This started life with the title and was not intended to be recollections of my upbringing. However, that is how it's turned out. As it turns out, it's going to be pretty long, so I've posted what I've written so far. It is definitely not finished.

Whatever else this is, it is not an attack on anyone's faith, just the story of my journey through other people's beliefs and my reaction to them.

The arrogance of truth.

I grew up in house of certainty. God was in his heaven and at the same time He found time to look after every single one of us. My parents both ‘knew Jesus as their personal saviour’ and were literal believers in the Bible. Homosexuality was wrong, all other religions were sacrilege, Catholics were misled, gambling was evil, drinking was sinful and the only way to avoid hell was to confess to God and ‘invite Jesus into your heart to be born again.’ As you can probably imagine, this had a strong effect upon me as I grew up.

I have vivid memories of events throughout my childhood, as most people do, but a great many of those memories are religious ones. To say that God and Jesus (not forgetting the Holy Spirit) were at the centre of my family’s existence would not be an exaggeration.

Speaking in tongues.

I was dragged around to many non-conformist meetings. These took place in various places: churches, mission huts, houses. Some of these would be what most people would view as reasonably traditional worship styles, others were quite unusual.

One evening, I think I’d be about seven, I was taken to a meeting. I don’t remember whether I was with my mum or dad or if my older brother was there. I remember the place though, a cold wooden hall, painted green on the outside and roughly furnished inside. There were bare wooden floor boards and the ‘congregation’ were sat on wooden chairs that were all too small – probably from an old school. It was warmed by a black, cast iron furnace set in the centre of the hall. You could still see your breath. The altar was just a simple table with a cloth.

The man at the front (I don’t know what his title was – pastor, reverend, minister etc) began his sermon. It was the usual tub thumping stuff that at that age I recognised as blunt and scary. As was often the case, part way through, someone was invited to give their testimony – how they had lived a Godless life and then found Jesus. It was at this point that the man next to me stood up. He was tall, wearing a grey/brown raincoat, had dark greased back hair, glasses and a thin moustache. Looking back as an adult, I can see there’s a certain stereotype here, but at the time, he was just some bloke I’d never met before. So, he stood up and started shouting in what I was later to discover was called tongues. I’m guessing this refers to a story in the Bible when God gave the disciples the power to talk to peoples from all over the world. Anyway, off he went babbling away. The only word I can remember is Malachi, a minor prophet of the Old Testament. What I have a clearer memory of, was being absolutely shit scared.

Living by faith.

All through my childhood and adolescence there were regular meetings in my home. The otherwise rarely used front room was utilised for this and many mismatched chairs and stools from other places in the house were squeezed around the perimeter. Some of these gatherings were prayer meetings: a sort of relay where one person would pray and then pass the (spiritual) baton onto the next. Others were Bible studies where a text from the Bible would be studied in great depth to winkle out its deepest meaning. Some gatherings were an opportunity for this particular community to meet with people who were thought to be dong something special with their beliefs. Many of these people professed to live by what they called ‘faith.’

One such couple really stick in my mind. After nearly thirty years, I don’t recall their names but do remember - him: balding, thick rimmed glasses, cockily confident – her: aging, earnest, simpering – the couple as a whole: odd, hypocritical, dishonest. I’m being as candid as I can be here, and I admit, time may have corrupted some of this, but those were the feelings I had of these people at the time. I was maybe twelve.

The story they told (interspersed and interrupted with many ‘praise the lords’ and ‘hallelujahs’) was a pretty simple one. They went around the country preaching to the unconverted. They did this in a camper van. They were proud of the fact that they received no financial help from official churches and nor did they sign up for any state benefits. They lived on what they called faith – kind and unsolicited gifts from the faithful. Even at the age of twelve I could see the flaw in the logic of their argument. Just describing how they existed was soliciting. They went on to tell the story of an old lady who anonymously left a brown envelope full of bank notes under a window wiper of their van. (Only discovered they said because they saw her sneaking away.) This old lady was apparently very poor, but her kind gift enabled them to go on doing ‘the work of the Lord’ for a few weeks longer. For those who have any kind of Christian upbringing, this story should ring many bells - think of the old lady giving her one coin outside the temple. Of course, this story ensured they left clutching more money to further evangelise around the country.

Living by faith, or living by gentle con? I’ll leave you to decide but will add that when I was growing up, we had very little. My dad worked bloody hard for every penny and my mum was extremely careful with her house keeping. Watching a couple of strangers leave my home with some of my parents’ money made me bitter indeed.