Call The Midwife-Some Rubber At Last

[WealdenMac]

Although the second series of the BBC's Sunday night programme is set in the late 1950's, there have, unrealistically in my opinion, so far been no scenes featuring the kinds of waterproof items that were commonplace around that time. Drawing from my experience of primary school, most young women of the midwives' ages would have possessed a lightweight plastic raincoat of some sort and a goodly proportion of the older women some kind of rubberised coat-essential when a lot of ones' days were spent riding around on bicycles.

However, in last night's episode, albeit in distressing circumstances, we were at last afforded a brief sighting of one of the other "staples" of the era, the brown rubber sheet. And it was, nostalgically, shaken out so that it produced that proper, profoundly memorable, "rubber" sound. Although early "training" was the norm at the time, in my and most of my contemporaries' households a brown rubber sheet was kept folded discreetly in a handy cupboard and brought out occasionally for use at a picnic or temporarily for its proper purpose after an unfortunate "accident". Even today, the usual accompanying phrase, "just in case", never fails to produce a frisson when spoken in a certain tone by the female voice.