Mr. Thomas’s lavatory is another symbol of the impracticality of the upper classes and their tendency to cling to obsolete things and values. Mr. Thomas’s training as a decorator means he can take care of his house, but he lacks the skills of a plumber because that was a profession for a man of a lower class. Mr. Thomas would rather undergo the inconvenience of going outside to use the bathroom than pay to make his plumbing functional again. Using the outdoor toilet, Mr. Thomas clings to a history that precedes his birth, back when Christopher Wren built the house in the 1700s and modern indoor plumbing was not yet available. Rather than value his house as a convenient and comfortable place to live, Mr. Thomas appreciates the way that it ties him to the past, when the rules of class were still unchallenged. The fact that Mr. Thomas is locked in his lavatory during his home’s destruction further suggests that this attempt to cling to vestiges of the past is futile and self-defeating.
Mr. Thomas’s Lavatory Quotes in The Destructors
After a while it seemed to him that there were sounds in the silence – they were faint and came from the direction of his house. He stood up and peered through the ventilation-hole – between the cracks in one of the shutters he saw a light, not the light of a lamp, but the wavering light that a candle might give. Then he thought he heard the sound of hammering and scraping and chipping. He thought of burglars - perhaps they had employed the boy as a scout, but why should burglars engage in what sounded more and more like a stealthy form of carpentry?
Mr. Thomas’s Lavatory Symbol Timeline in The Destructors
