Good Friday

Even now not my favourite day of the year.

In our (Christian) household, growing up, Good Friday was a thoroughly miserable day. When we lived in York (1956-62) we weren't allowed out and had to amuse ourselves at home. I was even told off for using a hammer; Mum felt this was not appropriate on that particular day of the year(!) (It wasn't like I was making a cross or anything; at the back of the garage Dad had a work bench and lots of offcuts of wood and I used to make crude models of boats and planes and stuff.) We did have fish and chips, though, which was OK.

After 1962 Dad was the vicar of Norton in East Yorkshire and would spend Good Friday afternoons delivering a THREE HOUR service. I don't know how many hardy locals managed the full thing, apart from him. We, thankfully, were only taken along for an hour in the middle. More than that would have surely constituted child abuse.

Come to think of it, Sundays, in York anyway, weren't that different. Dad was never around, though I've still no idea where he was. (The answer is always "he worked for Toc H".) To go into a shop (newsagents used to open, briefly, but nobody else) or, say, to the pictures, would be unheard of. Mum would take me and my brothers across town to a church where she knew the vicar for a morning of boredom. I would fold down a clump of corners in my hymn book before handing it back, in a secret act of protest. To this day I dislike the sound of church bells. Perhaps to mitigate the general downbeat nature of Sundays our parents would, every week, give us a "Sunday treat", which would be a little Milky Way or Fry's chocolate bar. (There was chocolate on our namesake's saints day too!)


The gloom of Good Friday and the limbo-land of the Saturday were, needless to say, soon supplanted when the Easter eggs came out. And I still associate Easter with the glorious splashes of yellow from the daffodils on the banks of York's city walls.