A Moveable Feast

Some of our local schools broke up for the Easter holiday last Friday. The others - which are in a different borough - pack up tomorrow. Unlike when I was at school and the Easter holidays -  regardless of the date of Easter Sunday itself - were wrapped around that particular weekend, the school holiday now move  according to how early or late Easter - the holiday we call 'a moveable feast' - is. It makes more sense this way; in my schooldays, when Easter was early, we had barely gone back after half-term before we were off again: when it was late, it was only just gone before Whitsun week was upon us. While it makes sense to adapt the school holiday to the date of Easter, it can make it difficult for parents to arrange childcare if they have children at different schools that take their holidays at different times. Not that childcare was a consideration when I was young, as during such holidays and with both my parents working,  I would be left at home from the age of about ten, with strict instructions not to go out or open the front door to any callers. There is no law in the UK as to what age a child can be left alone, although it is an offence to leave a child alone if it places them at risk, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) recommends that children under twelve are not left alone for lengthy periods: fortunately it did me no harm.

A solitary pedestrian in Romford back in the days when your average town just closed down on a Sunday.

Easter Sunday, like Christmas Day, is a day when the shops in England are closed - the large ones at least, so Easter Sunday is a bit of throwback to the days of my childhood when Sunday was the most boring day of the week. For a flavour of what all Sundays - not just Easter Sunday - in Britain were like in the 1950's and 60's, feast your ears on this, Tony Hancock's "A Sunday Afternoon At Home"

One thing that Easter has always meant to me is football. Today, thanks to the demands of television and the fact that despite everyone claiming that the players are so much fitter than they were fifty years ago, the Easter programme consists of just two matches per club and stretches from Thursday through to Tuesday; it was quite different fifty years ago. Back then it was the norm for teams to play on Good Friday, Saturday and Easter Monday, with two games against one other club bookending the Saturday fixture - and they were not all local derbies either. At Easter 1968, for instance, Romford- who I had just started supporting - played Wellington Town (now AFC Telford United) home and away, a round trip of 350 miles, with a home game against Hillingdon Borough sandwiched in between. Three games in four days were the norm at Easter and rarely if ever did you hear managers or players complain. Today if it were suggested that we return to such a schedule there would be apoplexy among Premier League managers - they get quite agitated at the prospect of three games in a week as it is.

Football at Romford FC's Brooklands ground in the 1970's, although I cannot confirm it was Easter.

Easter at school usually marked a turning point for the PE department. We would return to school after the Easter holiday to find all of the football and hockey goal posts removed - the rugby posts always remained in situ - and the running track marked out. Easter meant that winter sports were set aside in favour of athletics and cricket, although I confess that we played cricket at school rarely. Running, jumping and throwing things were the preferred options of most of our PE teachers between Easter and the summer holidays. Tennis was not available for boys on the grounds that it was a girls sport: quite how that was justified I will never know.

The goalposts have gone, in favour of a running track.

One unusual thing that I associate with Easter is snow. While white Christmases are actually quite rare in Britain, snow at Easter is much more common, and the Met Office records show that snow has been recorded in 2013, 2008, 1998, 1994, 1986, 1983, 1978, 1977 and 1975. In 1983, when Easter fell at the beginning of April, Scotland, the Midlands, and Kent had up to 10 cm. I can recall the snow at Easter in 1975 and 1977, and the reason for that is, funnily enough, football matches. In 1975, Romford played at Nuneaton Borough on Easter Saturday, which that year was in late March, and we experienced all four seasons in one day, with snow falling as our coach - which broke down more than once on the journey - trundled up the M1. And then in 1977, on Easter Monday at Tonbridge, a veritable blizzard engulfed the ground an hour or so before kick-off. Happily, both games went ahead, and more happily still, Romford won them both.

Football and snow apart, Easter is probably most associated with chocolate eggs (the religious connotations aside, which are a given). Like Bonfire Night fireworks, by the time I reached a certain age my parents offered me the opportunity to pass up on the traditional delights in favour of something else - usually a book. This year it seems there is some controversy over the sale of Easter eggs, or more specifically the packaging. There are people up in arms that Cadbury and Nestlé appear to have dropped the word Easter from their chocolate egg packaging, although Cadbury seems just to have moved it to the back of the packaging. Meanwhile, according to Nestlé, "Chocolate eggs (are)  synonymous with Easter... the association is now an automatic one. There has been no deliberate decision to drop the word Easter from our products." Even the Prime Minister - who one might think would have more pressing concerns - has been lured into the controversy to comment on the Easter egg hunt partnership between Cadbury and the National Trust, which is called The Cadbury Egg Hunt, thus omitting the word 'Easter.'  This naturally, is seen by many as diluting Britain's Christian heritage and pandering to minorities, whereas dropping Easter from egg packaging is more likely to be a marketing ploy to boost sales among people who would not otherwise buy them. The National Trust website, while it does not include the word Easter in the title of the egg hunt, uses it six times on the page detailing the egg hunts.

Comments, such as those by John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, who said that dropping Easter from the Egg Hunt was "tantamount to spitting on the grave of Cadbury," a reference to Cadbury's founder, John Cadbury, maybe miss the point a bit, since according to one of Cadbury's descendants, he was "a Quaker who did not celebrate Easter." Considering that what we traditionally call Easter eggs go on sale as soon as the supermarket shelves have been cleared of Christmas goodies, and that the vast majority of people who buy them don't see the inside of a church from one year to the next, getting vexed on religious grounds seems a tad insincere to me.

Apart from Hot Cross Buns, which I absolutely love, there is another food that I will forever associate with Easter, and that is chicken. It is difficult to imagine now, with chicken so cheap and plentiful, that there was a time when poultry was relatively much more expensive than beef or lamb, so chicken and turkey were a rare treat - well they were in my household when I was growing up - with turkey the default option at Christmas. For Easter Sunday however, our moveable feast was always chicken.