Roundabout
Stearn-heat
THE NEEDLE on the wall pointed to 110° Centi- grade; imperceptibly it crept up to 115. The white-coated attendant
reached them, the two sweating forms on the raised benches panted slightly. The sweat poured off them and dripped through the slats on to the floor. The pinewood walls sweated too—sweated resin, and a memory of forests, and other saunas a long way off from London's Haymarket. the bunch of leafy birch twigs with which the Finns beat their skins to remove the dirt. Perhaps it is too difficult to get fresh birch twigs in winter; or perhaps the Finnish tourist people are anxious not to shatter the incurable illusion of those who believe that the vasta represents Flagel- lation and Vice. Actually, the vasta is no more erotic than soap and fills exactly the same func- tion. But in the teeth of all the evidence, of the protests of Finn after Finn after Finn, the British apparently go on thinking the sauna a den of sex. At 110° Centigrade—we really are a very romantic nation.
Soft-soap
AS IN SOME FERVENT evangelical temple of the Arts, the question What Think Ye of Television'? hung in the air above the press conference. The goddess, Miss Vivien Leigh, sat in state, flanked by her acolytes, the journalists. With nothing but tea to distract them, they posed, repeated, begged, walked round and re-worded the question; and Miss Leigh, about to try the medium for the The memories hung in the almost unbreathable air :, a little sauna-house beside a lake in spring, and Finns running out to leap into a lake barely free of the winter's ice . . . of Finnish ladies, incorrigibly formal, sitting naked side by side and still addressing each other as 'Lecturer' or 'Assistant-Office-Manager' . . . the matchless photograph of the entire .Finnish Parliament in 1939, in the Parliament sauna : cabinet ministers, assistant secretaries, back-benchers, leaders of opposition parties—and not a stitch of clothing among the lot of them . . . one bather remem- bered the story of an asylum sauna in a small country town : one of the patients had seized a whole bucket of water and thrown it on the stones, creating a. wave of steam which had blasted door and door-frame two metres out into the snow. The other remembered sleeping in a sauna, as in a guest house, and waking at mid- night to hear the spring cuckoo still calling across the lake.
With eyes closed, with only the smell of pine- wood and the heat talking, the little London sauna seemed in Finland; the rumble of traffic. and the clink of heels on the pavement came through distantly, like the faint household noises of break- fast breaking the thin sleep of early morning. But once outside in the washroom, it was London again, and everything a little brisker and more clinical than it might have been in Finland. No rag rugs on the floor; no children pouring buckets of water over each other; no prospect of a coffee-party to follow.
In fact, not more than a quarter of the people who go to the Haymarket sauna are Finnish; and many go as much for the expert massage that follows as for the steam-bath alone. Some are Turkish-bath addicts who find sauna less ex- hausting—after sauna you feel remote, a little intoxicated, but not tired. It is good for hangovers, early colds and depression; bad fot heart con- ditions and hair styles. Here, it costs 15s. a time without massage; though regular steamers get a cut rate. Everything is firmly organised by three brisk masseurs, of whom only one is a Finn; stoves are heated by electricity, not birchwood, and everything is spotlessly clean.
Anyone who goes in hope of a hint of a Nameless Orgy is likely to be disappointed. Indeed, the one detail that is missing is the vasta, first time, returned oracular obscurities to all of them. At her feet, with clicking and nudging and much kicking of shins, the photographers made their engraven images,
In 7/u' Skin of Our Teeth, Miss Leigh is to play the eternal Psyche, the eternal temptress, the eternal goddess of you-know-what. Miss Margaret Rawlings is to play a Cassandra-like gipsy—and at the back of the crowd the gipsy was having a lot of fun. While the goddess per- force returned all the right answers, the gipsy swapped TV gags with the Scottish press. 'Como,' mused the Glasgow Bulletin, 'is a detergent with its own built-in laxative,' And do you know the one about the cereal?' retorted Miss Rawlings. 'They only show you a scrap of it, all smothered in cream and fruit and stuff. It is called "The breakfast food the kiddies not only lap up— but keep down."' The goddess moved over add embraced the gipsy—and then even she popped the question: 'What do you think of TV, dear?'
'It's awful,' said the gipsy with candour. 'While you're trying to act, people walk about and read the sports page and drink tea and cut their nails —they never do that in the front row of the
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