The NenEdwardians ,
1926 is, of course, much longer ago than people of my generation realise. Watching The Boy Friend, Mr. Sandy Wilson's admirable pastiche of a 1926 musical comedy, which seems to be just as popular with the young as with the middle- aged and the old, I wondered whether, in that distant year, I and my contemporaries. would have flocked to see a skit, however witty, on a musical entertainment of 1898. I think it most unlikely that we should have wished to revisit in this way the epoch in which our parents spent their sombre • and inhibited youth. Nor would it have occurred to us, even momentarily, to dress in clothes resembling as closely-as possible those worn by our grandfathers.. It was, rather, into the brave and hideous new world of Oxford trousers, Russian boots, Fair Isle jumpers, plus fours and the shingle that our anarchic tastes led us. We thought grey top hats were vulgar, and the bowler a symbol of respectability rather than of elegance. We were unable to discern in the days before our fathers' war any traces of the glamour which contemporary youth seems able to discover—here and there, at least—in the days before ours. Our nascent liking for Restoration comedy can hardly be diagnosed as nostalgia, and looking at old photograph albums was notoriously a penance. The fact of the matter was, I suppose, that to us in those days the traditions and conventions of our class still seemed secure and strong; our one idea was to escape from them. Today that class is committed to a rearguard action, and for the young the bold the original, the amusing, perhaps even th6 instinctive thing to do is not to rebel against traditions but—judiciously, of course, and selectively—to rescue them. But I. may be completely wrong about all this.
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