E49:What childhood illusions have you had shattered as you were growing up?

For the student, this essay should prove easy enough, since childhood and growing up are recent experiences. For this writer, it is not so easy, the growing up period being rather a long time ago. However, it is said that as we get older, childhood memories become much sharper, so I hope that what will now be written is based in fact and not in fancy!
I was lucky enough to have good parents, who gave me a secure background and who were ambitious for me to achieve success. in life. Some children then, and perhaps more now in Britain, lacked this basic advantage. Almost from birth, these children are neglected, often ill-treated, subjected to violence or abuse. Few are given incentives. They grow up believing that the world is against them, and quickly become street-wise , concerned with self-protection, and using violence to get something out of life. Childish illusions are knocked out of them almost from birth. Their view of life may be distorted, but it is realistic.

As a more fortunate boy, my first illusion was that life is essentially fair, that people who merit life's rewards always receive them, and that the tragedies of life are somehow deserved. It took the death of my best friend following a sudden terminal illness to shatter that illusion. That episode, and at a later stage, the deaths of so many of my contemporaries in the Second World War, finally convinced me that life is not a tight moral framework. It was not until many years had passed that I began to perceive the answers which a religious faith supplies. The obverse of that coin is that life often is fair when one hopes for a little unfairness. I remember having to take a History exam for which I had done little or no work. The night before the exam, I prayed hard for the few questions I could answer which would give me a pass. The right questions didn't come, and quite rightly I failed.

Children brought up with a religious background believe that prayers are always answered. One day, as a small boy, I had been stopped by my father from doing something I wanted to do, and I was angry. It came to bedtime, and prayers, finally to 'God bless ...' So I said, with my father present, 'God bless Mummy, and Grannie and Grandpa, and my dog, and that's all!' It took me some years to realize that God takes a rather more sophisticated view of our prayer life.


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