Gloomy Sunday

Sunday afternoons and evenings in London always seemed particularly dreary times to me when I was young. This was partly because my brother, who was a weekly boarder, would go back to school at the end of Sunday. Also, after my parents divorced and until they both remarried some years later, they conceived of the notion of a family dinner in a restaurant in Pimlico each Sunday night. It was after that meal that my brother would be swallowed back into his other world and my mother and I would go home alone, me convinced that my parents had set the whole thing up in order to see each other - and yet, once again, had failed to effect a reconciliation and were therefore both miserably sad and lonely. There is something very painful about feeling sorry for your parents when you are still a child. The perspective of adulthood makes me realise, of course, that I was quite misguided in my interpretation of events (about this and many other things).

Now, while racing through Little Dorrit before watching the BBC series - which has begun showing on the ABC on Sunday nights, (appropriately?) - I've found this passage, which I think captures the atmosphere of that time of the week rather well. There are many differences between the world of Dickens and the world I lived in - Sunday closing was not so strictly enforced by then, for example - and yet, there was still a sense in town of desertion, of everything happening elsewhere, of 'streets, streets, streets', as Dickens puts it. Even though we lived just off the King's Road in Chelsea throughout the so-called 'Swinging Sixties', a period that was supposed to be such an exciting explosion of energy and freedom, on Sunday afternoons and evenings the feeling lingered that the life of the place had drained away. Today, even though the unbearable Sing Something Simple - did I read somewhere that the suicide rate went up every week while it was on? - has finally been eradicated from the radiowaves and all sorts of things are open, I still think Sunday afternoon in the city has a melancholic air:

It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibilitiy furnish relief to an over-worked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world - all taboo with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it - or the worst, according to the probabilities.

Incidentally, I inherited my copies of Dickens from a great-aunt. They are, therefore, pretty old - early last century or late the century before. They are also all, as far as I can tell, free of typographical errors, something that seems remarkable today.