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In the Footsteps of a Hero

Ronnie Bray

I was raised in post-Victorian England and infused with the belief that Britannia ruled the waves. In concert with this, I harboured a boyhood dream to be a sailor, visit exotic places, and have the time of my life. Out of my dark moments, I was quite jaunty, which was a prerequisite for a life following in the footsteps of courageous seafarers.

When I left school, I got my first job in Sykes and Tunnicliffe's mill at Almondbury. I was an assistant to Vincent, the weaving shed foreman. He was a nice patient man who took pains to teach me all that the job involved.

After three months, I foolishly believed that I had learned everything and quit the job. I went to the Labour Exchange where I told the interviewer that I had an inspired vocation to be in the navy. He was unimpressed, told me to grow up, and directed me to the Co-operative Wholesale Society as a driver's mate, delivering groceries.

My vocation as a mariner went into hibernation in some dim and neglected corner of my mind. Of course, wanting to feel the wind and spray in my face was mere romantic whimsy, but I had fooled myself into believing otherwise. Unfortunately, a chance event revived the lifeless aspiration, and as it thrust it before my face shouted, This is what you want? This challenge taught me an important lesson.

In 1952, I enlisted in the Army. In April 1954, I flew to Egypt to maintain British and international interests in the Canal Zone. At the beginning of August that year, having secured the Suez Canal, at least temporarily, I was transferred with the Green Howards infantry regiment to Cyprus. From the Suez Garrison, we drove alongside the canal to Port Said, and waited to embark on the Royal Navy corvette, Empire Shelter. We had nothing to do but eat, wait, and complain, in the furnace of Egypt until our hegira.

I thought nothing could be worse than languishing in the sterile confinement of that place. I was wrong. Now so close to following in the footsteps of Drake, Raleigh, and Nelson, if I had known what lay ahead, I would have wandered off into the desert in the footsteps of Joseph and lost myself among the pyramids. Success in life depends on following the right hero!

This spell of enforced idleness was broken, and before the blood-red rim of the sun cleared the shimmering horizon, we were hurriedly taken to the dockside. I boarded ship with a sense of triumph: happy to escape the numbing ennui of the compound. The Empire Shelter was tidy, small, and functional, but big enough to swallow several hundred squaddies before churning up the postcard-blue waters of the Mediterranean as we throbbed northwards to Cyprus.

My triumphalism was premature. I was rescued from a friendly bear, only to be devoured by a hostile lion. The boredom of the lazy days of the transit camp was ended, but the elation of escaping was transformed into terror as the Empire Shelter cleared Egyptian waters.

They fed us as soon as we were under way, crowding us into the mess deck, two levels below the main deck. The food was plentiful, and we fell upon it with enthusiasm. Then, with time on our hands, we trickled to our bunks.

I had never seen a clinometer before, but as I lay on my bunk to rest, it kept vigil from the bulkhead a few feet before me. I am not putting all the responsibility on the clinometer, but I warrant it did not help. In a short time, the ship was rolling recklessly, and the four-foot long pointer quivered as the bulkhead danced this way and that, marking off alarming degrees creating unusual sensations in my abdomen and throat. Red alert!

When it became impossible to tell which was moving most violently, the ship or the contents of my stomach, I made my choking way upstairs to find the latrine. I remained in the cubicle for several hours, notwithstanding being ordered out several times by a disembodied authoritarian voice. I was not fit to be anywhere but exactly where I was. They would have had to shoot me to get me out, and that would have been a blessed release!

After three hours, I emerged and lay on the hot steel deck, endeavouring not to give what little remained of my meal to the fishes. There I passed the night, moving only when we steamed into sight of Famagusta. In the lee of its ancient walls, ablaze with the day?s first brilliance, I scrambled downstairs, turned down a fulsome and detailed invitation to breakfast from grinning comrades, collected my kit bag, and dragged it up on deck.

Although I had lain in the shadow of death for twenty-four hours, I felt better the moment I trod in the footsteps of Othello. I walked down the gangplank and onto terra firma, striding away from the dockside without looking back at either the Empire Shelter, or at my fancy of following in the wake of Nelson. That fancy was down at the bottom of the deep blue sea with my dinner.

That I have learned some of life's lessons slowly is true, and some lessons I have yet to learn, but one thing I quickly learned during my brief naval career is that when the Psalmist wrote:

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,

he was not necessarily speaking the truth. My heart was fine as long as its hope of a life on the ocean wave was deferred. It was the realisation of that hope that made me sick. And that brings me to the point of all this which is, when we place our trust in our own uninspired hopes rather than discover what it is that God wants us to do, we are bound to be disappointed. But when we follow in the footsteps of Jesus, we can not fail.

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Ronnie Bray

Touched by Angels - But Occasionally by Other Beings

by Ronnie Bray

Touched by angels! Of course, that could only refer to children. The wonderful thing about these little people is that when they do something wrong we smile at them and instantly forgive them. That's because angels bring out the very best that is in us. Let me explain myself by referring to my grandchildren.

Joseph was an unusual child in that he had no desire to speak until he was past three, and kept Nick and Jo waiting a long time for his second word after he had uttered his first. It was not that he couldn't speak, or that he didn't understand language. He could, and his understanding was well advanced. He just didn't want to speak.

Tom, on the other hand, was a verbal version of white water rapids. The trick with him was to get him to stop long enough to listen. However, Tom had a secret weapon that he used every time anyone looked at him: a smile as broad and bright as the Mississippi delta. It melted all but pathologically stony hearts and those none can melt, for they suffer from the dread disease of bitterness that places an impenetrable barrier between them and happy experiences.

However, Tom's armoury was not limited to the shafts of his infectious facial beacon. He had one that was as likely to distance people from him as his smile was to draw them close: a mischievous soul. Whether he was sent to stir his parents from the false sense of the almost silent security and ever-sunny days that Joseph had led them to expect, or whether he was part imp and part boy we still are unsure as the jury is still out. However, the red-haired little child knew mischief when he saw it, and he saw it often at the end of his own hands.

Joseph, who almost always never allows any expression to play on his face, was happy with his own pursuits. He had an attention span that beggars belief. When he was two we took him to see a pantomime at Almondbury Methodist Church. He sat on Norma's knee for the whole of the performance, without once taking his eyes from the stage. He played happily by himself, his delicate fingers building structures of amazing complexity that he filled with his titanic imagination.

Tom had barely started walking when he discovered how to press the impassive Joseph's panic button. Standing along the length of Joseph's railway track, or near one of his tall towers built of interlocking plastic bricks, Tom would slide his foot slowly but menacingly whilst watching Joseph's face. He would not make his final destructive lunge until he had seen the full strength of horror in Joseph's eyes. Then, with his smile widening to include his eyes and with the full beam of an angel of blessing, his full destructive force was unleashed on Joseph's joy.

Joseph's young and tender heart broke. Tom revelled in the reaction he had evoked in his older brother. However, Joseph was not the sole recipient of Tom's unusual mind. One day, Joseph told his mummy that Tom was being naughty upstairs. Jo went to investigate and discovered that Tom had been filling a jug at the bathroom sink, then pouring water on the stairs carpet, a step further down with each visit. As Jo reached the bathroom, Tom was just turning the tap off above his brimming jug.

One look at his mother's face told Tom that the jig was up and that it was time for damage limitation. Turning the tap off, he emptied the jug's contents into the sink, handed the jug to Jo, looked her straight in the eyes, and declared brightly, "I've finished now!" Jo was too amused to be cross. How much trouble Tom avoided simply by his pleasant attitude and mile-wide grin, no one will ever know.

Each of Jo's boys was quite different in temperament and character. Yet, each had that touch of something about them that convinced everyone that they had been touched by angels. After Tom, came Luke, a robust but demanding child whose smile belied his propensity for generating horror into his siblings. When the long-awaited Alice came, to partly redress the balance of three boys, she looked just like Joseph. However, her smile was as infectious and as easily provoked as Tom's.

Jo says that her children can be little monsters, but whenever I see them, they are as cherubic as seraphim and as sweetly innocent as newborn lambs.

Perhaps it is the miracle of human life that each of us swings between heaven and hell, and are sometimes touched by angels, although occasionally we are touched by other beings. The wonder of it all is not that now and then we are rather bad, but that from time to time we are very good. It is at these times that we approach our divine potential.

The prophet Elijah had a hard time after his failure to stop the prophets of Baal. In his misery he slept beneath a juniper tree and wished to die. However, his life changed for the better when an angel touched him.

Sometimes, when I am feeling tired or sorry for myself, I look at the tumbling mass of arms, legs, and blonde hair interspersed with the occasional flash of bright copper red among the flurry, and feel myself touched by angels. Suddenly, life is better and I silently thank God, smile, and count my blessings.