Vol. 31 No. 10 · 28 May 2009
pages 22-23 | 3213 words
Going up to Heaven
Susan Pedersen
- BuyBirth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-60 by Kate Fisher
Oxford, 294 pp, £24.00, May 2008, ISBN 978 0 19 954460 8
- BuyFor Their Own Good: The Transformation of English Working-Class Health Culture, 1880-1970 by Lucinda McCray Beier
Ohio State, 409 pp, £64.95, October 2008, ISBN 978 0 8142 1094 9
John Sayles’s film Lianna broke new ground in 1982 with its portrait of a young wife and mother who comes out as a lesbian. Equally ground-breaking was a scene early in the film in which Lianna’s husband, a philandering, self-obsessed academic, suggests that she have sex with him. Lianna looks at him with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation and says: ‘I’ll go put the thing in.’
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 11 · 11 June 2009
From Bob Hall
Susan Pedersen, examining working-class attitudes to birth-control techniques in the early and mid part of the 20th century, makes a delightful, if potentially disastrous howler (LRB, 28 May). The euphemism for coitus interruptus isn’t ‘getting off at Mill Hill’, as she supposes, Mill Hill being the terminus of one branch of the Northern Line. The correct expression, Liverpudlian in origin, is ‘getting off at Edge Hill’, Edge Hill being the penultimate station on the Manchester to Liverpool line before the terminus at Lime Street.
Bob Hall
Old Windsor, Berkshire
Vol. 31 No. 12 · 25 June 2009
From Susan Pedersen
I can understand Bob Hall’s glee at having (as he thought) found me out, but I’m afraid the Blackburn residents Kate Fisher interviewed for her study of birth control did use ‘getting off at Mill Hill’ as a metaphor for withdrawal, for the simple reason that their ‘Mill Hill’ was a suburban train station on the way into Blackburn (Letters, 11 June). Had they been Londoners it would obviously have made no sense, but they weren’t and adopted their own local bus and train stations to get across what they meant. One of the Lancashire residents Lucinda Beier interviewed for her study of public health advised that one should ‘get off the bus at South Shore, don’t go all the way to Blackpool.’ It’s hard to imagine an activity (or a phrase) less conducive to linguistic standardisation.
Susan Pedersen
Columbia University, New York
From Bill Peppe
As any sailor could have told Susan Pedersen, the safe procedure is to ‘get out at Fratton’, the last station before Portsmouth.
Bill Peppe
Carbost, Isle of Skye
From Dorothy McMillan
My version of the ‘getting off’ expression for coitus interruptus is ‘getting off at Paisley’, the station before the terminus at Glasgow. I am also reminded of a Glasgow colleague’s expression, ‘getting off at Govan’. Tom Leonard has a poem ‘A Priest Came On at Merkland Street’, and Merkland Street was the old Partick Station underground stop, the one before Govan, itself the stop for Ibrox, the Rangers football ground. Can anyone decode this?
Dorothy McMillan
Glasgow
From John Cashmore
It would seem that it is in the history of each major English city to have an alighting point. Perhaps its proximity to the final destination is a reflection of the inhabitants’ approach to risk.
John Cashmore
London W9
