Post-Pleistocene

Wot cheer! All the nybors cried . . . 'Oo yer goin' ter meet, Bill? 'Ave yer bought the street, Bill? Laugh! I thought I should o' died, Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road.

The dismal winter was done. For three weeks the English spring had been a perfection of soft breezes, clear blue skies, sunshine and gentle rains. Daffodils for once outdid even Wordsworth. Beer was back to its last August's (less than 3% of alcohol by volume) strength. As May drew to a close and Whitsuntide--the first of the summer holidays--came and went, June was busting out all over. London and all of Britain was in a laughing mood as it went on holiday.

Brarn Ale. A red-faced cockney drove his wife and grinning children in a greengrocer's cart. "Wot cheer, Bill?" called the voice of a stranger from a crowd of amiable pedestrians as the cart pulled up by a traffic light. "Wot's for supper?" "Jellied eels, shrimps, lettuss and termaters, and a quart of brarn ale," called the carter's wife with pre-rationing hospitality. "Come up and come along!" The heckler grinned and climbed aboard the cart as the patient horse moved on with the changing lights.

Even the staid Sunday Observer forgot its shrewd political analyses for the moment, to rhapsodize in the summer sunshine: "The daffodils have hastened away and the cherry blossom is over. . . . Now is the time for the drooping mauves of the ancient wistaria and for the tulips--most dazzling spectacle of all--when spring is turning to summer."

Many another Briton was finding it as difficult as the Observer to be depressed by politics and economics. On bicycles, afoot and in motor cars, the holidaymakers thronged the highways, soaking up the sun. In busy town streets young girls, finding this year's summer clothes gayer, cheaper and a little easier to buy, paraded in flowered and beribboned hats such as Britain hadn't seen in years. Even the men of London were turning out in pink, blue and cream-colored fedoras and straws. Tower Hill was bedecked with barrows selling ice cream, whelks and cockles, while up & down the Thames boats plied from London to Southend-on-Sea and Margate, Kew and Hampton Court loaded to the gunwales with singing, laughing vacationers.

Frosted Cakes. For the quality, there was a mammoth presentation garden party at Buckingham Palace. In top hats and cutaways, filmy gowns and floppy straws, some 5,000 Britons genteelly elbowed one another for the privilege of bowing to royalty and munching tea cakes with real, creamy frosting. In Regent's Park the London Cart Horse Society held its annual parade. With burnished shoes and beribboned manes, proud Percherons, Belgians, Shires and Clydesdales clomped past a record crowd of admirers pulling newly painted coal, beer and dust carts. In the carts grinning passengers laughed and cheered amid a profusion of perambulators, beer bottles and kitchen chairs. In one cart a reveler, succumbing to the drowsy gaiety of the celebration, lay flat on his back, happily oblivious to the crowd's cheers as the wife of the Society's chairman pinned a blue ribbon on "Queenie," the champion mare.

By week's end, as the vacationers trooped back to office and store to moon over their desks, dreaming of holidays to come, festive Britain was having its hottest weather since August 1945. Breathlessly the British Broadcasting Corporation reported that a man had been seen in Throgmorton Street, hard by the Bank of England, coatless and with his braces (suspenders) showing. "Well," opined a London bus driver contentedly, "seems like the Ice Age is over, don't it now?"

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