Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised.
When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed – for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little.
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.
Why did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later.
I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.
And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
You are unhappy. Things get worse.
It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’
In fact, they told you nothing.
6
Church
‘T
HAT’S NOT A CHURCH – THAT’S two terraced houses knocked together.’
Elim Pentecostal Church, Blackburn Road, Accrington, was the centre of my life for sixteen years. It had no pews, no altar, no nave or chancel, no stained glass, no candles, no organ.
It had fold-up wooden chairs, a long low pulpit – more like a stage than the traditional box on stilts – a pub piano and a pit.
The pit could be filled with water for our baptismal services. Just as Jesus had baptised his disciples in the River Jordan, we too fully immersed believers in a deep warm plunge pool which had to be slowly heated up the day before the service.
Baptismal candidates were given a little box for their teeth and spectacles. It had been spectacles only until Mrs Smalley opened her mouth underwater to praise the Lord and lost her top teeth. The pastor couldn’t swim so a member of the flock had to dive down and pull them out – we all sang ‘I Will Make You Fishers of Men’ as an encouragement, but it was felt that while losing one set of teeth was a misfortune, to lose two sets looked liked carelessness. And so baptism happened without dentures – if you had them, and most people had them.
There was a fierce debate about burial/cremation with or without the dentures.
Like most evangelical groups, Elim believed in the resurrection of the body at the Last Trump – Mrs Winterson did not, but kept quiet. The question was, if you had had your teeth removed, and that was a fashionable thing to do until the 1960s, would you get them back at the Last Trump? If you did, would the falsies be in the way? If not, would you have to spend eternity with no teeth?
Some said it didn’t matter because nobody would be eating in the afterlife; others said it mattered a lot because we would want to look our best for Jesus . . .
And on it went . . .
Mrs Winterson didn’t want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day. But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army – it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn’t believe in mass any more, it was all about energy.’ This life is all mass. When we go, we’ll be all energy, that’s all there is to it.’
I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the ‘things of the world’ that would pass away, ‘heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll’, were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother’s beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.
But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.
Baptismal candidates wore a white sheet, either sheepishly or rakishly, and were asked this simple question by the pastor: ‘Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your saviour?’
The answer was: ‘I do.’ At this point the candidate waded into the water and, while held on either side by two strong men, was fully submerged – dying to the old life, surfacing into the new day. Once upright again and soaked through, they were given back their teeth and glasses and sent to dry off in the kitchen.
Baptismal services were very popular and were always followed by a supper of potato pie and mincemeat.
The Elim Church does not baptise infants. Baptism is for adults, or those somewhere near adulthood – I was thirteen. No one can be baptised by Elim unless they have given their lives to Jesus and understand what that means. Christ’s injunction that his followers must be twice-born, the natural birth and the spiritual birth, is in keeping with religious initiation ceremonies both pagan and tribal. There has to be a rite of passage, and a conscious one, between the life given by chance and circumstance and the life that is chosen.
There are psychological advantages to choosing life and a way of life consciously – and not just accepting life as an animal gift lived according to the haphazard of nature and chance. The ‘second birth’ protects the psyche by prompting both self-reflection and meaning.
I know that the whole process very easily becomes another kind of rote learning, where nothing is chosen at all, and any answers, however daft, are preferred to honest questioning. But the principle remains good. I saw a lot of working-class men and women – myself included – living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church. These were not educated people; Bible study worked their brains. They met after work in noisy discussion. The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning.
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with our religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
We shall have to find new ways of finding meaning – it is not yet clear how this will happen.
But for the members of the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, life was full of miracles, signs, wonders, and practical purpose.
That was how the movement had started in 1915, in Monaghan, Ireland, though the founder, George Jeffreys, was a Welshman. The name Elim comes from Exodus 15:27. Moses is trudging through the desert with the Israelites and everyone is miserable, tired and looking for a sign from God, when suddenly, they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water and threescore and ten palm trees: and they encamped there by the waters.
If a hen wasn’t laying – pray over her and an egg was sure to follow. Our Easter services always blessed the hens, and a lot of people kept them; ours were in our allotment, most
were in people’s backyards. A visitation by a fox soon turned into a parable about the sneak-thief ways of Satan. A hen that wouldn’t lay however often you prayed over her was like a soul who turned from Jesus – proud and unproductive.
If you pegged out your washing and it rained – get a few of the faithful to pray for a good drying wind. As nobody had a telephone we often turned up at each other’s houses asking for help. Not Mrs Winterson – she prayed alone, and she prayed standing up, more like an Old Testament prophet than a sinner on her knees.
Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. She died without painkillers and in pain.
For the rest of us, for me, the certainty of a nearby God made sense of the uncertainty. We had no bank accounts, no phones, no cars, no inside toilets, often no carpets, no job security and very little money. The church was a place of mutual help and imaginative possibility. I don’t know anyone, including me, who felt trapped or hopeless. What did it matter if we had one pair of shoes and no food on Thursday nights before payday? Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you . . .
Good advice – if the kingdom of God is the place of true value, the place not bound by the facts and figures of the everyday, if it is what you love for its own sake . . .
In a world that has become instrumental and utilitarian, the symbol of the kingdom of God – and it is a symbol not a place – stands as the challenge of love to the arrogance of power and the delusions of wealth.
Monday night – Sisterhood
Tuesday night – Bible Study
Wednesday night – Prayer Meeting
Thursday night – Brotherhood/Black and Decker
Friday night – Youth Group
Saturday night – Revival Meeting (away)
Sunday – All day
The Brothers’ Black and Decker nights were practical meetings to fix up the church building or to help one of the brothers at home. The Saturday-night revival meetings were really the highlight of the week because that usually meant a trip to another church, or, in the summer, a tent crusade.
Our church had a giant tent and every summer we went up and down with the Glory Crusade. My mother and father had remade their marriage in a Glory Crusade tent on a piece of spare land under the Accrington viaduct.
My mother loved the Glory Crusades. I don’t think she believed half of what she was supposed to believe, and she made up quite a lot of theology. But I think that the night in the tent crusade when she and Dad found the Lord stopped her walking away from home with a small suitcase and never coming back.
And so every year when Mrs Winterson saw the tent in the field, and heard the harmonium playing ‘Abide With Me’, she used to grab my hand and say, ‘I can smell Jesus.’
The smell of the canvas (it always rains up north in the summer), and the smell of soup cooking for afterwards, and the smell of damp paper printed with the hymns – that’s what Jesus smells like.
If you want to save souls – and who doesn’t – then a tent seems to be the best kind of temporary structure. It is a metaphor for this provisional life of ours – without foundations and likely to blow over. It is a romance with the elements. The wind blows, the tent billows, who here feels lost and alone? Answer – all of us. The harmonium plays ‘What A Friend We Have in Jesus’.
In a tent you feel a sympathy with the others even when you don’t know them. The fact of being in a tent together is a kind of bond, and when you see smiling faces and when you smell the soup, and the person next to you asks your name, then quite likely you will want to be saved. The smell of Jesus is a good one.
The tent was like the war had been for all the people of my parents’ age. Not real life, but a time where ordinary rules didn’t apply. You could forget the bills and the bother. You had a common purpose.
I can see them; Dad in his knitted cardigan and knitted tie standing at the flap shaking hands with people as they came in; Mother, halfway up the tent aisle, helping people to find a seat.
And there’s me, giving out hymn sheets or leading the choruses – evangelical churches sing a lot of choruses – short sharp merry verses with rousing tunes – easy to memorise. Like ‘Cheer Up Ye Saints of God’.
It is hard to understand the contradictions unless you have lived them; the camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do – then set this against the cruelty of dogma, the miserable rigidity of no drink, no fags, no sex (or if you were married, as little sex as possible), no going to the pictures (an exception was made for Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments), no reading anything except devotional literature, no fancy clothes (not that we could afford them), no dancing (unless it was in church, and it was a kind of Irish jig of godly ecstasy), no pop music, no card games, no pubs – even for orange juice. TV was OK but not on Sundays. On Sundays you covered the set with a cloth.
But I loved it in the school holidays when the Glory Crusades were on and you could get on your bike and cycle thirty or forty miles to wherever the tent was and somebody would give you a sausage or a pie, and then it was time for the meeting, and hours later everybody who had travelled got in their sleeping bags and went to sleep on the floor. Then we biked home again.
Mrs Winterson came by coach on her own so that she could smoke.
One day she brought Auntie Nellie with her. They both smoked but they had a pact not to tell anybody. Auntie Nellie had been a Methodist but she had changed her mind. Everybody called her Auntie Nellie even though she had no biological family. I think she was born called Auntie Nellie.
She lived in a slum tenement of one-up one-down stone-built factory dwellings. The outside loo was shared with two other houses. It was very clean – outside loos were supposed to be very clean – and this one had a picture of the young Queen Elizabeth II in military uniform. Someone had graffitied GOD BLESS HER on the wall.
Auntie Nellie shared the loo but she had her own outside tap that gave her cold water and inside there was a coal-burning iron range with a great big tin kettle on it, and a heavy flat iron. We supposed she still used the flat iron to press her clothes, and at night she put the flat iron in her bed to warm it up.
She was unmarried, bow-legged, frizzy-haired, thin like someone who never has quite enough to eat, and she was never seen without her coat on.
When the women came to lay her out they had to cut the buttons on her coat to get it off and they said it was more like corrugated iron than tweed.
Then we found out that she wore woollen underwear, including a liberty bodice, woollen stockings, and a kind of patchwork petticoat made of bits and pieces – I think she sewed bits on and cut bits off over the years. There was a thick gent’s silk scarf round her neck, invisible under her coat, and that was quite a luxury that scarf and led to speculation – had she had a fancy man?
If she had it must have been in the war. Her friend said every woman had had a fancy man in the war – married or not, that’s how it was.
However it was, or had been, now she was wearing the scarf and the underwear and the coat and nothing else. No dress, no skirt, no blouse.
We wondered if she had been too ill lately to get dressed, even though she had still been walking up and down to church and to the market. Nobody knew her age.
It was the first time any of us had been upstairs.
The small room was bare – a tiny window with newspaper tacked over it for warmth. A peg-rug on the floorboards – you make those yourself out of scraps of cotton and they have a rough-coated feel and they lie there like downcast dogs.
There was an iron bedstead heaped with lumpy eiderdowns – the kind that were only ever stuffed with one duck.
There was a chair with a dusty hat on it. There was a slop bucket for the night. There was a photograph on the wall of Auntie Nellie as a young woman wearing a black-and-white polka-dot dress.
There
was a cupboard and in the cupboard were two clean sets of darned underclothes and two clean pairs of thick woollen stockings. Hanging up and wrapped in brown paper was the polka-dot dress. It had sweat pads sewn into the armpits the way they used to do before deodorant. You just washed out the pads along with your stockings at night.
We looked and we looked but there wasn’t anywhere to look. Auntie Nellie had kept her coat on because she had no clothes.
The women washed her and they put her in the polka-dot dress. They showed me how to make a body look nice. It wasn’t my first body – I had sat eating jam sandwiches with Dead Grandma, and in the North in the 1960s coffins were kept open at home for three days and nobody minded.
But touching a dead body is odd – I still find it odd – the skin changes so quickly and everything shrinks. Yet I would not give up the body I love to a stranger to wash and dress. It is the last thing you can do for someone, and the last thing you can do together – both your bodies, as it used to be. No, it’s not for a stranger . . .
Auntie Nellie cannot have had much money. Twice a week she had all the neighbourhood children she could squeeze into her one room and she made onion soup or potato soup and all the children brought their own cup and she ladled it out off the stove.
She taught them songs and she told them Bible stories and thirty or forty skinny hungry kids queued outside and sometimes brought things from their mothers – buns or toffees – and everybody shared. They all had nits. They all loved her and she loved them. She called her dank dark little house with its one window and black walls ‘Sunshine Corner’.