Toilets at the Brontë Parsonage Museum at last

BBC News reports that the Brontë Parsonage Museum has finally got funding to build toilets for visitors.

The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth is to offer visitor toilets for the first time in its near 100-year history.
Arts Council England has allocated £100,000 of government funding to the museum so it can build the facilities.
Rebecca Yorke, director of the museum which opened in 1928, said toilets were "difficult" to get funded despite being essential facilities. [...]
Ms Yorke said: "We have been here for nearly 100 years but we haven't had any visitors' toilets.
"This money is going to enable us to build facilities for our visitors, particularly those with mobility issues or those with small children who need changing.
"It is essential and it is what people expect when they visit a world-class attraction like ours, but they are actually difficult to get funding for."
Four toilets will be built, plus an accessible toilet with baby changing facilities.

The roof of the toilets will be planted to improve biodiversity by creating a habitat where insects can breed. (Adam Laver)

The Times has published an obituary of Maryse Condé.

Looking back on her life as one of the great voices of Caribbean literature, Maryse Condé cited two formative moments as a black girl growing up on the tiny island of Guadeloupe that made her want to be a writer.

The first realisation that words had a magical power came at the age of ten when she recited a poem she had written for her mother’s birthday. “She looked up at me, her eyes brimming with tears,” Condé remembered. “At that very moment I felt a surge of power that I have attempted to relive, book after book.”

The second came two years later when a neighbour lent her a copy of Wuthering Heights. In her fertile young mind, the book’s depiction of the Yorkshire moors and Heathcliff’s forbidding farmhouse was transposed to the ruins of a sugar mill and old plantation house on a remote and uninhabited part of the island where she had sometimes walked.

“I’d never heard of Emily Brontë but it was the first time that a book became close to my heart,” she said. “It showed the power of literature that you can be an English author but reach the heart of a Caribbean child.”

When she returned the book to its owner and said that it had inspired her to want to become a writer, she was told “people like us don’t write”. As a 12-year-old girl she did not ask whether the comment referred to black people, women or those who come from small islands.