This month I begin my eighty sixth year and like most pre-war babies, have vivid memories of air raid sirens. I recall seeing Sheffield burning at night during bombing raids on its steel and manufacturing industry. We even had the occasional bomb dropped on us as the Dorniers and Heinkels turned but needed to lose weight to speed up their journey home.
Horses and carts dominated the lanes but, as children, we were happy and spent most daylight hours in the fields. Two years later it was Lancaster bombers filling the sky as they flew east to deliver the same medicine we had taken earlier. Like the German pilots, thousands never returned.
In 1945 whilst we were enjoying our VE day and VJ day street parties, we children didn’t think of the German and Japanese children who had nothing to celebrate, and probably less food than we did. I do, however, recall my Great Uncle George, praying for them in the Chapel Vestry as he had for us months earlier.
The Privy was a shed at the bottom of the garden, and local journeys were made by walking, cycling or by the Mansfield, Trent, and Midland General bus companies. Respectively Green Red and Blue coloured they had different routes within the Derby, Nottingham, Newark, Sheffield triangle, but by war’s end all were owned by the Government, as were the lorries of the British Road Services Company. By 1950 the entire business of moving goods and people including telephones, mail, and parcels, plus the entire energy sector of Britain was owned and run by the State.
MPs were particularly important people and even in 1963 I had to ask one to get us a phone at home. I was employing two hundred people in a factory some miles away, but they couldn’t reach me out of hours. I digress to add that there were no calculators in those days, so product costings, production planning and wage rates for the Company were calculated using my slide rule and log tables.
When comparing the past and present, it is difficult to say whether society is better or worse. The word better suggests improvements but what constitutes an improvement? The survival rate of mothers and babies has dramatically improved, and in France every woman now has a legal right to an abortion, meanwhile at home, figures show that nine million abortions have been conducted since it was legalised fifty-four years ago.
Huge changes have been wrought by technology, and it is interesting to think that I was using a typewriter in 1980, but by 1990 I was on my fourth computer which was a CAF laptop with Ability Plus, WordStar and Lotus 123. By 1999 a colleague had taught me how to get recipes from Japan via the Web and within a year I was a dab hand with six web browsers. Things moved on when he told me about Go Ogle? And from then on Google was the door that opened the the world to ordinary folk.
Via the Net the wise and the foolish had equal access to information. Some would turn that information into knowledge for the benefit of others, some would use it for selfish or malign purposes. Now Artificial Intelligence has the same options. Good or Bad?
From 1939 to 2025 the world changed as never before. However, human nature has not. We do understand more about the world around us than did our ancestors and more about our bodies and brains. Amazingly however, we like them, also sense there is more to our existence than what we see or measure.
Religious thought and the Bible in particular has opened minds to a Realm of Transcendency.
For readers on a journey from the transient to the transcendent the video ‘Creed’ found on Pastoralguide.uk/Videos, might be of interest.
Bon Voyage.
Note the capital P in Pastoral.
Peter Wells
View from the Pew 