CHAPTER 1 ~ EARLY EXPERIENCE
As a child I had a recurring dream from between the ages of 2 and 3 years old until I was 19 years old. This dream only seemed to occur when, just now and again, I was feeling some negativity in my life. After the dream I always felt cocooned in deep love which lasted in my waking hours for ages after. Sometimes the dream came months apart, sometimes days apart, sometimes years apart. Throughout the dream over the years I stayed as a three year old child.
In my dream were two very high sand dunes…one on the right and the other on the left. The idea of the dream was to get from the top of the right sand dune to the bottom of it, and then up the left sand dune to the top. Once I reached the top of the left sand dune, I would finally see the ‘Beautiful City’. On top of the right sand dune was a shining bright white energetic figure. There seemed to be a silhouette of a long skirt-like piece of clothing and I thought I detected a shadow of a beard, maybe it was my child’s idea of God. But that was just a passing thought. Although I couldn’t make out a face, I always knew this shining energetic figure as ‘My Friend’.
My dream first began with me and about a hundred young children of the same age as me. We ran down the right sand dune, but would fall over. My Friend was there to pick us up. There was always a warm loving feeling when this happened. In my dream over the years, we got further down the right sand dune and up toward the left one. However, each time the dream occurred there were fewer and fewer children – falling down, yet being picked up by My Friend. Eventually, toward the last time I ever had the dream at 19 years old, I was the only child left to be picked up. I remember being sad about that. I remember I was nearly at the top of the left sand dune with great anticipation to finally see the ‘Beautiful City,’ but the sand was so soft that it felt like a much heavier climb. As much as I tried, I kept sliding down the dune and just couldn’t reach the final hurdle…. What’s more My Friend, for the first time, wasn’t around to pick me up. I felt absolutely alone and bereft. Suddenly My Friend appeared, took me by my right hand (I remember feeling its safety and warmth), and walked me up to the top of the sand dune. To my amazement all I saw before me were miles and miles, as far as the eyes could see, of more and more sand dunes! It suddenly struck me….It absolutely didn’t matter! I was with My Friend and that was ALL that mattered.
Over the years I’ve come to believe that my story you are about to read is that journey across that desert of sand dunes ominously stretched out in front of me. I was in the safest place I ever could imagine, traversing the storms of the changing dunes hand in hand with ‘MY FRIEND’.
I was born in 1946 in a north east of England working class family. An early memory was my biggest treat of creeping into Mam’s alluring bed when Dad’s inevitable ‘night shift’ cycled around yet again. His unsung long hard job at the ‘dragon’s mouth’ of the steel works allowed me to take his place cuddled up expectantly next to Mam, but not before peering over the heavy bedclothes, contemplating her perpetual reluctant routine of a tug of war with her armoured steel rod corset. It always astounded me how she got rid of this suffering crustacean, with rolls of excess fat popping like a bean pod over relieved hooks and eyes.
I was always glad when the final sigh of relief was gasped, a few ecstatic scratches and this ceremony was over. Lights out… and we’d kneel together to say our prayers. Mam always said hers in silence and it was always a matter of bewilderment and curiosity of how such an ordinary day led her to such a long silent conversation with God.
The stories could now begin.
Happy childhood memories were of Mam always singing around the house. She always saw the funny side of any negative situation. I used to watch Dad sit silently by, watching her in admiration. Mam was terrified of thunder. If ever it thundered in the middle of the night on Dad’s night shift, she would wake up my three brothers and myself to all sleepily go downstairs to cuddle up on the big brown leather arm chair for Mam to tell us true funny stories about the ‘olden days’ until the thunderstorm was over. Every story was always peppered with laughter. I loved thunderstorms.
It wasn’t until years later when I realised who the dower faced men were who sometimes came to see Dad. They occasionally gathered in the parlour away from us kids. Apparently Dad was a union leader and was holding union meetings, sometimes taking the men out on strike fighting for ‘justice’ and better working conditions. I always thought I took after my mam with her storytelling, but realised as my life evolved just how much I had my dad’s blood in me too. Dad died six weeks before his 65th birthday and because he didn’t reach 65, after working in the steel works since being 14 years old, Mam only got half a week’s widows pension.
Being the only female sibling among three brothers, a slow realisation taught me that I was at the bottom of the pecking order. Dad’s word was law and then came my brothers in order of age. Mam was never ‘allowed’ to go out to ‘paid’ work. Her job was the home and family, and whose designated sole purpose in life was to serve us.
William Beveridge, significantly a man and a British economist and Liberal politician, was a progressive, a social reformer, and the architect of the post-war welfare state. He advocated for adult women to normally be economically dependent on their husbands. His ‘norms’ legitimised the status quo. They revealed the power relations in society and were a post-war basis for poverty and oppression for women.
Throughout childhood, the patriarchal ‘high’ Church of England compounded my situation. Men made the decisions and women made the tea. There was always a man in the pulpit. The disciples were men. God was a man? Jesus was a man. The early Christian Fathers were men. The stories in my head around biblical women were that of the temptresses Eve or Salome, or the woman being stoned for adultery. The positive stories of women in the bible were subtly hidden, and only revealed to me 40 years later at theological college. I could see myself being subtly groomed for ‘serving’. This didn’t always come without any contention from me. I didn’t mind serving now and again, but why always me and never my brothers?
“The family becomes the nucleus of the patriarchal relations in society. To that extent parenting language for God reinforces patriarchal power rather than liberating us from it.”
R, Radford Ruether. 1983: p.70.
As a child, I was in constant conflict with the interjections, “You have to do it because you’re a girl,” or “You can’t do it because you’re a girl.” With such acute low self-esteem compounded by this subordination, being pure and clean to emanate the Virgin Mary solely for a potential future husband was my only pathway to heaven. If I wasn’t, it would be a pathway to hell.
This feeling of subordination led me in 1972 to leave my home and family at the age of 26 to emigrate alone by ship to Australia on a government £10 emigration passage.