Sunday 4 July 2010

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.

10 comments:

  1. Any chance of some more on your childhood? The scenes you've painted are really quite compelling.

    On the awfulness of old-fashioned Sundays, I love the scene in Look Back in Anger (only in the Richard Burton/Tony Richardson version - others I've seen have been unable to make me sympathetic to Jimmy) where Jimmy rails against the church bells on Sunday morning. Doesn't he scream out of the window?

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  2. What is really disturbing, as a friend pointed out the other day, is the fact that, because we are getting so old and the world is changing so fast, our childhoods are assuming an almost historical interest, regardless of anything that actually happened in them. And thanks for the tip re LB in A: I haven't seen any version of Look Back in Anger, although I've read it - I might look that Burton/Richardson one up; I'd like to see it. In that context, (that is, the context of plays I've read but not seen), I think it would be v interesting to see a staging of the Edward Bond play with the pram and the stoning - from what I remember of the script, it could be updated for the present really interestingly.

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  3. Too many interestings in that comment, shame on me, spurning the riches of our great language like that.

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  4. I think good writing has a lot to do with whether something (almost anything) can be made interesting.

    And as you demonstrate, sometimes interesting just has to out. I don't know the Edward Bond play. But I shall be intrigued to Google it: "play with the pram and the stoning'.

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  5. In case Google lets you down, I think it's called Saved, but will have to check with the English student daughter.

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  6. Gloomy Sunday, by the way (as your wife probably knows and Gadjo would tell you, were he still part of our silliness) refers to the famous Hungarian 'suicide' song:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOqiolytFw4

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  7. Oh yes. The English Sunday Afternoon.

    I commend this to you.

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  8. I used to like Sunday afternoons as a child, because if I was very lucky, we would have high tea and something good as a Sunday serial. it was only when I grew up and realised that all my parents wanted to watch was the Money Programme that Sunday night seemed dull. I rather enjoyed your evocation of your Sunday nights.

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  9. Kevin - I've just realised that Tony Hancock is the patron saint of Sunday afternoon
    Madame - I always wondered who watched the Money Programme (I assume, from your blog's references to the world of the office, that their viewing habits didn't lead to eternal riches for your parents [or they haven't shared enough of them with you to enable you to loll about in a state of independent wealth, eating chocs for the rest of your life?])

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  10. I don't know what's happening with the comments, I can't see my replies to the two above. If they are already there, sorry. Otherwise:
    Kevin - I now realise Tony Hancock is actually the patron saint of Sunday afternoons
    Madame - did the Money Programme have any positive effect on your parents' bank balance? I've never watched it, so perhaps that's why I'm not fabulously wealthy.

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