The Black Well

Having lived here so long Ermenia knows everything about the house and its history. On an early tour of inspection she wrinkled her nose up at the rather naff plastic concertina doors at one end of our kitchen. “You want to get rid of those,” she said, “there’s a nice wooden door that goes there down in the cellar”, which of course there was. She also solved the mystery of our septic tank, in Italian “pozzo nero”, literally “black well”. The estate agents insisted that a rather sad looking stone chamber in the grounds with a broken pipe leading into it was the pozzo nero. In an early experiment we poured a bucket of water down the toilet and waited for it to flow through the broken pipe and saw and heard nothing. I gingerly removed the bit of old tin and pile of stones covering the lid to the stone chamber, sending a horde of small scorpions and wood lice running for cover and found the interior dry and clean. “Are you sure that’s the pozzo nero in the grounds?” We asked Pierot the estate agent a couple of days later and he insisted that it was. Later we asked Ermenia. She laughed, “no that’s the pozzo nero for the washing machine, see, you can put a washing machine in that outhouse and you can supply it with water by connecting up this hose. The real pozzo nero is under the car park over here. It’s very deep underground. Mrs Convertini was a hairdresser and used loads of water, but they never had a problem with it.” Well, so far she had been proved right, our waste water gurgles away happily with no sign of a problem, although I’m also aware that every lifestyle book I’ve ever read includes a septic tank crisis at some point in the narrative.