BBC Radio
© John Denney 18 August 2005
Childhood
I
like children. I used to be one. And looking back across half a century and
more, I remember my childhood as mostly enjoyable. I liked school. I liked being a sixer in the Wolf Cubs. I played soccer on chilly Saturdays in
winter, and cricket under blue skies on Saturdays in summer. It snowed heavily every February, and we used
to toboggan down Wakerley Hill, where the houses are now, at the risk of life
and limb. In summer, armed with some jam
sandwiches and an apple, we’d spend the whole day at
For
my tenth birthday, my parents furnished me with the wherewithal to go with my
friend Keith on the bus to
Many
things that children take for granted today didn’t exist then. From the end of Children’s Hour at 5.45 until
Television Newsreel at 7.25, the black and white telly was off the air. Does anyone still long for the White Dot, as
I sometimes do? Meals were meat and two veg.
and on Sundays a steamed pudding or apple pie.
None of your pasta or yoghourt or turkey twizzlers; curries only if
you’d served in the
And
Jesus said we have to stop being sophisticated, stop being intellectual, stop
being wary, stop being, in short, “adult-minded”, if we want to be part of
Jesus’ eternal family. He took a small
child and said
I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you
will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in
the kingdom of heaven. And whoever
welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.[1]