Oh, I remember dragging myself up to go to church every Saturday. The day was a checklist of ritual, a weekly upheaval. After bathing, we’d come down the stairs dressed in our finest (floral below-the-knee length dress for me, pressed shirt, blazer and trousers for my brother.) Grandma would prepare sweet Barleycup and delicious, well-seasoned eggs and baked beans. We would grease our faces with Vaseline, wiping the excess on a steamed cloth flannel. Then it would be time to preen and perfect our hairstyles. Grandma and Granddad would appraise our appearance grimly, bickering amongst themselves. With maximum fuss, we’d put on the shoes we’d polished the day before and head off to church in our tiny red banger, late for the morning service, as usual.
Around halfway through the car journey, I’d get the belly cramps—the Saturday nerves. The feeling in my tummy was something with nails clambering to escape, and by the time I reached the church doors, it would be at its peak. I didn’t fit in with the girls at church; something to do with our clothes and the fact that my brother and I lived with Grandma and Granddad and no one had seen our parents. Or it was something about how we walked (hunched over), smelled (musty), the worry etched on our faces, or how we would hang silently around the other kids, not knowing quite how to be. Our family doctor misdiagnosed my stress as constipation; prescribed a laxative drink for the cramps.
Church was an all-day affair. The morning service went right into the midday service, after which we would break for lunch. Grandma and Granddad and my brother and I would have our sardine sandwiches and vegetable soup in the small back room of the church building. The other church kids said that was weird, too. Everyone else went home for lunch before returning for the evening service.
Here’s the truth - although we were always late for church and I had no real friends there, and the anxiety of walking into church late each week was wrecking my stomach, and the lunch thing was really quite embarrassing at the time, something felt assuring and redemptive about going to the House Of God each Saturday. It felt like a surefire way to get right with God, to get pure, clean and on track. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve-year-old me felt I’d be rewarded for my duties. We were keeping the Sabbath from sundown on Friday to sunset on Saturday. We were feasting on the word of God, and there was nothing about it to be questioned. As in Revelation, the last book of the bible, I knew that the End Of Days would be around before too long. God would smite the earth with fire and brimstone, and those who hadn’t behaved well enough would know about it. They would suffer. Hard. It would be torturous, and I felt terrible for them. In my house, we were stacking up our chips for heaven. God would come and take his righteous at the End Of Days, and we would all evaporate into the sky en route to heaven. Once there, we would sit together on a long golden table, eating plums, high-quality grapes, pot noodles, and chicken drumsticks. We would drink milk and honey and have gospel concerts every night.
Although I had a tendency toward hot pink, secular love songs and short skirts and sometimes couldn’t tell if I was godly enough, I studied my bible until I could quote it inside out. Heaven shone like a promise in the distance, so I’d deal with the sacrifices for now. No bacon. No shellfish. No cinema. No parties or party dresses. No going to Samantha’s sleepover on a Friday. No booze when I got older. No breaking the Sabbath, and no hot pink. Indeed, none of the doomed real world, with all its wicked, foolish unbelievers.
But then I went to live with Mum, became a teenager, got used to high school, and leaned into what I knew as Girlhood In the World. The word of God began to lose its hold. By the time I turned thirteen, I still believed in heaven, hell, and everything, but I had none of my rituals, only the guilt. Only the god-sense gone wild and the fear. Only the propensity for sin. My first few drinks at thirteen were close to what I thought heaven might feel like—ecstasy and light, then air.
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