I HAVE never liked Sundays. Sundays are ducks in the park; stale bread, soapsuds on a car, cheque book and electricity bill, wallpaper that needs replacing and the feeling that it is almost Monday. I have had thousands of Sundays and never beat one. My earliest recollections are of a Sunday school teacher who spat through his teeth when he sounded the letter "s."' We were all right with David and Goliath, but the loaves and fishes were murder.

I graduated to puberty with a friend and we would catch the first bus to anywhere, ending up soaked on river banks with lemonade, crisps and iumbago. He never beat Sundays either.

We found a friend with a van, and joined an aero club at Blackpool, 25 miles from our homes. The others became pilots and I became petrified, sitting in the backs of Austers clutching seats. My thin friend took a shine to a girl named Doris Dibbs or some such and invited her to our annual ball. He did not know they would be announced.

" Miss Doris Dibbs." cried tho announcer, and above the laughter you could hear him swearing not to take her again unless she changed her name.

He was not good with them. He said to a busty girl wearing a corsage, "I like your garden." and wondered why she flinched. Arriving back on a Sunday from a Farnborough air show both my friends tried to land the plane at once, grappling with each other while I screamed. " More flap," one of them kept shouting. I thought there was enough flap about. We did a three-point landing: that is, we hit the runway three times before tumbling out, still screaming. I was put in the back of the van for interfering.

We set out for North Africa by Auster on a Sunday, ending up diving, engineless, towards the Pyrenees before my friend realised he had an emergency tank. "Hands off," he would shout when I held on to him.

He would call over petrol tankers .at airports when they were already filling up airliners and say briskly: " Ten gallons, please." It was mortifying. Once we flew over his grandmother's home on a Sunday, frightening ourselves, and all she said was: "There's a wasp in this house." swatting everywhere with a newspaper. She did not even see us cavorting about in the sky.

We wore blue blazers with big aero club badges, even at work. Our gilded motto was, "You fumble, I pay."

I often wondered why I bothered to get up on Sundays at all. They're the tail lamps ot the last bus home when you're still running for the stop, or towels going over the pumps when you have just paid your round. I thought the troubles would end when I married. My own room. My own fire. But the kids came along and I stuck my head in a newspaper, sat on several half-eaten sweets, pretended the baby wasn't drowning, and charted the hours between Family Favourites and Songs of Praise.

I once had an eventful Sunday. I broke a finger playing cricket. But for the most part It was Albert Sandler and the Palm Court. .. I only mention all this because my eldest said: " What can I DO on Sundays ?" " When I was your age," I said. "we always found plenty to do."

Now it's Sunday again and there is not much to do except write about Sundays.

 

+ adapted from a Daily Express column I wrote (on a Sunday) in the seventies.