Category — Autobiog

Up into the loft on Saturday morning and again today. Why? We’re preparing to move house (once a few intervening difficulties have been negotiated away) and there’s the best part of 20 years of stuff up there. Eighteen years, actually, but who’s counting?

It’s a lot of stuff. Boxes and boxes of books - my favourite kind of stuff - that have had to be sorted into four piles: ‘keep’, ’sell’, ‘charity shop’, ‘chuck’. Old pictures - some of the frames are better than the pictures inside them. Electrical gear, cables, old electronics bits. Old papers. Courses prepared by Erica for the Baha’i Education Committee and the original Training Institute for England. Ancient suitcases. My Aunt Eveleigh’s wonderful collection of bulky family photo albums/scrap books - she left them to me when she died many years ago. Our collection - incomplete - of Baha’i Journals going back to about 1968. Bedding and an old futon.

A Baha’i Journal from February/March 1968 reports the first time the name of Baha’u'llah was mentioned formally and a Baha’i reading was included in Westminster Abbey as part of an ‘Observance in Silence with readings and music’ from the holy books of six different religions (Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Baha’i) on the even of Human Rights Day and at the beginning of the International Year for Human Rights. The Observance took place on 9 December 1967. The Dean, the Very Revd Eric Abbott, lead the Observance and introduced each of the readings. The Baha’i passage was read by Dick Backwell, who was an Auxiliary Board member at the time.

Another Baha’i Journal, from November 1974 this time, lists me as a newly appointed member and treasurer of the National Teaching Committee, along with Shahram Mottahed (Chair), Vivian Bartlett (Vice Chair), Wendy Thorne (Secretary), Kenneth Goode, Wendi Momen, Hazel Mossafaie, Iain Palin, Pamela Poulter. I was a hopeless treasurer, it has to be said. Kenneth Goode, Wendy Thorne and Pamela Poulter have all passed away during the intervening years, but the others are still alive and kicking. Shahram’s been in Canada for many years, and I served for the best part of 11 years on the National Spiritual Assembly with Iain and Wendi.

The same Journal shows that I had been on a summer teaching project in Shetland and had got a teaching post and a house there during the project. Oddly (and sadly) it makes no mention of Erica, who was also on the project and who was also responsible for finding the house - and that was the School House, Trondra, where we lived for almost ten years.

Amongst the papers were letters and scripts relating to my very first outings on the BBC World Service in 1991, when I started to write and present Words of Faith (which later became Pause for Thought). One of the letters I received at the time came from Sean Hinton, who was living with a nomadic family in the Altai Mountains in Mongolia at the time. He was 1,500 km from Ulaanbaaatar and 150 km from the nearest town (6 hours by jeep, then 2 hours on horseback). Sean’s letter starts like this:

Today is what I would call a “less good” day - a “low” day - even a “bad” day! It is early August and the snow is pouring down around my yurt tent - we are at 3,500 m and summer is over in the Altais. At 3am this morning I awoke with indigestion and a howling storm was ripping at the ties of my home and I had to go out, torch in hand, in the whipping wind and sleet, to lash down the canvas cover of my felt tent.

Sean goes on to describe how, trying to escape from the questions (always the same questions by Mongolians who meet him for the first time) pressed on him by visitors to the family he is camping with, he goes to his own tent to say prayers for patience. He’s alone for seven minutes before the visitors from next door come crowding into the ger - he clearly must now be feeling lonely. They fiddle with everything and he turns on the radio to distract them and cheer himself up.

Though the storm crackles fill the SW bands - suddenly like a shaft of light English speaking radio fills the air - home, country, one’s own people. “And the rover from Collingwood is bashing away - what a ripper”. Yes, Radio Australia with the Saturday Aussie rules from Melbourne. Is there no place to hide? [Sean had lived much of his life in Australia.]

Then in desperation I am twirling through the fog of crackles and hiss when, nestling in an almost imperceptible gap between Radio Alma-Ata in Kazakhstani and the loud beat of some regional Sinqiang pop station, there peeps out the dulcet tones that can only be the BBC … I hold my hand up fiercely when my nomads protest at missing the Sinqiang Top 10 and silence them, and hear distinctly “the teachings of Baha’u'llah”.

And the broadcast fades in and out - more snippets “love and respect for all members and obedience to the decision of the group” - “‘Abdu’l-Baha”. And then it ends - “BBC crackle hiss. “Words of Faith” fuzz fuzz, “Barney Leith”.

Sean was not the only Baha’i to hear this broadcast. Rocky Grove in the Andes, mountains half a world away from the Altai, heard it. Amatu’l-Baha Ruhiyyiih Khanum at the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa heard it and wrote:

I have enjoyed so much the way you presented the Faith over the BBC World Service recently, which, incidentally, came in very clearly here in Israel. I just thought I would let you know. Loving greetings, Ruhiyyih.

I thought I had lost these precious letters, but there they were in the loft, all part of the archaeology of my life. I had forgotten just how much these World Service short talks excited people. I have done many short talks about the Baha’i Faith on the World Service, Radio 4 and Radio 2 since then, but none have ever called forth the warm welcome that these very first efforts of mine did.

What else? Books, Ah yes, books to reflect so many different interests: railways, religion, philosophy, psychology, politics, art, fiction, layers of my life. Pulling the heavy boxes down the precarious ladder from the loft and sorting the books projected me into an archaeological dig down into those layers. So much I had forgotten of my own life emerged like treasures from what my dig unearthed (if you can ‘unearth’ what you bring down from the loft) from the earth of my past. I have ruthlessly sorted the books into those I must keep (the minority), those I can sell secondhand, those that will go to charity shops, and those that are just too damaged to keep - they will be thrown away.

And photographs. Friends from the early 1970s. Our children in Shetland and elsewhere. Groups of Baha’is at long-forgotten meetings and conferences. Photographs from the time I edited the Baha’i Journal in the early 1990s. Pictures of those who were living and are now, sadly, dead.

I am loath to jettison any of these traces of years that have passed from memory, but jettison I must.

Technorati Tags: autobiography, Baha’i, Bahai, human rights, inter-faith, interfaith

I recently found the website of the first school I went to, St Teresa’s in Minehead. It’s Minehead First School now, but it was St Teresa’s in the early 1950’s. I must have gone there in around 1952 or 1953, when I was 4 or 5. In those days it belonged to an order of Roman Catholic nuns. One former pupil, whose reminiscences are on the school’s site writes:

The nuns belonged to the Order of St Louis, which was a French order. Many of them were French or Irish and even the English ones spoke some French. Our French teacher in the senior school was a French nun called Mother Marie Theresa. We called her Bonjour Mere. Ladies lived in the convent with the nuns. They were drearily dressed spinsters. Some of them had bedrooms in the school and in the houses next to the school. Miss Davis was one of them. They spied on us when we were in the town and reported us for not wearing our hats, eating in the street or bad manners (like not holding a door open for an adult, walking through a door in front of an adult or just being silly). Mother St Gerard gave out the bad reports in assembly - there were never any good reports!