Things Unseen: A Book of Queer Christian Witness

Zeus doesn't answer his phone

We moved into a house on Altrincham Road in Wilmslow in the county of Cheshire, when I was four-ish. (My memory for dates and names is not great, so there is a certain level of approximation going on here.) Before that, my only real memory of substance was the ferry crossing from Northern Ireland on which my mum and I sailed away from everything I had ever known. There were toffees involved - a tin of them - and a small cabin that smelled of diesel. The journey seemed to go on forever, but then time is that much longer when you're four.

At any rate, my joined up memories began in Wilmslow. Our house was a 1960s new build, ugly in the way that was fashionable then. Altrincham road was a short residential street that ran parallel to the busy main road that took commuters into Manchester, and my bedroom faced this. Lying awake in the night I would watch the lights of the cars paint my walls with moving bars of brightness, and even now I regard the sound of traffic as being soothing, like rain on the window.

Just across this main road was Lindow Common, a large park with a lake at the centre and heathland covered in heather that is now a site of special scientific interest. Alan Garner, who wrote children's fantasy novels set around this area, chose Lindow Common as the place under which his villain from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen lived. And while we were living there a bog-body - now affectionately known as Lindow Pete - was discovered in the peat bogs nearby. He had lain there, mummified, since the Bronze Age.

I didn't find it eerie though. It was a good place to go and climb trees, or to lie down in the heather and relish the fact that under the scrubby branches you had become invisible.

Along Altrincham Road and to the right - down a street whose name I don't now remember - was a snicket through to woodlands called Bluebell Woods. I don't know how long this went on for, but I wandered there for hours.

Then, if you went further in towards the centre of Wilmslow, you could get into a larger park that ran along the river Bollin. Here I had a 'root house.' An oak, standing by the river bank, had a small cave washed out under its roots, and a child could go in there and pretend to be a caveman, or dream of lighting a fire and making it their home. I left a red clay handprint on the walls that is surely long gone by now.

To get down to either Bluebell Woods or the Bollin, I had to walk along a street of very posh houses, considerably bigger and more gracious than ours. One of them had a very handsome hedge. I can't now tell you whether it was a yew hedge or a holly hedge—it had dark evergreen foliage and red berries, so it might have been either. Yew, though, I think, because the motif of the moment of revelation beside the yew hedge is a thing that keeps turning up in my books and I must have got it from somewhere.

It was by this hedge that I had what I think of as my first religious experience.

I was walking—alone, of course—down to the woods, along pavements I had walked a million times before, and would again. The sun was out, but it must either have been very early or have just stopped raining, because there were droplets of water all over the hedge and as I walked I saw them glitter.

I stopped. Oh, the experience of the numinous is hard to describe. On one level nothing happened. The sun shone and I saw how beautiful the dark leaves and the shining water droplets were. Nothing special, right? But on another level, a swelling bubble of joy like liquid gold rose through me, time stood still, and I seemed to myself to be outside the world in a realm where everything was quiet and glorious and full of happiness.

And then after a little while it drained away, and I carried on to wherever I was going.

No particular revelation came, no words of wisdom, no commands. But the mere existence of such solid joy was new to me, and I remembered it ever since as my first experience of glory. When I hear "The Glory of the Lord shone around," I know now what that means. It means the golden light and joy, the sense of awe and gratitude I felt then for no reason beside that hedge.