I got chills...

No make up. No tights. No stockings. No short skirts. No trousers. No hair dye. No rocking rolling devil music. And, most certainly, no boys. Just tell the truth, shame the Devil, cross your legs and say no. Ah, those Carmelite nuns knew how to party though, simpering bashfully beneath their wimples when the jagged jaw of the parish priest came a calling. Rock on Sister, for you are indeed the bride of Christ Himself and the blessed one turns her eyes only heavenward as the fires of desire stoke the flames in your soul.

To a tall, flush-faced, be-plaited, be-ribboned, satchel-clutching ten year old Prossie* the finer aspects of the reign of Catholic fire and brimstone were as much a mystery as hieroglyphics. Pretty to look at, sometimes alarming in the telling, but as mortally unknowable as the activities with which unbaptised persons might occupy themselves whilst in God's eternal waiting room, Limbo being a concept that doesn't feature highly at a work-a-day down-town Methodist Sunday School. Oh, and the giddying heady heavenly scent of it. The incense, the holy smoke, the lithe writhing of the bright licking flames of the pure white candles in their jet black sconces. And the priest, listening hard to feverish whispering confession of sins in thought and deed, offering hoarse spoken words of absolution from behind delicate fretwork panels to juvenile knees.

I came unprovisioned, unprepared, into this Convent school world of saints and martyrs as my own adolescence was just beginning to bloom. 1979, Mrs Thatcher not long anointed as the bouffant haired latter-day Bismarck steering her iron-clad course into history. And I, on my first day, in brown felt hat, striped golden tie and coarse pleated skirt, stood wide eyed and craven in awe of the sheer power of it all. I was yet to learn the Hail Mary, mouthed nonsense words from half-closed lips, fiddled awkwardly with my tie at the moments in the chapel of genuflection and crossing. Make me an instrument of thy peace, Saint Augustine, and don't let Sister Philomena catch me doodling in the hymn book.

Five years on, I was an old hand. Could recite the prayers: English, French, Latin, knew the stations of the cross, ate fish on Fridays and passed unseen beneath the radar of my outsiderness. And then one day the priest must have called by unexpected, for the lunchtime corridors were deserted of sisters and their secular counterparts. Dun painted classrooms, playgrounds, tennis courts, quadrangles, we had the place to ourselves. The Devil he makes works for idle hands and our teenage hands itched with mischief. Some climbed upon the brown curtained stage, powered up the stereo, plucked from the ether a smuggled cassette tape and cranked up the volume. All that long lunchtime of bliss we tucked our skirts in our pants and danced and turned cartwheels to the Devil's very best tunes.

And so it was that the first time I heard the spine-tingling, hair-raising, pulse-throbbing, ear-addicting, blood-pumping sound of the (then banned) Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was dancing with my knickers on show with a room full of 15 year old girls in the hallowed hall of a Convent school. Over and over and over again, the windows shivering with unholy volume until the room was a spinning, sweating, swaying sea of singing young women on the very tip of the brink of the precipice of adulthood moving only in the ways that ten thousand thousand years of instinct compelled.

Some people know exactly where they were and what they were doing the moment JFK was assassinated. On the moment of the first moon landing, I was still a babe in arms. But there are some very special moments plucked from a lifetime of memories that condense, coalesce and stand still as if time itself has halted. That afternoon in 1984 was one of them. Relax. Oh yeah.


I was reminded of this today when I went to visit Fram's blog (>>>Sort of San Franscico Fan Club>>>) and found he had posted Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard that too: 2002, late September, driving across endless eternal beautiful red rocks in the Mid West USA. A lifetime of listening to music but some has the power to raise a tingle from nape to soul and stop the heart on vey first hearing. Another piece too like this, just the other day at the event of music and words. This time, Country Life by folk band Show of Hands, played and sung to perfection by Maria's husband Bob.

And if you're wondering, yes I did sing along. But not, this time, with my skirt tucked in my knickers.

* Prossie = Protestant

http://www.last.fm/music/Show+of+Hands/_/Country+Life