WßD Chapter 3 ~ Faith (Revised Edition)

Windsor Street Days

Chapter 3

Faith

I

THOSE WHO know me well say that I am a Christian; that I have a very strong faith, and that I can be extreme. Partly right and partly wrong.

As I mentioned in March Winds, I was given my first Bible at the age of five and three quarters and as a result of the questions I had been firing at Grandma! In fact, when it comes to questions, I developed that little trait very early on. I vividly recall, one day, standing alongside Mum who was crouched down opening the oven door and suddenly realising I’d overstepped the mark. Ken. Will you please stop asking me so many questions! Mum had by now three of us to contend with; me aged five and three quarters, which means my sister was aged eight and three quarters and my younger sister was aged about one month!

That triggers another memory.

Now I thought I was being logical when, in the course of mum changing my sister’s nappie (sorry sis 😉) I noticed the newly baked cake that morning, on the dining table at the other end of the room wherein said changing of the guard was afoot.

I looked at mum, looked at my little sister kicking and, basically, seeming to be really rather well pleased with life and her independent efforts in the nether region, and applied logic.

Mum, shall I cover the cake?

Oh dear! In years to come I always had a silent smile to myself when people trotted out the joke about something being about to hit the fan. Euphemistically, it sure did that morning in the dining room of 8 Orchard Terrace and which, of course, would most surely be reported to that mystical wonderland at 25 Windsor Street and thence across to Number Twenty!

So I gently put down the huge saucepan that I had already picked up - note the tendency to be ready to use initiative and to improvise in fulfilment of said initiative - to cover the cake; indeed, the same saucepan I also used to wear as a WWII helmet with its built-in cannon aka handle, and decided that Mum’s suggestion about playing in the garden might actually be a better idea all round. So, off I shot, at double quick speed. Vrummmmmmmmmmm!

Again, I digress.

But hey ho, it’s good to have a laugh along the way, especially when I realise that all these memories confirm to me what I’ve always known … I had a very happy childhood, a very happy childhood! So bear with me, because you’ll find quite a few anecdotes slipping themselves in when I least expect it.

II

Like millions of grateful children of my generation, I look back and wonder how ever mum and dad did all that they did do. Always asking questions, but that didn’t mean I’d ask questions at school. That was different.

I sort of ‘enjoyed’ school in much the same way as one ‘enjoys’ eating a meal that isn’t exactly inviting but which one is informed that it is full of wondrous nutrients.

But infant and primary schools, well, I had to work hard in my own little way to enjoy school.

Secondary school was different again. I did reasonably well. I liked being the head boy (prefect), and to this day I am immensely proud that my design of the school’s new sixth form uniform was accepted, and so when we became Monkscroft’s first sixth form year, it was a time of huge joy and a burgeoning realisation that the wide world was beyond the school gates but approaching at ever increasing speed.

III

But back to Roman Road Infants School just off the Gloucester Road. The kids were okay. The teachers, well, I guess they’d been through a lot with the war and so on, but one or two were downright vicious; their means of discipline was to hoist by the arm onto the table; yank the short trouser up to expose a bare buttock - that in itself was the most awful humiliation to a class of 32 kids all gawping, tittering, or in outright fear that they’d be next; and then a slap with the hand, not once, but twice. Then another yank back down to ground level and roughly pushed over to the wall, the fat adult hand firmly gripping the back of the collar to stand against the wall - “and you keep your nose six inches from that wall Kenneth, not nine inches, not a foot, six inches! And don’t you dare move! That, children, is what happens if you try to follow that horrible boy’s example of trying to miss this lesson.”

A bloody nazi! A bloody nazi who also got her comeuppence ~ to this day, I have no feelings of kindness towards that woman.

But that was all later.

IV

I remember, even now, the excitement of the night before my first day, where big sis had already been attending for three years, and coming home and thinking, well that’s it. Done.

Come along, Ken. Get ready for bed, you have school in the morning …

My whole little world suddenly wobbled … like a precarious jelly …

But I’ve been Mummy. I’ve DONE school!

And mum laughing and reminding me that, like my sister, I needed to go back again.

Well, at that point my little world not only wobbled, it did the proverbial crash, crumble and collapse routine, and I burst into tears.

And pleas to dad to intervene did not have the desired effect; he just beamed and steered me towards the stairs and bed. This beam thing. It crops up a lot. I was always dazzled by my mum and dad’s beaming smiles. Toothpaste was important in the house but, shock-horror, the day I copied the adverts on our Murphy TV and squeezed the paste all the way along the the brush. Rationing had by now only just stopped, but when a nation lives under rationing for fifteen years, old habits take a while to overcome. I mean, this was still the era of the almost non-existent banana.

Sunday afternoons at 25 Windsor Street saw us all with high tea, and there, right smack bang in the middle of the table were these bananas that mum could rarely afford. We knew they were very special and so I always associate the goodness of bananas with the goodness of Windsor Street too. Grand! I remember that a treat was a banana gently mashed with a small fork, lightly sprinkled with about six grains of sugar … and then handed a small spoon … I was in heaven! Likewise, those incredible banana sandwiches. And to this day, I treat myself to those two infant treats - minus the sugar, of course - and, again, Windsor Street Days come flooding back … the absolute safety, that feeling that we have a moat, that we have a drawbridge, and hearing Grandad slide turn the lock in the front door downstairs, sliding the bolt across after having had the last short dog walk; hearing Judy settle in her basket downstairs … we had a firm rule … stairs were Judy’s closed gate … and then loving that slightly creaking staircase as Grandma and Grandad ascended the twisting staircase onto the landing, then the final twist of four steps up to their mystical bedroom with its huge bed high up above me. For a tiny boy it was the room at the top of the tower where wonderful wooden caskets and boxes adorned the dressing table, several reaching back to the Nineteenth Century. And as with all small children, everything being ‘ten times bigger’ than they really are.

Reaching back …

For a tiny boy it was the room at the top of the tower where wonderful wooden caskets and boxes adorned the dressing table, several reaching back to the Nineteenth Century. And as with all small children, everything being ‘ten times bigger’ than they really are.

But guess what? All the boxes are now displayed in my own bedroom, and so I always enjoy retiring, having gone downstairs, locked the front door last thing, and turned the front door light off …Ah! I see Ken’s turned in for the night … across the road … He’ll be reading now upstairs, I bet. And then one last check of the garden room, yep, french doors secure, all in order, desk set tidily for the morrow … leave the door ajar at the stairwell … allow air to circulate the house during the watches of the night … upstairs, bathroom, check the dining and archive room, again, yep, all’s well … goodnight all … and thence to bed, book … … … and, yep, a quiet time of contemplation and scripture, prayer, and thence … lights out.

V

But again, I digress.

I gradually got over the shock of not being able to “do” school all in one day, and so school and me started out on our rickety relationship. 

I remember getting my first gold star for being able to name the people who were fleeing Europe - refugees. Nothing changes.

Everyone looked at me as if I’d spoken another language. To me it was simple. I watched the news because my mum and dad watched the news or listened to the wireless, and I listened to them and my four grandparents talking. I was the proverbial sponge. Even when quietly playing with my soldiers and the fort Grandad Marshall had built for me, and so on, I still, unwittingly, had one ear tuned to what the grown-ups were chatting about. 

This had a downside.

I am sensitive by nature, and I heard and saw things about the world that I wish now I had not seen, for they stay with me to this day; and when those newsreels suddenly flip back on in documentaries, I still have that shock. My sisters tell me I should just let go. But we are on different planets. So the subject is closed and I learn to live with it.

VI

We did not go to church every Sunday and yet, how do I explain it? Neither was I unaware that God existed. 

At school, I learned the Lord’s Prayer, and in my Bible, I had a fantastic set of coloured pictures, so accurate in the illustration of the text, that to this day, I remember every detail of them, and moreover, when I found that lovely book after an absence of thirty or more years, the resonance in my mind was as sharp as the reliefs I was now examining afresh.

Our minds are incredible, and I’m reminded of that wonderful line in Psalm 139:4 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows that right well. Another one too. Proverbs 25: 28 A man without self-control is like a city whose walls have fallen down. And still another. Psalm 84:10 I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my G-D than to dwell within the tents of the ungodly.

All of us, without exception, live lives that are underpinned by our earliest memory. For me, here are the three underpins of my life’s foundation. I often drift off, I’m not into religion, and yet, these three scriptures always bring me back.

Now, I write that with a caveat; and this caveat will, I know, cause some to put this book down, or to throw it away, or to just delete it from the screen. So be it. I am not writing to preach. I am writing about myself and giving some idea about my make-up. And, bluntly, I couldn’t give a toss. I am old enough now to realise that a man is wise indeed when he does not suffer fools gladly.

So, the caveat is this: I am not a creationist.

VII

So, if, perchance, that caveat has upset you, before you depart, take a look here at Dimension 11. It might quickly restore confidence!

When I say I am not a creationist, I mean that I do not agree that around eight thousand years ago, the Almighty God, in an instant, created everything that there is. There was a time, in my teens and up to my thirties, when there was room for this preposterous idea in a very loose way. I had no understanding of science or physics, not even a grasp. So, this incredible occurrence seemed plausible, at a push, logical even. Likewise, Eden, Adam and Eve and the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. Oh, and let’s not forget that odd-bod, the serpent.

Fifty-seven years on, we now have knowledge and understanding of the Cosmos, of astronomical events that just a century ago were beyond the comprehension of most of us.

So, to that caveat, I must add that, sure, I like the story of Adam and Eve, as a story; a means of illustrating to people, aeons ago, when the scribes first set ink to scroll, that here was a very attractive means of explaining creation in a way in which people could immediately grasp and understand, and then build upon.

I have no doubt that evil exists. We see it all around us. 

But, the singular figure of the devil, or Satan, I really must see only in the context of that allegorical story. And what a story it is. What guile and cunning did indeed the serpent wreak upon the woman. And what a cataclysmic fall, and judgment, from Lucifer the light-bearer to spending the rest of eternity as a snake and on your belly you shall go. 

VIII

My fundamentalist friends have tried to explain to me the wickedness of the ‘discredited’ theory of evolution. And they still do. Ever seen a battleship? When you’re next in London, take a look at HMS Belfast at her permanent moorings on the Thames (and to you Americans who quite rightly say Thaymes after the name of Thames in the USA, we say TEMS). I like battleships. I have no patience with misteaching, application of sin and guilt as a permanent fixture in daily life, and demand on Sundays for people to be forced to tell the gathered righteous congregants what one or two miscreants have been up to and, oh weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, must now bear their souls and rend their garments and go about in sackcloth and ashes. To those whose faith finds great joy in this predicament, with me, you’re looking down the barrel of a fifteen-inch three-barrelled gun turret! better toddle off before I notice.

So! Discredited? Really? I think not.

I am told in no uncertain terms that mathematics alone will show that it is impossible to talk in terms of millions and billions of years. Fine. Study the evidence. 

What I can say with certainty, is that this incredible Universe of which I am increasingly thinking, that what we actually see and observe is but one of the tiniest of parts, was indeed created! I remember musing on this in the 1970s when I was walking the beat on police patrol at night. We were informed, for the first time, about the Big Bang Theory.

It certainly rocked my boat. But what I found myself always asking was, well, if the theory is correct, what existed beforehand to cause the Big Bang? And what existed before that which came into existence and caused the big bang? And what caused that which caused that which caused the big bang … ? And so on.

And my conclusion was very simple and without equations and mathematical formulae.

The reality of Incredible Intelligence, is superior to anything that we will ever fathom. And because I had no other language, I called that Intelligence, GOD. And because I needed to have some means of identifying GOD I turned to the only book I was familiar with on the subject of GOD, as I knew him, the Bible. Just as a Muslim will turn to the Quran; just as a Hindi will turn to Krishna; just as a Buddhist monk will turn to the writings of Buddha; and so on.

And this, of course, brings me into contention with a whole new area within the terrifying realm of religiosity down the ages - Ecumenism.

IX

I was walking through the Cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral on my way to Choral Evensong at 3 pm, when I was surprised to see an exhibition of frescoes of people of all religions, with very clear statements as to their faith, many of them declaring that their version, if I can put it like that, of how God is depicted, was the one and only true version, and I really did rejoice. At last, the religions of the world are trying to work together. This is imperative.

I am a student of history. No. That sounds arrogant. A student of history studies history obtains formal qualifications and then goes on to become a historian. So, it is best for me to say I have a very active interest in history. It is my compass.

And I am increasingly aware that virtually all of the wars fought over the past thousand centuries, and more, can find their source in religious disagreement; one religion being imposed upon another. And whenever that happens, the most brutal crimes are committed.

All of us need to have faith in something. We cannot live our lives in a vacuum.

But two things I will not tolerate in regard to religion.

Firstly, religious fundamentalism, especially its extremes, and I certainly include here the more strident and discordant and very damaging elements, or fringes, of Christendom. In short, religious bullying. We Christians are, quite often, vile human beings.

Secondly, neither will I tolerate the equally strident atheistic bullying that I was subjected to twice in 2016 when my mother died. The person had written a drivel that was meant to sustain me but required me to accept that my mother had at some time abused me. I could not believe what I was reading. And, as always with bullies, this odd-bod could not accept that I had had a wonderful upbringing with loving parents. The lady was duly rebuked. What came forth was nothing short of venomous. Her letters became strident and vicious, full of self-righteousness as she pointed out to me how evil and selfish I was. It was bizarre behaviour. It still is bizarre behaviour. What really angers me, though, is that silly poetry followers in open mic sessions hang upon this odd bod’s every twisted word. They film her reading tripe. They wax lyrical. They fail to see a twisted and distorted mind, a troubled mind. But that is the problem with poetry open mic groups. They attract such people as light attracts moths. They cause irreparable damage. That was one of the Liverpool experiences that I don’t thank my city for!

So, the message to both groups is simple. On your bike. I’m not interested in bullies and I have a zero-tolerance policy to bullying of any description. 

In a way, my faith in the church can best be summed up in a poem I wrote in 2004 in northwest England and which was published by Spiderwize in 2009 in Idle Thoughts: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose :

Messed Up Christianity

The stench of religiosity
Dogma and prejudice;
The cause of wars and holocausts,
Bigotry and venom;
When satan dons the robes of a priest
and plays the role he loves the most:

A Priest!

But beware the trap of fundamentalism,
that has us believe that most priests are apostate
Most are genuine
And I’ll argue that ’til the cows come home.

© 2004 Kenneth Thomas Webb

***

I’ll return to the subject of faith again in a later chapter.

Kenneth Thomas Webb

29 May 2022
All Rights Reserved

© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022

First written 23 March 2020

Christmas Morning 1958

and vivid colour brought the text to life in an infant’s eye

When art and script combine to lead …