Ours was a vacation romance. Filey Week, the late 1960s, and I was bowled over by a girl from the southwest three and a half years my senior. She was pretty, she was bubbly, she was friendly. There were only two problems. She was older than me, a big deal for teenagers in those days, and she lived hundreds of miles away.
Brenda returned to Devon after the vacation and left no contact details. There were no cell phones, internet, or social media back then and many people didn’t even have a landline. From Yorkshire, I went through directory inquiries looking for families with Brenda’s surname, Down. It turned out to be a common Devon surname. I worked through the list, calling from a public pay phone in the street. Eventually, with a huge sigh of relief, I got a positive response.
“Brenda Down? Yes, we know her, she’s Tom Down’s daughter and he’s one of twelve siblings. That’s why there are so many Downs around! Why are you looking for her?”
It took Brenda fifteen hours on a private hire bus to get back to her parents’ farm from Yorkshire. She was greeted by her mother’s abrupt inquiry: “There’s been some fella here trying to contact you. What’s all that about?”
We started dating. Brenda made the long journey north to visit me. I traveled to Devon for long weekends when my shift patterns allowed, a round trip of 700 miles. That’s a long distance in UK terms. None of Brenda’s friends ever moved far from their farms or villages. It was a big deal for a girl from a remote dairy farm to marry a miner from the north of England. There were strong cultural differences and very different dialects and accents. I spoke with a very “broad Yorkshire” dialect back then. My parents took to Brenda immediately, very pleasantly surprised that this neat, sensible, and levelheaded farmer’s daughter had taken a shine to their son. Ever deferential, my mother took her aside. “We’re pleased you’re seeing our Mick, but you’re too good for him, you know.”
We married in 1971. We rented a very small terraced house in a run-down area. Brenda found our routine very different from anything she had known in the farming community and even more so when the children were born. I often worked nights. I worked hard and I worked long hours and gradually we were able to afford our own property on a new housing development. Brenda has always been a homemaker, neat and efficient. She was in her element. She had grown up on a farm amid the muck and dung, with animal feed bags for doormats, her father preoccupied with his dairy herd. Then she moved to a poorly lit terraced street with her new husband working long shifts down the mine. At last, now she had a home of her own and space and time to fix it how she wanted. Mark was born in 1973, Kevin in 1974. We had a regular wage and a decent home.
Then everything changed. I left my job, sold our house, and we went to Bible college.
The nagging itch was there for some time. Brenda felt it too. At the Filey Weeks, there would often be an appeal from the platform speakers for people to dedicate themselves to the mission field. Missionaries would visit our churches and echo that call. That was the atmosphere we imbibed. I sent off for prospectuses and brochures from various colleges, only to shove them in a drawer and forget about them. The following year the nagging sense returned with a vengeance. What’s more, Brenda agreed. She needed no persuasion. We both felt it was the right thing to do.
I opened the drawer, opened the brochures, and sent off letters of application.
I wrote first to Elim Bible College, the seminary for my own denomination. They turned me down. Of course, they dressed it up in spiritual sounding language. “We do not believe it is the Lord’s will for you at this time.”
Of course, I knew the real reason. I was uneducated. I had no qualifications. All I knew was how to play sport and dig coal, to repair heavy mechanical equipment down the mine.
I was the first in my family to get a coveted grammar school place. My parents were so pleased they bought me a bicycle to recognize my achievement. Grammar schools were intended for those expected to go on to university or into “the professions.” To get there you had to pass the eleven-plus examination. Otherwise you would go to a secondary modern school or a technical college.
I hated school. I was always the boy who left the school grounds without permission to retrieve the ball when it was kicked or knocked over the wall. I’d then be sent to the headmaster to get caned on the bottom, hands, and knuckles. Then, the year that we were due to sit the eleven-plus examination, the system suddenly changed. It was decided to conduct an experiment. Rather than sitting the examination, pupils would be assessed by the accumulated average of their grades across the year. Somehow, I had scraped through! I was off to Castleford Grammar. I had arrived and I had a bike to prove it.
In the event, I struggled at grammar school. I had no interest in Latin or the other subjects on the traditional curriculum. It’s a shame I didn’t pay more attention to languages though, given my later travels. After a French test where I scored seven or eight marks out of a hundred, the teacher took me aside.
“I gave you five of those because you’d turned up and put your name on the paper.”
I was good at spelling and English, brilliant at sport, but that was about it. One year my science teacher wrote in my school report, “He is lazy.”
“Well, that’s it then,” my mother said on reading it. “It can’t get any worse than that!”
The following year, with the same tutor, the report read, “He is bone idle.”
I had done it! I had exceeded even the damning report of the previous year. I had graduated from being “lazy” to “bone idle” and was very proud of myself.
Eventually, the school conceded defeat. It was possible to leave at fifteen in those days and they told me that I was wasting my own time as well as everyone else’s. I would be better applying to technical college. There I could learn a trade and prepare for work in the foundries or mines. So I applied to Whitwood Technical College, only to be refused entry. My cousin Catherine worked in the office there and saw the reference the school supplied. She told my mother in embarrassment that it was the worst she had ever known them receive.
We contested the decision. The College relented and let me in. For the first time, I began to do well and before long I was an apprentice mechanic at Kellingley Colliery.
I enjoyed working down the mine. I liked the banter, the strong bond and camaraderie between men who worked in hard, physical conditions. I enjoyed the challenge of making equipment work in the dank, dark conditions far underground. Kellingley was known for the width of its coal seams, at around six feet among the widest in Britain. Neighboring pits had seams just eighteen inches to two feet wide. To work them, miners lay on their sides to pick at the coalface. Kellingley was fully mechanized, but conditions were still challenging. The floors of the seams were so soft that the metal props sank into them. We often worked in cramped spaces. The place was tough and the talk was ripe. I was no prude, but for a young man with evangelical convictions, the language and stories could get a bit much. Men teased others during late shifts that colleagues from earlier shifts were even now around at their houses visiting their wives. If you were different in any way you became a target. You might be deemed too fat or too thin, too short or too tall, or you had spots, ginger hair, very curly or straight hair, wore glasses—whatever it was, your colleagues homed in on it. It was incessant. It could be harmless and funny at times. Often it was merciless. You had to be resilient and confident in yourself. You had to stand your ground. Many couldn’t face the relentless baiting and found other work.
This was the work and world I knew, so to leave all that and apply to Bible college was to enter a completely new dimension. Undeterred by Elim’s rejection, I persisted. The more applications I made, the more rejections
