Blessed Assurance – the novel progresses
Photo courtesy of Tim Green:https://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach
The first of an occasional selection from the forthcoming novel…
“Tom
I’d like to say the moors were my first memory, tuft grass and bracken stretching away into the mist, or the view across to Rawdon Billing from Dobrudden, but it would be untrue. And truth has become important to me as I grow older. My first memory is actually of scooping up handfuls of gravel from the drive and throwing them onto the lawn. Actually, the neighbour’s lawn. An early lesson in boundaries. Or maybe it is of my mother holding me, my father coming home from work, or the search for my lost teddy bear. Memory is slippery, difficult to pin down, as is truth.
The fact is that the moors and hills of my home were a formative influence but then maybe the gravel was as well. In my early years as a priest I would use something like that as sermon fodder. The gravel, I would point out, was like the seed in the parable of the sower, except for the depressing fact that none of it would bear fruit. But that, and the depression, came later. At the age of three, which is my estimate of age at the time of the gravel throwing incident, I was only aware of the texture of the stuff, of the fact that I could pick it up and throw it, that it was something over which I had some power, some control.
I don’t know when I stopped simply throwing gravel and started to think about the meaning behind it but I must have been very young. This ‘stuff’, as Liza calls it, has always been important to me. We‘ll come to Liza later, and at some length, but I want to chart my early years and mustn’t rush my fences.
Why do I want to chart my early years? Because they feel important; because they might shed light on my later struggles, my path to enlightenment; because that mixture of Yorkshire common sense and wild beauty crept into my soul and still help me to experience transcendence while keeping my feet on the ground. If they are on the ground; there are those who doubt it..
If I am to convey a sense of my doubts and certainties, of the influences that have shaped my life, it has to start here. A West Riding town, on the edge of the moors, and on the edge of the sprawling conurbation which is Leeds and Bradford. West Riding has not been the official designation for many years but I use the term advisedly. I remain, at heart, a West Riding man from a West Riding family. And a nonconformist one at that. Here I am, at 60, all those years as an Anglican priest, many in the home counties, but I still see myself as a Yorkshire Baptist. And yet neither of those identities sits well with me in so many respects. Some of it does of course. The places more than the religious identities. The people and the countryside more than the dogma and tradition.”
