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.

A life in letters: Whities

‘Would you like a whitie?’ my father would say, with no racist connotations whatsoever, if we were going out on a cold night.

From time to time when I was a young child he would buy small, white, extremely strong peppermints which were scooped from a jar by the shopkeeper, and poured into a white paper bag. These he called ‘whities’ and he regarded them as having a close to medicinal efficacy, administering one to protect his throat when he was venturing out in winter.

I suspect he dipped into the white bag, which he kept in his coat pocket all mixed up with his gloves, relatively infrequently, because it would be crinkled and grey long before the last mint was extracted. My father was not, clearly, a serial peppermint addict.

You’d say ‘Yes please!’, and he’d give you one of these treasures, and you’d go out with him into the darkness. You’d watch his Adam’s apple disappear beneath the dark green scarf as he ensured his neck was fully covered, and pressed his lips together to exclude the cold, than then you’d set out,  holding his hand, each of you breathing into the night air a peppermint-scented mist.

A life in letters: Falklands War

The Falklands War seemed to come from nowhere. First, there were reports that Argentinian scrap dealers had raised the Argentinian flag on South Georgia on 19 March 1982. (It later emerged that they had been infiltrated by Argentinian Marines.) Then, on 2 April, the Argentine invaded the Falkland Islands, and soon the Task Force was being assembled driven by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s conviction that the Falklands could not be abandoned.

I remember listening to the historic Saturday morning debate in the House of Commons on Saturday 3 April. I was sitting in the car on a deserted Industrial Estate on the outskirts of Airdrie. That week I had been deeply wounded when someone I fancied like mad turned me down, and not wanting to face my parents with whom I was still living when I felt so so miserable, I took myself out. I channelled the pain-driven energies into writing a drama for the Airdrie Academy Christian Union weekend away on the life of the biblical character Gideon, with the car radio on in the background

In my opinion Margaret Thatcher grossly over-reacted. No matter how long the Falklands had been in British hands, the fact of their geographical proximity suggested to me that Argentina had a perfectly legitimate claim to them. An instinctive pacifist, I balked at the idea of sending people to war, particularly in such a dubious cause.

As the Task Force was assembled and sailed south, during the weeks of battle, and particularly after the victory, I realised how hard it would be to stand against a war which seemed to have gripped the patriotic imagination of so many fellow Scots.

I remember sitting in Airdrie Baptist Church as spring sunshine shafted down the polished Victorian woodwork, feeling some anxiety about this war we were in, and a sense of empathy with those who had filed into the same pews in 1914 and 1939. The walls of that room were no strangers to sadness.

Information about the progress of the war was tightly controlled, and we became familiar with the face and voice of Ian Macdonald the civil servant who made official announcements about the progress of the war at Ministry of Defence press briefings. Brian Hanrahan, on the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes watched Harrier Jump Jets flying out on a sortie, and not permitted to reveal the number of aircraft involved, famously announced ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’ At lunchtime, some of us would join Iain Morris in his English classroom at the school, and we’d watch the latest reports.  There we saw film of the sinking of the Argentinian vessel General Belgrano which led to the loss of over 300 lives. Two days later, the Argentinians destroyed HMS Sheffield, and 20 died.

I’d come out of the National Library of Scotland and was standing at a ‘bus stop on Edinburgh’s George IV Bridge when I saw the evening paper billboard announcing that the Falklands had been re-taken on Monday 14June following the recapture of Port Stanley.

But I was never persuaded that the result was worth the tragic loss of life.