1980 The Composting Toilet Experience ................


Of all the bizarre events in my life, etc etc etc etc.

Well, it was a conspiracy against me I suppose. No paranoia here, it was a conspiracy of events really. I.e. God did it or failed to stop me doing it.

We were newly into our Shubenacadie home. I was a great reader of Harrowsmith, a magazine which tells us how to live properly and greenly. But great strength of character is needed to live the Harrowsmith way. Sadly the pioneer in most of us has leached away leaving us soft and whiny.
But I was still wide open to ways to lead a greener, leaner life.

So when the septic field failed and the toilet flushed not, I was fertile ground. The septic field failed because of clay soil and our contractor's abysmal incompetance. A pox on his head, may camel ticks infest his groin etc etc etc etc etc.

Undaunted I sought alternatives. (-we should have sold up and moved to Halifax and proper sewers-). The Harrowsmith magazine was touting the virtues and advantages of composting toilets.

Sigh ........................................

A composting toilet is a self contained sytem. It stores human bodily waste, in effect saving it, while it slowly transforms "the stuff" into harmless, odourless compost. At some time in the indefinite future it will need emptying, which will, no doubt be a simple and pleasant enough process. In your own tiny mind you disregard any thoughts of anything but having an invironmentally friendly toilet. Maybe, you tell yourself, it'll need attention three or four times in your remaining years. I could go on about the 'thing's' supposed pure goodness but let's, as they say, cut to the chase.

Having decided to go the route we located a local retailer on Windmill Road in Dartmouth. We headed thence ............ The Mini can just, and only just, accomodate a composting toilet!!! It was a difficult fit, no, it was an inpossible fit, but we got it (and us) in and headed homeward with IT.
Next, the installing of IT in the bathroom. It had a throne-like quality only partially diminshed by me cleverly half recessing it into the floor. White and massive with an oddly plum coloured seat and lid it rather intimidated all who beheld it.

It used electricty for its heaters and its extractor fan. The latter was vented through the roof. We prepped it as per instructions, peat moss and water ............... oh yes, installation wasn't for the faint of heart.

We set then set about using it, ............................. solidly and liquidly.

Time passed and as did bodily wastes.

Mother-in-law visited from England and used it and was, I'm sure, severely intimidated by our toilet and its throne-likeness, who wouldn't have been?

It was supposed to be odourless ... it wasn't.
It wasn't supposed to get flies ... it did.
It was supposed to be quiet ... it wasn't.

It did smell, it did get flies and its fan was noisy. The environmentally friendly Huttons were getting disillusioned.

Mutterings about getting another septic system installed OUTDOORS were to be heard.

There was the "Draining Incident". The device began to get more 'water' in it than it was evaporating. Standing on a ladder in the basement, holding a bucket and unscrewing the front panel until the "water" began to run out was one of those jobs the brain stubbornly refuses to forget.

When the bucket was nearly full the panel had to be tightened and the bucket carried outside for emptying into a small pit I'd dug. Inevitably one bucket was spilled in the basement!!! The fluid smelled awful and was awful. The whole job was horribly, noxiously, vilely awful. It was days before I felt clean again.

In the end a new septic system was installed in the front garden and use of The Composting Toilet ended.

Martin and I dug a huge hole (it was a huge toilet!) in our adjacent property. We hauled the 'device' out of the floor, out of the house, across the garden, into the alder bushes and buried it will full military honours.

I assume it's still there, waiting, in sinister silence, for a future archaeologist.

Me? I'm completely cured of any urge to own one or use one or see one ............................ EVER AGAIN.

Is it all funny now, after a quarter of a century? Ask me again in another twenty five years.

1966 The Mill .....................................

I could write a book about the mill, not a thick book perhaps, but the whole saga merits more than just a short story.

Bielby (sometimes spelt Beilby) is a Yorkshire village. Somewhere between Pocklington and the wide River Humber. Pocklington? Well it's not far from Beverly. How we (four) came to be there stems from my taking a job with Blackburn Aircraft after I came out of the R.A.F.

I'd already lodged solo in Goole very briefly and a little longer at a 'farm' "somewhere" north of York. While I did that, Glennys and Mitchell and Martin stayed in Blackpool with mother-in-law. It was a Yorkshire winter and I was working at my new job and no doubt trying to find somewhere for us to live.

Perhaps someone at my new workplace recommended The Mill. Anyway, I went and looked and talked to the lady farmer who owned it. The romantic in me was smitten I suspect and I said 'yes' and set about moving the family hence.

Bielby's mill was 111 years old when we moved in. For the afficiandoes of mills, it was driven by a side mounted, undershot wheel. Power was from Bielby Beck (beck is the Yorkshire word for stream - see how much you're learning here folks).

The mill was sited at the end of a short, purpose-built spur from the Pocklington Canal. Initially the mill ground (I think) locally grown grains for flour. As this busines declined it turned to grinding bone meal. In the end, the mechanism, probably due to reduced maintenance, began to damage the building's structure and operation ceased.

When our time to inhabit arrived the building served as accomodation and storage for the adjacent farm.

Our time there, about a year, was filled with a lot of interest and humour and not a little grief. The rest of the chapter can follow in subsequent tales. We were to love and hate Bielby Mill by turns.

*******************************

And here, told a little differently, is the same tale. I wrote it for the Pocklington Canal Society's newsletter and they published it. It tells more and less the same story again, perhaps worth a read too:


Bielby’s Mill
We; my wife, two young sons and I, lived in Bielby’s mill during most of 1966 and 67. Fresh out of the Royal Air Force I was working at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor airfield as an inspector on Blackburn Buccaneers.
Supposedly 111 yrs old then, the mill would be 143 yrs old now. I suspect it’s rather older.
It showed its age! Built before damp courses were invented, wet weather would see “the rising damp” rise alarmingly. Downstairs floors were stone I think. The upstairs floors sagged quite alarmingly and every piece of furniture had to be levelled with pieces of wood. Anything like children’s marbles rolled rapidly towards the building’s centre. The roofs leaked here and there too.
We were to love and hate the mill by turns.
On the positive side? On a sunny day it was a lovely place to be. Walks with Lurch, our black lab, along the arm and up and down the canal. Disused then of course it was weed-choked and mysterious. Back then too, before Google, information was harder to come by and I really had little idea of the area’s history - perhaps too young to care much. Ah, careless youth!
The mill was what I think they call an undershot type. Driven by Bielby Bec it was a big whitewashed brick structure. Used to grind corn etc. I think and in latter days, bone meal. I was told it had been taken out of use because the massive machinery was beginning to damage the building’s structure. When we lived there I think the building was used to store animal feed while we occupied the old miller’s accommodation.
Behind the building were several of the millstones. So big and heavy! How did “they” handle such huge items back then? For reasons that elude me now I decided to move one round to the front of the mill where it served as the base for a bird feeder, a tree branch being jammed into the wheel’s pivot hole. Using logs as rollers and assorted levers I gradually move this massive item from A to B. Is it still there I wonder?
Many, many memories, too many for here perhaps but,
‘Jacko’ Jackson, an aircraft cleaner lived in the village. He had a Ford Anglia and I a Morris Mini. We took turns driving each other to work. A gentle, quietly spoken man with a Yorkshire dialect that defeated me sometimes. He’d spent the war in a prison camp after Dunkerque and his brother had died at Imphal in Burma.
In the field opposite the Bielby Arm, ploughing turned up pieces of an aircraft, a WW2 crash perhaps. I hauled pieces of engine cowling from the canal. What, I wonder, was the story behind that.
I remember the Mill’s lighting flickered during high winds and there were stories of haunting. I remember ruined canal locks and a plan to build some sort of punt to use on the canal.
Then Blackburns offered us a council house in Brough and the Mill suddenly became a memory. A year later we emigrated to Canada. Now, nearly a half century later Beilby’s Water Mill remains a vivid moment in my history.

2006 That Sister of Mine ..............................................

This is hardly a memoir as I'm writing it today (Nov 16th '06) But it goes to show how history's pages turn.

Yesterday evening I phoned Sister Toni in Toronto for a chat and perhaps because of an urge to talk about my dad. I got the "This number is no longer in service" recording. So I redialed - same result. Three phone calls to Directory Enquiries got me nowhere although I have her address and phone number - evrything in fact.

Is she alive, dead, sick, moved, kidnapped? Took 34 years to find her - have I now lost her again? Is there that must told of "simple explanation"?

I'll write to her (old?) address and then wait for her (maybe) Christmas card. But today did have an awful empty ring to it.

1999 or whenever it was ...........................................

When Andrea came to Heathrow airport that day to collect Vivian and I, it was to be her first meeting with my new maiden.

Why? ............ Oh why, was she looking for a tall, young, black girl?

We all know Vivian is short, not so young and definitely white.

Where did Andypooh get her ideas from?

2006 So, How's the Blogging Going? ...............................................

How indeed? Been 'at it' for over a month thus far. Eighteen entries. Who's on board?

Mitch ..... who acknowledged the fact.
Alexandre ...... who didn't (yet).
Martin ...
Sherri ... who thinks it a good idea.
Vivian ... well she thinks me strange anyway!
Marc Andre?
Andrea ... not yet.
Sister Toni ... not yet.
Me ... of course, I'm writing it! And loving it.

1939 to the present, My Encounters With God ..........................................................

Probably in 1940 I was baptised (or was that christened or both? Unsure of the difference). I know it happened because I've seen me in the church register. There I am: DErick Hutton. See that odd spelling with the aparent typo of a capital 'E'? Now, thereby hangs a tale, as they say.

What makes the "mispelling" odder is the fact that my birth certificate has me as Derek.

My father was Harold Eric Hutton. It would seem he wanted me christened Eric - and why not? My guess is that he succeeded and there it was, writ thus: Eric Hutton ........... I should have been Eric for all time.

But my mother hated my father with a passion, she kept that up until she died. My guess, and of proof there is none, is that my mother quite literally crept into the church one day and simply added a 'D' in front and a 'k' behind. And hey presto! there I am, DErick.

Does it matter? Not one jot really. But it's a neat little footnote to my history.

Much later, in the 1970s, there comes a strange twist in Hutton history, which adds a little credance to the above. ...................... Earlier in this 'blog' I spoke of "getting a sister". Well that sister was called, if you recall, Antonette Frances Hutton. She was born to my father and his second wife, Eileen Josephine, in 1944.

My mother told me, and I believe my maternal grandmother confirmed it, that my father wanted to call me Anthony. This was met with dismay in the Webber family (I'll explain later) and seemingly all joined forces to prevent me from being called Anthony. Perhaps they grudging settled for Eric.

But Harold Eric wasn't to be thwarted, when his second child was born a girl he called her Antonette. Perhaps a sweet way of getting-his-own-back. Maybe he knew about DErick? Much mystery surrounds the man.

So what has all this to do with my encounters with god? Nothing at all, just rambling off the subject as I am wont to do.

My maternal grandparents were Wesleyans. Wesleyanism is an off-shoot of the Protestant church. You'll have to Google an explanation.

How they fell into Christian Science is a minor mystery. My grandmother Florence seems to have "seen that particular light" at some point in the late 1940s? Heaven knows why, she was a very smart woman. My mother seemed to be a 'converted' to the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy too. So ..... they started sending me to a Christian Science Sunday School in nearby Camberley. I'd go on the bus or my grandfather would take me in the car. I don't think I benefited much from the Sunday mornings spent thus, although my grandad would often buy me an ice-cream afterwards.

I there learned (or is that learnt?) that we are made in God's image and as God is perfect, we are therefore perfect too.
Seemingly if you believe this firmly enough all ills will be cured etc etc etc etc. It never seemed to help me much but then I likely didn't believe enough.

As soon as possible I stopped going to Sunday school and that was it ........... I became sort of faithless. I always thought 'free-thinker' sounded good but nobody accepts it as a faith - well it isn't I suppose. When you say "atheist" people look a little affronted, as if you'd said "Leprosy". Agnostic is a bit weak I think, a sort of cop-out. So maybe I'll be a free-thinker after all.

The military were always keen to get you to church and had what they called Church Parades.

I was in Westminster Abbey once when I was in the Air Training Corps, singing along with Princess Margaret but I don't think she noticed me.

The RAF loved Church Parades. Usually on windswept, rained-on parade grounds or runways. The padre would tell us how good things were and we look forward to geting away to where things were even better ... and drier and warmer. I skipped a church parade once by posing as a Roman Catholic which meant being in civvies instead of uniform and getting away on an earlier bus to the sinfulness that was Blackpool. Either God missed this transgression or it's noted in a black book somewhere. Sigh. But I still try to be good!

Ah yes, about Anthony. The English have never liked Italians. This is because the English are warlike and the Italians think war rather stupid so they supposedly make poor soldiers (did everybody forget the Romans?)
This seemingly make them quit early in a war so the English think poorly of the Italian. This is all very vague isn't it. But .................. many Italians settled in England and seemingly most ice cream businesses and ice cream sellers were Italians. Many of them were called Tony which is beacause the English perhaps think Tony is the only name for Italians. Anyway, the upshot of all this was the declaration, by the senior members of my then family, that they didn't want any descendant of theirs named after ice-crean sellers. Pretty convoluted eh? So I'm DErick or Derek and Antonette's Toni.

1939 to the present. Me and God...............................................

We get along fine, a sort of mutual agreement, he lets horribly deformed children be born and most of Africa starves etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc ..................... and I don't go to church.

There may be a god, there may not. Until someone proves there is, I'll just stay away from it all. If he's half as wonderful as "they" say, he'll understand me and I'll go to heaven anyway ..... cos I've bin good!

If we were all the same shade of brown and if we all spoke one language and if we did away with religion the world would be near perfect. So ........ I've done my bit to cure number three.

That's my spin on God!

1948 ??? That first TV .................................

Not quite sure what year it would have been. It's all a brief whirl of images now. As with cars, my grandfather managed to be among "the earlier to have things".

That the TV was a black and white there's no doubt. After all, television for the masses was, to all intents and puposes, a post-war arrival. These was early days. I'm sure the screen was laughably small by today's standards and the picture probably awful. The only transmitter then was at Alexandra Palace to the north of London, so at 30+ miles we must have been at the limit of the range; line of sight and all that.

In those days the BBC or British Broadcasting Corporation was the only broadcaster. ITV, Independant Television followed later with its transmitter at Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham. At eight years old I knew and cared little about all this.

I can only remember a couple of programmes: Test Match cricket which my grandfather followed avidly and a children's programme called "Muffin the Mule". Much of the time the transmission ended abruptly and the screen would display either goldfish or a windmill and the caption: "Normal Service Will be Resumed as Soon as Possible". But in those days, even the goldfish or a windmill were a source of fascination.

Programmes were rather restricted. Mostly evenings I think. At 'non-programme' time there was a patterned 'test card' displayed on the screen. I'm told folks would even stand and gaze at that in radio shop windows.

I remember that the start of transmission was marked with a picture of Alexandra Palace's huge antenna with "waves" emmanating from it.

We've come along way since then - but was it the right way? Given show content and quality today, I'm far from sure.

1957 I Join The Royal Air Force .........................

In a way I had no choice. At seventeen I was acutely aware that National Service was looming. This requirement lasted from war's end in 1945 in Britain until somewhere in the sixties when the law was changed. National Service was dreaded by young men in my day. It meant you served in the military for two years when you reached eighteen. NO exemptions unless you were seriously medically unfit or already worked in a war related industry.

So, rather than have two hulking red-caps knock on the door and carry me away into the dreaded British Army - I opted for the "pale blue".

Presumably I went to a recruiting office and just - volunteered, I don't remember now. But I soon found myself at R.A.F. Cardington.

I found the heading picture on the 'web'. Those are the balloon sheds of Cardington. It said in the article that the Titannic would fit in one of those sheds with only 40 feet sticking out. They were indeed huge, completely dominating everything during my brief say. Originally built in the 1920s to house the construction of airships they still stand today - 80 years later. The ill-fated R101 was built there, that huge airship that crashed and burned in France on her maiden voyage. Thus ended airship building, in Britain at least.

When I was at Cardington the sheds housed 'barrage' balloons of world war two vintage. Huge, almost like silver elephants, these were used to train RAF Balloon Operators. Balloon operators and their balloons in turn helped train Army paratroopers, and others, in the arts of parachute jumping. The necessary huge piles of red hydrogen gas cylinders were everywhere for inflating the balloons, not very nice stuff hydrogen - it killed all the people on that R101!

But Cardington was also the 'kitting-out" centre for the R.A.F. and here I was duly kitted-out with a seemingly endless array of clothing etc. We got a best blue and a working blue uniform, a huge greatcoat, shoes and boots, socks and underwear, shirts and ties and collars - even collar studs. And ... a beret and a 'flat' hat, a webbing belt and small pack and shoebrushes and pyjamas and towels ......... the list seemed endless. Lastly they gave us a kitbag in which it was all supposed to fit (I never saw that packing miracle achieved).

We were there a very few days but much happened. Looking back, it was there, that in a way, I determined the rest of my life. 'Choosing a trade', seemed no big deal at the time. The only trades open to me (so they said) were Airframe Mechanic, Marine Craft and Police. I probably had a young man's aversion to police in any form so I rejected that. Marine Craft (yes I know it's the Air Force) ... well I couldn't swim so I side-stepped that too.

Which left Aircraft Mechanic. Well, I'd always had a thing for aeroplanes AND it was the only choice left, so I was on my way to being one. To get the trade it seemed you had to 'sign on' for five years minimum, so I said yes to that too.

We also went for haircuts. No too traumatic for me but these were the days of Teddy Boys, the then current male-toughy image. It was nice to see these young louts lose their DA (duck's arse) hair style and their padded shoulders and peg-leg pants - they ended up looking just like us, thin and young and lost.

Visits to the tailor got our uniforms to the point where they nearly fit. The R.A.F. never did seem to care much about the uniforms it gave its airmen. Looking at relative pictures of me will confirm this.

All that was left was the swearing our allegiance to our monarch and swearing to obey the orders of those officers placed in authourity above us. Now we waited for our transportation to "square-bashing" or boot-camp as my North American readers will know it. We sat around sewing our number tags on the countless bits of our new kit and wondering just what we'd let ourselves in for.

A day or so later a train pulled in at the bottom of the parade ground and we marched down to it in disorder and climbed aboard - if Cardington had been a shock, more shocking was to come.