The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
told the melodramatic discovery of the drunken cook with his mother’s
‘great ceremony’ of pouring the gin down the sink. However, the house’s
moral rules and the cook’s fall from grace are recounted with a cynic’s
post-teetotal, post-puritan ‘edge’. It is a story drawn straight from the narratives
of early twentieth-century puritan teetotalism, but in its telling in 1970
it is ‘cynicised’ for consumption by a younger listener, someone assumed
alien to the world of the description. The story works because it is
recounted within its historical, early twentieth-century puritan discourse,
permitting the evangelical ‘narrative machine’ to move relentlessly between
its polarities. If the cynicism were to be removed, it reads exactly like a
teetotal tract.
This is an oral-history interviewee moving between two discursive
worlds: that of the evangelical discourses of his youth in the 1900s and
1910s and the non-evangelical discourses of 1970. At the age of 68 years,
Ronald Walker is sharing with a younger interviewer the ‘strange’ world
of his past, a world which for its time was hegemonic upon his life, and
to which as a young man he owed an unquestioning allegiance. He is sharing
with the interviewer a window on the past, and assuming (perhaps rightly)
that the interviewer would be fascinated and educated by this revelation.
It is a confessional memory rooted in that moment in 1970 when the discursive
world of his youth was not just anachronistic to his listener but was,
on the face of it, anachronistic to him also.
Yet, his testimony reveals the evangelical narrative as far from anachronistic
to the way in which he constructs his past. His entire and very lengthy
interview develops from this early start into an exploration of the discursive
gap between present (1970) and past (1900s, 1910s and early 1920s). It
is intense in its exploration of the evangelical moral structure of his childhood
and youth.
Q: Did your parents bring you up to consider certain things important
in life?
A: Yes, in a narrow Nonconformist tradition. Lying was the unforgivable
sin, so I’m afraid I’ve been unforgiven a few times.
Turning the other cheek was regarded as a good thing. They
would have been pleased if I’d shown any interest in the
Methodist ministry which, of course, I didn’t. ... And respect for
elders. I’m talking about the usual Victorian traditions, which was
common. 11
The young man was being raised by parents with a high expectation for
his piety. The family met round the family piano on Sunday evenings for
hymns and carols, read Dickens, Thackeray and Scott, and magazines of a
light but mostly ‘improving’ character, with mother taking the ‘the family
magazines, you know, the predecessors of the present glossies’: Home Chat,
Pearson’s Weekly, Titbits, Chums, The Scout and the Boy’s Own Paper.
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