Sister Teresa has always had a very soft spot for Fotherington-Thomas, the macho and cynical Nigel Molesworth’s ‘gurly’ companion at St Custard’s, from Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s Down with Skool
I have always had a very soft spot for Fotherington-Thomas.
He was the macho and cynical Nigel Molesworth’s ‘girlie’ companion at St Custard’s, from Geoffrey Willans’s Down with Skool (1953), illustrated so brilliantly by Ronald Searle.
Fotherington-Thomas is prone to saying, ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky,’ and has a touching little round face with a beaming smile going from ear to ear. I don’t think he is on record as saying, ‘Hullo flowers, hullo sun,’ but he might easily have done.
That same enthusiasm is to be found, in a more serious vein, in George Herbert’s Easter:
I got me flowers to strew thy way;
I got me boughs from many a tree;
But thou wast up at break of day,
And brought thy sweets along
with thee…
Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns shine to
endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.
Herbert takes us all the way from Jesus’s short-lived triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, past his Passion and crucifixion and on to the baffling joy of the empty tomb. Jesus beat everyone to it on Easter Sunday morning – not just Herbert, but also ‘Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome [who] brought spices with which to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning on the first day of the week they went to the tomb, just as the sun was rising.’ (Mark 16:1-2)
‘And brought thy sweets along with thee’ is a wonderful line. The sweets are not a bag of toffees but something unimaginably richer. They take us back to the ointments and spices of the women going to the tomb and further back to the myrrh offered to the infant Christ for his burial. None of these is ultimately needed, since to live in Christ is the fulfilment of all our longings.
We have been through a long, damp, grey winter with its permanent threat of Omicron. It is now time for blossom and daffodils to come into their own, and for the sun to rise in the East and to warm us through. Not just the sun of our solar system, but the Son of God.
The cosmic Christ can seem a very long way away, and inconsequential. Herbert assures us that this is not so, and that we are the heirs of that unique occurrence: the Resurrection. He neatly rounds off the 365 days that make up a calendar year to ‘three hundred’, then reminds us that there is only one day that really counts: Easter Sunday. All our other days are subsumed into it.
Hullo flowers, hullo sun, indeed.
