Without Warning & Only Sometimes

by Earnest 3 Replies latest social entertainment

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  Earnest

  Another biography will be published on 18th August 2022 - Without Warning & Only Sometimes by Kit de Waal who writes about her childhood in a mixed-race family in 1960's Birmingham (UK). It is not only about JWs but her "descriptions of church meetings are deliciously evocative" (The Guardian 08/12/22) :

  “Time does not pass. The clock does not move … I live with the dread that one day when my young muscles rebel, can take no more stillness and the brutal confinement of my very self, I will stand and strip naked and burst out of my skin. Not today, please not today.”

  BBC Radio 4 will be reading exerpts from it each day this week (Monday - Friday, 15 - 19 August at 9:45 BST) and repeated (Tuesday - Saturday, 16 - 20 August at 00:30 BST).
  
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  stan livedeath

  i wonder which congregation she attended. I was at Hockley, Birmingham UK--1960-66.
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  Earnest

  Not likely the same congregation, Stan. In the reading this morning she says they lived in Moseley, probably Sparkhill, and so she would have attended the Moseley congregation. She describes it as "an old building in a shabby part of south Birmingham [which] is cold and damp with hard seats, paraffin heaters, crackling lights. We sit in rows of six and it begins with a song ... Two hours on a Thursday, two hours on a Sunday."
  
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  stan livedeath

  /\ /\--i grew up near that area--Balsall Heath.

  There was a cong in Sparkhill at that time.