Easter brings tumbling memories of Scott Fitzgerald's novel This Side of Paradise. Amory and Eleanor are sparking off each other:
"I never fall in love in August or September," he proffered.
"When then?"
"Christmas or Easter. I'm a liturgist."
"Easter!" She turned up her nose. "Huh! Spring in corsets!"
"Easter would bore spring, wouldn't she? Easter has her hair braided, wears a tailored suit."
A tailored suit! Square shoulders, decades before Joan Collins and Dynasty. Long jackets with nipped-in waists. Tight skirts down to mid-calf. Hat-brims falling over one eye - the beckoning eye. Enough to make a young man scratch his head and think.
I hate Christmas, but Easter does not bother me. The weather is better, for one thing, and the natural world is coming alive again. Easter in my white youth was the time we took our shoes off. Today, we read worthy nonsense about barefoot children; but we could not wait to go barefoot from April to September. I still remember some of those families with webbed second-and-third toes - The Ss, the Ms, and the Ws, for instance.
Chapel gate
At Easter, women broke out in new finery - tight-waisted suits, broad-brimmed hats, long-seamed stockings, smart shoes - as they high-heeled along the ringing road. I wonder if we fully appreciated how fine they looked. I think, perhaps, we did; though we may have lacked the courage or the sensitivity to say so. The men who lined up outside the chapel gate made ribald comments about the women; but that was only the bravado expected of males herded together. The men's eyes told the true story. The eyes paid tribute to the packaging of the women, and to what it contained. The eyes were full of wishing and longing and wanting. The eyes were clouded with defeat. When the men went inside and knelt at the back of the chapel, their bodies prayed for the gift of sins so sweet and improbable as might never befall them within the imperium governed by the cold and faraway Bishop of Rome.
Some years ago, a TV commercial - in black-and-white, for period effect - had a woman and two children waiting on a railway platform for Daddy to get off a puffing steam train. I have no memory of what the commercial was pushing; but I shall never forget the woman - dressed in classical 1950s suit and broad-brimmed hat - as elegant as fine tailoring could make her.
One night, a woman in Bunny-girl attire walked into the RTE hospitality room before the Late Late Show. Eyes popped; chat foundered; jaws dropped to the floor. After the show, we were given drinks in the canteen, where the woman reappeared - now in a trouser suit, and far more alluring than she had been in Bunny gear. (Message to all those producers, aping one another, who show "mooning" women on television, these days: thanks, but no thanks!)
Spiritual gloom
Good Friday, in my memory, is always a grim and melancholy day, like a day out of an Ingmar Bergman film, a day on which we were supposed to experience a deep spiritual gloom; though I do not recall having felt it, because I was too busy growing up. We were told that the sun hid behind the clouds at three o'clock in the afternoon, because that was Crucifixion time. No one reckoned on the time difference between Ireland and Palestine; that might have spoiled the mythology. In the evening, we went to church, where the priest performed the Stations of the Cross, reinforcing the spiritual gloom.
Two days later, Easter unfolded like a lily, and all the gloom, real and contrived, was driven away. When I had stopped being a boy and was learning to be a man, the thing that struck me most about Easter was the flowering of the women, blossoming in new suits, new dresses, new hats - hats especially, which came in all the colours of spring and fluttered in the breeze in a wickedly disturbing way. All of a sudden, women took surer steps and walked on longer legs than they had done all winter. Beneath the decent veil which the Church had drawn over our Celtic civilisation could be heard the insistent pagan drumbeat of the tumultuous blood. It was a thrilling sound.
Then, in mid-afternoon, there was Benediction, my favourite liturgical time. The sun peered through the chapel windows and scattered highlights on the hair of the girls in the pews in front. The acolytes spooned incense on the glowing coals in the thurible, which the priest then swung, sending aphrodisian fumes throughout the entire chapel. The purpose of it all was to put us in a proper religious frame of mind. But the effect of it was to drive us wild: to convince us that there was no reason why we should not reach out and stroke the sundrenched hair of the girls in the pews in front of us.
Crime film
To catch sight of elegantly tailored women of the past, watch any black-and-white crime film of the 1940s. Two hoodlums, packing guns, are eating salami on rye in a diner. A slender woman (probably Veronica Lake), on high heels, in a well-fitting suit and broad-leaved hat, walks up the diner floor and sits at a table across the aisle from the two men. One of the men, flicking his head in her direction, asks his accomplice, "Hooza tamayta?"
It took us a while, this side of the Atlantic, to work out what was being said; but we finally cracked it. "Hooza tamayta?" translated into English as "Who is the tomato?" And the answer usually was: "Sheeza wonna Shorty's broads."