My father left me nothing of worldly value, but a wealth of principles. Typically, I’ve rejected most, but treasure a few.
He was born in 1909, in the tiny hamlet of Daisy Hill, County Durham: a beautiful area, but with pits, slagheaps and smoke as evidence of the price to be paid for its only industry. My paternal grandfather had been a coal-miner until gas in WW1 threw him back to Daisy Hill, unfit for work.
My father left school at 14, and inevitably began to work in the colliery – still with private owners who could dismiss with impunity any troublemakers, like my great-uncle Tom Holmes, who led a strike against unsafe working conditions. His sacking led to my father’s dismissal: because, as a relative, he was tarred with the same brush.
Somehow, my father found another calling. Somehow, in the depression of the late 20s and 30s, he found his way to Cliff College in Derbyshire, an evangelical training college, a sort of protestant seminary. As well as theological qualifications, Dad learned to live by his principles, twice trekking round Britain, with a handcart and banner proclaiming “Mission for Christ”.
Somehow, he met and married my mother, the daughter of a Sacriston bricklayer. Somehow, at the start of WW2, he became the lay pastor of a Mission in the East End of London, then of another in Plymouth, during the bombing of both cities. Only much later, I learned that he was a pacifist, a conscientious objector, who had volunteered as a firewatcher: a compromise between his unbending ideology and his Christian outrage at the evils of Nazism.
I was born a year before the end of the war, in Lincolnshire, where (somehow) my father had become pastor of a small Methodist Chapel, and assistant chaplain at Horbling Prisoner of War Camp. Some of my earliest memories (and family snapshots) are of sitting on grey-uniformed shoulders, excitedly clapping to the beat of a big bass drum. Father had got permission for the PoWs not only to worship at his chapel, but to parade there with their band.
One of the German prisoners, Manfred Knodt, had been training as a Lutheran priest when he was conscripted. My father helped him with his theological studies, and his ordination in Lincoln Cathedral at the end of the war. Manfred became Pfarrer of the Stadtkirche in Darmstadt (heavily bombed, and home to “Little Texas”, a huge American base, when I first visited in the early fifties); the twinning of Darmstadt and Coventry led to Manfred’s involvement in the creation of a European ecumenical community, united in the belief that all, whatever their faith or dogma, should work together towards peace.
To my shame, I was embarrassed to discover my father’s pacifism when I went to grammar school at the age of 10. Many of my teachers had returned from the forces, damaged in a variety of ways. Most of my story-books and comics were excitable reworkings of the gallant Allies fighting the evil Huns. Open scorn and derision for the cowardly conchies who’d run away from their patriotic duty meant that I kept my father out of my school-life and friendships.
Much, much later, as a pacifist too, but also an atheist, I was torn between admiration for my father’s courage and opposition to his dogmatic adherence to other evangelical principles: teetotalism, sexual purity, the sanctity of even a disastrous marriage … as a student in the late fifties and early sixties, I just couldn’t co-habit with such a father!
What has led me to re-tell a narrative which must be familiar to many others of my generation, my zeitgeist? The most important value to survive the war was not patriotism, but friendship. In the late fifties, my father preached friendship and European unity at Manfred’s church. In the late seventies, Manfred flew from Germany to preach at Dad’s funeral (home, at last, in County Durham).
And, in 2017, Manfred’s nephew Reinhart Bȕttner and I renewed our friendship, first formed in the early fifties. Two old men, comparing hip replacements and back operations, two brothers damaged by the war and its aftermath, determined to be Europeans, to be united once more: against the new fascism, the new nationalism, the new “alternative facts”, the Trumpery which is overshadowing our lives.
Perhaps all we can do is shout and rail against secular as well as religious evils. But he’s an artist, and I can write, so perhaps we can shout more eloquently, and wave our walking sticks in protest.
As a belated remembrance, near the 100th anniversary of the end of World War 1 which so damaged his own father, here’s a small offering to Adam Holmes Coe (1909 – 1979)
FATHER’S FIRE
Each morning father had to lay the fire.
Riddling dead clinkers, separating those
from ash and half-burnt coals to be re-used.
Ashpan emptied, grate swept and cleaned, he chose
paper, sticks and bits of nutty slack
and made a little pyramid, precise,
well-ordered. Satisfied, he lit a match.
A small half-smile, then, kneeling down, touched flame
to paper. As if in prayer he waited.
And only when the fire spread upwards
through the kindling, layer by layer, he stood,
task over. He would make the tea and then
turn to the scripture for that day. He read
about the all-consuming fire of God,
the tongues of pentecostal flame, the gift
of holiness.
From mining coal, he said,
he had been called to spread the gospel, trek
the length and breadth of Britain, preaching
where and when he felt the flame consume him,
searching out more souls to save, prepared
to pay the price demanded by his God
as Satan led the worldly powers to war.
He was a conchie, volunteered instead
to keep his dockland mission in the day,
but watch for fires every night. He never spoke,
except to thank the Lord that he’d been saved.
“Soldier for Christ” he called himself, a brand
plucked from the burning …
… and every morning
of his burnt-out life prepared the fire
and separated ash from coal, and prayed
to his zealous searing God to give him
strength to carry the torch for one more day.
