Easter Sunday in Old Money

 

‘It’s Sunday. I’ve had a rotten dinner. It’s raining. And I’ve got nothing to do.’ 

So said Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock in an episode of his radio series that acquired instant classic status when it was first broadcast in the late 1950s. The boredom of a typical British Sunday in the suburbs was something that everyone could relate to. Nowhere to go. Shops all shut. No television until 4pm when the Flowerpot Men came on. And you’ve seen all the films at the local cinema. No, there literally wasn’t anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon than try and spot faces in the wallpaper, or fill in all the ‘O’s and the ‘P’s and the ‘Q’s and the ‘D’s in the newspaper using a biro. Anyone under thirty reading this won’t have a clue what I’m on about. The clue is in the title of this blog itself.

‘Sunday in Old Money’ derives from a simple idea, that seemed to sum up what I’ve neen trying to capture in this series of conversational essays. Sunday, like nostalgia in the oft-quoted aphorism, isn’t what it was. This blog set out to give a first-hand account of how it felt to grow up in the 1960s and 70s, considering how the pop cultural and sociological landscape has changed in the past sixty years. In it, I’ve looked back at television, comics, toys, all manner of pop cultural icons and ideas, and tried to give an impression of how it felt to encounter them before they had acquired what one might term the patina of iconography. More to the point, the ways in which we, the audience, interacted with those phenomena were fundamentally different from how we do so today, and it is those differences that I’ve been trying to preserve in these posts.

But what of Sunday itself? As time draws on, there will be fewer and fewer of us left who can remember the sabbaths of old, those dreamlike empty days that came once every week. In the immortal words of Sid James: ‘there’s one a week, there always has been, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Sid, speaking in 1958 in that same edition of Hancock’s Half Hour, was wrong. There was something we could do about it: but it would take another thirty-five years for the change to come about.

Prior to 1994, Sunday as a socio-cultural phenomenon, was fundamentally unchanged in living memory. The aforementioned Hancock episode still felt entirely relevant when I first heard it sometime in the mid-1970s. Sunday had always felt a bit weird to me. Empty and strange. Everywhere closed, shop fronts shuttered, the roads and town centres quiet. I didn’t entirely like it, either. As a child, I favoured Saturday over Sunday if only because the shops were open which meant you were more likely to have a toy car bought for you (such was our dad’s generosity). You will gather from this that we were not religious in our household, despite our mum’s Catholic upbringing. My earliest recollections of Sundays in the mid sixties are characterised by teas with our grandparents – salads, tinned salmon, trifle and cakes of varying kinds (including the late, lamented ‘Kunzle Showboats’ – Google them for more on that story). Even the television was different. ITV came from a different operator, which meant different continuity announcers, and programmes you never saw on any other day of the week.

To find any shop open on a Sunday had a kind of unreal, miraculous quality. Despite the laws on Sunday trading, one or two outlets were permitted to open, including newsagents, essential for the supply of Sunday reading matter. But even this seemed a bit unusual. There was a newsagent-cum-post office a few minutes walk from where we lived in Lichfield, and this shop, uniquely, was open on Sundays (though not, of course, the post office counter). From here, sometime in 1966 or early 67, I remember getting a pack of Batman bubble gum cards. It felt pleasantly unusual to have anything like that bought for you on a Sunday. My first ever encounter with a shop that opened on a Sunday came even earlier than this, in maybe 1964 or 65, when our grandmother took me round to another newsagent, near their home, one Sunday afternoon, from where I was bought a small Matchbox model of a Bedford tipper truck. I still own it. This model always stood apart for me because it was the first time I’d been in a shop on a Sunday and had a toy bought for me. A small, indistinct line in the sand had been crossed.

Traders, of course, had been lobbying for a relaxation in the Sunday trading laws even then, but for the forseeable future, only a few outlets – including petrol stations and off-licenses – were legally permitted to open. A somewhat different situation held sway at the coast, where more shops seemed to be open on Sundays to cater to the tourist trade: yet even here, the majority of retail outlets remained closed.

This all changed in 1994, with the arrival of the Sunday Trading Act. Its terms allowed for large shops – ie. retailers with a ‘relevant floor area’ in excess of 280m² – to open for six hours on Sundays between the hours of 10am and 6pm. Smaller retailers were at liberty to set their own trading hours. Christmas Day and Easter Sunday were excluded as trading days. This situation prevails to the present time, with supermarkets typically opening at 9.30 or 10am and closing at 4pm, along with most high street outlets.

At first, it was hard to notice much of a difference. The supermarkets were the big deal as far as I was concerned, and it took a while for other retailers to follow their example, there being issues regarding staff working hours and union objections to be factored in. There was resistance from various quarters, notably the lobby group calling itself Keep Sunday Special, whose objections were wholly on religious grounds. That didn’t make any difference to me, but as time wore on, I began to miss those strange empty Sunday afternoons, when you could stroll around the town unencumbered by the world, his wife and kids. Car parks were empty, and for the most part, toll free. 

As with Sundays, so too with Bank Holidays. The typical Bank Holiday Monday used to feel like having two Sundays in the same week, but today, you’ll find an increasing number of retailers open for business.

On Easter Sunday this year, driving down through the town where I live, it felt odd to see the supermarket car parks deserted, and the roads devoid of the usual Sunday queues, and it struck me that Easter Sunday is the last gasp of those ‘old money’ Sundays I remember from childhood. Of course, the same applies on Christmas Day, but Christmas doesn’t necessarily fall on a Sunday.

In August, it will be thirty years since the Sunday Trading Act came into force. There are generations alive now who never knew those ‘Old Money Sundays’ bemoaned by Hancock and co but which were so much a part of my childhood. And don’t get me onto the subject of ‘Early Closing Day’, that quaint provincial phenomenon that seems now to belong to the era of HG Wells’ History of Mr. Polly. One thing remains certain: if you hanker after the vibe of those Sundays of yore, there will always be one day every year when you can recapture it.

Happy Easter!