Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny

Mary Kenny keeps her spirits up and her bottom warm in Stockholm

When I was isolated and quarantined in Dublin at the start of autumn, I vowed I must make the best of whatever life I have left to live.

At the age of 76, I can’t be forever feeling locked in and locked up, for fear of COVID-19. So when I found that a travel agency in Deal could arrange a weekend break in Sweden in October, I grasped it.

Sweden has been deplored as a land of liberal porn, then regarded as a gloomy Bergman landscape, and then disparaged as a lefty nanny state where social control is mandatory. In Nordic noir TV, we’ve seen Swedes portrayed as semiautistic introverts.

But Sweden’s image has changed. It’s the nation of the COVID light touch, where the government doesn’t boss and nanny its citizens or require mask-wearing, but trusts people to use common sense.

Stockholm was, indeed, stunning to behold: a classically beautiful capital, set on the Baltic, sometimes said to be a mix of Athens and Edinburgh It is stuffed with fine museums, galleries, churches, palaces and shops. It was a pleasure to walk around, and easy to explore by tram and bus. The fishy food was delicious, too.

And seeing an oldie visitor, solo, the Stockholmers were warmly welcoming. Since Swedes are functionally bilingual it was easy to strike up conversations in English, and people’s responses were unfailingly friendly. Almost no one was wearing a face mask.

Sweden has been criticised for not imposing lockdowns, although some local areas, such as Uppsala, have had some restrictions. Granted, their circumstances are different from other countries’: low population density, and a tradition of social distancing anyway (as well as immaculate hygiene). There were, anyway, some notices exhorting people to ‘stay safe’ – sometimes in English – to maintain the two-metre rule and to wash hands frequently.

Yet there was, too, an overwhelming atmosphere of normality, with families and friends openly gathered together in public, cheerfully.

I am not against mask-wearing when it’s required. But I came to the conclusion that the Stockholm friendliness I encountered was definitely connected to the openness of the bare-faced experience. Seeing the full human face prompts more human responses.

Sweden has had its COVID-19 deaths and infections but, when all the data is examined retrospectively, I wonder if it will emerge as more psychologically healthy: where people felt less isolated, less depressed and less locked in by lockdowns?

It was a sweet autumn city break in a sane land.

Stockholm joins my list of approved cities that have decent on-street seating. Oldies need places to sit down when exploring cities, and the Swedish capital provides plenty of street benches and individual seats. Made of wood, too, which warms – not aluminium, which freezes – the derrière. Bravo!

When I was 20, I got to live in a Kensington flat with a gaggle of BOAC air stewardesses. They were the most glamorous creatures I’d ever encountered

– always dashing off on long-haul flights, seemingly without a care in the world.

One of their number, Rowena Harker Leder, a long-legged Yorkshire blonde, taught me how to eat spaghetti properly, and did a fabulous dance to The Stripper, which seemed both daring and innocent. She had been part of the legendary Bluebell Girls dance troupe in Paris, led by the formidable Margaret Kelly, ‘Miss Bluebell’.

Rowena, now 84, and a director of the Grassington Arts Festival for 18 years (for which she was awarded an MBE), has written a memoir – Love and Laughter Around the World. It’s about the fun times she’s lived through as a venturesome young woman, as a performer (first at Mayfair’s Murray’s Cabaret Club, just before Christine Keeler), with the Bluebells in Paris and Las Vegas, as a BOAC stewardess and, incongruously, for a short time, as a Sunday-school teacher.

Rowena experienced the golden age of aviation, when being a stewardess was one of the most coveted jobs. She spent time in a New York hotel with a ‘little old lady’ who turned out to be Dorothy Parker. She refused the in-flight advances of Cary Grant (she thought he was mean, with money and in spirit), among many other adventures and larks.

Her romances were varied and exciting, and she is frank without being coarse. Flying was fabulous, but there were also disadvantages. Stewardesses were ‘too old’ on reaching 36, and she suspects their fertility was affected by the crudeness of air-pressure manoeuvres in those days (several pals subsequently had problems conceiving).

Her story is an archive and a picture of the days of our youth, and the robust attitudes young women had. They didn’t whinge about sexual harassment – they dealt with it. Besides, they liked men.

When she hears people say, ‘I don’t regret anything,’ her answer is ‘Then you haven’t really lived!’.

The Oldie