Recollections of a chapel childhood, by Samuel Ashcroft
An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this extract from his autobiography, published in 1894, a man looks back on the Sundays of his childhood in the 1840s and on his father, a strict chapel deacon.
Of all the days of my childhood, it is the Sundays I remember most clearly, and I remember them as one remembers a long illness: not any single hour, but the weight of the whole.
My father was a draper in a small way of business and a deacon of the chapel in Brook Street, and he held that the Sabbath was the Lord’s and no part of it belonged to a boy. On Saturday night our toys were put away in the press on the landing and the key turned upon them. On Sunday morning we rose at seven, were washed with more than usual severity, and were dressed in clothes that were too good to play in, which was, I now think, the purpose of them. We walked to chapel in pairs, my sister and I in front, where he could see us.
The morning service lasted two hours. The afternoon we spent in the parlour, where the blinds were half drawn, reading from a shelf of improving books whose titles I could still recite to you. I recall one, a memoir of a pious boy who died at nine, which I read so often that I came to envy him. We might not whistle. We might not run upon the stairs. Once, when I was perhaps seven, I was found in the yard making a boat out of a walnut shell, and my father took it from me without a word and put it in the fire, and stood beside me until it had quite burned.
I have heard men of my age speak of their fathers in that period with great bitterness, and I have sometimes felt it myself. And yet I cannot leave the picture there, for it would be untrue.
When I was ten I took the measles very badly, and for a week I did not know where I was. I have one memory of that week, and only one. It is of my father, at some hour of the night, sitting beside my bed with the Bible open upon his knee, not reading it. His face was wet. I had not known until then that his face could be anything but stern, and I lay very still, so that he should not know I had seen.
He did not change after I recovered. The toys went into the press every Saturday as before, and the blinds were drawn on Sunday as before. But I watched him differently, and I began to understand that the rules were not cruelty in him but a kind of fear: fear for us, and for himself, in a world which he believed was very near to judgement. He died when I was nineteen. Among his papers we found, folded inside his pocket book, a sum in my handwriting from my first term at the grammar school, with a red mark of ‘Excellent’ upon it. He had never told me he was pleased.
“The writer looks back on his father with nothing but resentment.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.