Why lockdown was like living in the 50s

The Sightgeist, by Glen Le Lievre.

As I wave goodbye to lockdown, I find there is one aspect of it I treasured — the time-capsule transport back to the 1950s. And especially the large dollops of 1950s-style time itself that lockdown brought me.

I am just old enough to remember the 1950s. They are a routinely maligned decade but they were very good years for Australia.

Our poetry and fiction were supreme. Our nation began to experience its modern success. Something of the spirit of America — that sense of largeness and national purpose — entered into our soul, even as we became more Australian than we had ever been.

The 1950s was also the last decade when most of us — rich and poor — enjoyed an occasional sense of solitude, even repose.

In the 1950s my family didn’t have a car or a TV, so if you wanted weekend entertainment you went for a walk, or down to the local park. All through lockdown, especially when we weren’t supposed to drive much outside our postcodes, the streets of my suburb teemed with people on their daily walks.

While we all kept our distance, we nodded politely and sang out a word of cheerio to each other. Whenever I fossicked in the front garden people would stop to chat — over the fence, of course.

And because we all had all the time in the world, the chats could range and roam. Everyone was trying to behave with some tact, not wanting to ask directly if a neighbour had a family member struck by the virus, or if they’d lost their job.

So a certain politeness and restraint accompanied the friendliness — there’s your 1950s for you.

And there were these eerie little physical resemblances to the 50s.

There was never any football on the TV in the 1950s, not much in the 60s (and none in lockdown). Even when they started showing a little bit of live rugby league in the 60s, it was typically just the second half of a game — so as not to reduce crowd size.

Surely that’s the last moment when reality meant more than broadcast image.

Speaking of TVs, ours collapsed — perhaps from over use — during the lockdown so we got a new one. This is hooked up to the internet, which allows me to access the glorious black and white of my childhood.

As a kid in an intensely urban inner-western Sydney suburb, black-and-white TV, when we finally bought a television set, convinced me that both nature and history happened in black and white and spoke with an American accent.

Now that I have this internet time-capsule TV, I have watched more than my wife can bear of black-and-white classics.

Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in The Road to Rio — wise-cracking, knowing, clever, full of charm.

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes — urbane, patriotic, wittily offset by the affectionate, bumbling Watson. And Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan, deeply patriotic to his adopted America, shrewd detective and comic son, an early version of crime as domestic dramedy.

And this in the 1950s — lots of families eating meals together, every day. I was shocked to read that 20 per cent of American meals are consumed in cars. When I was a kid every meal was attended by every member of the family not then at work, school or sport.

When I first went to Ireland, 30 years ago, it too reminded me of the 1950s, because everyone there always had time for you. A little gift from lockdown, an echo of the 1950s, an extra slice of time.

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