Protest

by Josie Smith.

I am not by nature a marcher or a flag-waver or a displayer of placards.   But there are two protests I felt keenly and was not able to make, years ago, and still recall.

The first was in my Primary School days.    We walked to school alone at that time, or with friends we met on the way (something my great-grandchildren find incomprehensible in these fearful days when parents accompany their children to the school gates.   Didn’t my parents care, they want to know) – or sometimes in my case running to try to keep up with a long-legged and fast-walking male teacher at the same school, who lived next door to our family, made no concession for my little legs, and obviously found me an encumbrance.    It was quite a distance.

The school was led by an old-style head teacher, who was nearing retirement age and was remote and austere and frightening.   Each morning, he would lead the assembly, and we would dutifully sing the day’s hymn, and recite the Lord’s Prayer which we had learned by rote and didn’t mean much to most of us – but then he would call up to the platform those who had broken school rules or in other way transgressed.   And that was the point at which his cane came out.

I shall never forget a quiet boy called Michael, who was persistently late for school.    And just as persistently he was caned for being late, on the platform in front of the entire school.    After morning worship.     Did anyone ever ask why he was so often late?    Was he what these days we would call a Young Carer, having to do a lot of work at home to make life possible for a sick mother? Did anyone ever enquire into his home life? What effect this routine beating had on him I can’t guess, nor why it just went on happening, but my grown-up self still feels a sense of outrage.

I left that school when we moved house and I was nine years old, and one was not permitted to question the behaviour of grown-ups.

The second occasion was in church, when I was older, but still diffident.   Some small children were whispering to each other, making a bit of a disturbance and putting the elderly local preacher off his stride.    He stopped speaking, leaned forward with his hands grasping the pulpit Bible, and addressed these kids in a stern voice.     ‘God won’t love you if you’re naughty!’ he said, before resuming his task.

My whole being was shocked.     I wanted to stand up in my pew (we had pews then) and say ‘BUT THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT!’   Did he not remember that bit about ‘while we were yet sinners’?    The Grace of God is never conditional!    To this day I feel – again – a sense of outrage.     My adult self wants me to have protested then, but I was only a young member, and was surrounded by elders of the congregation who did nothing.     And one did not answer back in church.

It is often said that ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’.     So, I thank God that there are people who have the guts to shout, and march, and protest, and DO SOMETHING.    Heaven knows, there is so much that is wrong, so much hatred and injustice and cruelty and suffering in the world, and doing nothing is not an option.    So I am on the side of the marchers, the whistleblowers, the little solitary Greta Thunbergs pictured on the school steps, the victims of ill-considered decisions – and all who, in whatever way, speak truth to power.    Though my active days are behind me, I can still use words, to Them in Westminster, and to local government, and to businesses, and in encouragement to those who have the energy I no longer have; to light their own candle in the darkness.