This did not bother me at first, because I did not realise the significance of matriculation. My reading had made me thirsty for adventure, and I dreamed of joining the Merchant Navy and becoming a Radio Officer – no doubt the legacy of Mr Kennedy’s tales of his life in the Royal Navy before he became a teacher. The outside world, however, brutally woke me up to reality. For the vast majority of working-class children, school ended at fifteen and work beckoned. So I was suddenly pitched into the world of employment, and became an office boy at the London Electricity Board in East India Dock Road, Bow.
The adult world I now found myself a member of was certainly not dull or lacking interest. On the contrary, it was a bustling, urgent world of caring for customers and serving others. As office boy I was at the bottom of the heap, and the servant of all. At the top of the pile was Mr Vincent, a tall, emaciated figure who swept through the outer offices to sycophantic calls of ‘Good morning, sir! Good morning, Mr Vincent.’ Without acknowledging any of the greetings he would disappear into his office, closing the door sharply behind him.
I fell foul of Mr Vincent in my second week. I was summoned into his office and given instructions to go to a shop in Whitechapel and collect some goods he had ordered. He gave me £5 to cover the cost. I was thrilled at this opportunity to show him that I was up to scratch. I jumped on the bus happily and then, for some reason known only to the brain of an absent-minded fifteen-year-old, I started to clear out my pockets of their debris, discarding some items and shredding others. I arrived at the shop, and after I had been handed the parcel I reached for the note I had put into my top pocket. With mounting horror, I realised what I had done. From my pocket I withdrew – half of a fiver. The shopkeeper refused the tattered remains of the note point-blank, and with panic I returned to face the music, knowing that my job was on the line.
A stern-looking Mr Vincent heard me out in total silence. ‘Now go to the bank,’ he ordered, ‘and in return for the half of the banknote, you may be able to get a new £5 note – otherwise you will have to pay for this yourself.’ As that represented at least two weeks’ salary for an office boy, I was relieved when the bank gave me a whole £5 note for the fragment I sheepishly presented. It was not a happy start to my working life.
There was, however, another side to this unpopular boss whose grumpy personality made him seem a tyrant to his staff. One lunchtime Mr Vincent found me in the corner of the open office reading a book I had withdrawn from the local library. As I was by far the youngest in the office I had no one of my own age to chat with, and reading was the only way to pass the time – not that I, of all people, complained. No doubt Mr Vincent had observed me reading on other occasions, but this time he approached me with a book.
‘Carey. Have you read much of Charles Dickens?’ he asked.
I replied that I had not.
‘A pity,’ he said. ‘He is in my opinion one of the greatest writers in the English language. Here, borrow this book, and tell me what you think.’ He disappeared into his office, slamming the door behind him.
Within a few days I had read Nicholas Nickleby and returned it. The following day I was called into Mr Vincent’s large office and, standing on the other side of his desk, I was required to give him a critique of Nicholas Nickleby. His muttered grunts indicated approval, and another Dickens novel was passed across the desk. I must have read my way through most of Dickens’s oeuvre before I left to do my National Service at the age of eighteen. How I thank God for Mr Vincent for giving me such a wonderful apprenticeship in learning. It dawned on me later that it wasn’t only the reading of Dickens he encouraged in me, but the articulation of ideas. He made me use words more effectively, and made me listen to the rolling cadences of prose. ‘Read that again,’ I was often ordered. ‘Do you see the way he was combining nouns, adverbs and verbs to bring the reader into the story?’ He made me pay attention to the uses of language, as well as to its beauty.
But another discovery – an even more important discovery – happened during this period. I discovered there was a God.
My family was not religious – at least, not in the sense of feeling a need to go to church and worship. To this day I am not religious in that way. Worship is of course important, and people who claim to be Christian should belong to a congregation and attend as regularly as they can. But if worship is the outward badge of being a Christian, putting one’s belief into practice will always be its heart.
It was Bob, one of the twins, four years my junior, who first started going to Old Dagenham Parish Church. From the back of our three-bedroom council house at 198 Reede Road we could see the tower of the church in the old village of Dagenham. Bob loved the people he met there, and told me about them. So after work one day I decided to go along to the Youth Club that met on a Monday evening.
I made friends instantly. Every Monday the open Youth Club met, and on Tuesdays there was a meeting of ‘Christian Endeavour’. It was these that really interested me. They took the form of a service lasting one hour, led, in the main, by young people. Most of them were from lower-middle-class backgrounds, and they were zealous and bright. A few of them stood out, and would become special friends: Ronald Rushmer, Edna Millings, and the twins David and John Harris.
They were all a year or two older than myself, and I was impressed by the depth of their faith, the rigour of their thinking and the breadth of their lives. There was nothing ‘holy’ or ‘religious’ about them. They seemed to me to be whole people, and their interests were certainly mine. The fact is that, whether religious or not, I was deeply interested in philosophy, and particularly the meaning of life. I can’t even begin to date this interest, although I know that as soon as I was old enough to get a library ticket I started to read books by great thinkers. I vividly remember reading a book by Bertrand Russell for over an hour at Becontree library, and being asked to leave by an impatient member of staff who wanted to lock up.
The war had deeply unsettled my generation, and led many of us to ask fundamental questions about the meaning of freedom, democracy and peace. Working-class men returning from six years of conflict were determined to put behind them forever the nightmare of the thirties. Winston Churchill’s stock in the country was still high, but it was felt that even he represented a period that demeaned the vast majority of people in the land – as was demonstrated by his defeat in the general election of July 1945.
War affected me too: not in the sense of unsettling me psychologically, so much as making me aware that there were exciting questions concerning the meaning of life. Later I would find that Immanuel Kant’s classic formulation expressed my search succinctly: ‘What can I know? What must I do? What can I hope for?’ The three questions, focusing on epistemology, morals and the future of humankind, seemed to me to identify the truly crucial issues. For me as a teenager, however, the questions took a less sophisticated form: ‘Is there a God? If so, what is He like? Is He knowable?’
Old Dagenham Parish Church, with its open and evangelical style, suited me perfectly. A new vicar had arrived, the Reverend Edward Porter Conway Patterson – or ‘Pit-Pat’, as the young people instantly baptised him. Pit-Pat had recently returned from service in Kenya as a missionary. His preaching was direct, and always contained an appeal for people to turn to Christ. Many did, and the congregation grew. There could be no denying Pit-Pat’s great abilities and focus. His theology was Christ-centred and Bible-based. He was against anything that watered down the heart of what he believed to be Anglican theology, and particularly disapproved of Catholicism in any shape or form. If there was anything worse than Roman Catholicism, it was Anglo-Catholicism. He urged his congregation to abstain from drink and to avoid cinemas and theatres: ‘Come out from among them and be separate’ was one of his favourite Pauline texts.
Pit-Pat’s great strengths were his directness and simplicity; his weaknesses were the same. It did not take me very long to discover this, and in time I became concerned that he was projecting a joyless and stern gospel that fell short of the faith I was discovering for myself. Sadly, the negative influence of his teaching resulted in my feeling guilty for the next ten years whenever I saw a film or drank even a glass of beer or wine.
Worship