Life, Laughter, and the Lord: An Autobiography

By Jenny Rawlings

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: May 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483630793

Jenny Rawlings

My life has been packed and interesting through my varying careers and my walk of faith. I have been privileged to experience miracles and other awesome moments during my time and feel that they should not go unshared.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Jenny Rawlings.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 04/20/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

0-800-644-6988

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

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Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: The Early Years

The Build-up of My Family

My First Five Years of Life

My Primary School Years

Chapter 2: My Secondary Education and Start of Work

The Lower School Years

The Middle School Years

From Upper School to Work

Chapter 3: Entering Paid and Voluntary Work

The World of Photography

Stepping onto the Path of Volunteering

Chapter 4: Growing in Faith and a Change of Career

Faith and a Partner

The Joys of Motherhood, and a Seaside Landlady!

Chapter 5: The Bigger Picture

From the Eldest Sibling to the Youngest

Chapter 6: The Beginnings of a New Era

The End of My Marriage and the Guest House

Everything New: Beginnings, Home, and Work.

A New Man in My Life and More Voluntary Work

Chapter 7: From Rags to Riches

The Last Will and Testament

The Boys’ Education and My New Work

Ghosts Galore and a New Work Experience

Chapter 8: Further Faith Experiences and My Boys’ Careers

A Closer Walk with God

My Sons’ Career Stories

Chapter 9: Prison Work and Authorised Ministry

Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone

Not Ordained but Authorised

Chapter 10: Reflections on ‘The Way, the Truth, and the Life’

How I Feel about the Church Today

Dedicated to my sons, Darren and Kevin

Preface

I have never written a book before, so at the ripe old age of sixty-nine, I must have been feeling brave to write this one. I was pleasantly surprised how well my memory has held out for fine details and given me the result I was striving for.

I never knew much about my parents and realised how important, to me, it is to know about their lives.

My two sons would not know much about me had I not written this book, so I would recommend the idea to all who feel they have a literary legacy to leave behind.

I have been privileged to encounter some rather strange and inexplicable moments through my life, and recording these for others to read seems the right way to share them.

Having completed my original manuscript, I allowed some friends to read it and had some very positive feedback:

‘You certainly did a lot in your life!’

‘Very interesting!’

‘Couldn’t put it down.’

‘Well written and linked together.’

If you have a sense of humour, you will find some amusing stories here. If you have a faith, you will find this book has some stories of encouragement. If you are, like the author, looking for the unknown, you will find this inspiring. As you read through each chapter, you will get to see the personal development and growth.

I hope you enjoy the story of her life as much as those who encouraged her in the beginning. I strongly recommend it as being a fascinating read.

Roger Rawlings

*     *     *

Chapter 1

The Early Years

The Build-up of My Family

Life is like a journey, and we each make this journey from our birth to our death. There are times when we are in control of this journey, and there are other times when we are not, and if we look back over our journey, we can sometimes discover those times. This is the story of my journey which contains many facets of life on earth, some traumatic, some sad, some wonderful, some awesome, and some rather humorous. For me, my life has been packed full from early age to retirement and beyond, and in this book, I have covered a great deal of ground.

So how did this book come into being? It was about eighteen months ago, when my younger son said that I should write a book. What me? Apart from minutes of meetings, a few reports, and some assignments, I have never written anything consisting of more than 2,000 words. When I developed spinal stenosis and my mobility grew less, I kept getting a nudge to write a book. At first I ignored it, but it kept coming back, louder each time: ‘Write a book’. So here we are.

I am going to start with a little information about my family background. I know very little about my mother (Lois Barnes) other than that she was born in 1902 in Hull, Yorkshire, and from about eleven years old through some of her teens was brought up in a convent, because her own mother had died of diphtheria quite young. Mother also lost a sister, Dorothy, born in 1900, with diphtheria, a common illness in those days which has since been eradicated with the use of immunisation. She told me that all her sister’s belongings were burnt except for one coat which my mother wore and consequently contracted the same illness. However, unlike her sister, she pulled through. Mother also told me that her father was a musician, teaching the piano and violin. What she didn’t tell me was that he was a bricklayer by trade—I found out this and more through research. She had an older sister called Florence, born in 1896—who by the age of fifteen was in service in a place called Emsworth, Sussex,—and two younger brothers, Kenneth, born in 1904, and Harold, born in 1907. Uncle Ken was the only one I never met. They lived in Hull, in Yorkshire, initially but moved down to Westbourne in Sussex, near to where Florence was working, before Harold was born. My maternal grandfather’s name was William Henry Barnes, born in 1870, in Spalding in Lincolnshire, and my maternal grandmother was Caroline born in 1869, in Worcestershire. They married in 1895. Caroline died at the age of forty-two when mother was only ten years old.

My father, William Thomas Turk, who was born in 1891 at Brookland, came from a large family of eleven children, but I can only remember three sisters and two brothers. However, after some research by a friend of mine, I now know that he had seven sisters and three brothers. His sisters were, starting from the eldest, Lucy, Florence, Bessie, Jane, Eliza, Rosa, and Alice. His brothers were all younger than him; they were George, Dive, and Frank. George was killed in the war and is mentioned on a list of those who died, in Brookland church, on Romney Marsh. He was in the 2nd/5th (Territorial Force) Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment. He died on 4 September 1916 at the age of twenty-two. He is buried at Acheux British Cemetery, Somme, France. Row A and part of row B, including George’s, are the earliest graves in the cemetery. None of us children ever heard about Uncle George. Their parents had eleven children in sixteen years, but families were inclined to be large in those days. I don’t remember any grandparents when I was small, so I missed out on that generation, which I feel is quite sad. Due to this research, however, I do know that my paternal grandfather was John Thomas Turk, born in 1862 at Ivychurch, Kent, and my paternal grandmother was Lydia, born in 1865 at Fairfield, Kent. My older sisters seem to remember my father’s mother looking after a Dorothy Kate as if she were her own, she was born in 1909 making her four years younger than Alice, the baby of the family, and she is registered as a granddaughter. We think that Lucy, Florence, or Bessie must have had an illegitimate daughter as they were old enough to be her mother, and they kept her as part of the family.

In her early twenties, my mother became pregnant from a liaison with a sailor whilst living either in Hastings way or in Margate in Kent. In 1925, she had a daughter and called her Kathleen. Kathleen always regretted that she knew nothing of her father and interestingly enough mother never named our father on our birth certificates. Where the father should have been named, it just has a line through it; hence, we all took our mother’s name. A year or so later, my mother saw an advertisement in a paper, for a housekeeper to a ‘Looker’ (the name for a shepherd on the Romney Marsh), which she answered, and to her delight landed the job. This was how she met my father. Apparently, he was married and the only information I have about his wife is that she went blind and left him. My eldest sister tells me they had a son. There was never any mention of a divorce. It wasn’t the done thing in those days.

So let us come back to the family and see how it grew. When Kathleen was four, Pamela Joan was born in Tenterden Hospital. She was followed by three boys in succession, Arthur Anthony, born in a house called Little Scotney, New Romney, Ronald Wyndam, born in Becket’s Cottage, Fairfield, and Dennis Guy, born in 2 Church Villas, Ness Rd in Lydd. We think mother stayed with two of father’s sisters when she had Dennis and Ronald. Another girl, Olive Alcott, born in Payne’s Bungalow, Old Romney, then Raymond John, born at Woodruff in Fairfield, followed by Lois, born in Sussex, at Outlands Cottage, Juries Gap, Camber. Interestingly, I know that our grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather were all born in Sussex, and finally, the author, Jennifer Eileen, and you will read where I was born later. It appears that every one of us children was born in different places. Not an easy life for our parents with all that moving around and an ever-increasing family. Pam was born in 1930, and I was born in 1941, so mum had eight children in eleven years. Because my half-sister, Kathleen, called our father ‘uncle’, we all called him ‘uncle’ and so this was our term for ‘father’. We were never corrected to call him ‘Father’ or ‘Dad’. We always referred to him as our father, never our dad. There was very little close association with him, as a child should have with a father, and other than producing us, we appeared not to be of much interest to him. I maybe wrong but that is the way I perceived it; my older siblings may have other thoughts on that. The only exception to the rule for me was when I passed my eleven plus, he told various people on the farm and in the village. Then I think I was temporarily the ‘apple of his eye’.

My First Five Years of Life

I was born at midday on Sunday the 28 September 1941. We were living in a thirteen-roomed house, on a farm called Godhall in Brenzett, at the time. This is a small village situated on the Romney Marsh, and this particular house has an underground passage to nearby Snargate Church. There is another place with a similar underground passage to a nearby church, the Woolpack Inn just off the A259 as you approach the road which takes you over the border to Sussex. This underground passage leads to nearby Fairfield Church. These passages were used for smuggling in the old days but have since been boarded up. Tobacco was stored at Snargate Church according to the Romney Marsh history books. I remember going back there with some sisters and brothers when the place was derelict, and we saw this passageway all boarded up.

Having already mentioned my father was a shepherd, my birthplace Godhall and being born on a Sunday, would you not agree it was a good entry into the world for a Christian? When I was still a baby, and remembering these were the war years, I contracted bronchial pneumonia and was very ill. All I would eat was calves’ foot jelly, and I would have died but for a lady neighbour, who lived a short distance away. She sent letters all over the world to get this calves’ foot jelly, and kept me alive. This neighbour’s name was Mrs Buzzy, and she kept bees! How quaint is that? While on the subject of bees, I will always remember the time when my youngest sister and I visited another neighbour, Mrs Parsons, about half a mile or so away. She was very distressed because she was inundated with wasps. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said to us, ‘I am killing them by squeezing their tail ends, but they are still managing to sting me!’ We enlightened her gently by telling her that it was the tail end that they sting with.

When I was eighteen months old, the family moved to Blackhouse Farm, down Featherbed Lane, in Brookland. My earliest memories are being pushed out in a pushchair, and one day, when I was being held in my mother’s arms, as she stood by the back door seeing my siblings off to school, I said, ‘When can I go to school?’ and she said, ‘You will be going soon enough.’ I think I was about four at the time. Sure enough, the year passed soon enough, and it was time for me to start on my path of education.

I just feel I ought to mention here that not long after we moved to Blackhouse Farm, my elder half-sister, Kathleen, ran away from home. She deceived the authorities about her age saying that she had passed her eighteenth birthday, got away with it, and joined the Land Army. Because of this, we lost contact with her for a number of years as she later met with a Scotsman, Jimmy Craig, married him, and moved right away. They had three daughters, Katriona, Fiona, and Isla. I believe he worked for the coal board. She had her husband believe that she was an orphan, and when she did make contact with us, my brother Ronald visited her on a barge on the Thames where she was living at the time. When her husband came in from work, she introduced Ronald as an old school friend.

My Primary School Years

The primary school was in the village, one-and-three-quarter miles down the lane, and travel was by taxi which was, I believe, paid for by the education authorities, although I seem to remember my mother mentioning that she paid a farthing a week towards it. Just before my fifth birthday, I started at this school which comprised of two classrooms, one for the infants, with a Miss Probert in charge, and the other for the juniors, with a Miss Reynolds in charge. She sometimes brought her young son Peter to the school, and I think she may have been a single parent. This second room had a large black bogey stove to heat it up and old-fashioned desks, you know the ones with the lifting tops and inkwells set in. Strange things one remembers from early school days, like the time one child poked a bead up another child’s nose causing great consternation; the occasion when ice covered the river bordering our playing field, and one girl, Gillian Bowditch, was blindfolded and then dared to walk down the middle where a hole had been previously made. Fortunately, she missed it! There was the day my mother had asked me to go over to the post office, in my lunch break, to buy a postage stamp. During the afternoon, I remembered it was still in my pocket, so I opened up my desk to put the stamp inside for safe keeping. Unfortunately, I was not quick enough and was seen by the teacher, Miss Reynolds, who gave me the cane! I didn’t have any orange peel to rub on my hands beforehand as I understand this stops it hurting so much! The discipline in this school was as such: when we were infants, if we were naughty, we had a ruler across our hands, but when we were juniors, we had the cane. Teachers were very strict in those days.

One poor lad in the school suffered from epilepsy, and you could bet that whenever he had a fit, he was in the wrong place. Once he fell into the river face down, another time into the fire place. Unfortunately, he never had any warning when they were coming on. We had two large brick-built shelters in the playground, and one day, my brother Raymond had been naughty and hid in one of these shelters, and as a younger sister, I found this all rather amusing. My brother Dennis, on the other hand, came to grief in the same shelter. He was assisting another lad in bringing out some logs to keep the bogey stove burning. The lad who was picking them up and throwing them to Dennis hit him in the eye, accidentally, and scarred the retina at the back of his eye. This affected his sight from then on and gave him a split image in that eye. A lesson to be learnt I thought. In his latter years, this had worsened, and the sight in that eye was almost non-existent, and it was touch-and-go recently as to whether he would be allowed to continue driving. He does not like driving long distances now, and night driving is also difficult for him as he also suffers from Glaucoma.

When I was in my last year of primary school, I remember being called up to the teacher’s desk with two other pupils, and we would have what she called, ‘intelligence tests’, mental arithmetic, and other questions and answers. I thoroughly enjoyed them, but can’t think why. This was in preparation for our eleven plus examination.

I loved living on the farm as a child. Sometimes I would go round the field with my father in lambing season and watch him helping the sheep to give birth. Then after the birth, if the lamb had any difficulties in breathing, I quite often saw him stick a finger into