21st July 2010 – Squatty Bogs

Despite the exhaustion, and doubtlessly because of the excitement, and possibly because of the frogs singing in the valley, I slept badly that night, tossing and turning and bruising my hips at each twist. Eventually I resorted to stuffing my well-travelled cushion down to buttock level, meaning that my pelvis was thrust into the air with a peculiar tilt. It did at least mean that my bones couldn’t feel the floorboards, even if it was ungainly. That cushion had seen as many places as I had, from South Africa to Slovenia. I didn’t like to sleep without it hugged to my chest. I was growing to regret having chosen the room without a proper bed. My hips were so sore that it hurt to squat. And squatting was fairly necessary at Fontsoleil.

After the civilised outside toilet at Fontchouette, I had been in for a shock at Fontsoleil. Water was just as much in shortage as it had been up the road, and so it followed that a regular toilet wouldn’t be used all the time. As Michelle explained to Goedele and me at the beginning, we could use the inside toilet only at night. Otherwise we were to use the dry toilet outside: in fact, if it was just a pipi then we should just do as she did and use the garden if that was more convenient! To my knowledge neither of us ever did that. Even though the raspberry canes would have provided adequate privacy, the prospect of it seemed somehow perverse.  

The toilet was up a jungle tangle of a path, past the washing line and up through nettles and thorns that snagged at skin and trouser legs and onto a flat stretch looking out over the house and garden and surrounding trees. It was a closed cabin of chipboard, painted white on the inside although the paint was flaking off. A bucket of sawdust balanced precariously at the back of the cabin replaced the need for a flush. That was where the largest spider lived. If I were a spider, I would have found a more freshly-perfumed abode. Once I even walked in to find a butterfly there, which I liberated to cleaner air. Hanging at the front was a rather sweet toilet roll holder, fashioned from an empty four-litre plastic bottle of something which protected the tissue from any rain that might seep in. The roof slanted downwards away from the door, meaning that even before you entered you had to be backing in, stooped over. At any clumsy movement more paint would peel away from the walls. 

Clumsiness was a dangerous pursuit in that dry toilet. The floor comprised two uneven and disconcertingly wobbly planks of wood, one for each foot. One step in the wrong direction would mean a shoeful of sawdust and excrement. Balancing whilst removing a trouser leg and trying not to drop it into the pit whilst squatting, holding onto the door and concentrating on doing whatever you went up there to do in the first place was nothing short of an art. It was also necessary to listen out for other potential toilet users. There was no lock and no way of knowing if anyone was in there until reaching the little waist-high window in the door. Waist-high was, of course, head-high to a squatter. The trick was to dangle a hand out of the window, alerting any prospective squatters to the cabin’s current occupancy. It saved many a moment of embarrassment.

Needless to say, none of us WWOOFers relished our toilet trips. There was no chance of going for a long session with a good book. We were all guilty of illicit inside toilet trips when Xavier was in the garden and Michelle was in her pottery shed. We all tried to hold on in the evenings until it got dark, at which point using the real toilet was considered acceptable. Although even that toilet was a mite strange: it had no door, just a thin brown curtain. It wasn’t a house for prudes.