The Gospel According to Angel Cake
In Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s, Sunday school was not negotiable. You went to school, you played endless games of Kick the Can on the patch of wasteland we called the Bank, and on Sunday you were scrubbed, buttoned into something uncomfortable, and marched off to the Ebenezer Gospel Hall on Wern Fawr Road. Nobody sent you there out of burning religious conviction. You went because it was expected, and because it bought the grown-ups an hour's peace.
The hall was squat and smelled of floor polish and damp hymn books, and it was run by Mr Godsell, a name that practically came with the job attached. I couldn't tell you now what flavour of Christianity it offered. Something Baptist-adjacent.
What I remember is the pit.
Most of the year you'd never know it was there. It ran under the floorboards in the middle of the hall, boarded over and carpeted, so that for weeks at a time you could sit through a service directly above it without the faintest idea.
Then one Sunday the boards came up, the water was in, and an older girl, dressed in a plain white gown, was walked down a set of steps I hadn't known existed until that morning.
They held her under properly, not a token dip, and she came up coughing and fighting for air while the whole congregation sat there looking pleased with themselves, as though something had been achieved rather than someone nearly drowned.
The gown clung to her coming out of the water, and I remember looking away, embarrassed on her behalf in a way I didn't have the words for at the time and still don't entirely have now.
I watched from a pew and made a private decision, the way you do at that age with total conviction and no room for negotiation, that I would have no further part in any church that did this to people and called it salvation.
The one part of the arrangement worth turning up for was the summer outing.
A red South Wales Transport double-decker would pull up outside the hall and take the lot of us to Bridgend Park, a good ten miles off and therefore, as far as we were concerned, abroad.
Each child got a paper bag with a snack in it. I remember the angel cake specifically and almost nothing else about the day itself, beyond running about like something let off a lead and probably terrifying every duck in the park.
By the time we were old enough to know better, we'd worked out the system. You didn't need to attend all year. You needed to reappear for a few weeks before the outing and show your face, and you still qualified for the bus and the cake. Mr Godsell, to his credit, must have clocked exactly what we were doing and let us come anyway.
It was in the Godsells' back garden that I nearly finished myself off. I'd got hold of a garden fork and, in my own mind, permission to dig with it. Mrs Godsell appeared at an upstairs window shouting something I couldn't make out. I looked up to try and read her lips, and while I was looking up I put the fork straight through my wellington boot and into my foot. I've still got the scar.
Another trip to hospital, another tetanus jab, a collection I was building up at roughly the rate other children collected birthday cards.
That was Ebenezer Gospel Hall.
A pit under the carpet where they held people under water for their own good
A bus trip bought with strategic church attendance.
And a garden fork through the foot before the season was out.