Sex, like cricket, is also a Sunday sport

Hartley Neita, Contributor

THE only sound heard on Sundays in the village of my youth years was the pealing of the church bell announcing the start of Matins at mid-morning and before Vespers in the early evening.

Except for The Gleaner car which dropped off the newspapers at the police station before dawn, and the Romance bus which plied between Kingston and Mandeville and returned in the morning and afternoon, there was hardly any other Sunday traffic on the main road which linked our village with May Pen to the east and Porus in the west.

There was little visiting between neighbours. Children joined each other along the route to church and spoke softly to each other. After church was over they returned to their homes still whispering to one another.

Our home had a gramophone and on Sundays we could only play recordings of hymns. We could not even play the Christmas carols sung by Bing Crosby on Christmas Sunday, as he was a pop crooner. We could also not play the negro spirituals recorded by Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson.

Games, of course, like cards and dominos and snakes and ladders were forbidden ­ except, strangely, for bagatelle the forerunner of today's video games. We could also not play cricket or hop-skotch in the backyard.

Different customs

In those days, cricket and football matches were never played in country villages on Sundays. Kingston folk, however, lived a different custom. That was the day they travelled by the hundreds by trucks and buses to Al Terry Beach and Dunn's River Falls in St. Ann for seaside picnics and dances. In Kingston, too, the business house cricket and football competitions took place on Sundays and Kingston, Melbourne, Wembley and other Kingston clubs also held bridge tournaments on Sundays ­ after church services. Mah-Jongg and other Chinese gambling games also took place on Sundays.

No one, of course, was concerned with the religious sensibility of Seventh Day Adventists and because they were then a minority denomination any protests they might have made about sports being played on Saturdays were ignored.

The change in attitudes began to take place about 50 years ago. Radio Jamaica, for example, was not yet broadcasting all day and night, and on Sundays its menu consisted of the classics and religious songs and programmes. Gradually, the station began to play light pop music. Today, any and everything plays on the dozen or more stations.

Sunday Christians suffered their first major casualty when the Jamaica Cricket Association agreed to the playing of its cricket competitions on Sundays. I seem to remember that the parish cricket boards did not go along with this decision at first. It was however justified by the observation that cricket commenced at 1 p.m. and that most churches ended their services by 11 a.m.

So one could go to church in the morning and give a donation of one shilling for God's work, then go to cricket in the afternoon and pay an admission of five shillings!

Today, Sunday is no different from any other day. Men play dominoes on the piazza of shops within shouting distance of the village churches on Sunday mornings. Parsons have had to negotiate with sound system operators to delay playing reggae and dance hall music until services are over. The only programmes now absent from radio on Sundays are the talk show programmes and it's only a matter of time before that changes.

Stores and supermarkets are now open on Sundays. So, too, are go-go clubs and brothels. After all, why not? Sex, like cricket and football, is both a spectator as well as a participatory sport.

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