Scrap Book Project – Picture Stories From The Bible

When I was a boy I used to like bible stories and when I was quite young my parents gave me an impressively substantial ‘Picture Stories From The Bible’.  It had a burgundy cover with its title in gold letters and inside it contained water colour comic strip style stories of the scriptures.  God was depicted as a booming voice from heaven, angels would swoop about in the sky and occasionally descend to earth to give helpful advice and deliver messages and the stories were full of sagely old men with kind faces, white beards and flowing robes.

I read the stories over and over again, for me some of the best were David and the slaying of Goliath, Moses and the parting of the Red Sea and then, there was Samson who used his tremendous strength to defeat his enemies and perform other heroic feats such as wrestling a lion, killing an entire army with nothing more than a donkey’s jawbone, and tearing down an entire building with his bare hands.  At the time my favourite was always the story of Noah and his Ark and I can remember being slightly sceptical to read that he allegedly lived until he was nine hundred and fifty which even at seven years old seemed a bit farfetched to me.  Adam, the first man, did nearly as well but only lived until he was nine hundred and thirty.  My favourite story about Noah now however, is not the Ark, but the fact that after the great flood he settled down and became a farmer, experimented by planting some vines and invented wine.  We should all be eternally grateful to him for that!

At school too I always enjoyed bible stories and to illustrate this I have come across an old drawing that dad kept for many years in his scrapbook.  This was my early attempt to create a pictorial record of the feeding of the five thousand and it always amused him because he always wondered where the other four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people were!  Please try and remember that I drew this picture nearly fifty years ago so I have absolutely no explanation to offer as to why it has failed so miserably to capture the scale of the event and why there is only one person in it.  Actually, as it happens, there were a lot more than five thousand because this didn’t include the women and the children.  Possibly the person in the picture is Jesus himself and the crowd is behind me listening attentively, or perhaps I was just being meticulous and concentrating on producing a perfect picture, or maybe it was the end of the day, the school bell rang and I simply ran out of time but I’m afraid I will just never know.

The feeding of the five thousand was always one of my favourite bible stories and it is also one of the most important and the only one of the miracle stories, apart from the resurrection that is (which is the most important of all), that is recorded in all of the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  These days there is obviously a lot of scientific and theological debate about the miracles and I don’t know if they were true or not but as a child I recall that these were ripping good yarns.

This one goes something like this.  It had been a difficult week.  Jesus had been having a bad hair day, and I think I have captured that nicely in my picture.  He had been pretty annoyed when he learned the bad news that his friend and spiritual mentor John the Baptist had been executed by King Herod the day before for criticizing him for his wedding arrangements (thank goodness we live in more enlightened times) and he felt the need to have some time alone, so he wandered out of the town of Bethsaida, which was near the Sea of Galilee and went to a quiet place he knew next to the River Jordon.  A real problem for Jesus was that he was very popular because he was known as a great prophet and deliverer of miracles so people pestered him a lot and followed him wherever he went and it was hard for him to get quality time to himself.  On this occasion, as usual, the crowd followed him out of town and in their rush they forgot to stop by at the corner shop on the way out and pick up a sandwich or whatever for later on.

Jesus stayed out all day moping around and as it was getting dark the disciples started to get concerned and came to him and suggested that he send the people back home because they didn’t have enough food to feed them if they all spent the night out in the wilderness.  It’s quite likely that they didn’t want to be stuck out here all night themselves in the wilderness and probably had thoughts about a glass of wine or two at the local inn.  Jesus had other ideas and gave the disciples a challenge and said  ‘they need not depart, give ye them to eat’.  I can imagine that the disciples thought this was a huge joke but Jesus just told them to see what food was available.  Luckily they came across a boy who for some reason had a basket containing five loaves of bread and two fishes, he was probably planning on having a b-b-q later or something and making a shekel or two, but the disciples quickly confiscated it and gave it to Jesus.  No one knows how the boy felt about this, it’s quiet possible that he wasn’t especially pleased to have his groceries appropriated in this way.

The disciples gave the food to Jesus who must have felt like a contestant onReady Steady Cook.  Imagine him looking expectantly through the bag of today’s ingredients and trying to figure out what on earth he was going to do to feed all the hungry mouths.  What are you going to cook for us today chef? They might have asked.  What can you do with bread and fish?  Unless you are Rick Stein of course!  What Jesus did, and this is where he is brilliant, is that he took the food, probably added a bit of wild asparagus or whatever else was available, blessed it and broke it up and multiplied it many times so that there was more than enough to go round.  It was a miracle on a grand scale.  Even without a b-b-q he managed to feed everyone, the five thousand men and all the women and children and afterwards he had twelve baskets full of leftovers for the beggars and the birds.  Brilliant!

I’m afraid that I have to concede that my humble picture has really failed quite miserably to capture the huge scale of the event …

_____________________________________________

Related Articles:

Mary Jones’ Bible

Hillmorton Chapel and St John The Baptist Church, Hillmorton

Childhood and Religion

Picture Stories From The Bible

The Miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000

Scrap Book Project – Picture Stories From The Bible

When I was a boy I used to like bible stories and when I was quite young my parents gave me an impressively substantial ‘Picture Stories From The Bible’.  It had a burgundy cover with its title in gold letters and inside it contained water colour comic strip style stories of the scriptures.  God was depicted as a booming voice from heaven, angels would swoop about in the sky and occasionally descend to earth to give helpful advice and deliver messages and the stories were full of sagely old men with kind faces, white beards and flowing robes.

I read the stories over and over again, for me some of the best were David and the slaying of Goliath, Moses and the parting of the Red Sea and then, there was Samson who used his tremendous strength to defeat his enemies and perform other heroic feats such as wrestling a lion, killing an entire army with nothing more than a donkey’s jawbone, and tearing down an entire building with his bare hands.

At the time my favourite was always the story of Noah and his Ark and I can remember being slightly sceptical to read that he allegedly lived until he was nine hundred and fifty which even at seven years old seemed a bit far-fetched to me.  Adam, the first man, did nearly as well but only lived until he was nine hundred and thirty.  My favourite story about Noah now however, is not the Ark, but the fact that after the great flood he settled down and became a farmer, experimented by planting some vines and invented wine.  We should all be eternally grateful to him for that!

At school too I always enjoyed bible stories and to illustrate this I have come across an old drawing that dad kept for many years in his scrapbook.  This was my early attempt to create a pictorial record of the feeding of the five thousand and it always amused him because he always wondered where the other four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people were!  Please try and remember that I drew this picture nearly fifty years ago so I have absolutely no explanation to offer as to why it has failed so miserably to capture the scale of the event and why there is only one person in it.

Actually, as it happens, there were a lot more than five thousand because this didn’t include the women and the children.  Possibly the person in the picture is Jesus himself and the crowd is behind me listening attentively, or perhaps I was just being meticulous and concentrating on producing a perfect picture, or maybe it was the end of the day, the school bell rang and I simply ran out of time but I am afraid I will just never know.

The feeding of the five thousand was always one of my favourite bible stories and it is also one of the most important and the only one of the miracle stories, apart from the resurrection that is (which is the most important of all), that is recorded in all of the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  These days there is obviously a lot of scientific and theological debate about the miracles and I don’t know if they were true or not but as a child I recall that these were ripping good yarns.

This one goes something like this.  It had been a difficult week.  Jesus had been having a bad hair day, and I think I have captured that nicely in my picture.  He had been pretty annoyed when he learned the bad news that his friend and spiritual mentor John the Baptist had been executed by King Herod the day before for criticizing him for his wedding arrangements (thank goodness we live in more enlightened times) and he felt the need to have some time alone, so he wandered out of the town of Bethsaida, which was near the Sea of Galilee and went to a quiet place he knew next to the River Jordon.

A real problem for Jesus was that he was very popular because he was known as a great prophet and deliverer of miracles so people pestered him a lot and followed him wherever he went and it was hard for him to get quality time to himself.  On this occasion, as usual, the crowd followed him out of town and in their rush they forgot to stop by at the corner shop on the way out and pick up a sandwich or whatever for later on.

Jesus stayed out all day moping around and as it was getting dark the disciples started to get concerned and came to him and suggested that he send the people back home because they didn’t have enough food to feed them if they all spent the night out in the wilderness.  It’s quite likely that they didn’t want to be stuck out here all night themselves in the wilderness and probably had thoughts about a glass of wine or two at the local inn.  Jesus had other ideas and gave the disciples a challenge and said  ‘they need not depart, give ye them to eat’.

I can imagine that the disciples thought this was a huge joke but Jesus just told them to see what food was available.  Luckily they came across a boy who for some reason had a basket containing five loaves of bread and two fishes, he was probably planning on having a b-b-q later or something and making a shekel or two, but the disciples quickly confiscated it and gave it to Jesus.  No one knows how the boy felt about this, it’s quiet possible that he wasn’t especially pleased to have his groceries appropriated in this way.

The disciples gave the food to Jesus who must have felt like a contestant on “Ready Steady Cook”.  Imagine him looking expectantly through the bag of today’s ingredients and trying to figure out what on earth he was going to do to feed all the hungry mouths.  What are you going to cook for us today chef? They might have asked.  What can you do with bread and fish?  Unless you are Rick Stein of course!  What Jesus did, and this is where he is brilliant, is that he took the food, probably added a bit of wild asparagus or whatever else was available, blessed it and broke it up and multiplied it many times so that there was more than enough to go round.  It was a miracle on a grand scale.  Even without a b-b-q he managed to feed everyone, the five thousand men and all the women and children and afterwards he had twelve baskets full of leftovers for the beggars and the birds.  Brilliant!

I’m afraid that I have to concede that my humble picture has really failed quite miserably to capture the huge scale of the event …

__________________________________________________

Other posts about Religion:

Mary Jones’ Bible

Hillmorton Chapel and St John The Baptist Church, Hillmorton

Childhood and Religion

Picture Stories From The Bible

The Miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000

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Picture Stories From The Bible

When I was a boy I used to like bible stories and when I was quite young my parents gave me an impressively substantial ‘Picture Stories From The Bible’.  It had a burgundy cover with its title in gold letters and inside it contained water colour comic strip style stories of the scriptures.  God was depicted as a booming voice from heaven, angels would swoop about in the sky and occasionally descend to earth to give helpful advice and deliver messages and the stories were full of sagely old men with kind faces, white beards and flowing robes.

I read the stories over and over again, for me some of the best were David and the slaying of Goliath, Moses and the parting of the Red Sea and then, there was Samson who used his tremendous strength to defeat his enemies and perform other heroic feats such as wrestling a lion, killing an entire army with nothing more than a donkey’s jawbone, and tearing down an entire building with his bare hands.  At the time my favourite was always the story of Noah and his Ark and I can remember being slightly sceptical to read that he allegedly lived until he was nine hundred and fifty which even at seven years old seemed a bit farfetched to me.  Adam, the first man, did nearly as well but only lived until he was nine hundred and thirty.  My favourite story about Noah now however, is not the Ark, but the fact that after the great flood he settled down and became a farmer, experimented by planting some vines and invented wine.  We should all be eternally grateful to him for that!

 

At school too I always enjoyed bible stories and to illustrate this I have come across an old drawing that dad kept for many years in his scrapbook.  This was my early attempt to create a pictorial record of the feeding of the five thousand and it always amused him because he always wondered where the other four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people were!  Please try and remember that I drew this picture nearly fifty years ago so I have absolutely no explanation to offer as to why it has failed so miserably to capture the scale of the event and why there is only one person in it.  Actually, as it happens, there were a lot more than five thousand because this didn’t include the women and the children.  Possibly the person in the picture is Jesus himself and the crowd is behind me listening attentively, or perhaps I was just being meticulous and concentrating on producing a perfect picture, or maybe it was the end of the day, the school bell rang and I simply ran out of time but I’m afraid I will just never know.

The feeding of the five thousand was always one of my favourite bible stories and it is also one of the most important and the only one of the miracle stories, apart from the resurrection that is (which is the most important of all), that is recorded in all of the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  These days there is obviously a lot of scientific and theological debate about the miracles and I don’t know if they were true or not but as a child I recall that these were ripping good yarns.

This one goes something like this.  It had been a difficult week.  Jesus had been having a bad hair day, and I think I have captured that nicely in my picture.  He had been pretty annoyed when he learned the bad news that his friend and spiritual mentor John the Baptist had been executed by King Herod the day before for criticizing him for his wedding arrangements (thank goodness we live in more enlightened times) and he felt the need to have some time alone, so he wandered out of the town of Bethsaida, which was near the Sea of Galilee and went to a quiet place he knew next to the River Jordon.  A real problem for Jesus was that he was very popular because he was known as a great prophet and deliverer of miracles so people pestered him a lot and followed him wherever he went and it was hard for him to get quality time to himself.  On this occasion, as usual, the crowd followed him out of town and in their rush they forgot to stop by at the corner shop on the way out and pick up a sandwich or whatever for later on.

Jesus stayed out all day moping around and as it was getting dark the disciples started to get concerned and came to him and suggested that he send the people back home because they didn’t have enough food to feed them if they all spent the night out in the wilderness.  It’s quite likely that they didn’t want to be stuck out here all night themselves in the wilderness and probably had thoughts about a glass of wine or two at the local inn.  Jesus had other ideas and gave the disciples a challenge and said  ‘they need not depart, give ye them to eat’.  I can imagine that the disciples thought this was a huge joke but Jesus just told them to see what food was available.  Luckily they came across a boy who for some reason had a basket containing five loaves of bread and two fishes, he was probably planning on having a b-b-q later or something and making a shekel or two, but the disciples quickly confiscated it and gave it to Jesus.  No one knows how the boy felt about this, it’s quiet possible that he wasn’t especially pleased to have his groceries appropriated in this way.

The disciples gave the food to Jesus who must have felt like a contestant on Ready Steady Cook.  Imagine him looking expectantly through the bag of today’s ingredients and trying to figure out what on earth he was going to do to feed all the hungry mouths.  What are you going to cook for us today chef? They might have asked.  What can you do with bread and fish?  Unless you are Rick Stein of course!  What Jesus did, and this is where he is brilliant, is that he took the food, probably added a bit of wild asparagus or whatever else was available, blessed it and broke it up and multiplied it many times so that there was more than enough to go round.  It was a miracle on a grand scale.  Even without a b-b-q he managed to feed everyone, the five thousand men and all the women and children and afterwards he had twelve baskets full of leftovers for the beggars and the birds.  Brilliant!

I’m afraid that I have to concede that my humble picture has really failed quite miserably to capture the huge scale of the event …

_____________________________________________

Related Articles:

Mary Jones’ Bible

Hillmorton Chapel and St John The Baptist Church, Hillmorton

Childhood and Religion

Picture Stories From The Bible

The Miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000

A Life in a Year – 12th February, Charles Darwin and ‘Picture Stories From The Bible’

On 12^th February 1809 Charles Darwin was born and if hadn’t been for Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution I might well have become a Vicar or even a Bishop!

When I was a boy I used to like bible stories and when I was quite young my parents gave me an impressively substantial ‘Picture Stories From The Bible’.  It had a burgundy cover with its title in gold letters and inside it contained water colour comic strip style stories of the scriptures.  God was depicted as a booming voice from heaven, angels would swoop about in the sky and occasionally descend to earth to give helpful advice and deliver messages and the stories were full of sagely old men with kind faces, white beards and flowing robes. 

I read the stories over and over again, for me some of the best were David and the slaying of Goliath, Moses and the parting of the Red Sea and then, there was Samson who used his tremendous strength to defeat his enemies and perform other heroic feats such as wrestling a lion, killing an entire army with nothing more than a donkey’s jawbone, and tearing down an entire building with his bare hands.  At the time my favourite was always the story of Noah and his Ark and I can remember being slightly sceptical to read that he allegedly lived until he was nine hundred and fifty which even at seven years old seemed a bit farfetched to me.  Adam, the first man, did nearly as well but only lived until he was nine hundred and thirty.  My favourite story about Noah now however, is not the Ark, but the fact that after the great flood he settled down and became a farmer, experimented by planting some vines and invented wine.  We should all be eternally grateful to him for that!

 

At school too I always enjoyed bible stories and to illustrate this I have come across an old drawing that dad kept for many years in his scrapbook.  This was my early attempt to create a pictorial record of the feeding of the five thousand and it always amused him because he always wondered where the other four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people were!  Please try and remember that I drew this picture nearly fifty years ago so I have absolutely no explanation to offer as to why it has failed so miserably to capture the scale of the event and why there is only one person in it.  Actually, as it happens, there were a lot more than five thousand because this didn’t include the women and the children.  Possibly the person in the picture is Jesus himself and the crowd is behind me listening attentively, or perhaps I was just being meticulous and concentrating on producing a perfect picture, or maybe it was the end of the day, the school bell rang and I simply ran out of time but I’m afraid I will just never know.

The feeding of the five thousand was always one of my favourite bible stories and it is also one of the most important and the only one of the miracle stories, apart from the resurrection that is (which is the most important of all), that is recorded in all of the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  These days there is obviously a lot of scientific and theological debate about the miracles and I don’t know if they were true or not but as a child I recall that these were ripping good yarns.

This one goes something like this.  It had been a difficult week.  Jesus had been having a bad hair day, and I think I have captured that nicely in my picture.  He had been pretty annoyed when he learned the bad news that his friend and spiritual mentor John the Baptist had been executed by King Herod the day before for criticizing him for his wedding arrangements (thank goodness we live in more enlightened times) and he felt the need to have some time alone, so he wandered out of the town of Bethsaida, which was near the Sea of Galilee and went to a quiet place he knew next to the River Jordon.  A real problem for Jesus was that he was very popular because he was known as a great prophet and deliverer of miracles so people pestered him a lot and followed him wherever he went and it was hard for him to get quality time to himself.  On this occasion, as usual, the crowd followed him out of town and in their rush they forgot to stop by at the corner shop on the way out and pick up a sandwich or whatever for later on.

Jesus stayed out all day moping around and as it was getting dark the disciples started to get concerned and came to him and suggested that he send the people back home because they didn’t have enough food to feed them if they all spent the night out in the wilderness.  It’s quite likely that they didn’t want to be stuck out here all night themselves in the wilderness and probably had thoughts about a glass of wine or two at the local inn.  Jesus had other ideas and gave the disciples a challenge and said  ‘they need not depart, give ye them to eat’.  I can imagine that the disciples thought this was a huge joke but Jesus just told them to see what food was available.  Luckily they came across a boy who for some reason had a basket containing five loaves of bread and two fishes, he was probably planning on having a b-b-q later or something and making a shekel or two, but the disciples quickly confiscated it and gave it to Jesus.  No one knows how the boy felt about this, it’s quiet possible that he wasn’t especially pleased to have his groceries appropriated in this way.

 

The disciples gave the food to Jesus who must have felt like a contestant on Ready Steady Cook.  Imagine him looking expectantly through the bag of today’s ingredients and trying to figure out what on earth he was going to do to feed all the hungry mouths.  What are you going to cook for us today chef? They might have asked.  What can you do with bread and fish?  Unless you are Rick Stein of course!  What Jesus did, and this is where he is brilliant, is that he took the food, probably added a bit of wild asparagus or whatever else was available, blessed it and broke it up and multiplied it many times so that there was more than enough to go round.  It was a miracle on a grand scale.  Even without a b-b-q he managed to feed everyone, the five thousand men and all the women and children and afterwards he had twelve baskets full of leftovers for the beggars and the birds.  Brilliant!

I’m afraid that my humble picture has really failed quite miserably to capture the huge scale of the event …

_____________________________________________

Related Articles:

Mary Jones’ Bible

Hillmorton Chapel and St John The Baptist Church, Hillmorton

Childhood and Religion

Picture Stories From The Bible

The Miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000

Religion

One of the good things about growing up in our house was that Dad liked reading and there were always plenty of books around.  When I was quite young my parents gave me an impressively substantial ‘Children’s Picture Book of Bible Stories’.  It had a burgundy cover with its title in gold letters and inside it contained water colour comic strip style stories of the scriptures.  God was depicted as a booming voice from heaven, angels would swoop about in the sky and occasionally descend to earth to give helpful advice and the stories were full of sagely old men with kind faces, white beards and flowing robes.

I read the stories over and over again, for me some of the best were David and the slaying of Goliath, Moses and the parting of the Red Sea and then, there was Samson who used his tremendous strength to defeat his enemies and perform other heroic feats such as wrestling a lion, killing an entire army with nothing more than a donkey’s jawbone, and tearing down an entire building with his bare hands.  At the time my favourite was always the story of Noah and his Ark and I can remember being slightly sceptical to read that he allegedly lived until he was nine hundred and fifty years old which even at seven years old seemed a bit far fetched to me.  Adam, the first man, did nearly as well but only lived until he was nine hundred and thirty.  My favourite story about Noah now however, is not the Ark, but the fact that after the great flood he settled down and became a farmer, experimented by planting some vines and invented wine.  We should all be eternally grateful to him for that!

 I found that book most inspiring and it stimulated in me an interest in the stories from the Bible and although a lot of the learning bits about going to school I found thoroughly disinteresting and a bit of a chore I did enjoy religious education and especially used to look forward to morning assembly when once a week the Minister from the Methodist Chapel nearby used to attend and tell a story or two in a children’s sermon.  Some of my school reports from this time revealed quite stunning results in religious education and at the same time as I was without fail picking up a disappointing sequence of Ds and Es for the important subjects like arithmetic and english I was consistently being awarded As and Bs in religion.  In 1963 I scored an unbeatable 100% in the end of year exams.

In 1961 the New Testament of the New English Bible was published which to date was the last major translation of the Bible and to commemorate this all pupils at the school were given a copy courtesy of the Warwickshire County Council.  It was quite a plain book with a green cover and with only a few black and white illustrations it certainly didn’t compare with my ‘Children’s Picture Book of Bible Stories’ in all of its technicolour glory.

Strictly speaking we were a Church of England family but the Parish Church of St. John the Baptist in Hillmorton was in a sorry state of neglect and significant disrepair on account of the fact that the Vicar had little interest in his parish or his congregation because like Father Jack from Craggy Island he was an alcoholic.  People use to say that you always knew when he was coming because the beer bottles used to rattle in the whicker basket that he had attached to the handlebars of his bike.   He didn’t hold many services in the Church, well, certainly not as many as he was supposed to, and there was certainly no Sunday school.

For this reason I was sent to the Methodist Church where the Reverend Keene and the Sunday school teacher Christine Herrington made us feel most welcome.  I liked the Reverend Keene, he was down to earth and amusing and later he used to come to secondary school to teach religious studies and take a weekly assembly there as well.  I remember that he smiled permanently and had a most pleasant disposition that was appropriate to a minister of the church.  One morning in 1969 without any warning the Headmaster announced at morning assembly that following an operation he had died suddenly and I was really sad about that.

I don’t suppose so many children go to Sunday school any more but I used to really enjoy it.  The origin of the Sunday school is attributed to the philanthropist and author Hannah More who opened the first one in 1789 in Cheddar in Somerset and for the next two hundred years parents right across the country must have been grateful to her for getting the kids out of the way on a Sunday morning and giving them some peace and quiet and a chance of a lie in and who knows what else?

In contrast to the Hillmorton County Junior School I seemed to be learning something at Chapel and what’s more I was being really successful.  Every year we used to take an exam, well, more of a little test really, and if you passed there was a colourful certificate with a picture of Jesus and signed by absolutely everyone who was anyone in the Methodist Church hierarchy.  I was awarded a first class pass three years running and even though the school headmaster had written me of as an educational no-hoper I wasn’t in the slightest bit concerned because I was becoming convinced that I was going to be a vicar.

I had heard it said that people went into the clergy after getting a calling from God and I used to lie awake at night straining out listening for it.  It never came.  I also understood that it might alternatively come as a sign and I used to walk around looking for anything unusual but this never happened either.

One night, some time in 1966, I think God dialed a wrong number and got dad instead because overnight he suddenly got religion in a very big way and we all started going to St John the Baptist which by now had got a new vicar.  His name was Peter Bennett and he was starting to deal with the problems left behind by the previous man who had retired somewhere into an alcoholic stupor.  At twelve years old I was too old for Sunday school and went to church now instead, I was confirmed in 1967 which meant that I could drink wine at communion (thank you Noah) and joined first Pathfinders and then the Christian Youth Fellowship Association or CYFA for short which was (and still is) a national Christian youth club.  The good thing about CYFA was that I got to go away to youth conferences and camps and there were lots of girls there too.

I auditioned for the choir but was rejected on account of being tone deaf but to compensate for this disappointment the Vicar appointed me a server which meant that I got to wear a scarlet cassock and had the important job of carrying the cross down the aisle at the beginning of evensong and putting the candles out at the end.

None of this could last of course and with no sign of the calling, and with dad’s religious fervour waning, my attention began to drift off in other directions such as pop music, girls and woodpecker cider and gradually I just stopped going to Church and to CYFA, left the bell ringing group and all of my scripture exam certificates were put away in an envelope in the family memory box and simply got forgotten.

The only time I go to Church these days is for a wedding or a christening or a funeral or to visit a cathedral when I am on holiday.

_____________________________________________

Related Articles:

Mary Jones’ Bible

Hillmorton Chapel and St John The Baptist Church, Hillmorton

Childhood and Religion

Picture Stories From The Bible

The Miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000