Antimacassars and other strange customs 

I was going to write to you about antimacassars, a strange word which had fallen into disuse. Except it hasn’t. When I went into Google to check its spelling, I find that it’s still used to describe a piece of cloth draped as protection across the arms and/or back of an armchair. In the Victorian era, antimacassars were usually of lace or possibly embroidered cloth; now it seems they’re of any fabric and appear to be much more sturdy than their older relations.

At least we don’t have to live with other Victorian ideas like draping fabric around a piano’s legs because seeing legs, even on an inanimate object like a piano, was regarded as provocative. Seeing a lady’s ankle was a sexy as it got. Which is odd as in slightly earlier times as we saw in Pride and Prejudice and a myriad of other television series and movies, women wore extremely tight bodices with a great deal of bosom pushed up and out and men wore extremely tight “inexpressibles” of knitted material which one imagines were even more revealing than budgie smugglers.

O tempora, o mores – Oh the times, oh the manners!

It’s interesting how fashion – in clothing, manners, activities and more – has changed from my youth to now.

Take “Ban the Bomb”, the slogan of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a strong peace movement in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. It advocated the abolition of methods of mass destruction but is no longer active although its logo, a kind of revamped Mercedes symbol, is still co-opted sometimes by other anti-establishment movements.

And then there were beach inspectors. Even in the ‘60s, they patrolled Bondi Beach (and maybe elsewhere) looking for young women wearing scanty bikinis which were against either the law or the statutes of Waverley Council. I was humiliated by being complimented by one of these loathed public servants because my two-piece was supremely modest, the bottom half coming all the way to my waist.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, men escorting women down the street would reliably position themselves on the kerb side of the sidewalk, a custom ingrained from when streets were muddy and passing traffic would fling mud or dust upwards. I doubt there is anyone alive under 70 who would do this for that reason. It’s a bit like women wearing gloves to go to town – totally foregone.

Kids today have their LOL (laughing out loud), BRB (be right back), BTW (by the way), FISH (first in, still here) and POS (parents over shoulder). But we had our own acronyms; as young teenagers we wrote SWALK on the back of envelopes (sealed with a loving kiss) and giggled at the supposed meaning of POSH (allegedly written on the suitcases of the sahibs and memsahibs sailing to and from India and standing for Port Out Starboard Home, instructions on which side of the ship to have one’s cabin) and the supposed meaning of the word Snafu, coined by the military and meaning Situation Normal All F**d Up.

We also had Pig Latin, an invented language where each word lost its first letter which was pushed to the end of the word with the sound “ay” afterwards. So, Pig Latin for Pig Latin was “igpay atinlay”. Astonishingly, it didn’t really catch on.

Ladies were not supposed to eat in the street in the Olden Days; if I ever find myself slurping an ice-cream as I wander along, I send up a silent “sorry” to my late mother.

Young ladies also didn’t get their ears pierced. That, apparently, was only for foreign people. So strong was this admonition that I didn’t get my ears pierced until I was a dashing 72.

We did a lot of singing the National Anthem in the Olden Days, including at the cinema where we had to stand and sing before the film (or fillum or pitcha). In those days it was, of course, God Save the Queen. It took me years to learn Advance Australia Fair when it was introduced as our National Anthem, and I’m still wobbly on the second verse.

By the way, the young Queen visited Australia in 1954, less than a year after her Coronation, which was celebrated by the publishing of glossy black and white picture books which we young girls sighed over. On her 1954 visit, my mother, along with an estimated 1.8 million others, took my little brother and I to wave flags as her motorcade flashed by. I recall wondering when I was older how she coped with the disgusting stench of the tanneries which lined the then best route from the airport to the city. Perhaps she had her bottle of sal volatile (smelling salts) without which, I understand, no lady would travel.

And another quaint custom of the Olden Days … When we young ladies finally met and married Mr Right we completely lost our identity, subsumed into that of our husbands; Betty Williams became Mrs John Brown or Helen White, Mrs Bob Jones.

 

 

Quote of the Week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

US poet Robert Lowell: “If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the light of the oncoming train.”