The Boy Who Was Afraid of Butterflies - Chapter 22 'Sunday School Teacher'

Chapter 22 Sunday School Teacher

Despite being brought up in a churchgoing community, I discovered that I understood little about religion. Oh yes, I knew the facts. I knew my bible stories. I never quite managed to match my father who, as a boy, had achieved 100% in the Scripture Exam when he was ten years old. But I’d got 99%, and 98% twice. I found out that it was easier to achieve these near perfect marks when you were still young and the answers were based on knowledge and memory and not on understanding. The required responses were factual, right or wrong. Papers set for teenagers expected more discourse, reasoning, argument and by the time I reached that age, I was at Charterhouse with no opportunity or inclination to enter the annual examination set by the Scripture Union.

I knew the rituals required of churchgoing Christians too. I attended Sunday School and morning and evening services at the Methodist chapel. There were mid-week meetings, some social, some more devotional in nature. I knew all the committees - Methodists revel in committees as they’re very democratic - because my dad seemed to go to most of them. I knew the hymns - Methodists sing a lot too - but can’t say I was ever an enthusiast for singing despite my apparent tuneful voice which held out until well into my teenage years. Church was just what you did in the 1940s and 1950s. Nearly everyone then attended a church of some sort and you were thought odd if you were the exception. Of course, now the opposite is true.

At Charterhouse we had daily morning prayers in the chapel consisting of hymn, bible reading and prayers, usually the collect for the day followed by the Lord’s Prayer. The school was in the Anglican tradition, two ordained clergy were members of the teaching staff and pretty awful they were. One gave the impression that he never took it seriously - his sermons remind me now, or what I can remember of them - style not content - of the well known parody by Peter Cook, I think it was, the sermon with the text, ‘For Esau was a hairy man’! The other was earnest and so deadly boring that he was a poor advertisement for religion - he must have converted many boys to agnosticism or even atheism. He took RE lessons for the junior and middle years and spent most of the time reading verses in rotation round the room from the Psalms, the maximum input from him being an occasional explanation of a word from the Authorised Version that we had not understood.

When I was fifteen I remember being taken on one side by my Housemaster ‘Jock’ Reith who enquired politely why I had not yet been ‘done’ - his exact words I think - saying that all other boys in our house of my age had been confirmed, and somehow implying that I was letting the house down. I think I satisfied him eventually by explaining I was a Methodist (I don’t think he’d ever met one before!) and we had the equivalent of preparation for full church membership, a process I was undergoing at home during the school holidays. This step on my behalf seemed logical, but it was no sudden conversion or blinding commitment. It just seemed to be the right thing to do as I was so busy with church activities. Any deeper involvement, especially anything that smacked of evangelical fervour, had long been sent packing by my encounter with that emotionally bullying evangelist from Newfoundland who’d so embarrassed me on the pavement outside Esher station.

As I moved into the Sixth Form, RE lessons became much more enriching and stimulating. We had the Headmaster himself, a very young Brian Young, who was intellectually very sharp and got us arguing and thinking. Another master we had one year admitted to being an agnostic but encouraged us to think for ourselves and did not undermine or ridicule our arguments or beliefs as long as we could give evidence or reason for our convictions. This was very liberating and thought-provoking.

After I’d left school at the age of eighteen, and before going to university, I’d helped out as teacher in the junior department of the Molesey Sunday school - Mr Knight had moved on, thank heavens. Teaching nine year olds was quite fun, I had a small relatively well behaved group of youngsters, although they taxed me sometimes with some of their questions. When we moved to Woking in 1957, I was soon prevailed upon to help out at a large London overspill estate, Sheerwater between Woking and Byfleet where approximately 5,000 people from London’s East End had been rehoused. Trinity Methodist Church in the centre of Woking itself, where I was a youth club member, had supported the building of a small church and community hall in the new estate and whilst it only had a small adult membership - some 30 or so - it ran a number of children’s activities that were heavily subscribed and at one stage had over two hundred children on the books of its Sunday School which stretched its resources to the limit.

I was therefore persuaded, as I had stayed at home and commuted daily to my London college, to transfer my allegiance to the Sheerwater church and teach one of the Sunday School classes there. I was originally made teacher of the eight year old boys and found to my horror that I had 42 on my register, a group I could not hope to control in one moderate sized open hall shared with three or four other classes. I don’t think I ever had all 42 at once, but I do remember numbers running to over thirty and finding the children at the boundary of my group further away than children in some other classes whose chairs bordered on mine. Mrs Amor, the leader who’d recruited me from Trinity in Woking, decided pretty quickly that this was just not practicable and recruited a couple more teachers who felt better qualified at teaching boys than girls, so I was asked if I would be prepared to teach a class of eleven and twelve year old girls for whom no teacher was available. I blanched at the idea, but allowed myself to be talked into it, and soon had my abilities and knowledge stretched to breaking point.

I have to say right now that we broke every rule in the book that is now good practice in child protection and safeguarding, but such rules were unheard of in those days. As the main hall was already overflowing with the younger children, the only room left into which I was crammed, alone, with a dozen vulnerable girls, for nearly an hour every Sunday morning, was the tiny minister’s vestry. I did my best to be very correct and kept my documentation in apple pie order and was most conscientious in following up children who were sick or absent, so that I was well known to the parents who seemed happy to accept my role. These girls really pushed me hard and I had to give a lot more thought to my faith and beliefs to cope with their questioning minds, but I was out of my depth emotionally and in hindsight it was quite wrong to expect a young man of nineteen to cope on his own with the emotional needs and demands of a dozen twelve year olds.

I frequently found myself trying to resolve typical schoolgirl quarrels between friends and trying to advise on other relationship problems they threw at me and before long I began to realise that I was having to cope with schoolgirl crushes that one or two of them seemed to be developing on me. My reaction was - as in other circumstances - to over-react in the opposite way, and I can recall upsetting some of the girls on a couple of occasions when I was too harsh with them in putting down some favour they wanted or in criticising their behaviour. We somehow survived two years without any disasters and without, as far as I’m aware, any lasting traumas as far as the girls were concerned, although I must say that I probably still have a few scars from the experience. No-one today would ever be put in such a position in working with children in the church - I now act as a trainer and consultant on child safeguarding for the Methodist Church in our District and can speak with feeling from my own experience on what should not happen.

While this was taking place each Sunday, I was regularly attending London University’s ‘Meth Soc’ at Hinde Street Chapel, near Bond Street tube station. I was a member of the Tuesday group (there were student gatherings every weeknight), and I would meet with fellow students at around 7-7.30 and stay drinking coffee and arguing religion from first principles until I had to rush to Waterloo to catch my last train home. We were meant to be exploring different topics of faith through bible study and questions on ethics, but one year we rarely got off the ground as we had one very vociferous student who started every session by questioning the existence of God, which made progress a little difficult.

Debates in the German Department of UCL were often similarly explosive and moved frequently from violent disagreements about the interpretation of literature to equally divisive arguments about religion. We had one particularly vehement atheist, Dr Wells, who flatly denied the existence of God, as well as most meanings our other lecturers ascribed to the German literature we were studying. He was a very useful antidote to some of our other professors who would discover innumerable potential levels of meaning behind the simplest of texts, but his reaction was blunt to put it mildly. Nothing that could not be proved was valid. In his more extreme moods he reminds me now of the caricature of the Bishop of Bath and Wells in one of the mediaeval episodes of the TV series ‘Blackadder’. I was astonished to find recently that he was the academic that Richard Dawkins uses to bolster his arguments for atheism and rejection of Christianity. If a German language professor with an unwillingness to believe anything unless physically proven is the best support that Dawkins can claim, I feel he’s on weak ground. However, I give Dr Wells the honour of forcing us to really think about what we believed and begin adopting our own independent realms of thought.

My continuing doubts and crises of faith were addressed very much in Bishop John Robinson’s controversial book ‘Honest to God’ that burst upon the theological world in the 1960s. I found his arguments very reassuring and helped me realise that a Christian could challenge much that was accepted without question in the religious upbringing that I’d had. In the 1980s there was a reaction to such liberalism in the charismatic movement, which was often biblically fundamentalist in theology which I could not accept and for a while I felt I was a ‘second class Christian, if one at all. However, further reading and an encounter with street children in India convinced me that my own Christian beliefs and principles were accepted as long as I lived them out in compassion and integrity.

My ‘conversion’ to acting out my more liberal and radical Christianity came about, as I tell people if they are interested, through the instruments of a six year old and a railway engine on an April day in 1982 and a September 1989 encounter with a street child who can’t have been more than six or seven either on Churchgate railway station in Bombay. But these events are outside the timeframe of an autobiography on childhood and youth.