Cats will gladly eat roaches, especially if they are eating leftovers instead of Fancy Feast. The ones that cat doesn’t get, you just get used to…just like how in Hawaii and Florida it’s pretty normal to kills a couple of cockroaches in the course of the day. Generally they rarely venture into primary living spaces. and it’s easy enough to avoid kitchens and bathrooms at night (this is part of why chamber pots were popular.) It does help if you don’t have a ton of stuff- a room with some bare bedposts, wooden floors, a single blanket. and a lamp is not going to be attractive as the piles of junk we accumulate these days.
You can put up with a lot of bedbugs and fleas before it gets unbearable- you learn to think of the bites like mosquito bites…annoying, but not something that is going to ruin your day. When it starts disrupting your sleep, you boil the linens and lay the mattress in the bright sun for a few days. Usually the majority of them will move on. It helps that you are probably sleeping with some layers on, so they are less likely to find exposed skin to bite.
My grandmother was born in the 19-teens and grew up in a cabin with no modern amenities. She often recounted discouraging bed bugs and other pests by taking a feather dipped in kerosene and running it over all the cracks and crannies of the bedframes.
Here is a Good Housekeeping article from 1888 on bed bugs; as well as kerosene writers advise alcohol, sassafrass, quicksilver, and eggs.
You’re correct, the idea behind the housekeeping is bed bugs hide in things other than beds. People think if you get rid of the mattress you’re fine. But they live in other things, especially wood. So if you get rid of the clutter they have no where to hide.
But you are right, as long as there is a host bed begs will be there. They’re like lice in that regard
I remember reading a historical novel about a plantation in the south where they raised indigo. The indigo plants attracted ants by the ton (or was it grasshoppers)? Anyway, all the legs of all the beds, in fact any legs on any furniture, were put in containers filled with water. The taking apart of the beds and washing in carbolic acid was a regular part of spring cleaning in Victorian times.
Well what about head lice? I seem to recall (I might be wrong) in Betty Smith’s book A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, the mother dipping Francie’s hair in kerosene to ward off the lice.
I guess they could shave boys heads or shave the girl’s head and give her a scarf
In The Thorn Birds, the heroine, a young girl in Australia in the 20’s or 30’s, had long red blonde curls that her cold, extremely busy mother took the time every night to roll up in rag curlers. Her hair was awesome. Got lice. It got hacked off to a couple of inches, to everyone’s disgust, and weepingly combed through with kerosene. How traumatic!
