Everyone had a piece of paper pinned to the back of their shirt. Everyone was given a coloured marker. The assignment was to go round the room writing on everyone else’s back an adjective that applied to them. As we were all leaving theological college at the end of the week, everyone was as positive and encouraging as was humanly possible. When I took my piece of paper off and had a look at it, I found variations on a theme: “BRAVE”, “COURAGEOUS”, “FEARLESS”. I was very proud of this, until a friend explained that it was one of the running jokes in Yes Minister, and meant “completely crazy”.
Putting aside the question of my sanity, for which there are, or used to be, testimonies, I suppose my old friends might point out that this column is evidence that they were right all those years ago.
I used to be afraid of so many things. Really afraid, viscerally afraid. There was a relentless grinding sound which could be heard in the distance and came closer and closer, very, very slowly. I’d hear it in my dreams and wake up terrified. It was decades before it could be identified. It was a road sweeper. Had I, aged two or so, been sitting on the kerb with my feet in the gutter when it made its first appearance? There were witches, which would get you if you weren’t asleep by the witching hour, whenever that was, and the abstract shapes in the bedroom curtains which my sister said were monkeys’ skulls. There was the dark and being left alone in it. If I woke up in the night crying, though, there was a chance that my father or my mother would come and pick me up and take me into the kitchen, where the light was on and where they were drinking tea and eating biscuits, and I was comforted.
A few years later, the fears included dead birds, which I would cross the street to avoid, and death itself: I’d lie awake for hours exploring the inevitability of my own extinction. There really was no way out, was there? Once you were alive and here in the world with your head on the hot pillow you were doomed. The penny-in-the-slot mechanical execution scene in the Museum of Childhood did not help. Or maybe it did. If you watched carefully, just before the curtain closed, the head bounced back in place on a small spring. Maybe it would be like that for us.
Looking back on all this in my sixties, I give myself a pat on the back. I’m no longer afraid of the road sweeper, nor the curtains nor the dark. I’m no longer afraid of dying of embarrassment. If it hasn’t happened by the age of 40, it never will. In fact, I’m not afraid of dying, nor of death, which are two different things. I’m still afraid of becoming homeless, but I’m not alone in that. It feels as though we are all travelling along a potholed road with a terrifying drop on one side and a sheer cliff on the other, with fires and landslides, drones and bombs, greed and cruelty and only the narrowest path between them. “Be not afeard,” I say and then add “the isle is full of noises.” Shakespeare, of course. The Tempest, echoing the King James Bible that was published that same year.
“AFRAID”, “Be AFRAID”, “Not be AFRAID”, “Be not AFRAID”, “Sore AFRAID” and “as AFRAID” take up a column and three quarters of eight-point type in my ancient Cruden’s Concordance, Alexander Cruden’s once-indispensable masterpiece of 1737 that lists every appearance of every word in the authorised version of the Bible. It’s “be not afraid” that most interests me, though I note that fear is all around us and it’s not just the sinners and the wicked who are trembling. Someone once told me that “do not be afraid” is the commandment repeated most often in scripture, and, without checking this for myself, I’ve gone on to repeat it from the pulpit and in Sunday school. Let’s see: 19 instances in Cruden, from both Old and New Testaments. And 23 instances when we’re told someone was afraid. “Afraid” by itself is a mixed bag, since it includes “the Lord is my strength, of whom shall I be afraid?” and three instances of “none shall make them afraid” and a few other variations on that theme, along with all the occasions when people were very much afraid. That’s before turning to the five and a half columns on FEAR.
There’s a lot of fear around, no doubt about it. I’m comforted to see that the righteous know fear at least as much as the wicked. Take heart.
