Elsan! I know… it sounds like a sun-kissed Spanish Beach doesn’t it?. El San!
What it is, is a make of chemical toilet. In the old days, we called it The Can!
In the yard behind a Yorkshire farmhouse… your fate & your poo - was sealed!
Grandma Ellen’s WC was the best advert for crapping alfresco out in the nearest field.
But, in a corrugated shed… a plank seat on a galvanised bin with a cranking handle.
Always best visited in daytime ‘cos after dark you’d need to take a candle.
And, when you’d achieved your goal in there… and it was past your time,
you cranked it and your extrusion disappeared in the primordial slime.
It was not a reader’s loo… No time for catching up wit’ Daily Mail.
although the paper was held neatly to the shed’s timber frame with a trusty, rusty 6inch nail.
It was cut into handy squares. And almost without fail, you’d start to read still sitting there
and, when you got into the words, readable in the gloom, they were cut off just above the tear!
No, you’d just want to get out quick… The Jeyes Fluid scent would tend to make you gag,
It didn’t even allow my cousin Alan time for a crafty *** And monthly, according to occupancy,
Uncle Charlie did the job he’d said he’d never fancy, that of struggling toward the field
to empty the contents. Ironic really that after Uncle Charlie and Auntie Nellie died
the next owners plumbed their new one - up to the new fangled mains inside!