AFTERTHOUGHT
Earth or water?
JOHN WOODFORDE
A farming paper interviewed me about doing up some old cottages and subsequently stated in their article that I had set fire to a total of nine water closets. This was a mistake. They meant earth closets.
Newly informed on a subject fashionable for the first time since Prince Albert's death from typhus. I now realise there could be merit in reducing the number of cottage water closets, especially in low-lying areas of rural sprawl. All too often they merely pass the sanitary buck, as Adrian Bell has said— fouling rivers, brooks and ditches, via over- flowing cesspits, in a way which the old earth closet did not.
But the earth closet had to be properly managed; the householder had to dig the pail's contents into shallow trenches in the garden. If he did this systematically there was no affront to either health or sense of smell and his crops won prizes at the flower show. Above all, the conscientious country dweller contrived neatly and sweetly to keep his wastes ecologically to himself.
In practice, few of them—and no wives— had the will or the energy to cope with the regular drill. They preferred the privy perched over first one then another hole in the ground—and all quite near the well. The earth closet system usually only worked properly at the sort of house where paid hands could be dismissed for carelessness.
In the 1930s I boarded at a school in Dorset which made a virtue of earth closets and kept the boys healthy with abundant supplies of home-grown vegetables. Earth for dozens of closets was distributed, not manu- ally with a scoop, but by a built-in device which acted automatically on the user riiing. Opportunities for jocular mismanagement. like releasing all the earth at once, were cer- tainly present, but I do not remember this happening.
There was a maintenance man on the staff whose daily task it was to see the emptyings on their way, deep in the headmaster's kitchen garden, to becoming an innocuous manure. His name was Bert; he didn't mind what he did, and one of his many jobs was ladling out the cocoa before early school.
Now, all or nearly all can rely on the swilling of unlimited piped-in water. Only since the onset of Conservation Year, and its horrific disclosures, have some of us begun to feel ashamed of the way we sluice our troubles elsewhere. Those lucky enough to be on the main drains suppose that the effluent reaching river and sea has been made harmless by official treatment. Mostly, it has.
Recently I visited our local town's sewage works, situated in its various parts on a plain beside the Great Stour. I drove for several minutes along a winding concrete causeway until I came to the administrative heart of the complex. This was a hut partitioned to provide a small laboratory and the office. There was a slightly mediaeval smell; and I was surprised to see in the lab two attractive white-coated girls. (Perhaps their job is an asset socially: anyone would react on hear- ing of it at a party. Yet how fwsh and keen they looked while pouring liquids from bottle to bottle.) The deputy manager was there, a bright young man in a three-piece dark blue suit. He volunteered to show me round. As we stood at the intake point, an open concrete tank, he told me the works was six years old and had cost just over a million pounds. watched the sewage being pumped in, 20,000 gallons daily, from six sub-stations. It made its actual arrival upwards, through six foun- tains; and of all the sights of the place this was the most arresting. One fountain rose higher than the others. My guide frowned, knowing why, but seemingly not anxious to explain.
The final effluent, he said, was quite plea- sant. Later I saw a glassful and agreed it had a sparkle. There were more positive products, too: a dried sludge for fertilising farmland and an annual supply of methane gas worth between £15,000 and £20,000. The latter fired the boiler for the plant's heat-treatment pro- cess. All went well until there was heavy rain with flooding. Then the last but one tank, resembling a swimming pool, had to be allowed to overflow directly to the river. Anglers. I learned, gathered on the bank at such times, for fish thrived on a certain con- centration of rough material; too much for too long brought dense plant growth—and bacteria—and thereby used up the necessary supply of oxygen. Provided none of the dread diseases were about, there was no danger, I was told, to human health.
I was relieved to hear this. I had begun to think of how our ancient cesspool unob- trusively overflows into a tiny tributary of the Great Stour (reaching the water, as it happens, at the point where this ceases to run through the garden). On first coming to rural Kent four years ago, I bombarded the council cleansing department with a series of increasingly urgent telephone calls: 'We need emptying—it's filling up.' It's getting near the brim.' It's up to the brim.' It's OVER- FLOWING: The official was always calm.
When the emptier and his tanker even- tually drove up, he gave me a soothing talk about the chemical process that went on inside a cesspool and said that, although it might not seem so, the overflow was partially treated. Now I never look inside my cesspool and let the man come twice a year as stipu- lated on the rating paper. The babies love to watch him at his work.
It appears indeed that in these post-typhus days, with the major and vital treatment schemes established, straight sewage is the least of the pollution problems, offending nose and eye sometimes but not the public health. The sinister pollution is the sort created by toxic factory wastes reaching waterways and fissures in the earth, oil dumped in the sea, and pesticides seeping into the food. A well-run earth closet may be the only really sanitary unit. But would the most headstrong conservationist wish, in this respect, to put back the clock?
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