The Dream

3

3“You must not judge the religion of an age by its temples and churches,” said Sarnac. “An unhealthy body may have many things in it that it cannot clear away, and the weaker it is the less it can prevent abnormal and unserviceable growths...Which sometimes may be in themselves quite bright and beautiful growths.

“But let me describe to you the religious life of my home and upbringing. There was a sort of State Church in England, but it had lost most of its official standing in regard to the community as a whole; it had two buildings in Cherry Gardens—one an old one dating from the hamlet days with a square tower and rather small as churches went, and the other new and spacious with a spire. In addition there were the chapels of two other Christian communities, the Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists, and also one belonging to the old Roman Catholic communion. Each professed to present the only true form of Christianity and each maintained a minister, except the larger Church of England place, which had two, the vicar and the curate. You might suppose that, like the museums of history and the Temples of Vision we set before our young people, these places would display in the most moving and beautiful forms possible the history of our race and the great adventure of life in which we are all engaged, they would remind us of our brotherhood and lift us out of selfish thoughts...But let me tell you how I saw it:—

“I don’t remember my first religious instruction. Very early I must have learnt to say a rhymed prayer to—

“‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

Look on me, a little child.’

“And also another prayer about ‘Trespassing’ which I thought referred to going into fields or woods where there was no public footpath, and which began with the entirely incomprehensible words, ‘Our Father Charting Heaven, Haloed B thy Name.’ Also one asked for one’s ‘daily bread’ and that God’s Kingdom should come. I learnt these two prayers from my mother at an incredibly early age, and said them every night and sometimes in the morning. She held these words in far too great reverence to explain them, and when I wanted to ask for my ‘daily bread and butter,’ she scolded me bitterly. I also wanted to ask what would happen to good Queen Victoria when God’s Kingdom came, but I never mustered courage to ask my mother that. I had a curious idea that there could be a marriage but that nobody had thought of that solution. This must have been very early in my life, because Victoria the Good died when I was five, during the course of a long, far-away, and now almost-forgotten struggle called the Boer War.

“These infantile perplexities deepened and then gave way to a kind of self-protective apathy when I was old enough to go to church and Sunday school.

“Sunday morning was by far the most strenuous part of all the week for my mother. We had all had a sort of bath overnight in the underground kitchen, except my father and mother, who I don’t think ever washed all over—I don’t know for certain—and on Sunday morning we rose rather later than usual and put on our ‘clean things’ and our best clothes. (Everybody in those days wore a frightful lot of clothes. You see, they were all so unhealthy they could not stand the least exposure to wet or cold.) Breakfast was a hurried and undistinguished meal on the way to greater things. Then we had to sit about, keeping out of harm’s way, avoiding all crumpling or dirt, and pretending to be interested in one of the ten or twelve books our home possessed, until church time. Mother prepared the Sunday meal, almost always a joint of meat in a baking-dish which my elder sister took in to the baker’s next door but one to be cooked while we worshipped. Father rose later than anyone and appeared strangely transformed in a collar, dickey and cuffs and a black coat and his hair smoothed down and parted. Usually some unforeseen delay arose; one of my sisters had a hole in her stocking, or my boots wouldn’t button and nobody could find the buttonhook, or a prayer-book was mislaid. This engendered an atmosphere of flurry. There were anxious moments when the church bell ceased to ring and began a monotonous ‘tolling-in.’

“‘Oh I we shall be late again!’ said my mother. ‘We shall be late again.’

“‘I’ll go on with Prue!’ my father would say.

“‘Me too!’ said Fanny.

“‘Not till you’ve found that button-’ook, Miss Huzzy,’ my mother would cry. ‘For well I know you’ve ‘ad it.’

“Fanny would shrug her shoulders.

“‘Why ‘e carn’t ‘ave lace-up shoes to ‘is feet like any other kid, I carn’t understand,’ my father would remark unhelpfully.

“My mother, ashen white with flurry, would wince and say, ‘Lace-up shoes at ‘is age! Let alone that ‘e’d break the laces.’

“‘What’s that on the chiffoneer?’ Fanny would ask abruptly.

“‘Ah! Naturally you know.’

“‘Naturally I use my eyes.’

“‘Tcha! Got your answer ready! Oh, you wicked girl!’

“Fanny would shrug her shoulders again and stare out of the window. There was more trouble afoot than a mislaid buttonhook between her and my mother. Overnight ‘Miss Huzzy’ had been abroad long after twilight, a terrible thing from a mother’s point of view, as I will make plain to you later.

“My mother, breathing hard, would button my boots in a punitive manner and then off we would go, Prue hanging on to father ahead, Fanny a little apart and scornful, and I trying to wriggle my little white-cotton-gloved hand out of my mother’s earnest grip.

“We had what was called a ‘sitting’ at church, a long seat with some hassocks and a kind of little praying-ledge at the back of the seat in front. We filed into our sitting and knelt and rose up, and were ready for the function known as morning service.”