The weather had been rather dull when we arrived, but suddenly there
was a glint of sunshine, and a grind-organ that had wandered up the
street started playing just opposite. Two couple of children began
to dance. A girl with a jug stopped to watch them, and mothers with
babies came to their doors. A window was thrown open opposite and a
whole family of children leaned out to see the fun.
Bermondsey was gay, and after we had gone the "Student" perpetuated
the fact in a water-colour drawing which he sent to his cousin
afterwards.
In the evening, however, the sounds would be more discordant, also
the Student was running a Boys' Club, taking several Sunday services
at the Mission, visiting some very sick people, and attending to a
multifarious list of duties which left me breathless when I saw it,
knowing too how many casual appeals always came to him and that he
never was known to refuse a helping hand to any one! Nevertheless
it was there, and in six weeks, that the _Lord of All Good Life_ was
written!
"Then came the war," and the Student shall tell us in his own words
what it meant to him. Writing still to Tom Allen, who had also
enlisted, and afterwards also gave his life in the war, he says:
"For myself the war was, in a sense, a heaven-sent opportunity. Ever
since I left Leeds I have been trying to follow out the theory that
the proper subject of study for the theologian was man, and had
increasingly been made to feel that nothing but violent measures could
overcome my own shyness sufficiently to enable me to study outside
my own class. Enlistment had always appealed to me as one of the few
feasible methods of ensuring the desired results....
"I was interested to hear that you found the ---- so illuminating as
regards human potentialities for bestiality. I think that I plumbed
the depths between sixteen and a half and twenty-two. I have learned
nothing more since then about bestiality. In fact I am hardened, and,
I am afraid, take it for granted. Since then I have been discovering
human goodness, which is far more satisfactory. And oh, I have found
it! In Bermondsey, in the stinking hold of the _Zieten_, in the wide,
thirsty desert of Western Australia, and in the ranks of the 7th
Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. I enlisted very largely to find out
how far I really believed in the brotherhood of man when it comes to
the point--and I do believe in it more and more."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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