A Clerical Murder
Category:
Action/Thriller
The Introduction followed by the Prologue
INTRODUCTION
It is known beyond doubt, that beavers do not have engineering degrees yet they build dams with expertise. Nor does the crime writer have to be a convicted criminal to write a crime novel. It should then follow that in this novella, I need not have knowledge of things supernatural or divine. This however, is not the case. I have much baggage in this department. I should come clean from the start.
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The UK is largely a post-Christian country if we gauge worship attendance figures. However I have been in the past, a son of the manse, a Jewish sympathiser, a West African Presbyterian missionary, a worker in a Roman Catholic school, a Humanist observer and a Baha’i supporter. I have lived with Sunni Muslims in the NWFP of Pakistan and I married an Anglican.
So how did this ecumenical boiling pot lead to me being, at this stage of my life, agnostic? This being a view that there is no proof of either the existence or non-existence of any deity, but since any deity that may exist appears unconcerned for the universe or the welfare of its inhabitants, the question is largely academic and that their existence therefore has little or no impact on personal human affairs and should be of little theological interest. Yet the Ghanaian Akan Twi proverb ‘No state is permanent,’ speaks to me. The future is an empty chapter at present.
This novella I remind you is not solely a book about faiths but a crime novella. Ummm ....an interesting combination.
Prologue
I came from Kirriemuir in rural Angus, to Shawlands in Glasgow, aged eight. My first day at primary school there was a seminal experience of considerable educational and religious magnitude.
Miss Dick demanded that we work out a sum on the board and proceeded to stroll up each row of pupils like a viper whose tongue was ready to pounce on an errant mathematician. The problem I had was I knew there was no long division in Kirriemuir. (I believe they have it now.) My ploy was to score out the sum and start to draw it in again as Miss Dick passed by. I knew if I could survive this day, then my older sister would be able to instruct me in this advanced mathematical mystery that night.
‘We do not make a mess like that,’ I heard. An eerie silence prepared the class for the day’s ritual torture. I was dragged out to the front. The viper struck. Twice in fact with her Lochgelly manufactured leather belt, the likes of which I had never set eyes on before. I tried hard not to cry as my fingers tingled in red hot pain. I was sent back to my seat without any instruction in how to go about solving the sum and so anticipated another trashing that afternoon if we returned to this dark calculation. Morning break could not come quickly enough.
That was when I was approached by a caring pupil whose surname I had never encountered. Leslie Hecht felt sorry for my morning difficulties and befriended me with a very strange question.
‘Miller, are you a Jew?’
This was not the time to reject the kindly voice I was hearing. Somewhere in the make-up of my ‘son of the manse’ background, a phrase kept itching to be heard. Ah yes, Christ was King of the Jews. I could now reply with confidence.
‘Yes, I am a Jew,’ I said pleased with myself.
‘Then bring your yarmulke on Friday. That’s when we have Hebrew lessons.’
‘My what?’
‘Yarmulke. Your parents must be reformed Jews. Your school cap will do.’
The next couple of months were less traumatic than that first day at Shawlands Primary but my father, who was minister of Shawlands Old Parish Church, was also the school chaplain. He asked me what I was enjoying at school, probably to see if I had an arts leaning or a science preference.
‘Hebrew,’ I said.
‘Hebrew?’ clarified my father who had studied Greek and Hebrew at St. Andrews University as part of his divinity degree.
‘Yes. Baruch hata Adonai. Elo-henu malech ho-olam, ha’tov, va-ha’me-tev,’ I said.
‘Why are you speaking Hebrew, Miller?’ ‘Because I am a Jew, Dad.’
‘No, you are not.’ he replied as my eyes fell to the ground. At that moment I realise no more bar mitzvah’s of my friend’s older brothers would come my way.
Several years later, when I was a student, I flew to the States with Camp America in the summer months. It happened to be a Jewish camp I travelled to. Beautiful Lake Onota, in the verdant Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts nestled at this site which had served the New York Jewish community for three generations. There, they were not surprised that I spoke Hebrew. They assumed I was a Jew until we got ready to swim in the camp pool. I was certainly not a Jew after all.
Three months later I was working for the Presbyterian Church in Ghana. I was there from 1972-1978. It was there I met my Anglican wife. Membership seemed open to all adherents in her mother church - except for us.
When my wife met the vicar of the church in Wigan, in preparation for our January wedding, he was somewhat concerned to find her fiancé was, not an Anglican, not English, lived in West Africa and was not present. The Anglican Church did not open its doors to everyone it seemed, at that precise moment.
The Anglican Bishop of Liverpool was to be notified and consulted before progress could be made for our marriage. And so the famous cricketing Bishop, David Shepherd, gave his blessing on our marriage and the great personal event took place in January 1978.
The following year, we returned to the UK from Tema in Ghana. I enrolled to study a post graduate degree in West African traditional religions, geography and the history of colonial Africa. There I found a multitude of faiths mixed at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. Jews and Moslems, Hindu and Baptists mingled with Sanskrit poems and readings heard in the corridors. We drank coffee and smoked from Turkish Aykoc Meersham Sultan pipes and I made many friends of different faiths, in harmony with different belief systems.
After graduating, I was offered two jobs. One was in Surrey and the other Stirling. With a family in mind, we preferred to head north and I found work as an educational social worker in St Modan’s Roman Catholic Secondary School, in Stirling. These were happy days in which I engaged in the rites of that denomination but when I left three years later, I was more than ever convinced that religion in schools should never be on a compulsory basis – as in France.
I became a reporter to the children’s panels. Over the next twenty years, I was a reporter in Kilmarnock, Irvine, Ayr, and finally as Regional and Authority Reporter for the south of Scotland. A Hearing meant that at every meeting there were three panel members. Robin Wood was an excellent member and held a high position on the Council for Secular Humanism. He gave me magazines and I attended some Humanist conferences, ironically some were back in Stirling. There were Jews, Baptists, Methodists, Atheists, Salvationists and Congregationalists – all caring panel members making decisions in the lives of children, influencing young lives in a positive manner and, in turn, influencing me to a significant degree.
After I retired, I knew a Policeman who also had a restaurant. He was a Muslim. Farook Ahmed’s niece was killed in the tragic Earthquake in south Asia of October 2005. He met me in town. As he knew I had been the reporter, asked if I would go to one of the camps to help the children who had lost parents and their dwellings in the disaster. He had in mind that I would play with and teach the young children. Accordingly I travelled east with paper and crayons, several glove puppets and a mouth organ.
But there was trouble at the Mundihar camp in the Islamic Republic of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan when I arrived. Aid had come flooding in from wealthy countries and the farmer and his wife, who had donated their land for the tents, could not cope. Some of the aid was taken by the farmer’s wife to the local town’s people who had not been affected by the tragedy. A meeting took place in the camp grounds. It was chaired by a Brigadier of the Pakistani Army. He was deciding if the farmer’s wife should be prosecuted for her illegal distribution of aid.
I stood up and told the assembled circle of interested parties that when a major disaster occurred, the world-wide response was immediate. Money and goods were rushed to the area but so often, whether in Asia or Africa, the local networks were traumatised and understandably slow to get organised with a distribution plan. I had sympathy for the farmer’s wife as she had faced this problem and then sat down. The Brigadier stood up and pointed his finger at me.
‘You are not a Muslim,’ he said placing me on edge. ‘You are independent. You will be the camp manager.’
And so I became responsible for the care, protection, feeding and supplying the needs of 24,500 Sunni Moslem victims of all ages, of the earthquake.
The camp had its own Imam. His name I regret my memory escapes me but his English language was clear, educated and beautifully descriptive. But his wish was to make me realise Islam was the only way of life. Yes, Christ Jesus was a prophet but no more than that. He was persuasive and persistent. When I left, I did not reject his ranting but saw all religion as part of a human psyche trying to find the meaning of life.
Let each use his or her senses to find that meaning but remember religion requires faith and faith is not fact. Nor should anyone be prevented to choose their own vehicle of faith and certainly no one has the right to prevent individuals to leave their set of beliefs to acquire another, or none at all.
So these are my somewhat unusual if not unconventional exposures to different religions over my lifetime. These encounters, I accept must influence this novel, for writers rely on their experiences and what they know and have learned.
So why have I written this book?
There is a hunger to understand the forces of religion. They can drive the politics of good and also the powers of evil. They can create acts of great kindness and acts of sheer evil, death and destruction. It is worn ostentatiously by some and covertly by others. Their way is the best way; the only way, if only that were true.
This novel looks behind the denominational beliefs to find the essence of a common human experience – the very values of what it is, to be human.
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