How Did I Get Here?
Other folk would call it a spiritual journey, but…
They took me to Sunday School. At least, my mother did. It was at the same Presbyterian Church she’d gone to as a child, and which her parents had attended. It had once been a rather classy-looking brick-built neo-Gothic job, but the Luftwaffe got to it in 1941 and by the time I went, the church had bought two largish houses and knocked them together.
Not terribly churchy in terms of architecture, I must say! An entrance foyer flanked by two staircases, the main hall and a small kitchen covered the ground floor. Upstairs was a large back room for Infants and Juniors Sunday School, and slightly smaller front one for Seniors, as well as a vestry and a couple of other smaller rooms.
There I spent my Sunday afternoons for much of my childhood. Sing a hymn, say a prayer (“Hands together, eyes closed.”), listen to a Bible story, do the collection, split up into groups so that a teenage church member could talk a bit more about the story, draw a picture, sing another song (not an official hymn) while doing the ‘actions’ that went with it, say another prayer, then go home. The high point was stopping at the sweetshop to spend the sixpence Granddad had given me.
By the time I was five or so, I knew the ‘special’ times of year — Christmas, Easter, Harvest…
