Gabrielle #37 – Christine

An erotic Easter sermon.

The White Cross of Trealaw.

I grew up next door to a chapel. A huge, austere thing established by Congregationalists in the 1880s and expanded after the Welsh Revival in the early 1900s – the most significant religious awakening the country has ever experienced, and the root of the modern megachurch in Europe.

The services were passionate in a way that’s rarely associated with the religious character of the UK. The Church of England, with its dour face, polite hostility, and kill-yourself-boring hymns, still lays claim to that, which tends to obscure the amount of fire and brimstone evangelism that has existed and still exists today (though most of it, when not being extolled from the rafters of black Baptist churches, is smuggled away in container-style office buildings. Can you think of anything more English than bashing bibles on flat-pack furniture?). Welsh Revivalism had the same spontaneous outbursts of singing, prayer, repentance, confession and conversion you see in America’s “big tents,” transplanted into dank grey stone buildings in the Valleys. One write-up of the chapel in question, published in the Western Mail in 1904, describes “extraordinary scenes of religious fervour” that lasted for days.

Obviously, by the time we moved in, that culture had largely died along with the miners the village was built to accommodate. Looming two-storeys high, taller than everything around it besides the hills, the chapel always seemed out of place. God’s house plonked in the middle of a terraced street cluttered with galvanised steel sheds and Fiat Puntos, like someone’s dad standing in the middle of a 100 gecs pit with his arms crossed. It’s still there now. The more time passes and local history feels not even like a memory, but an entirely lost world, the more incongruous it looks.

Neither of my parents are religious. My dad thinks you become worm food when you die and my mam is sort of a witch, but I spent a lot of time in that chapel. Mainly during school holidays, because it was the only place you could stick kids for free that wasn’t someone else's house. Everyone’s parents worked, the ones that didn’t were usually drunk by mid-morning, and all the grandparents would be run ragged by Tuesday afternoon. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, me and the other kids from the terraces would become a nuisance. Nothing bad, like. Nicking things from Happy Shopper, chucking stones at our own houses to knock the pebble dash off, occasionally someone (me) would split their head open flying over the handlebars of a bike while seeing who could go down The Big Lane the fastest. If you were interested in keeping your kid in check round there in the 90s, it was chapels and rec centres by day, falling asleep under a pile of leather jackets in a working men’s club by night.

Every July, this group of American missionaries would come over and run a free “sports” camp, which is exactly what it sounds like: recreational activities with bible classes shoehorned in (though they likely saw it the other way around). They lived in the church for six weeks. Slept there and everything. Woke the whole street up singing “Kumbaya” at the tops of their lungs every morning at 6AM sharp, including weekends, which pissed my mam off to no end. Still, my parents sent me over there every day while they were at work. That's where I met her.

I can't remember her name, her face, or where exactly she was from. All I remember is that she had mousy brown hair parted in the middle and was good at football. The image I have her now is almost cartoonish – lanky, fair, dressed like a teenager off The Simpsons with high waisted knee length shorts and a plain t-shirt tucked in. Let’s call her Christine.

I was seven or eight, maybe, the first time the missionaries visited. I was mostly indifferent to them. I was in it for the activities and I was used to hearing bible stories from my grandmothers so that part didn’t bother me. I also preferred being around older kids, so in retrospect this little “camp” probably satisfied something every pre-teen is desperate to feel: a sense of camaraderie among a group of teenagers that actually want to hang out with you. Plus they were American, which to a sponge-brained kid raised by 90s alt rock and Nickelodeon immediately meant “cool,” even if they were literal virgins in sandals.

But I liked Christine. I wanted to do all the things she was doing, and I wanted to do them the way she did. I was never competitive but I rushed to her side of the street for anything team-related and constantly tried to angle the full beam of her attention towards me by pulling her away from the group to teach me how to do keepy uppies. I didn’t even like football. It’s considered a transgression to acknowledge this in relation to children but there must have been an erotic charge to the whole thing because the main thing that struck me about her, and the only thing I remember now, is how she looked and carried herself. Tomboyish the same way I was, which was validating, but older and more assured and good at something that wasn’t “for” girls, which was aspirational. Plus, I have a thing for brunettes now.

When she left, I started writing her letters. The programme, which was quite obviously designed to convert children to Christianity, encouraged you to pick one of the missionaries as a pen pal. Obviously, I chose Christine. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember the feeling of having someone to write to. I remember the excitement of scribbling some exotic address (which was, let’s be honest, probably “Mississippi”) on an envelope and the thrill of getting one back – a letter, addressed to me, with loopy handwriting and a bunch of weird stamps on it. I’m sure there were photos of us enclosed in one of them, or at least of her. I remember the warm glow of someone taking an interest in me, and I remember it feeling like the end of the fucking world when my mam found the stack letters in what I considered to be “my” drawer of the family computer unit and ripped them all up. Apparently the contents went into great detail about how, if I didn’t accept Jesus Christ into my life, I was going to burn in hell. I spent the following summer somewhere else.

My parents still live next to the chapel, though it’s not a chapel anymore. It closed in 2021 but the building is still there, looking exactly the same on the outside as it did when I was little, if a little worse for wear. A private developer bought it for dust and he’ll probably turn it into flats. In the meantime he’s given the keys to a bunch of young lads who fucked a load of weights in there and are using it as a gym. Can’t fault that. There’s still fuck all around there for young people so ironically the chapel is arguably “serving the community” more now that it’s out of commission than it has done for the last fifty years.

Whenever I go back to visit, I can see them nipping in and out of the side entrance from the window of what used to be my bedroom, which directly overlooks the chapel. I am God’s greatest voyeur. In response, he delivers an act of vengeance in the form of leaving the security light for the side door on. All day, all night, for as long as I can remember – even in the intermission between the Christians and the lads when the building was vacant. All the streetlights get switched off at midnight so in the early hours of the morning, besides the occasional car, it’s often the only light for miles. It’s so bright it throws a big white crescent across the back garden and slices between the bedroom curtains, leaving a radiant line on the ceiling in an otherwise pitch-black room. It looks like someone slashed deep space with a knife.

When I was a teenager it irritated me so much I started sleeping with a t-shirt over my face – a habit I’ve struggled to break as an adult even though it makes me look like I’m being waterboarded. The light still does its thing too, creeping across the grass and crawling up the wall as soon as the sun goes down. An ever-watching eye.