1965, the year that changed my life
John Nelson Parr (1886-1976)
1. One Sunday evening, after church, when Peter Gooding and I got off the cream and green Blackpool Corporation Transport number 14 bus at the Neville Drive bus stop, Thornton, and strolled in the direction of my house, we were expressing to each other our deep concern that no-one at the church was “on fire for God.”[more] Presumably, we regarded ourselves as exceptions to this; and then we started identifying one or two others who might well also be “on fire for God.”
“Maurice?”
“Oh, yes, I think Maurice is on fire for God!”
“Pastor?”
I can’t remember what we concluded about Pastor, though I suppose we gave him the benefit of the doubt.
2.
On this or another occasion, we agreed that we were not making sufficient progress in spreading the gospel at
school, and agreed that the next morning in the cloakroom we would go around giving out gospel tracts to all the boys gathered there.
Before the religious Assembly of the whole school in the hall, and before the registration of each form in its classroom, the boys had first to assemble in the cloakroom. Beneath the coat racks there were wooden forms on which we sat, in order of our year at the school. There would be a lot of noise and activity, and people talking and laughing at the top of their voices, till the prefects appeared to calm us all down. At the end of each rack a prefect would take his stand, usually slouching with his arms round the support post and hands clasped over the beam of the coat rack, insolently exercising his delegated authority over the inferior beings sitting on the forms before him, and keeping their boisterousness in check. Then we would be allowed to march, year by year, down the boys’ corridor for Assembly in the hall.
3.
Peter and I were very scared — or I was, at any rate — but we decided to keep to our plan, and with a handful of tracts each, we went through the door from the boys’ playground and began handing them to everyone we passed as we went from row to row. This caused an uproar of astonishment and not a little mockery from the boys who were there. But at least we had taken the stand which we felt we had failed to take, and we were well known after that for the faith we professed. (Presumably, Peter and I did this tract distribution before the prefects arrived.)
Peter arouses my interest in Audrey Wood
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