Vintage View: The chamber pot

When I was a child, my brother and I regularly came up from the country and stayed with a more ancient relative in Dublin over weekends. 

Our bedroom abridged hers with rolling pocket doors. At night, with the car lights raking the steel, venetian blinds, our infant imaginations were consumed, fascinated and repelled by one detail of her living arrangements above all others — the curiously named ‘Jerry’ beneath her heavily upholstered bed.

It was a big house, and I can well appreciate why this tiny, disabled but ever elegant woman did not take the dark adventure to the nearest proper bathroom, which was in fact the original outside ‘privy’, connected loosely to the house by a windy corridor roofed in plastic sheeting.