Sunday School days

For the life of me I can’t remember when I last went to church when it wasn’t an occasion – christenings, weddings, and all too often in recent years, funerals. But I recall my Sunday School days as if they were yesterday.

As one who was educated in primary and secondary schools with strong religious ethics, with morning assemblies, going-home prayers, pre-meals Grace, encouragement to be confirmed, boarding school ritual of stomach-rumbling, pre-breakfast Holy Communion, little wonder it crossed my adolescent mind that it might be fun to be a nun. At the last school I attended, which started out as an educational establishment for daughters of the clergy, we even had our own chapel, to which we trooped every morning.

I grew up with Catechisms and Creeds coming out of my ears, word-perfect in every popular hymn and psalm in Hymns Ancient and Modern, and the fact that our school chaplain was the late, former canon of Derby Cathedral, the very dishy Paul Miller, only added to our schoolgirl religious fervour. But I digress.

For at least six years of my childhood, I found joy at Sunday School. From singing Sunshine Corner, oh it’s jolly fine, it’s for children under ninety-nine, at Tansley C of E when I was staying with my cousins in that village, to Hear the Pennies Dropping as they took the collection at Two Dales Chapel, I was in heaven.

I actually wasn’t very faithful to just one place of worship, and would often attend two in a day. The local Methodists had super Whitsun anniversaries, also known as the "sittings-up", where we’d dress up in, in my case, home-made finery, and each do a "turn", in front of proud parents. It was certainly worth the morning attendance to qualify. Who could forget my Stir Up the Pudding oh Diddle-Diddle Dough? Certainly not my mum.
But then, at St Helen’s Parish Church, down the road, Sunday afternoon sessions lured us with little booklets, and colourful, iconic stamps to stick in. A full booklet at the end of the term was the stuff today’s university –ology degrees are made of.

It’s so sad that today’s children are no longer encouraged to go along to these gentle little sessions, a fact brought to light recently with Derby City Council’s rejection of would-be foster parents Eunice and Owen Johns, because of their religious views. Sunday School teacher Mrs Johns wanted the children in their care to go to church on Sundays. As the Johns, from Oakwood, explain quite clearly, it’s not as if they’re going to cart off kids, kicking and screaming, to a church service if they don’t want to go, but they would like the option for the youngsters in their care to choose.

Even more worrying is the same Council’s issue on homosexuality. Mr and Mrs Johns, parents of four, and with 20 successful fosterings under their belts, also had their good intentions banned because, through their Christian beliefs, they refuse to tell children as young as ten that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle. Like Derby Mayor, Pauline Latham, who has taken up their case, I’m appalled. So, too, are friends in the gay community in Derby, who have discussed this with me.

Blow quoting the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) which makes it illegal for any business or organisation providing a public service to discriminate against anybody because of their sexuality. And spare a common-sense thought for the chronic shortage of foster-parents nation-wide – 8,000 needed right now.

Back to those halcyon Darley Dale days, there was a chap who knitted the most intricate Fair-Isle, made all his own shirts, and iced totally exquisite wedding cakes. And a woman who dressed in dungarees, worked in a local factory, and drank pints of beer. And guess what? Nobody questioned their sexuality, and I didn’t know what a homosexual was until I was in my 20s.
It’s political correctness gone mad. And as my mother would have said, we’re all going to hell in a hand-cart.


**


My friend Rose Kennedy was awoken from a deep sleep, fearing a plane had crashed on Shardlow Road, Alvaston, and found the cat, Smokey, clawing his way under the duvet on the spare bed. Another pal, Lil Bancroft of Chaddesden, was roused from her slumber by the clanking of the beads on her bedroom curtains, and a Victorian jug-and-bowl rattling on her chest-of-drawers. Elsewhere, in Ferrers Way, Allestree, niece Cindy Alcock and husband Steve joined their neighbours in the street, all donned in night attire, all wondering what an earth had happened.

Was I, who screeches "insomnia" at the sound of our milkman chinking his bottles, Ower Annie de-fleaing herself on the bed, or himself sneaking downstairs for a pre-dawn cuppa, and can time the mail plane on its way to East Midlands Airport to the very second, the only one for whom the earth didn’t move at around 1 am on February 27 when the quake struck?

***