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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 9:18:49 GMT
I hadn’t been to the ancestral village for about a year, and since my mother’s birthday was on December 6th, it seemed like a good excuse to go, now that family friend Gertrud has died and there is no one to look after the tombs. Like most villages in France, the cemetery in Batilly is on the outskirts, although over time the nearest house is now only about 50 metres away. However, I drove into the village from the opposite end. In fact, for regions of nostalgia I left the autoroute early so that I could take the old small roads of my childhood. The exit for Fresnes-en-Woevre was the one I would take to visit my great uncle René before he was carted off to the nursing home in Messancy, Belgium where he died. He was my grandmother’s little brother and she was very close to him. He lived in Étain in a house that seemed so alien, because it resembled nothing in the area, and all of the houses of that part of town were the same, because in fact they were built by the U.S. Air Force in the 1950’s. The United States had a NATO base there until France left NATO in 1966 and an entire neighbourhood was built in a completely American style for the air force families. There are about a dozen streets that look like there were vacuumed out of Fresno, California. They look so wrong in that setting. I don’t know when the houses were sold to the local population, but there was not much that could be done to change them except to turn the big back yards into kitchen gardens. The French furniture looked out of place inside. I had to sleep in that house every now and then, and it was excruciating. I could hear Uncle René snoring through the walls, more like a sawmill than a human being, and the next morning he would invariably say “I didn’t sleep a wink last night, not more than 2 or 3 minutes.”
I no longer have to turn left towards Étain. In Fresnes-en-Woevre I have a second cousin, but I don’t know her address so no reason to stop. I turned right towards Warcq. Some cousin of my grandmother used to live there, that’s all I know. We would be on that road sometimes, and my mother would say to my grandmother “isn’t that where cousin so-and-so lived?” and my grandmother would agree. Mystery relatives. Before long, I arrived in Conflans-en-Jarnisy with its claim to fame, the E. Leclerc hypermarket where the whole region does its shopping. It’s where you run into anybody from any other town in the area, and Gertrud would regularly say “I was at Leclerc and saw your Uncle René” even though René had no business being behind the wheel of an automobile. He had the eyesight of a mole and was a public danger. This is also the location of the local McDonald’s. If anyone had predicted that there would be one in this area some day, I would have said that they were crazy.
Conflans is where my grandfather was based in his career with the French national railways. There used to be a train from Conflans to Metz, and it stopped in Batilly. Now there is just a bus for passengers, even though the rail line is still used for freight. My grandfather was already retired when I was little, but we would go to the SNCF co-op sometimes to get cases of wine and lemonade. The lemonade was for the American grandchildren; otherwise he would have had no reason to buy such a thing. The bottles had swing-top stoppers with a rubber seal. I thought they were so cool, because we had nothing of the sort at home. The town is decorated (littered?) with memorabilia from both its rail and its mining past. The E. Leclerc car park even has a full sized locomotive from the 1950’s sitting in a flower bed. Otherwise, there are mining cars here and there as you drive through town. They have flowers in them in the summer.
I saw there was a new médiathèque in town, very flashy. It must have eaten up a considerable part of the municipal budget, even though I’m sure it was financed 80% by the department, the region, the national government and the EU. Whenever they are building such things, the information boards always proudly display the percentages out front. Most of the town is just dreary and not much has changed since my childhood. I saw that “La Station,” an old service station that had been converted into an ‘American Graffiti’ type snack shop, has now been abandoned. But it lasted about 20 years, impressive. It was probably killed by McDonald’s. In Jarny, there is the turn to get to Labry, where my grandmother died in a nursing home. She was only there for about 2 months after being kicked out of the SNCF retirement home near Paris which was not equipped for nursing care. I will never turn on that road to Labry.
Then it was on to Doncourt, barely more than a hamlet, but it has its own claim to family fame. It has a little private airfield (“cow pasture”) where tiny planes fly. When my grandparents planned to come to California for a visit in 1970, neither had ever taken a plane before. My grandfather decided they needed to get ready for the big trip and go for a first flight. And so they got ready for a trip in a Boeing 747 by circling the fields over the various villages in a plane for 4 passengers. My mother was flabbergasted when they told her because she herself would never have boarded such a small plane. Little did she know that we would fly together in an 18-passenger Twin Otter from Djibouti to Aden across the Red Sea. I had a free ticket from Red Sea Airlines, but she had to pay $100 for a ticket since our itinerary had been disrupted. “I just want a ticket, I don’t want to buy the plane,” she protested.
Back on the road for part two shortly…
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Post by bjd on Dec 13, 2019 11:44:54 GMT
Since that is an area of France that I do not know at all, I had a look on google maps for Fresno-style housing in Etain. Didn't see it but the town certainly doesn't look especially interesting. And it's so flat!! Parts of the Landes are hilly in comparison!
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 12:11:15 GMT
There is nothing to see in Doncourt, but I was careful to take the old road that goes through Jouaville rather than the direct road to Batilly, which did not even exist when I was little. Jouaville is an absolute hole populated by peasants upon which even the villagers of Batilly look down. After all, it only has a population of 304 while Batilly is a metropolis of 1250 although when my mother was a little girl, both places had about the same population. The old train track goes through Jouaville and there is still a small gatekeeper’s house, just as there used to be at every single grade crossing where somebody had to crank the road barrier up or down several times a day before the barriers were automated and/or back when there were still trains on these old lines.
I would absolutely never have noticed that little house except for the fact that my second cousin Gisèle lived in it for a few years, proof that she had gone down in status. That’s probably because of the motorcycle accident. She was the prettiest of the three daughters of cousin Georges, but after the accident she was never the same. She had a big scar on her throat from the tracheotomy along with a raspy voice due to the ruined vocal chords. And then she got fat. She married the son of a Polish immigrant, and her ugly sister Yvette married the other son more or less simultaneously. This probably didn’t expand the gene pool very much, but that’s none of my business.
The reason for taking this little road was now in sight ahead of me. These tiny village roads can only be considered to have one and half lanes, so you are always happy when you do not encounter a car coming from the opposite direction. Usually you can squeeze past each other but there are times when you have to move onto a tractor trail or force the other car to do so. In front of my was the Bois de Ponty, a small woodlot very close to Batilly. It has mythical status in my mind, but it was absolutely magical for my mother when she was a little girl. My grandfather would come home from the rail yard in Conflans and sometimes bring the incredibly rare treat of bananas. My mother couldn’t imagine where he had got them and he would always tell her that he knew the location of a secret banana tree in the Bois de Ponty. No, he couldn’t tell her exactly where it was. She would go into the woods and search for it for hours, but she never found the banana tree. When I was little, I never looked for bananas, but with my grandparents we would gather hazelnuts and wild strawberries, as well as mushrooms and snails depending on the season and the weather. About 30 years ago, the owner cleared out a lot of the vegetation, and I was devastated, but now it has grown back to how it was before. Someday I will return to search for the bananas.
In less than a minute, I entered Batilly, and I must say that you can feel the money. Let me explain. My grandfather was mayor of Batilly from 1945 to 1971 and one of the last things he did was to create an industrial zone at the other end of the village. This was because the Autoroute de l’Est was under construction and it was going to pass within 3 or 4 kilometres of the village with an exit not too far away. He never got to see the result of his action even though a contract was signed just before he died in 1973. And a couple years later, the Renault factory took over the entire zone. It is the largest private employer of the region (2200 employees). It builds mostly commercial vehicles under the names Renault, Vauxhall, Nissan and Opel and has an annual turnover of more than 2 billion euros. And it pays a business tax to the village, so yes, you can feel the money. It has perfect footpaths from the moment you cross the town limits, big planters for flowers, 100% underground wiring, a municipal event hall, covered tennis courts, and the old people get huge baskets of gourmet items for Christmas in addition to being invited to an annual dinner. In poor Paris, I just got my shitty box of chocolates.
I decided that I needed to park and inspect the old street for the first time in years.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 12:24:11 GMT
Since that is an area of France that I do not know at all, I had a look on google maps for Fresno-style housing in Etain. Didn't see it but the town certainly doesn't look especially interesting. And it's so flat!! Parts of the Landes are hilly in comparison! As a special treat, here are the American houses in Etain. First we'll leave our satellite high in space.
Dropping down a little, you can see better.
Uncle René lived on rue André Maginot.
And here are some views down on the ground.
This house is on a real estate site with a proposed price of 162,300 euros. Expensive for the area, but these houses are quite huge -- 3 bedrooms, dining room, living room, etc.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 13, 2019 13:06:04 GMT
I'm sure they are good and proper, those bungalows, but after being brought up in an area of pre-fab housing hastily put up after WWII, they look very similar, except larger.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 13:21:49 GMT
The most incredible detail to the people in northern France was the sliding glass doors in back.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 13, 2019 13:32:08 GMT
Strange terminology in that sliding glass doors to me are patio doors, whereas double glass doors that open normally are French doors.
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Post by bjd on Dec 13, 2019 15:00:54 GMT
Thanks, Kerouac. It's more obvious when seen from above, with the little dead end curves. Nowadays, I think US suburbia would have bigger houses on smaller lots and more driveways.
Mark, can you have patio doors with no patio? I have never heard them called that, although I do know the term French doors.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 13, 2019 15:57:27 GMT
Certainly. Then they'd probably go into the garden. Can be called sliding glass doors.
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Post by mich64 on Dec 13, 2019 16:49:13 GMT
Loving this report Kerouac! Your descriptions of the area, your family stories and the photos are interesting. I have special feelings about our family a few kilometers east across the A4 from your family roots.
My mother-in-law jokes about the McDonald's across from CORA (where most of the family has worked over time!) saying she never thought that would be one of the first things she seen when coming off the highway into her hometown area when she first returned after 30 years in Canada. She said while everything was the same, everything was different.
Two cousins have just completed building new homes in the area, they look a bit like the last photo. They joke about building their own "Southfork" ranches.
We call our sliding glass doors, patio doors, even the set that open onto the deck. Exterior french doors are sometimes now called garden doors.
Excited for this thread to continue.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 17:22:56 GMT
Thanks, Kerouac. It's more obvious when seen from above, with the little dead end curves. Nowadays, I think US suburbia would have bigger houses on smaller lots and more driveways. That's obvious but don't forget that we are talking about the 1950's and military housing where families would only live for a few years, not a lifetime. I doubt if all of the soldiers even had a car in France back then. There was certainly transportation provided to "work."
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 17:28:10 GMT
Strange terminology in that sliding glass doors to me are patio doors, whereas double glass doors that open normally are French doors. In any case, it was probably inappropriate to install that kind of door (with no double glazing) in a cold part of Europe. One of the principal things that I remember about Uncle René's house is that it always felt cold. Of course he was used to it and was always wearing a heavy sweater. I would venture to speculate that more than a few of the residents have replaced the glass doors with a "real" door.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 13, 2019 17:38:56 GMT
Your grandfather, mayor of Batilly from 1945 to 1971, I presume he kept having to be re-elected? If so, how long was a "term"?
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Post by bjd on Dec 13, 2019 17:41:06 GMT
Nowadays, municipal terms are 6 years. No term limits on mayors as far as I know.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 17:42:55 GMT
Right now, municipal terms are something like 6 years, but I think it has varied over the years. He would have kept going, but he knew he was dying. 80 years old is almost young not really old for a village mayor in France;
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Post by bjd on Dec 13, 2019 18:54:45 GMT
Not to mention that village mayors often stay in the job for years because nobody else wants to do it.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 19:02:14 GMT
Probably being mayor of Batilly has become more attractive in modern times. Even though Léopold, my grandfather's assistant, took over as mayor for a number of years after my grandfather stopped, I saw that the current mayor is the very first one to be affiliated with a political party (MoDem). I'm sure that the money from the Renault factory makes the job much more "interesting" than in all of the surrounding villages with no resources.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Dec 13, 2019 19:38:26 GMT
Interesting report as always Kerouac. We would love a bungalow but those ones aren't screaming 'kerb appeal'....very neat tho.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 13, 2019 19:39:24 GMT
I pulled up behind the old Vicini garage. Its petrol pumps were removed at least 30 years ago, but the structure of the building still implies that a garage was there. In the house next door there was a tiny grocery store run by old granny Vicini who could barely speak French. I remember that she was from Rimini because she would always say how wonderful it was and it made me think that she had been more or less forced by her son to live in cold and grey Lorraine just like countless Italians. My grandmother did not really like her and was horrified when we had to buy something there like a jar of mustard for dinner. She would always try to think of a second item to buy at the same time because she felt it was insulting, even if she didn’t like the old lady, to buy just one thing for a few francs. The son Dédé (André, I suppose) was in better standing, especially with my grandfather. He was in charge of the petrol station, but also, more importantly, of the dance hall hidden in back. I only knew it to be used for the village ball on the 14th of July, but I suppose it must also have been reserved for various wedding celebrations or whatever. I presume that my grandfather was in charge of all of the formalities. Even though I was quite small, I attended a few of these events over the years, the first time at age 7. There was live music, playing the Piaf or Trenet classics but also bad versions of the popular songs of the moment. I liked the coloured lighting, and there were also streamers and confetti, which were used in profusion when everybody was drunk. I probably fell asleep quite early on one of the benches and/or was carried home to bed right across the street, but these events have been engraved in my mind forever. It was probably the first live music that I had ever seen apart from street musicians in Paris. I got out of the car and was facing my grandparents’ house although not the side that my grandparents lived in. The front facing the avenue was the house of my grandfather’s sister, Aunt Nini and Uncle Marcel. It has been driving me crazy recently that I do not have the slightest idea of what Aunt Nini’s real name was, although I suppose it was Anne… Annie. So many ghosts these days. Nini was delightful, while Marcel was nice but gruff. Even though my grandmother made pickles, Nini would always give some of her jars, and they were so different. I think that Nini made the most vinegary pickles in the world. I liked them, but my mouth would contort when I ate them. I don’t have the slightest idea whether my grandmother would bring them out because she liked them too, or if it was out of submission to her husband, Nini’s brother, or just because after living through two wars, it was out of the question to waste even the smallest scrap of food. Frankly, I don’t really remember my grandmother ever eating a pickle, but at my age, I wasn’t really paying attention. All of the houses on the street (“Impasse des Roses”) were built for railroad employees, and they are all mostly identical. They all house two families but are split either by length or by width. Our house was split by length. I have been in most of the houses on the street and never had to ask where they toilet was, because it was always in the same place. The houses were built around 1925 and were probably the first in the village to have an indoor toilet. These were not actually toilets but sort of an indoor outhouse. They were upstairs where the two bedrooms were but were just a sort of wooden cabinet with a round hole on which to sit with a pipe going down to the cesspool. There was a little elbow in the pipe upstairs and certainly another one at the bottom to orient the contents to the covered pit in front of the house. Just try to imagine how impressive this was to a small child who had grown up with a flush toilet. There was a big pitcher of water to flush down any residue. Of course you had to use it with parsimony since it was my grandmother who had to lug the pitchers of water upstairs. The main annoyance to me (and probably to everybody else) was during the summer. When you would sit on the hole, flies would come up from below and stroll on your buttocks. There was absolutely nothing you could do about this except to put up with it. In the winter, there were no flies, but I cannot even describe how icy it was, but I know that anybody who ever lived with an outhouse can imagine it very well. In the late 1960’s, my grandfather replaced this system with a flush toilet, but being near Germany, it was the system with the ceramic platform for viewing your production before flushing it. I don’t know if Germans have more worms than other cultures, but I do not understand why systematic inspection seems to be so important. I have gone off topic and it is time to cross the street to the house.
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Post by whatagain on Dec 13, 2019 20:26:18 GMT
Excellent title and excellent report. I too had an uncle marcel. He married aunt flora. Their child was briefly my godfather but died in a car accident when I was 2. They had an outdoor toilet. So i know all about flues in summer and cold in winter. There was a 'urinoir' on the side. That stank by god.
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Post by bjd on Dec 14, 2019 7:50:43 GMT
Perhaps you can find out your Aunt Nini's real name by doing some genealogical research. All records up to 100 years ago are available on internet. Although I suppose you would need her maiden name too since their marriage date was probably not before 1919 if you knew her.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 14, 2019 14:02:56 GMT
Once out of the car, a hundred years of memories wash over me – stories from my grandmother and my mother mostly, and personal memories of my own. Probably the oldest memory was from my grandmother as a newlywed. I don’t know how she met my grandfather. She was from a village in the Vosges and everybody in the family had always worked in the textile factories of Senones and other towns. I read once that the vast majority of the world population is born, lives and dies in a radius of 50 kilometres (obviously that is less and less true in modern times). My grandmother’s village of La Petite Raon is 153km from Batilly, but the Great War caused much upheaval and quite a bit of travel, so they must have run into each other somewhere. My grandmother was even briefly a barber in Brussels as a teenager – so many stories that I would have loved to have heard! Anyway, Batilly was a border town from 1871 to 1918 and actually had a huge rail yard for freight to pass through customs, which is probably why my grandfather ended up in a railroad career. One thing my grandmother always talked about was the beginning of her marriage. She was bored with village life and my grandfather had sweet talked her during the courtship and promised that as soon as they were married, they would move to Paris, which was her dream. If she had done a little research, she would have discovered that he was born in Batilly, his father was born there, his grandfather was born there and his great grandfather was born there – and it probably goes back for several more hundred years. The ancestral tomb of which I take insufficient care goes back to 1837.
My grandmother’s in-laws ran a boarding house in the centre of the village, so my grandmother was pressed into service while my grandfather was doing his railroad stuff. My mother was born in that building, which still exists. When I was little, the Café des Sports occupied the left side of the ground floor and a barber shop occupied the right side. In the 1980’s the building was abandoned for about ten years. The brutal winters wore off most of the paint and the family name reappeared over the front door, probably for the first time since 1945. Now it is an apartment building, with 4 apartments, I think. The family name will never reappear because the front door was moved to the side of the building, and there is no trace of where the old entrance used to be.
My grandmother still complained about the “German thugs” who would come across the border to make trouble, particularly during the yearly patronal feast. They would pick fights with the local boys and break things. These “thugs” came from Vernéville, a village 4.5km away on the wrong side of the border. Before 1918 is was still Verneheim, population 485 (618 now). There was no border control in farming areas back then – at least I don’t think there was – but even if there was a post along the road, there were a million places to just cut across the fields on foot. Even in the 1980’s she would continue to refer to those awful people from Vernéville as Boches. Oddly enough, she had absolutely nothing against cities like Metz or Strasbourg.
But this is just one item that drifts through my head as I cross the street. There was also my mother’s story about being dressed in her Sunday best when she was about 5 years old. The adults were taking too long to come out of the house to walk to the church, so she went lizard hunting in the old washbasin next to the railroad tracks. When her father saw the mud on her little patent leather shoes and also on her dress, he pulled her panties down and spanked her in the middle of the street in front of everybody. My mother kept a long list of grievances against her father during her entire life, and this incident was near the top of the list. I always wonder when I cross the street there if I am on the exact spot where she was spanked.
Anyway, my mother grew up on this side of the house, where my grandparents lived almost their entire lives until 1981. My parents built the modern “annex” on the right side of the house after my grandfather’s death in 1973. They had settled in Béziers, but my grandmother drove them crazy with imaginary ailments that forced them to drive across the entire country to attend to her – and there was no autoroute for most of the way back then. The two residences have been split with separate access now, but the last time I saw the old house for sale, the asking price was 76,000 euros.
i.postimg.cc/FKMVY4pH/Lorraine-12-2019-014.jpg
i.postimg.cc/C1bHDQrH/Lorraine-12-2019-015.jpg
There was a well for every four houses, and they are still there even though they have been sealed off. When I was little, we would use it to get water for the garden if the rain barrel was low.
i.postimg.cc/mrzSZDQn/Lorraine-12-2019-016.jpg
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 14, 2019 15:11:47 GMT
Look's a nice solid house. I see there are attic windows. Did you venture up there as a child?
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Post by questa on Dec 16, 2019 1:37:48 GMT
This is wonderful, Kerouac. Every now and then I get the echo of Lake Wobegon narration and the loving way you tell of your ancestors from a child's point of view. Is there a library in your town? I am sure they would appreciate a copy of these reminisces for their historical section.
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Post by mich64 on Dec 16, 2019 2:12:59 GMT
The houses are similar to the mine houses, they too have been sold to the general public once the last of the mine family relatives move out.
An interesting trip so far!
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 16, 2019 5:30:54 GMT
Thanks. Due to my internet being down until Friday,there will be a slight delay before I post the rest.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 16, 2019 12:54:48 GMT
Look's a nice solid house. I see there are attic windows. Did you venture up there as a child? The attic was excellent -- a dusty mess full of junk from the past, jugs for distilling mirabelle brandy, broken chairs (why did people keep broken chairs?), all of my mother's schoolbooks and scrapbooks (I rescued all of those when the house was sold -- otherwise it was straight to the bin.). There were some empty trunks but one of them contained my mother's first two baby dolls, disfigured because she had bitten off their noses. They were probably waiting for their revenge on a moonless night.
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Post by htmb on Dec 16, 2019 13:11:52 GMT
Too bad about your internet, Kerouac. Your vivid and detailed descriptions of memories past are quite interesting. Looking forward to eventually hearing more.
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Post by lugg on Dec 16, 2019 19:28:44 GMT
Thank you for posting K2 . I suspect / imagine that it was quite an emotional return. It triggered a memory for me of my grandparents house which did not have a bathroom but did have an outside toilet. Staying there in the winter was a challenge - there was always an oil lamp burning when it was very cold to stop everything freezing ; but the heat never transferred to the seat. Despite that I preferred it to using the chamber pots they had in the bedrooms.
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Post by mossie on Dec 17, 2019 9:21:16 GMT
Ah! The good old days, Reminds me of the paraffin heater we had in the bedroom to warm it up before we went to bed. Although it was put out once we were in the smell lingered.
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