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