The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
pronounced during recollection of religious trauma. Another interviewee,
Norris Thompson from Gravesend, was born in 1905 into a Nonconformist
shopkeeping family in which religion was vitally important, his mother
spending enormous time evangelising amongst poorer people.
And of course I was very frightened too. You see I believed in the
second coming of Christ. And they [his parents] felt it was quite
imminent you see. Well, and it created a real fear in my early – because
I knew I wasn’t good enough to go up, you see. And I always thought
my mother and father, they would go, they were so good you see –
and it was a real fear. Yes, yes. I don’t think I ever told this to my
parents, I have never told it to anybody, but it was always within
me. If they were late, you know, coming back from anywhere: ‘Where
have they gone?’ 21
Religious fear was not limited to Nonconformists. Maude Baines, a woman
in Highgate in London born in 1887 into a Church of England family, was
read stories at bedtime by her father as she was a poor sleeper: ‘I was
terribly afraid of going to hell, you see, and I was afraid of going to sleep
in case I burnt up. I suppose, you know, I was brought up in the old way
of the hell-fire and all that, and being a very imaginative child I was terrified
of going to sleep. I tried not to go to sleep and used to get hysterical
and father used to come and sit and – and read to me a little and pat my
hand and he was very tired.’ 22
The most obvious way in which oral testimony reflects the evangelical
narrative is from the starting point of a ‘religious’ childhood which has
been ‘lost’. However, testimony could start from the other, ‘irreligious’,
end and travel the conversionist route to ‘salvation’. Born in 1889, Elizabeth
Ormston from Leigh in Lancashire lost her first stepfather, a butcher, at
the age of ten when ‘he killed hisself with drink’ going on ‘the flash’ or
binge drinking with other men. But the family then moved to Bolton where
her mother married a teetotaller, a man who played in the Aspull
Temperance Band. She was then brought up ‘very religious’, her mother
ensuring she went to Sunday school and also attended church, twice every
Sunday. She was forbidden from so much as stitching a button on that day,
and was sent on weekday evenings to the Band of Hope and Christian
Endeavour. To add to the polarities, her new stepfather was poor and
teetotal, but his sister married the very wealthy clerk of works at a brewery:
‘they lived in a big house on Junction Road, stood in its own grounds, so
hadn’t any time for us’. 23 Elizabeth structured her narrative of childhood
years between the bipolarities of the evangelical discourses on male
immoralities, their destruction of family life, and their redemptive opposites:
the drunken stepfather succeeded by the teetotal stepfather, the rich
and aloof brewery manager versus his poor, respectable and abstaining
brother-in-law.
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