“Have you been to the Place, dear?” or “Have you been?” Or else “Hubert, shouldn’t you run along the passage?” when Hubert was fidgeting frighteningly from foot to foot.Įntire books have been written about the social history of toilets and our many words for them and for what we do in and around them. Brock to mention it she called it the Place. Hubert even had a po in the bushes “in case.” Another thing these kind nuns had done was to teach him to say “the toilet” when he meant the po or the lavatory, which was a vulgarity no one seemed able to straighten out. In those days thrombosis had not been heard of, and invalids, young and old, were allowed a comfortable rest after their operations. The nuns in the nursing home had spoiled him so that he was really unbearably demanding, sending me in all directions and inventing tasks for me while he lay on a chaise longue under the cedar tree with lemonade constantly at his elbow. When at last he came home he was a very great disappointment to me. As I cleaned out his budgies and his mice his eyes haunted my work – his eyes that never lit and sparkled as blue eyes should, as I knew mine would, if only they were big and blue. Constantly with me was the thought of his black hair, peaked on his forehead, smooth on his head as if painted on an egg. I prayed night and day for his recovery and that he might get a reprieve from pain. They took Hubert off to Cork that same night, and he had an appendix and tubes and nearly died. The narrator, a memorably antisocial creation, reports on her brother’s visit to the hospital when they were both children: The first paragraph below is not of immediate linguistic interest but supplies context for what follows and no little amusement in its own right. Molly Keane’s exceptional and darkly comic novel Good Behaviour (1981) has a telling passage on euphemisms for toilet in upper-class Anglo-Irish society a century or so ago.

Good behaviour molly keane summary