Some of these forums make wonderful reading, thanks to you all. The cotton reel was the equivalent of todays keyring and because of its size was always obvious. My two grandparents both had outside toilets. Grays Road had only the one toilet at the end of the scullery block, past the fuel store. A bleak cold building with an inside bolt, bleached wooden seat, made up seemingly of four planks with the hole fashioned in the middle, all very carefully sanded and smooth, except for the joints. My grandfather always told me that this was how the seats used to be in Warwickshire country toilets. The other feature was the carefully torn up squares of the News of the World, I first read parts of Forever Amber and never understood what was wrong with so many Bodmin Vicars!!!! In the memory cells it is one of the articles that I can remember to this day, unfortunately in those wartime years our sexual knowledge was not as advanced as that of the children of today. In fact my dear mother passed away recently and still had not told me about the birds and the bees, so as Frank sings 'I did it my way'. My other grandparents in Queens Road off Slade Road, Erdington had two toilets one in the bathroom, floral with an ebony seat and one outside full of brooms, spades, spiders the size of small dogs, beetles and cold as the artic even on a summer's day. A bleached white wooden seat, no torn up newspaper, but shiny squares from a box - was that Jeyes? The memories keep coming from all that you write. Just completed a week on the canals, but could not get round the ring because of a cherry picker in the canal at Brierley Hill, can anyone tell me where I can read the full story?