I was the first child christened in the old church when it became UR, so it was put in the hands of the congregation in the village to develop my spiritual awareness. A Presbyterian. A Billy Boy. The Scottish Kirk. Like George Best and err .. Ian Pai
sley. I can sing you The Sash and Follow, Follow if you like. But, like Bestie, religion never left a huge impression on me.
Sunday school has left a blank canvas in my mind. I can remember not wanting to get up and go down in the morning, prefering to kick a ball around the fields or play marbles with ball bearing 'steelies', but nonetheless our Bally and I would drag along behind the Munro girls as we went and sat in the wooden pews with an echo reverberating on the high ceiling of an empty building. The soft light through stained glass windows.
My only recollection is of being awarded a book and having to go to the front to collect it off the vicar. The Good Samaritan in cartoon-like form.
Bally and I eventually got out of Sunday school by getting work. We shared a paper round that kept us out of church, rising early to bundle and bag up the heavy broadsheet Sundays and walk around Rothbury in the quiet of morning as the village slumbered.
I never feared God. I first confronted death at a very young age when my Nana passed away. Crossing the small wooden Coplish bridge I stopped and wouldn't go to see her at home in the Woodlands as I feared she would be a skeleton. It is my earliest memory. When you die, you become a skeleton, my young mind deduced.
In my imagination I saw dust in the shaft of sunlight breaking through the chink in dark curtains with my Nana in the room. I couldn't comprehend it and cried. But the thought of God and Holy reckoning never entered my mind. I just knew she was gone.
The old Border Reivers didn't think too much of the church either. They were so partial to wrecking them after they'd launched a raid on a village that the Archbishop of Glasgow laid down a curse on them.
It's never been officially lifted and the fact that a stone commemorating the curse is in an underpass in Carlisle was blamed on the floods that swept through the city two years ago.
That would probably have made tham laugh as much as the raucous belly-aching that they no doubt did when they read the original proclamation. Ticked off like naughty schoolboys by the church.
I blame the godparents!
