I ought to declare a tribal interest in Patrick Collinson’s latest instalment of collected essays: he and I both grew up in that unjustly overlooked and astringently beautiful county, Suffolk, which figures largely in his text. Our respective childhoods embraced the polarity of Suffolk religion in the mid-20th century: solid Prot, of course, but divided by the great contraries of Church and Chapel.
I was the parson’s son: on Sundays I sat in the Rectory pew in the chancel of our parish church, staring at the monument to one of my father’s predecessors, the Regency baronet who had turned a Tudor farmhouse into an elegant parsonage (rather faded in splendour since his day). By contrast, Collinson recites with deep relish his genealogy of purest Chapel, ready-made to alarm my youthful Anglican priggishness: Ipswich Bethesda Strict and Particular Baptist Church; Colchester Railway Mission; Great Barton Independent Chapel, plus an array of independent evangelicalism, Primitive Methodism, Quakerism.
John Calvin, a Godot-like absent presence in Collinson’s essays, might have discerned a divine calling in two such complementary childhoods, a providential designation as church historians of that now much-altered East Anglian world.
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