopping her forehead from the heat and upbraiding grandfather for not getting her a hired girl.
I was 17 when electricity came to Ellersville. Grandpa Watson was one of the first to get connected. He said it was so I could do my homework in a decent light but we knew he was hoping to quieten my grandma’s complaints about not having a hired girl.
We all still had to use the outdoor privy though, and every bed had a chamber pot underneath it. Mine was an enamel one that I had used back when I was being toilet trained. It was far too small for me when I was a teenager and anyway I tried never to use it because dealing with it next morning was disgusting. My mother’s chamber pot was made of plain white pottery. I don’t think I ever saw grandfather’s chamber pot – it wouldn’t do to let a girl see such things.
Grandmother’s however, was special. It was, she frequently told us, ceramic. I didn’t know what ceramic was – it looked like ordinary pottery to me although it had an elegant design of flowers all around the exterior. It had come, she said, from England. As time went on she added that it had probably come from the mansion of a lord. Eventually she dropped the word ‘probably’ and added the words ‘genuine antique’
You have to understand that in small town society back then no-one mentioned the term “chamber pot”. This became a problem for my grandmother because the genuine ceramic antique chamber pot from the mansion of a lord was her proudest possession. Fortunately she had an able accomplice in my mother who had the enviable skill of being able to make an ordinary object such as a spade sound like a silver teaspoon.
Re-naming a chamber pot was perhaps somewhat of a challenge for her at first. She struggled for a while with ‘bedroom pottery’ until she came up with ‘boudoir’ and ‘fine china’. Later she switched fine china to ‘porcelain’ pronounced as if it were a French word. The flowers around the sides became English tea roses painted al fresco, until some less-than-appreciative urchin asked “Who was Al?”
Still it was difficult to drag boudoir porcelain into a conversation when neither bedrooms nor bodily functions were mentionable. My grandmother would go out to take tea and admire her hostess’ china cups and saucers and lead the conversation from there to her own fine china, adding with a majestic smile that her refinement prevented her displaying the finest of it. If ladies came to take tea at our house grandmother would pour politely into her very best cups and add “Of course, lovely as they are, this is not our finest china…”
