Week 52 2013

                   Tendring Topics……..on line

The Grandparents of Jesus

Some twelve years ago my wife Heather and I wrote ten monologues purporting to be by witnesses of the birth of Jesus and its aftermath.  Since then they have been used in church and Quaker events and some of them have been published in The Friend, the Quaker weekly journal. Sadly Heather died in 2006.  She and I had been married for sixty years and had grandchildren of our own.

Below are our ideas of the recollections of Jesus’ grandparents which I thought might be appropriate for the ‘Christmas Edition’ of Tendring Topics….on line to be published on the internet on Christmas Eve 2013. I wish a Happy Christmas and a New Year of Peace and Hope to all blog readers!

                                                                                        

                                                         Heather and I

The Grandmother’s Tale
                          

There is no mention of Mary’s parents in the four Gospels.  Tradition, and at least one apocryphal gospel, name them as Joachim and Anne or Hanna, so that is what Heather and I did.


 'Joachim, that’s my husband, always insists that sufficient faith, hope and love will see you through any crisis.  That may well be so.  Neither of us has ever been short of love but I do know that we have needed every ounce of all the faith and hope that we could muster to see us through the last six years.

We never did see that angelic visitor!  Our Mary saw the angel all right. I have no doubt about that now.  So did Joseph, thank God. Mary tells us that the angel also appeared to some shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem when the baby was born, and later warned her and Joseph to flee to Egypt with baby Jesus to escape that wicked King Herod’s wrath.

 If only that angel had called on us – how much heartache, mistrust and desperate worry we would have been spared!  Joachim says that we may have been left out to test our faith.  It certainly did that!


 Can you imagine how we felt when Mary – then just sixteen! – calmly announced that she was pregnant.  What’s more, she insisted that her fiancé Joseph wasn’t responsible (if he had been, it would have saddened us, but would at least have been understandable).  Her son, so she said, would be the child of God’s Holy Spirit, and would prove to be the long-awaited Messiah, the salvation of Israel.


 Well, Mary had always been a thoroughly truthful girl, but we simply didn’t believe her.  If she had been your teenage daughter, would you have?  We knew, of course, that God’s holy messengers did sometimes visit humankind, but surely not to an ordinary Galilean girl like Mary; certainly not to a small out-of-the-way place like Nazareth.


  Despite Mary’s assurances I suspected Joseph.  We sent for him right away but it was quite obvious from his astonishment and dismay that he was entirely innocent.  He was broken-hearted poor chap.  He’d have liked to have believed Mary’s story but – like us – he just couldn’t.  He was keen though to save her from shame and disgrace.  Would it be possible, he wondered, for her to be sent off to a distant relative to have her baby?  We’d all have to sleep on it.


  Sleep!  Neither Joachim nor I had much sleep that night – nor, I imagine, did poor Mary sent off to her room in disgrace.  I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was how I’d manage to face Naomi, Rebecca, straight-laced Susannah, and my other friends and neighbours when they knew.  Goodness knows, I’d had sneers enough over the fact that I had been able to give Joachim only one child – but I had managed to hold my head high over that.  This would be far, far worse.


 I was inclined to blame poor Joachim for our troubles.  He’d always been something of a radical and had given Mary a lot of ideas that I thought were quite unsuitable for a young girl in her station in life.  He remained silent, utterly dejected. I knew that he could hardly believe that our Mary was capable of wrong-doing.


  We dozed off just before dawn but were awakened by a hammering on the outer door.  It was Joseph – a transformed Joseph.  He wanted to beg Mary’s forgiveness for not having believed her.  He too had had an angelic visitation in the night which had left him in no doubt about her virtue and truthfulness.  When could he and Mary be married?


That changed the situation entirely!  I was still inclined to be a bit suspicious.  Joachim though had no doubts whatsoever and was absolutely delighted.  He was looking forward to his grandson – the Messiah – raising a mighty army and freeing Israel from foreign bondage.


  We held a family council and decided that the best thing that could be done would be to send Mary off to stay with her cousin Elizabeth.  She too was preparing for an unexpected baby but, of course, she had been married, and childless, for years.   While there, she and Joseph would be quietly married (not the kind of wedding that I had hoped for, but that couldn’t be helped) and, in due course, they would return to Nazareth as a married couple.


   And that’s what happened.  There may have been a few sideways looks from some of the neighbours when Joseph and Mary returned as man and wife – but no-one made any open comment.

  Then, of course, came the next bombshell.  Caesar declared that everyone must return to his hometown to be counted for tax purposes.  Joachim was furious.  Rome interfering again with our way of life! Nazareth was our home but Joseph had originally come from Bethlehem – way down south near Jerusalem – and that’s where he and Mary, now heavily pregnant, had to go.

  We watched them, with their donkey, trudge down the south road towards Jerusalem until they were dots on the horizon and finally vanished from our sight.   And that was the last we were to see of them for five long years.


 

  Yes, for five long years we had no firm news of Joseph and our Mary.  We didn’t even know whether they were alive or dead or whether Mary had had her baby.  If only that angel had called to reassure us during that dreadful time!


 There were lots of rumours, of course.  A neighbour who had to go to Jerusalem to be counted said that he had heard that Mary had had a fine baby boy – and that the birth had taken place in a cattle shed of all places. I didn’t believe that for one minute. There were stories of heavenly visions being seen near Bethlehem at the time that we knew the baby was due.  Then we heard the dreadful news that that wicked Herod (he was worse than the Romans!) had sent his soldiers to slaughter all young babies born in and around Bethlehem.  Some though, it was said, had escaped. We clung to our hope.


 A travelling carpet seller from Egypt said that he had seen, and had spoken to, a Jewish refugee couple about Mary and Joseph’s age with a young child.  He couldn’t remember their names but his story raised our spirits.


 Then came the news of Herod’s death and finally, just two months ago, trudging down that same road along which they had departed, came Joseph with our Mary  and our new five-year old grandson Jesus.  They had prospered in Egypt and all three were fine and well.


  Words can’t express our relief and delight that they had been returned to us safe and sound.  Every day we thank God for his great mercy towards us.  All grandparents dote on their grandchildren but, however many we may have, Jesus will always be very special to us.


  Joachim is quite convinced that he’ll grow up to be a great military leader who’ll sweep away the Romans and restore the land of Israel to its people.  Somehow though – I doubt it.  I think that God may have other plans for him.



The Grandfather’s Tale

Joachim’s experience of the Nativity of Christ was, of course, exactly the same as Anne’s.  However, Heather and I were grandparents ourselves and we felt that the reactions of the grandfather might well be very different from those of the grandmother.  And so, as you’ll read, they were. 

    If you have ever had a teenage daughter, and especially if she is or was a well-loved only child, you’ll have an inkling of what Anne and I felt when we learned that our sixteen year old daughter Mary was pregnant – and that the father wasn’t Joseph, to whom she was engaged to be married.  It will only be an inkling though unless, of course, you too live in a society in which stoning to death is the statutory penalty for what would have been called adultery.


 We were devastated – and so was Joseph, the prosperous local builder to whom she had been betrothed.  The few minutes in which we broke the news to him seemed to add twenty years to his age.  He genuinely loved our Mary and didn’t want to see her publicly shamed, let alone punished with death.  We just couldn’t accept Mary’s story that she was guiltless; that one of God’s holy angels had told her that her child was to be the long-awaited Messiah, the saviour of Israel. I even wondered for a moment if it could be a cruel joke aimed particularly at me – everyone knew how I longed for the coming of the Messiah to free us from Roman rule.         


The next morning saw our despair change to elation.  Mary’s story had been true.  Joseph too, had been visited by the angel, who had told him the same story.   He had been commissioned by the Almighty to guard and watch over the young mother with her holy child.

  

Anne was still a bit doubtful, but for me everything clicked into place.  I realized why it was that our Mary had been chosen for this honour.  As she was our only child and it had seemed unlikely that Anne would have another, I had tried to educate her and bring her up as though she were a boy.  Mary had all the womanly skills of course – Anne had seen to that –but I had also given her a thorough grounding in the Holy Scriptures and in the literature, history and aspirations of the people of Israel.



 She was even something of a poet herself. Have you read the poem that she wrote to thank God for the great honour he had conferred on her by choosing her to give birth to the Messiah:  ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour’? I’ve no doubt at all that it was I who inspired those bits about putting down the mighty from their seat and exalting the humble and meek; filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away. She was obviously the right girl – the only possible girl in the whole land of Israel – to bear and bring up the Messiah we all awaited.


 We bundled her off to her cousin Elizabeth and she and Joseph were quietly married.  Then they settled down again in Nazareth where they prepared for the coming of Mary’s holy child.


I might have guessed that Rome would put its oar in and try to wreck everything!  In order to wring our hard-earned money out of us more efficiently, they decided to hold a census.  Everyone had to return to his home town to be registered.  Anne and I come of families that have lived in Nazareth for generations but Joseph, poor fellow, came from Bethlehem, way down in the south.  It was there, together with our Mary, that he had to go to register.


 I railed against the wickedness of Rome and swore that my grandson would avenge this affront to his parents – but it was all no good.  They had to go. When Anne and I watched them head southwards, little did we dream that we wouldn’t see them again for over five long years.


 Those years seemed to be unending.  Hope and love kept Anne going but I had a firm conviction that God would never let his chosen one suffer permanent ill.  Against all the odds I remained firm in my faith that one day they would come home again, safe and sound.


 And, as you know, my faith was justified.  Mary and Joseph came home safely with Jesus, our new grandson – the child destined to be the hope of Israel.  They have shared all their adventures with us.  We know how our grandson, God’s Messiah, was born in a stable of all places.  We were told of the homage of the shepherds and of the Magi with their wonderful gifts.  We shuddered when we heard of Herod’s treachery (the puppets of Rome are even worse than Rome itself!) and of the headlong flight into Egypt where, thanks to God, they prospered until news of Herod’s death had meant that they could safely return to their own land.


 Our grandson Jesus is now nearly six years old – strong, active and intelligent.  He has a great future. Mary and Anne don’t agree with me – and Joseph is inclined to take their side – but I have no doubt that in fifteen or perhaps even ten years time (how old was David when he slew Goliath?) he’ll raise a great army, sweep the Romans from our shores and punish the miserable collaborators who have supported them.  I’m looking forward to seeing him, ‘put down the mighty from their seat, and exalt the humble and meek’

.

Week 20 2013

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Syrian Bloodbath.

            I know of no better validation of the Quaker testimony against all wars and physical violence than the current situation in Syria.   The Civil War there has cost the lives of thousands of men, women and little children, has inflicted disabling wounds on thousands more and has turned tens of thousands of innocent civilians into homeless and penniless refugees.

Let’s forget for a moment questions of morality and consider the current conflict from a purely materialistic and practical point of view. It is surely obvious that, however awful the Assad regime may have been, when the war comes to an end, whichever side is finally ‘triumphant’, life in Syria will be far, far worse than it was before the first shot was fired in anger. If the rebels win, as seems quite possible, we in ‘the west’ hope to see the emergence of a free and democratic Syria with equal rights for every Syrian,  male or female, and freedom of religious worship comparable with every country in Western Europe.  It is quite possible that that is the objective of some of the rebels.   It certainly isn’t the objective of all, or even most, of them.  I have little doubt that within months of the peace, Syria will be under the control of Islamist extremists, women will be relegated to the status of second class citizens, and all the freedoms that are so important to us will have been made illegal.  It happened in Iran after their popular revolution against the Shah.  It is happening in Iraq, in Egypt and in Libya.  It will certainly happen in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of  NATO troops.

            What is more, the extreme Islamist rebels, having become experienced in the art of killing their fellow-men and women, will look round for fresh worlds to conquer and destroy, and fresh targets on which to vent their hatred of everything we think of value.   They will find them in Western Europe, in the UK and in the USA.

            Was the Assad regime a cruel dictatorship?  Perhaps - but I have heard of no secret killings and no torture chambers such as we heard about from victims of the regimes in Iraq and Libya. Compared with Saudi Arabia, pre-civil-war Syria was an oasis of freedom and tolerance in a desert of autocracy and bigotry. Women enjoyed freedoms unknown in other Muslim countries and Christian and Muslim communities lived side by side in peace and tolerance. Now the Saudi Arabian government is backing the rebels!  I suspect that President Assad’s principal fault is that he is ‘the wrong kind of Muslim’, was probably too friendly with Iran and was giving positions of power and influence to his co-religionists.   Now, of course, we hear of mass killings carried out by government forces.  The reports are probably true.  Violence begets more violence.  It was Gandhi who said that if we all insisted on ‘an eye for an eye’ we would all end up blind.  If in a civil war both sides claim ‘a life for a life’ they will surely end with a country of the dead.

             Other nations are taking an unhealthy interest in the conflict.  Russia is supporting (or at least not opposing) the Assad Government.  The UK and the USA are supporting the rebels. As if there was not already death and destruction enough, the Israelis have launched lethal rockets into Syria, ostensibly to prevent arms from Syria reaching a pro-Iranian Islamic group operating from Lebanon.  Does anyone seriously imagine that a Syrian government, fighting for its very existence, would allow, much less encourage, arms to pass out of the country to any other armed group whatsoever?

            Britain is becoming steadily more and more involved.  It started highly commendably with humanitarian aid.  Our intervention in Libya began, you’ll recall, with the very moderate ‘enforcement of a no-fly zone’.   In Syria we have progressed to non-lethal military aid.  What next I wonder – supplying the rebels with weapons?   That would surely be almost as daft as the idea, currently held by some in the USA, that the best way to end gun crime is to make sure that all ‘the good guys’ are armed to the teeth!   The only winners in that particular arms race will be the arms manufacturers and dealers.

            The Syrian conflict is not of our making.  When it is all over I hope that we will help with the reconstruction and the establishment of peace.   In the meantime I do urge our rulers:  For God’s sake (and I do not mean that blasphemously) keep Britain OUT of it.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good…….

          ……..and the cold wintry weather that plagued our holiday resorts during the Easter holiday seems to have done no harm at all to one outdoor leisure activity enjoyed along the Essex Sunshine Coast.  Sea angling has flourished and a report in the Clacton Gazette by John Popplewell carries the headline Cod and Thornbacks in plentiful supply.

            During my adolescence I was a keen fresh-water angler.  My home was on the outskirts of Ipswich and I fished regularly for pike, perch and roach along the River Gipping at weekends and during school holidays.  Occasionally, venturing further afield, I would cycle the ten or so miles to Flatford Mill to spend a day in the ‘Constable country’ angling along the River Stour between the lock gates at Flatford  and Dedham, a mile or two upstream.

            Only once have I been sea angling, and that was some twenty years ago when I was writing advertising features for Essex County Newspapers.   I went out on a charter boat from Harwich for a very enjoyable day’s fishing off the Gunfleet Sands and, with help and advice from the professionals, I caught several skate and a sea bass. I know that I later wrote a glowing report of the day that I hope brought the skipper of the boat some custom!

            John Popplewell reports catches from boats, from beaches, from kayaks operating just a few hundred yards offshore, and from piers all along our coastline.  Boats from Mersea and Brightlingsea have been catching more thornbacks than he can ever before remember, as well as fair-sized (one weighed ten pounds) cod.  From Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton and Clacton there are similar reports, with bass, whiting, dogfish and skate also being caught.  

            Clacton Gazette readers are accustomed to reading angry criticisms in readers’ letters about the wind turbines proliferating off our shores – they’re inefficient, an intolerable blot on the seascape, unreliable, uneconomical, a danger to migrating birds, and so on.  It was quite refreshing to have quite a different point of view from John Popplewell.  ‘My personal opinion on why we have so many thornbacks now is to do with our wind farms.  We have two that we can see from our coastline – the Gunfleet Sands and a larger one further out on the Greater Gabbard.   They seem to be acting as man-made reefs, and are a safe haven and breeding ground for a lot of species, including lobsters, which are now breeding happily in these areas.

            It really is an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

‘The old grey widow maker’*

            The juxtaposition of the anniversary of VE Day (8^th May 1945) when the war in Europe ended, and the commemoration of the thousands of dead in the Arctic Convoys, and in the Battle of the Atlantic, brought flooding back memories of my own artillery regiment’s voyage to Egypt through submarine infested waters in the late summer of 1941.  At that time enemy air power and submarines closed the direct route to Egypt via the Mediterranean.  We sailed in the New Zealand Shipping Company liner The Rangitiki from Avonmouth, first to the mouth of the Clyde to join a large convoy.   From there we sailed north-west almost (so we were told) to Iceland to avoid the German submarine packs, then south and east down the West African coast to the Cape of Good Hope. We put in for a few days in Durban, and finally sailed up Africa’s east coast to the Red Sea and Port Tewfik at the southern end of the Suez Canal.

The Rangitiki

           

 I volunteered to man a Breda machine-gun on the Rangitiki’s bridge, doing a four hours on and eight hours off ‘watch’ throughout the voyage. This was not out of heroism (my fervent hope was that there would be no air attack!) but because I was and am, as I mentioned in last week’s blog, mildly claustrophobic. We machine-gunners slept with members of the crew in the fo'c'sle on an upper deck, and not in hammocks on those crowded mess-decks at or below the waterline!

            There was a submarine alert while we were in mid-Atlantic.  We were warned to be ready to go to our lifeboat stations. I had been allocated a place on a raft with ropes round its side to which, if we found ourselves in the water and still alive, we could cling until rescued – or not, as the case might be.  The destroyers (or were they corvettes? I have no idea) circled round the convoy. Then their paths converged. We saw depth charges being launched and felt, rather than heard, the shock of the explosions on the Rangitiki’s hull.  I really wouldn’t have wanted to be a submariner!   The danger was declared to be over.  We relaxed and the convoy sailed on.

            There was one more, even more alarming, episode off the West African coast – in the vicinity of a reputed U-boat base.  The Rangitiki’s engines failed and our progress stopped.  The convoy, and its escort, sailed on. The escort had a whole convoy to worry about. They couldn’t stop for just one ship.  It was a clear night with a full moon.   To add to our disquiet there were thunderous banging, rattling and drilling noises emanating from below as the ship’s engineers strove to repair the engines.  We must have been clearly visible and audible to the crew of any U-boat within twenty miles! At last, after several anxious hours, there was silence, and then a scarcely audible hum.  We could feel a vibration in the deck and a white wake appeared in the rear of the vessel as the engines sprang into life.  We were moving again.  Soon after dawn the convoy came into sight.  We took our place in it and the journey continued uneventfully.

‘Ferret’ (left) and I in Durban.  The chap with the splendid head-dress never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood there having his photo taken with soldiers off the convoys

We put in, but didn’t go ashore, at Freetown.  It poured with rain. Local boys came alongside in their canoes and dived for pennies that we dropped into the murky water.  They always managed to retrieve them!  The seas were turbulent as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope.  The heavily loaded vessels of our convoy were tossed about as though they were match boxes.   At Durban we put in for five days and were allowed to go ashore if off-duty.  We machine gunners had no other duties and there was no risk of an air raid in Durban.  ‘Ferret’ Hawes (I don’t think I ever knew his first name), a fellow machine-gunner, and I went ashore each day.  Local residents were very welcoming.  Notices announced in English and Afrikaans that this, that or the other facility was ‘for whites only’.  I can’t pretend that this bothered us, though it probably would have if there had been any non-whites in the regiment.

It wasn’t till we left Durban that we were sure of our destination.  The convoy split up, half sailing eastward towards Singapore while we continued up the East African coast to the Red Sea and finally to Port Tewfik for our destination on the Egyptian/Libyan frontier.  As we went ashore, thankful for having had a relatively uneventful voyage, we little dreamed that just over a year later, fifty of our number would be crammed with 150 other prisoners of war into the hold of the Scillin, an Italian merchant ship, to be transported to a prison camp in Italy – and that they would meet their deaths in the Mediterranean, torpedoed by a British submarine!

Most of the 200 victims of the sinking of the Scillin were young unmarried men, but Kipling's old, grey widow-maker (Nicholas Monserrat's 'Cruel Sea) made a few more widows that night.

*What is a woman that you forsake her, and the hearth fire, and the home acre, To go with the old grey widow-maker?   ‘First verse of ‘The Harp-Song of the Danish Women’ by Rudyard Kipling.