May Day holiday: a history

It is a fact of life, when one is on a year-long lunch break, that May-Day bank holiday is just another day. However all over Europe, and in China, it's a time when, historically, the hard-working Masses get to step off the treadmill for a day and celebrate the end of the Heating Season (for those, that is, who can afford heating). The UK was dragged kicking and screaming into this tradition by the (then) EEC, in 1978. Lunchista was, while still at school, an eyewitness to some of the kicking and screaming. I invite you to share in the drama of How May-Day Holiday Was Won, at least in our part of the country.

Picture the late 1970's: the Winter of Discontent, rubbish piled up all over Liverpool, kipper ties, boarding schools, the IRA, "Life on Mars" if you can't remember the real thing, you get the idea. Lunchista's school (the very same, but about a year before, the notorious "fellwalking" incident): was a rather old-fashioned establishment and had either just finished celebrating its 250th anniversary, or else fallen through a time-warp. The buildings had a Hogwartesque touch. The headmaster loved Cricket and Shakespeare, and you might sit there and think "so what", but for the time he had once famously launched into fiery oratory, one Speech Day, about how one racist taunt overheard at Lords had (and I quote) "turned an idyllic English summer afternoon into a Vision Of Hell".

But even that sense of justice didn't mean that he'd allow his school to indulge in Workers' Holiday. So we all turned up as usual, and had a totally usual day, until just after lunch when the bell rang, and didn't stop. Someone had telephoned the school with a bomb scare and we all had to go home. Buses were summoned early, and Lunchista's class had to freeze all the way home in games kit.

No-one ever officially found out who did it. But let's just say that The Brightest Lad In The School had been taught a cracking Irish accent by our brilliant English teacher the previous year, so that he could play McCann in the school production of The Birthday Party. And I might add that, although many countries featured in our intake of about 350 people, at the time neither part of the Emerald Isle was one of them.

Let's face it, given the circumstances things could have got ugly. But we were spared panicking staff, "Life on Mars"-style policing and Bomb Disposal detonating people's bags, desks and suspicious-looking objects in the Physics lab at random. So Lunchista raises a glass to all those whose cool professionalism allowed me to enjoy my first ever May-Day holiday.