Last night we made one of rare evening trips to the city centre. We were going to a Pokey LaFarge gig and decided to eat in town beforehand. We went to a West Indian restaurant on The Centre: a large eatery but at 5.00pm three quarters of the tables were occupied and the place was buzzing. Then we had an early drink and on to The Fleece for the gig.
I reflected on the contrast between this and the Bristol of my youth. According to my parents you couldn’t have gone to a restaurant on Sunday in Bristol: there weren’t any restaurants. The first we children went to was the Berni Inn (in 1955 the first of a chain of Berni Inns across Britain). The food as I remember it (confirmed by Wikipedia) was typically prawn cocktail, steak and chips and (frozen) peas, and black forest gateaux/or cheese board (a gourmet’s dream). But if there had been restaurants they would probably been shut on Sunday because nothing much was allowed to open. The laws governing Sunday was controlled by a bunch of Christian gangsters calling themselves the “Lord’s Day Observance Society”. These misanthropes were generally of the opinion that God did not like fun and would not tolerate it under circumstances on a Sunday. And if they were going to observe God’s Day then the rest of us were going to damn well have to as well.
Nor would we have been able to a pub for live music until 11.00 pm. I don’t know if public musical entertainment was banned on Sunday (but it probably was) but pubs were closely regulated and could only open noon till 2.00 and 7.00 till 10.00. The LDOS were strongly opposed to this as well, and said things like: “You can drink six days a week. Surely you can manage to not to drink for one day.” They said the same thing about shops: “You can shop six days a week. Surely .......”. There was a whole long list of stuff that God would be really upset about if did them on Sunday.
What God wasn’t upset about – indeed what he insisted upon in our household – was people worshipping him. So every Sunday morning we all went to the centre of the city to the Welsh Congregational Chapel (there have been Welsh chapels in Bristol since the 1600s) for morning service. Then home and back again for Sunday School. The morning bit didn’t teach me much since it was conducted in high formal Welsh and I had stopped learning Welsh at 4 years old so couldn’t follow any of it. The lyrical passion of the various itinerant ministers we had (a different one each week) and the powerful singing did impress me though – but not for Sunday after Sunday after Sunday after ...
The only good thing about Sundays that I can remember was that often my parents would have visitors. They were always entertained in the Front Room. This was a very special place and we were only allowed in there to present ourselves very politely to the guests, attempt to make intelligible answers to their pious questions about what we had done in Sunday School and how we were doing in real school, and then to withdraw. It wasn’t that going into the Front Room was so great – it wasn’t great at all – it was that no-one was in the kitchen and I could listen to the wireless. I could listen to the forbidden programme: forbidden because it would give me nightmares (which it never did). The programme was Charles Chilton’s Journey Into Space (I still remember Jet Morgan, Lemmy, Mitch and Doc) followed, in a later series, by The Red Planet (and who can forget the haunting, homicidal and, ultimately, tragic figure of Whittaker?). Unfortunately after a while one of my parents usually had into come into the kitchen for something or other; the wireless promptly switched off; myself given a lecture about deceit and trust, made to promise not to do it again and sent off to bed.
Those were the bleak Sundays of my youth. Tony Hancock nailed this bleakness absolutely in his episode “Sunday Afternoon at Home”. On Sunday, Britain is now a hell more fun to live in than it was back then.