Fireside Tartan?
The good wives of Glasgow were suspicious of leisure; if cleanliness was next to godliness in the Calvinist credo, busyness was close behind. And to the industrious eye, signs of fecklessness were everywhere apparent. Tongues clicked at tenement stairs un-scrubbed to India-rubber whiteness. Wraparound pinnies were wrapped more tightly (the Protestant equivalent of crossing oneself) at the sight of a dingy net curtain.
As a child visiting from Ireland in the 1960s, I would be whisked past these scenes of licentiousness by my grandmother, whose own dustless domestic interiors would have delighted Vermeer. Magical realism was not then fashionable, but I swore that Gran, a woman of decided opinion, could wring a floor-cloth just by looking at it. Something of the same miraculous nature attached to the blooming of ‘Fireside Tartan’ on the legs of less exemplary women. A hexagonal pattern of red weals or ‘measling’ raised on bare legs by sitting too close to the fire, this mysterious condition was the mark of Cain for the ‘clarty’ (a peculiar Scots-irish term denoting sluttishness, but with any pleasant associations of sex expunged).
A medical dictionary confirms that capillary congestion in the lower layers of the skin, known to science as erythema
ab igne, afflicts men equally. Nonetheless, as other familiar names for the condition – ‘Granny’s Tartan’ or ‘Lazy Tartan’ – make clear, it was seen as a female complaint with clear connotations of moral laxity (interestingly, south of the border it was known as ‘Corned Beef Legs’, which carries no such judgement).
‘Heat-shaming’ has long roots in our complicated culture. If, traditionally, cold baths were held to be morally bracing, the opposite might also be true. Women who went in for warmth were likely to succumb, in other ways, to slackness. The next thing you knew, they’d be running to the shops in their slippers or – the ultimate gesture of abandon – hanging out the wash on a Sunday.
The censure heaped on the heads, or rather limbs, of leg-toasters, however, seems disproportionate. In most midcentury homes, the fire in the kitchen range or living-room hearth was the only source of heat in the household. Given that almost no women of my grandmother’s generation wore trousers, the unrolling of highly priced, highly flammable nylon stockings before the blaze seems only prudent.
More probably it was the sitting that offended – those ergo-enthusiasts who insist we should stand /jog at our desks all day long had nothing on Gran who, in her eighties, never once took off her hat in my house without first wiping all surfaces. Either way, ‘Fireside Tartan’ was to be avoided; the image of unbridled sensualists with extravagantly mottled shins, dozing in delicious warmth while dinners burned and children hung perilously from high windows, was our own version of Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’.
Erythmea ab igne has not disappeared entirely. In a strange, semiotic squaredance, ‘Lazy Tartan’ has come back as a sign of luxury: cases have been reported in the US where drivers travelling long distances on heated car seats have noticed the distinctive criss-cross on the backs of their thighs. I hope sufferers of ‘Porsche Drivers’ Plaid’ can hear their grannies laughing.