The Big Necessity (21 page)

These Public Necessities would be something new. For the first time, the privacy of residential facilities could be provided in a public setting. In 1851, over 800,000 people paid a penny to use private-public facilities installed by George Jennings at the Great Exhibition, a fact that gave the English the euphemism “to spend a penny” to signify a bathroom visit. With Jennings's efforts, the template was fixed. So was the importance of public necessities in civilized life, at least for the next century. Providing publicly funded facilities was simple good manners—and kept the working classes from being too smelly—and the Victorians liked to show theirs off. Their public conveniences were as lavish as those of the Romans, with pretty porcelain and copper piping, heavy wooden doors, and sturdy locks. Across the Channel, the Parisians followed suit. A 1903 toilet, the first in a station of the Paris Métro's new
Line 1, provided 13 stalls for men and 14 for women, three of which included bidets with warm water. There were six attendants, and the facilities were open from 7
A.M
. until midnight.

 

From where I'm standing, that Paris subway restroom—long since closed, by the way—sounds like heaven. I grew up in the final decades of the twentieth century. This makes me a child of the new dark ages of the public bathroom. In London, 47 percent of public bathrooms have closed over the last eight years, and nationwide they have decreased in number by 40 percent. In a 2001 guide to New York City, Fodor's warned visitors that “public bathrooms are few and far between, and run the gamut when it comes to cleanliness.”

Three successive mayors failed to agree to proposals that would have put public restrooms on New York's streets, and when Mayor Michael Bloomberg did, in 2005, newspaper headlines cheered that new restrooms were finally going to be provided. On closer inspection, it was apparent that the plan would provide 3,300 bus shelters, 330 news kiosks, and only 20 public bathrooms. Most of the world's cities lack public facilities, of course. A Russian professor, lecturing at the WTO's Moscow conference, managed to make the deprivation of Soviet times sound poetic. “When we still had socialism,” he explained, “the way to survive was to take your heart in your hand and squeeze tightly and be very, very patient.” It was the same with public bathrooms, which were few and very, very far between. “Sometimes there are kilometers to run before you reach a facility and can unsqueeze your heart and do what your body wanted you to do.”

But New York City and London are supposed to represent the height of civilized achievement. They are examples of what urban planners call “the sanitary city.” They are cities that are supposed to have already perfected the skill of delivering services to their citizens. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, declared that “a country in which every citizen has access to a clean toilet has reached the pinnacle of progress.” In that case, progress in two of the world's most advanced cities is going backward, with barely a protest. Academia doesn't much
care, either. Toilet culture in general, and public necessities in particular, have rarely been considered worthy topics of study. Outside Norbert Elias and Alexander Kira, there is little examination of public facilities. When a call for papers was put out for a journal to be titled
Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets
, a blogger at
New Criterion
magazine could not contain his scorn. This, he wrote, represented “the pathetic intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the humanities. . . . Public toilets! Has it come to this?”

I find this strange. Anthropologists and sociologists should be infesting public bathrooms. There's nothing else in human society quite like them. Not in society, not quite out of it. Needed but rarely demanded. A place where all sorts of human needs and habits intersect: fear, disgust, conversation, grooming, sex. It's an ambiguous space that is not quite in the public eye, though the public uses it. A place of refuge and sociability, of necessity and criminality. How we are allowed to behave in a public necessity even influences everyday speech. Steven Pinker, in his explanation of taboo words, quotes a spectrum of excreta-related swearing.
Shit
is less acceptable than
piss
, which is less acceptable than
fart
. And so on through to
snot
and
spit
, “which is not taboo at all. That's the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public.”

To be uninterested in the public toilet is to be uninterested in life.

 

In the absence of academic curiosity, I will ask the experts. I have like most people used all sorts of public bathrooms in my lifetime. I have struggled with luggage through stupid turnstile toilets in railway stations; I have used clean and free restrooms in supermarkets and libraries; I have trekked through half a dozen departments in department stores to find their poorly located, poorly sign-posted facilities behind indoor furnishing or haberdashery. I have sneaked into hotels, and failed, usually, to sneak into pubs, in case I'm identified as not being a customer and because I have an English sense of embarrassment. I have bought cups of coffee and bottles of water that I don't want to be able to use cafe restrooms. All these qualify as public conveniences, though the British Toilet Association prefers the term “away
from home toilets,” which mistakenly presumes that all of us have homes, or that our home and the public toilet aren't the same thing. A postman in Devon was disconcerted to find an envelope addressed to “Simon Norris, The Disabled Toilet, The Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth.” My local government in London was recently obliged to remodel the security system of a brand-new public convenience because it was being used as an overnight accommodation by Polish migrant workers, undoubtedly delighted to get a smallish room for twenty pence a night. (Fighting over the more spacious disabled cubicle was fierce.)

Where there have been no facilities available, I have done what 95 percent of Britons have done, according to a survey by the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign: I have squatted behind parked cars, or in alleyways, with a friend keeping watch, or with considerable anxiety when I am friendless. Along the way, I have talked to restroom attendants in several countries, including in China, where a woman called Shu told me that not one of her clients flushed the toilet. She was also sick of finding footprints on the seats, from Chinese peasants too accustomed to squatting to change their habits for a new contraption.

In Bangkok, I met women drivers of mobile toilet trucks, steel and shiny and smelling of ammonia, who seemingly lived in their cabs, which had carpets and TVs and Buddhist shrines. These hardy women would step in with their dozen toilet stalls at public events, or at the airport, which lacked bathroom facilities, or to assist Bangkok police with random drug testing that required impromptu urine samples. A woman who wouldn't give her name told me she had driven a mobile toilet truck for twenty-six years, and her parents did it before her and her daughter will do it after her. She said some neighbors give her a hard time. “They say it stinks and that I stink, too. But as jobs go, it's fine.”

At various points along my public necessity life, I used the Longcauseway facilities in my home town of Dewsbury, a medium-size town in Yorkshire. The Longcauseway necessities were built in the 1980s as part of the Princess of Wales shopping center, which replaced the old bus station with the kind of low-rise forgettable shops that have infected the minds of urban planners for decades. I had used them many
times while growing up and remembered their heavy doors with old-fashioned locks that could only be opened by the insertion of a coin (two pence when I was young; twenty pence now). But mostly I remember them from a visit I made a couple of years ago, because at the time they also contained a sink full of soft toys and several jars of lemon curd for sale, by a sign saying “To pay, apply to Margaret.” When it came to writing about public necessities, of all the toilets in the world, I remembered the lemon-curd ones. I set out to find Margaret.

It takes a few visits, but I find her eventually, sitting in a cubbyhole provided for attendants. It is furnished with two armchairs, a TV and VCR, books, and tea-and coffee-making material. There is no shrine. It's a cozy place, and Margaret looks comfortable in her straight-backed easy chair, but despite the lived-in look, she says she's not here much. “I'm always jumping up and down,” she says. She's always dealing with complaints, clients, cleaning. There is never a moment's peace.

Margaret has been working as a toilet attendant for three years. She doesn't like the job much—“You'll not find anyone who does”—but she gets to raise money from her sink sales. (The soft toys and lemon curd are sold to generate funds for a cancer charity.) It's a perk of the job, and it makes up for the fact that, as she discovered recently, the council pays street-sweepers more than toilet attendants. Margaret is insulted by this hierarchy. When did a street-sweeper have to do everything she does? “I've had to dress old ladies, take someone to hospital, look after children. This isn't just cleaning: I'm a care worker who works in a toilet.”

There have always been people whose jobs consisted of cleaning up other people's excreta. And because most societies have rules about what is clean and what is not, the people who have to deal with the unclean suffer the societal consequences of the time. However dismal Margaret's working conditions, though, she is still better off than the cesspool cleaners of the fifteenth century, who supplemented their income by charging fees to lance the boils of tuberculosis sufferers. In 1895, when Paris authorities removed the gas stoves of the city's famed
Dames-Pipi
(Pee Ladies) toilet attendants to save on heating bills, the good women were forced to go on strike until their stoves were returned (and only because the pipes were freezing over).

Margaret isn't likely to resort to industrial action. Most people treat her with respect. They appreciate her, enough to buy her cakes and Christmas presents. But sometimes she doesn't appreciate them. Margaret has the lament of the toilet cleaner: you can't imagine how people behave. They do things they'd never do at home. In
The Bathroom
, Alexander Kira explains public convenience behavior by noting that people feel more negatively about public toilets than private, because of the stranger factor. Public restrooms fuel old primeval concerns about territoriality, which should be guarded, and strangers, who should be feared.

Kira lays out a spectrum of toilet tolerability. Most people are comfortable in a hotel bathroom because it offers the best pretense of being private. Workplace restrooms are the next best thing, because the people who use them are known, usually. And so on, through cinemas and shops and hotels, to the free-standing, filled-with-strangers public bathroom, which provides privacy from others and a total removal of responsibility. People do all sorts in public bathrooms because they can, especially when prudishness persuades planners to locate them out of sight, away from public thoroughfares, behind hedges and in far-off parking lots, where anything and anyone goes. Margaret sees all sorts in hers: Asian ladies in head scarves who sneak quick smokes in the cubicles and think she doesn't notice. Gin and beer bottles rolling out from under the cubicle doors; women who let their children eat food in the toilet. Drug tools. Things you wouldn't believe.

The removal of inhibition can be liberating as well as criminal. Recently, a Reuters reporter expressed frustration that American soldiers stationed in Iraq would tell him nothing until he went to the latrines. “You have to go out to the Port-o-Potties. For some reason, they talk there. You can read how they really feel—all the anti-Bush stuff, all the wanting to go home—in the writing on the shithouse walls.”

But generally, when local governments close facilities, they do so with the excuse that they are being used for drug-taking or sex. And sometimes it's true. The restrooms in the small Yorkshire village where my parents now live were closed several years ago when they were
found to be listed on a Web site of the best places for gay cruising. When the House of Lords debated the ins and outs of sex in public toilets, the debate was colorful and sustained. Baroness Walmsley of Sutton Coldfield, though proclaiming herself a libertarian, agreed that a specific clause was necessary to prevent people engaging in activity that might “frighten the horses.” Much aristocratic brainpower was expended on whether sex performed behind a closed cubicle door constituted a public or private activity. The peers made their point; the government backtracked; and the crime of having sex in a public convenience, even behind a closed cubicle door, was retained in Clause 71 of the Sexual Offenses Act of 2003. Transgressors can get six months in prison. In practice, hardly anyone does. It costs money to prosecute someone. It's cheaper to close the place down.

 

The nearest great city to London does things differently. The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, known for interesting initiatives like rentable bicycles and riverside beaches, gives public bathrooms the attention that is their due. In 2006, he made all automatic public toilets—
les sanisettes
—free of charge. Usage grew from 2.4 million to 8 million visits in three months. He recently attacked public urination by fining offenders 500 euros each. But fines and free toilets still didn't work: during the rugby World Cup, the mayor was reportedly dismayed to see Parisians peeing against his town hall though there were sixty-two
sanisettes
nearby. His latest weapon is an “anti-pipi” wall, whose angles spray the urine stream back onto the offender.

Paris's efforts are impressive—as are the volumes of animal excreta left on its streets—but to really learn about toilets, you have to head east. Clara Greed, a professor of planning and author of
Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets
, tells me she envies the Asians. They are properly thoughtful about public bathrooms. (At WTO events, it is common to find yourself surrounded by Singaporeans, Malaysians, and Hong Kong Chinese, who impress you with the size of their delegations and the seriousness of their intent.) Asians have come to understand that public necessities have a value that is both moral and monetary. It is ironic that
one of the best examples of a well-funded and well-executed public bathroom program, one that would make British Toilet Association members sigh with envy, has happened in a country better known for toilet standards that are more execrable than exemplary.