Word: washbasin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...dirty clothes is a problem that varying Harvard men solve in varying ways. Some carefully pack their laundry in neat cardboard cases, lug them down to the Post Office, and then spend weeks in squalor and grime waiting for the return mail. Other pile their clothes in the washbasin and alternately serub and sneeze until a dazzling brightness is attained. But most undergraduates shoulder or dispatch their wash to Cambridge laundries which charge up to $18 to fray cuffs off of shirtsleeves...
Nice Kitty. In Elizabeth, N.J., a six-year-old cat named Mitzie had got in the habit of jumping to the bathroom washbasin and brushing her own teeth, said her mistress...
...cellmates, four Japanese criminals, spent a good part of each day mashing mosquitoes against the concrete walls of their 9-by-5½-ft. cell. It helped keep down the mosquitoes and it helped pass the time. Once a day the Bishop was escorted to a corridor washbasin - cold water and no soap. One morning a woman prisoner smilingly offered him a piece of soap. The gesture restored his waning faith in human nature. Coarse rice, a piece of pickle, vegetable soup and tepid water were the daily fare, but Bishop Heaslett had the privilege of having food sent...
First there is the quick glance around, the swift inventory of "the iron bedstead, the washbasin, the W.C., the barred window." Next, invariably, the prisoner tries "to pull himself up by the iron bars of the window and look out. He fails . . . but decides to . . . master the art of pulling himself up by his hands." He dusts the wall-plaster off his suit. He "pulls a face, being determined to prove that he is full of courage and confidence." Suddenly he notices, at the spyhole of his cell door, an eye. It is an eye without a man attached...
Author Partridge is no more sentimental than a washbasin. In getting back to the past he completely bypasses the antique shop. His books are nostalgic, but it is not a nostalgia for antimacassars or oil lamps. The nostalgia is for a democracy that was real because in the general dearth of material things, nobody was able to have much more than anybody else. It was integral and uniform, and its patterns were as obvious and as artless as the patterns in its Brussels carpets...