No doubt you showered this morning or wallowed in a luxurious bath. Cast your mind back to the time when most people didn’t have bathrooms, just a cold tap in the kitchen or the backyard, a shared tub by the fire in the living room. It prompted hygiene-conscious Victorians to open bath-houses. A likely subject for a tongue-in-cheek memoir!
It is one Don Chapman explores in his latest book, A Tenpenny Dip in Paradise and other flights of fancy, a collection of some of the wackier articles he wrote during his 40 years as a journalist. After the landlord of his first digs in Keighley took the tops off the lodging house bath-taps he went to one, fearing the worst.
‘Oh, the folly of ignorant prejudice. I issued into paradise. Angelic voices rose from nowhere, water splashed happily to the tune of celestial laving, and a cherubic little man motioned me to a spotless closet, wherein stood the largest bath I had ever seen, filled to the brim with piping hot water, a heavenly loofah floating on its surface.’
He has lived for the last 52 years in Eynsham, so inevitably many of the articles have a local flavour from his quest for the well behind Millstone Cottage to the time the whole village was infested with fleas.
The Eynsham Society will be hosting the launch of the book in the village hall on Friday 21 October at 7.30pm when Don will talk about and read from it. Free admission and a glass of wine or fruit juice. Please let him know if you’d like to come – don@donchapman.plus.com
If you can’t make that date, but would like a signed copy, you are welcome to contact him. If you no longer live locally, it’s available online and from all good bookshops [ISBN: 9781914913860] at £9.99, or as an e-book at £3.99.
Further reading
Literary Eynsham: Eynsham writers and Eynsham connections.