G21 EUROPE

London Calling!

May Day

by Felicity Ussher

G21 Europe Staff Writer

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LONDON - When I was six and lived in a village, May 1st was not just another bank holiday when people sat indoors watching TV. Nor was it the sole survivor of the International Socialist Movement, which ordered labourers in 1889 to sieze a day for themselves. May Day was the most English day of the year, as if all our heritage had been stored in school cupboards, waiting for spring flowers and the first cuckoo.

The Maypole went up outside the sweetshop, and all the village gathered to watch. We had practised our dance in the school hall for weeks, weaving in and out of each other with our hands in the air, as if we were already holding the coloured ribbons. The one dress rehearsal had been shambolic, ending in tangles and sobbing, and I was not going to take my eyes off my feet this time. We stood poised in a circle of dresses and suits, ribbons stretched out taut from the top of the pole. But when the music began and we started weaving ourselves closer and closer to the centre, I sneaked a glimpse up and saw the miracle - beautifully plaited ribbons right down the pole. We skipped in and out, adorning and exposing and re-adorning the pole, until my grandfather brought out his cine-camera and all the village clapped to see the young innocents' adoration of the great phallus.

We did not then pair up and go bonking in the bushes, as was the ancient custom of those who went a-maying. By our time, the villagers had introduced the May Queen to symbolise that mood of springtime celebration. Unless I was just too young to know. The Queen was one of the older girls at school, but I did not recognise her with her bright pink cheeks and enough sparkle in her eyes to do the maying for the whole village. Her cart was wheeled about the green by handsome men wearing garlands of flowers, who were no doubt wooing her, although this boring to me, aged six, my first summer in England.

I was busy watching the grass getting trampled and all the people getting drunk from plastic beakers and then dropping them. I saw the Morris dancers, dressed in multicoloured rags with bells up to their knees. All wise men with long beards, they looked straight ahead and thumped their sticks and jumped forward and back, as solemn as men should be who have preserved a tradition for hundreds of years.

It was a village in touch with its heritage, with wooden stocks for pelting wrong-doers with rotten fruit and a dunking platform by the pond to check for witches. Bus loads of tourists came on Sundays to take a look, but the school faced closure unless it could find one more pupil. The local kids may have jeered at our accents when we came over from Ireland, but our arrival put the school in the black and kept the virgins on show for another year. And by the time Mum found work in London and we could move away from her parents, a new family of children had moved in, to keep the traditions alive.

In London now, May Day has adapted. People roam the supermarket with identical trolleys of meats, kebabs, potoatoes, beers and fuel for their first barbeque of the summer. City supermarkets do not obey bank holidays, of course. It is the only day of the year when you can't risk leaving your trolley alone in an aisle for a minute, in case someone grabs it, rather than gather an identical collection for their own barbie. This may seem like a tamer version of the annual ravaging of virgins, but who knows - maybe their daughters are at it every day, without the consent and protection of their community.

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