Nor did the Tooth Fairy, and Black Friday was still just a day to be wary of. There was no sign of Hallowe’en and the Easter Bunny didn’t drop by. My childhood also predated the Americanisation of all things celebratory dull old us still burned Guy Fawkes on the 5th of November and went First Footing at New Year. Valentine’s Day wasn’t something my parents celebrated, but then it was the 1950s and we were hideously poor.
It was spoken about a lot in my family – no surprise really with a father whose army nickname was ‘Dillinger’ and who had a lifelong fascination with the Chicago mobs and Capone in particular. Dining out may never seem quite the same, and dining in, is of course, a rose-tinted delight.Īs a child, the 1929 St Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago looms large in my memory. Any other allusion shall remained veiled and you can make of it what you will. There’s also a vague association between romance and martyrdom too, but we, as humans, seldom revert to eating our mates, at least not in the cannibalistic sense. It’s hard to separate the idea of Valentine’s Day from martyrdom in one form or another because martyrdom is locked into the history of the day and the people after which it’s named. But one Valentine’s Day she learned that to love herself required accepting who she was.
For decades romance was full of complications for Lexie Matheson.
