I got a shock when I walked into the bathroom – for a moment I thought the floor was covered in gobbets of soot & black dust.
Well next door has builders seeing to the roof, perhaps all the noise & banging could have dislodged some of the century’s worth of smoky smut & grime from our roof space – but where was the hole it had fallen through?
I am never at my best first thing in the morning.
When I collected my wits I realised that it was a sheet of newspaper, laid there for a purpose. What I took for black blobs of dust were actually the hair on the heads of the crowd at the opening day of the 1948 Olympics, part of a magnificent series of photographs, archival or new, being published in The Times.
1948 resembled 2012 in that a dreary wet summer turned gloriously sunny just in time for the Games, which opened on a day when the temperature reached over 30° A good half of the crowd sat, bareheaded, in seats completely unprotected from the elements; a few wore hats, but many relied on their newspaper, placed tent-style, on top of their head, which induced great waves of nostalgia in me. Actually I thought that if they had really been letting themselves go they would have fashioned their newspapers into folded hats, or created makeshift caps by tying knots in the corners of their hankies; that none did so means that they retained a certain sense of the decorum appropriate to the relative formality of the occasion.
One correspondent to The Times found it odd that not one pair of sunglasses could be seen in the poster-size panoramic photograph of the crowd, putting that down to post-war austerity where there was not enough money such fripperies.
Actually my memory tells me that sunglasses were actually frowned upon for most of my childhood. At best they were an unnecessary affectation, adopted by Hollywood film stars, poseurs, unrelaibale men & women no better than they ought to be; at worst they were actually bad for your eyes. And in between they provoked a response which, it now strikes me, is not dissimilar to the modern objection to the full Muslim veil – although in that case the objection is that you cannot see the face, with shades the unease is down to the fact that you cannot see the eyes of the person you are talking to. It would have been the height of rudeness to keep your darkened glasses on while talking to someone.
On days when the sun really did blaze down a hat would have provided all the protection your eyes needed from the glare. If no hat were readily available you could improvise with a scarf, towel, or yes, newspaper.
It still causes me a certain frisson of concern to see sunglasses on a child not yet old enough for secondary school, and as for babies in dark glasses - send for social services.
