A life in letters: Filey

I was familiar as a teenager with church people talking ‘going to Filey.’  They were referring not so much to the Yorkshire seaside town, as to the ‘Christian Holiday Crusade’ which was held annually at the Butlin’s Camp at Filey from 1955 until the camp closed in 1983, after which it relocated for a few years under a new name to the Butlin’s facility at Skegness. ‘Filey’ was started under the leadership of the evangelist J. Lindsay Glegg (1882-1975) in the aftermath of the 1954 Billy Graham ‘Greater London Crusade’  to provide an annual week of intensive sustenance to those who had come to faith through the mission and similar events.

I was asked to attend the 1977 Filey event by the youth organisation Scripture Union, for which I had recently begun working as a bookshop manager, and I drove south from Lanarkshire. It was my responsibility, assisted by a colleague, to staff a bookstall of SU publications. I found the long hours, the unfamiliar routine, and especially what seemed to me the unconventional personality of the man I was not just working alongside but also sharing a chalet with, cumulatively very stressful. Although to be honest, I think the problem was more with me than with my colleague – in my naivety, I simply wasn’t used to hearing Christians utter such fulsome appreciation of the female body as he expressed when confronted with Evie Tornquist,  ‘Christian music’s greatest sweetheart’ who was 20 at the time and performing at Filey that year.

I remember walking up the dark stairwell leading directly into the brightly lit auditorium one evening after a conference session had begun, feeling the empty poignant sadness of exclusion as the crowd sang with an impassioned yearning:

                   Open our eyes Lord, we want to see Jesus

                   To reach out and touch him

                   To say that we love him.

On the final evening of the event, having arranged to purchase unsold Christmas stock for my shop, I spent a hectic hour shifting it to my car to take north. The next morning, after a restless night, I left Filey, and headed north. After a few miles, completely unexpectedly, I was overcome by an intense conviction that I wouldn’t make it home, that there would be a fatal accident on the way. Mile after mile I drove in terror, tensely gripping the steering wheel and fearfully eyeing each approaching vehicle. Would this be the one?

I stopped at a motorway service station, and so certain was I that my death was imminent that it was only with difficulty that I restrained myself from phoning my parents (with whom I was still living at this point) telling them not to expect me back. It was only when I reached Lanark, a few miles from home, that I could admit the faintest hope that I might, after all, make it back safely. Eventually, I turned into our drive, switched off the engine, and slumped back in my seat.

Before this, I had been no stranger to anxiety and stress, especially during the spiritual turmoil of my teenage years, but that experience on the road back from Filey was more severe than anything I had endured previously. Although the anxiety didn’t constantly remain at this intense level, in my mind the day I returned from Filey in 1977 marks the start of a 13-year period of considerable emotional pain which was only relieved when an effective medication was identified, and which forced me to acknowledge that I had a mental health problem.