大象传媒

I was eighteen and lived in North London and had just started work in the City. My boyfriend, six years my senior, was training for the ministry in Cambridge. Fifty miles separated us, so when the opportunity arose for him to "practise" preaching he welcomed an invitation to take a servic at a church in Putney. It meant a weekend visiting me! The service was supposed to take the form of an appeal for a charity.

On the Sunday morning after a night of bombing, we caught the tube and made our way to the church for a service at 11am. At 10.30 we arrived, but there was no church; it lay in rubble, nothing but rubble.

The congregation would be arriving in fifteen minutes. What to do? The empty manse next door was still standing, minus its windows, and we got in - I don't remember how - found some brooms and set to work, sweeping up all the broken glass. Some old forms for seating were retrieved from the far end of the rubble that we climbed over, and brought into the manse, ready to greet the shocked members who were arriving by this time.

Needless to say the service that ensued was a short one, but the evening service was to come, and that presented a fresh challenge. We took ourselves into Kew Gardens where sitting on the grass, my boyfriend had to prepare an appropriate sermon. The result must have been a success as afterwards the Seesion Clerk, who was the leading light there, came up to me, beaming, and said "Your father did very well in the circumstances."

The experience had obviously put years onto my boyfriend, later my husband, and as for the charity it was ignored: perhaps it was true that at that time charity had to begin at home.

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