More Baths Less Talking Read Free

authenticity absent even from independent cinema. Oh, and no fiction at all, which has got to be significant in some way, no? If you want to ward off corruption, then surely the best way to do it is to sit by a swimming pool and read a chapter about Britain’s postwar housing crisis. It worked for me, anyway. I can exclusively reveal that if you sit by a swimming pool in L.A., wearing swimming shorts and reading David Kynaston, then Hollywood starlets leave you alone.
    Finishing Austerity Britain was indisputably my major achievement of the month, more satisfying, even, than sitting in a plush seat and applauding for three and a half hours while other people collected statuettes. A month ago I had read less than a third of the book, yet it was already becoming apparent that Kynaston’s research, the eccentric depth and breadth of it, was going to provide more pleasure than one had any right to expect; there were occasions during the last few hundred pages when it made me laugh. At one point, Kynaston quotes a 1948 press release from the chairman of Hoover, and adds in a helpful parenthetical that it was “probablywritten for him by a young Muriel Spark.” The joy that extra information brings is undeniable, but, once you get to know Kynaston, you will come to recognize the pain and frustration hidden in that word probably: how many hours of his life, you wonder, were spent trying to remove it?
    While I was reading about the birth of our National Health Service, President Obama was winning his battle to extend health care in America; it’s salutary, then, to listen to the recollections of the doctors who treated working-class Britons in those early days. “I certainly found when the Health Service started on the 5th July ’48 that for the first six months I had as many as twenty or thirty ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions—I mean, of that twenty or thirty there would be at least ten who had complete prolapse of their womb, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.” Some 8 million pairs of free spectacles were provided in the first year, as well as countless false teeth. It’s not that people were dying without free health care; it’s that their quality of life was extraordinarily, needlessly low. Before the NHS, we were fumbling around half-blind, unable to chew, and swaddled in giant homemade sanitary napkins; is it possible that in twenty-first-century America, the poor are doing the same? Two of the most distinctive looks in rock and roll were provided by the NHS, by the way. John Lennon’s specs of choice were the 422 Panto Round Oval; meanwhile, Elvis Costello favored the 524 Contour. What, you think David Kynaston would have failed to provide the serial numbers? Panto Round Oval, by the way, would be a pretty cool name for a band. Be my guest, but thank me in the acknowledgments.
    My parents were in their twenties during the period covered in Austerity Britain , and it’s easy to see why they and their generation went crazy when we asked for the simplest things—new hi-fis, chopper bikes, Yes triple-albums—when we were in our teens. They weren’t lying; they really didn’t have stuff like that when they wereyoung. Some 35 percent of urban households didn’t have a fixed bath; nearly 20 percent didn’t have exclusive access to a toilet. One of the many people whose diaries provide Kynaston with the backbone to this book describes her father traveling from Leicester to west London, a distance of over a hundred miles, to watch the 1949 FA Cup Final, the equivalent of the Super Bowl back then. He didn’t go all that way because he had a ticket for the game; it was just that he’d been invited to watch a friend’s nine-inch black and white television. We stayed in the Beverly Wilshire for the Oscars, thank you for asking. It was OK.
    I haven’t read Puzzled People