Digging a Cesspit by Dorothy Lawrenson
Digging a Cesspit
After a week the Elsan was at high tide,
thick bluish fluid lapping with foul flotsam.
My sister’s new boyfriend arrived on cue.
Dad marked out a square metre, the blade
of the trenching spade knifing through
lank grass, handed the spade to the youth
and said he would fetch the pickaxe:
there were bound to be rocks.
In the kitchen, cold flagstones
and flypapers kept July at bay.
Mum strained and bottled elderflower cordial
to put under the stairs. I played on the floor.
The lad was knackered after an hour,
tormented by sweat-seeking flies.
Still he toiled in noon heat:
his legs slowly disappearing,
he grew shorter and more stooped
as if reconciling himself to his grave.
I stopped pretending to be a horse.
A hole as deep as a man is tall!
I had heard the story about the Jew
who fell in a cesspit on a Saturday
and refused help, only to die on Sunday
when the Christian rescue party would do no work.
In the afternoon, I helped the boy clamber out.
Mum poured the bucket’s brimming contents
into the pit where they frothed, sloshed
and settled, sheets of the pink paper she favoured
floating like waterlilies on the surface.
That was thirty years ago. For a long time –
and maybe still – square patches of lush grass
and big-leaved nettles high as a child’s head
grew in that rough ground under the elder tree.
DOROTHY LAWRENSON
…………………………………………………
If you ask the general public to name what they regard as fit subjects for poems, then nature, war and love are likely to top the list. Chemical toilets and cesspits would be unlikely to feature. Yet here is a poem ‘about’ an overflowing chemical toilet and a cesspit being dug to receive its contents. Still, as the Jungian analyst James Hollis was fond of saying, ‘It’s not about what it’s about.’ The anecdote from childhood recounted by this Dundee-born, Fife-raised poet (who writes in English and Scots) both stands in its own right as a vivid memory and serves as a vehicle for a subtle exploration of the roles we perform within society, particularly the family.
The poem begins with a line that might sound conventional to a reader who is unaware that Elsan is a make of chemical toilet rather than, say, a noble schooner: ‘After a week the Elsan was at high tide’. The next line uses alliteration in much the same manner as Yeats’s famous lyric poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (‘I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore’), but to a different effect: ‘thick bluish fluid lapping with foul flotsam’. The reader is not being lulled but repelled. Despite the unpleasant subject matter, the style so far has been ‘poetic’, but then comes the down-to-earth plainness of ‘My sister’s new boyfriend arrived on cue.’
The story being told next reads like an initiation into manhood. The ‘new boyfriend’ is being tested by ‘Dad’ – is the boyfriend man enough to pull his weight in the digging of a cesspit? He clearly goes all out to impress and win acceptance, almost to the (metaphorical) point of death as he disappears into the hole he is digging: the simulation of death is a feature of many primitive initiation ceremonies. The poet uses the informal word ‘knackered’ to describe the lad’s exhaustion. This is common parlance in most English-speaking countries, but it is probably intentional and, in the context of male initiation, apt that the poet uses a word whose plural noun is the slang term for testicles.
The males are outside while the females are inside, in the kitchen. The blokes might have shitty work to do, but it’s important work in their eyes. And while they strain their bodies, the wife/mother is in the kitchen straining elderflower cordial. Meanwhile her young daughter plays on the floor: play is permitted to the very young in this hard-working environment. The narrow confines of family life are extended to include a wider religious dimension, with the gruesome but witty story that recalls Christ’s words, ‘If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?’ Religious observance is another way in which society defines our roles, but the sentiment of that particular parable is not to be too rigid in the formalities of your observance. And so the females join in the dirty work, the girl helping the young man out of the hole and the woman pouring ‘the bucket’s brimming contents / into the pit’.
The poem’s serious themes are leavened throughout with humour. It’s easy to smile at lines such as ‘I stopped pretending to be a horse’. This isn’t a case of ‘kids say the funniest things’: being a child is a serious business, however much it amuses adults. The perspective of the poem deftly shifts between the girl’s and the adult poet’s.
The poem ends powerfully with the image of ‘lush grass / and big-leaved nettles high as a child’s head’ fertilised by that cesspit. A life lesson is implied in Lawrenson’s poem, but also a statement about poetry itself, where the most mundane or difficult matter (‘rough ground’) is nutrient-rich (more elderflower heads for the cordial) and can give rise to a dangerous beauty.
‘Digging a Cesspit’ will be included in Lawrenson’s debut collection, Given to the River, from Drunk Muse Press (November, 2025).