Living in 2016 in the 40s

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http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28106466

 

[LizzieMaine]

Somebody give that 1939 girl his phone number, quick.

 

[St. Louis]

Over the years I've seen quite a few posts in this forum about people who live in the 30s and 40s. They can be found all over the planet -- England, the Netherlands, Japan, and the U.S. Has anyone ever tried to pull them all together somehow? I would really love to be a fly on the wall during a conversation among them. I think most of them don't really post on internet forums, do they?

These folks are my heroes. I've been retrofitting my own life over the past ten years or so, but I'm a rank amateur compared to most of them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What strikes me is how many of them seem to be in the UK. People there seem to be much more aware of the prewar/war/immediate postwar period in general than they are in the US, where the Boys From Marketing's version of "the fifties" seem to be the genericized version of the past. Books could be written analyzing exactly why that is.

 

[Fading Fast]

Having read / seen both this story and the 1939 girl's story recently - and remembering some of the earlier ones - I find my mind shifting from thinking these individuals are simply passionate about the pre-war period, etc., to thinking they are also looking for a way out of or a way to mitigate the speed, pressure and rate of change of the modern world. Not judging, just noting that my view / my interpretation of what they are doing is evolving.

 

[Edward]

Somebody give that 1939 girl his phone number, quick.

Heh. This guy does seem to have a more realistic attitude, if she could be taken at face value - clearly he engages with the 'real' world too, whereas she seemed terribly keen to pretend it actually is 1939. That said, I did have a sneaking suspicion reading her interview that she was winding the interviewer up a bit, and probably doesn't sit at home pretending it's the blackout every night....

I also rather enjoy that his house is realistic - far too often when you see this sort of thing, it's done like a showhome of the period, with everything being new as of the selected year. Real people of course accumulate a lot wider a range of stuff - living in 2016, my kitchen was installed in 2008, most of my furniture is of a design considered "classic" and long established by the end of the nineties, and so on. I've got a 50s kitchen table I use as a writing desk, which is much the same as this guy's Victorian bits and pieces, time-wise. It looks not only like something that somebody did live in, but also like something that would be comfortable to live in today (albeit that I'd have wifi and a concealed flat screen in there!). The concealed fridge is another sign that he's got a very healthy attitude to it all, psychologically speaking.

What strikes me is how many of them seem to be in the UK. People there seem to be much more aware of the prewar/war/immediate postwar period in general than they are in the US, where "the fifties" seem to be the genericized version of the past. Books could be written analyzing exactly why that is.

There's a certain tendency in the UK to massively fetishise WW2, often to a dangerous and worrying degree. For a great many people, the actual history is outweighed by far by the mythology - Churchill, the Wonderful Man, the Blameless Allies who Never Did Wrong, and on it goes. I think the romanticisation of the war, implicit in so much UK popular culture (a common English soccer chant when playing germany to this day remains "two world wars and one world cup" - and the fans have adopted the theme from The Great Escape, whistled with particular gusto when they play Germany), has a lot for which to answer. This only increases with historical distance, as the generation who actually lived through it die out, and a generation influenced by the Sixties cinema version is increasingly supplanted by a generation who romanticise the era of their passing grandparents. Of course, if they actually had to live through the war, the Blitz, rationing, and all the rest of it, few of them would be so keen. Another issue, which I think affects this period more broadly, is the perception that Britain was "truly great" in the era, often cleaved to by those who believe that Britain is not now the "world power" they think it should be. That was the era of the Empire; the tail end of the forties is typically seen as marking its decline (reality is, of course, that the British Empire was on the way out from at least 1916). Certainly, the UK had a thriving manufacturing industry in that period - now long gone. Pre 1948 was also an era in which Britain was resolutely "white" for the very main part, and sadly our modern vintage scene does contain a certain element - small though it is - which holds firm to the notion that "things were better before the Windrush arrived, and women and ethnics got uppity".

Please don't get me wrong - this is by no means all or even a majority of the vintage scene, and I've not personally encountered that attitude among the folks who are as hardcore as the man in this piece. You'll see plenty of it around, though - were this to appear on the website of certain national newspapers, a very significant number of the comments would be to the effect that "Britain was better then", with, at best, some very unsavoury attitudes heavily implied. The broader culture of romanticising the war era in particular, however, certainly plays a big part in that era being so popular here. Most folks who have a strong interest in the fifties in the UK, at least in my experience, are drawn to it by the music primarily, and it's a much more 'American' view. There are a lot of great fifties weekends here, very much focussed on the American rock and roll music and clothing styles. Popular culture here doesn't typically have the underlying notion of the fifties are a "golden era" for the UK. The Sixties, in many ways, are looked back on as the Great Era in the same was as the fifties in the US - people were, by and large, better off, the UK had a thriving popular culture industry which straddled the globe, it was the era of much classic British cinema, there was the early sixties British rock and roll boom (sadly killed off by thosed damn Beatles), the UK car inustry was at its peak....

Having read / seen both this story and the 1939 girl's story recently - and remembering some of the earlier ones - I find my mind shifting from thinking these individuals are simply passionate about the pre-war period, etc., to thinking they are also looking for a way out of or a way to mitigate the speed, pressure and rate of change of the modern world. Not judging, just noting that my view / my interpretation of what they are doing is evolving.

I am inclined to agree. To an extent it is a very healthy thing: all too often in contemporary society we confuse novelty with progress, I believe. There's much to be said for an attitude of "well, I like this, it does what I need, I don't need The New Thing". Where I think it can tip over into something very unhealthy is where the focus becomes on living in a very specific year and trying to cut out from life anything thereafter, no matter how beneficial. It wouldn't be the first time if I met someone on the 'vintage scene' who stopped listening to muic they love because it was 1970s and they wanted to be a thirties person, for instance. I'm also wary of anyone who seeks to present their chosen era as the 'perfect' period for human existence - once too often I've heard a profession of the superiority of their chosen time period turn into a profession of their own superiority over the moderns, which is when it can take a really nasty turn. Woody Allen made some very pertinent comments on the notion of "Golden Era Thinking" in Midnight in Paris, which addresses the issue of misplaced nostalgia very nicely.

Again, this guy in the BBC film is an example of doing in well - no spite towards modern life or anyone living it, happy to make compromises of which he feels the benefit (such as the fridge), and clearly very genuinely happy in himself. Bravo to him! Given the finances, I might do something fairly similar to him, though mine would feature a little more modern technology, and probably sit closer to 1959 (the sort of 1959 as depicted in The Hudsucker Proxy, naturally...).