Whitsuntide

Today is Whit Sunday or Whitsun, the festival of Pentecost. I'm not religious nowadays but I was brought up like many of you in a far more religious world, that of the Sixties. Whitsun, or Whitsuntide as my family called it, meant a long weekend, as the Monday was a holiday. My Parents always took us Woodsies out somewhere, maybe for Chicken in a Basket in a country beer garden, paddling in the stream at Brock Bottoms or maybe even a trip to Blackpool or Heysham Head, a taste of glorious things to come in the summer when we headed out to Pwhelli or Minehead for a whole week at Butlins, where I was usually dumped at the camp nursery when I was really little but later I could chase the Pirate into the pool and join in all the other grand antics.

I am, it has to be said, in melancholic mood at the moment and I often turn to poetry at such times [stop that yawning!]. We lost our Gran last week and time seems to have stood still. So in memory of Gran and the simple pleasures of the past I thought I'd share one of my favourite poems, The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, published in 1964 when Whitsuntide was still very much a part of my childhood world. It's a bit long as he's sat on a train describing what he sees, only as Larkin could. Enjoy. [PS. please share your Whitsun memories if you like].

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

    Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept   

    For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.   

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and   

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;   

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped   

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass   

Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth   

Until the next town, new and nondescript,   

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

    The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys   

The interest of what’s happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls   

I took for porters larking with the mails,   

And went on reading. Once we started, though,   

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

    Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. Struck, I leant   

More promptly out next time, more curiously,   

And saw it all again in different terms:   

The fathers with broad belts under their suits   

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;   

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,   

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,   

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.   

    Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed   

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days   

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

The last confetti and advice were thrown,

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define   

Just what it saw departing: children frowned   

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

    The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.   

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast   

Long shadows over major roads, and for

Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say

    I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   

And someone running up to bowl—and none   

Thought of the others they would never meet   

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   

I thought of London spread out in the sun,   

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   

    Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   

Travelling coincidence; and what it held   

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Philip Larkin, “The Whitsun Weddings” from Collected Poems. Courtesy of of The Poetry Foundation via the The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Phillip Larkin.