It was always known as ‘the chapel’ or even ‘church’, never Mount Zion; but it was the closest that Glascoed got to an official religious establishment. St Michael’s church apparently existed, but in a mythical, invisible manner for us children, like a unicorn. Whenever the school wanted to do a religion/education collab for Easter or Christmas or Harvest festival, it was to the chapel we primary-school kids all went. How, I can’t remember. Did we all walk, did we get ferried there by hordes of parents in cars, did the school rent a bus? No idea. It was all part of the magic.
From the mid- to late-1970s most of the Monkswood kids on the ROF estate attended the chapel for Sunday School. We were given no choice in this matter by our parents, who did not attend church themselves but presumably viewed Sunday School as an indicator of good parenting, like ensuring that children cleared their plates and were polite to their elders.
The classes were organised and run by Mr Knight, who must have either been storing up a great deal of advance credit in Heaven with his pious deed or genuinely concerned by our eternal but very doomed souls. I strongly suspect the latter, because he was just a very nice person – and a perpetual optimist. On this site there’s a 1930s photo of children from the parish, and we see a young Dick Knight at the end of one row, unaware of the terrors that the 1970s would bring him.
We were largely a band of feral brats who wanted to spend Sundays rampaging around the local woods, not studying the Bible in a cold and draughty chapel. I’m not sure Mr Knight ever converted anyone for the Minister to baptise, but they certainly had a darn good go with me. Fortunately, at the age of seven they realised I had to cooperate in the process to at least some degree; babies were allowed, indeed expected, to scream in protest at a CofE christening, but it was a bad look when baptising those who were supposedly there of their own free will and volition. My reluctance had little to do with religious passion or aversion, and everything to do with my mortal fear of the outdoor baptismal pool in the graveyard, which was only ever seen covered with rusting corrugated iron sheeting. Presumably it was utterly freezing and full of spiders and other unmentionables. In truth, I have no idea if it was even in use at the time, but we kids certainly believed it was coming to us in punishment for our many and varied sins. This was probably not the message of love and spiritual rebirth our teacher believed was being spread.
Apart from this corrugated hole in the ground, the graveyard was quite literally our playground before and after the Sunday School hour. It was unsurprisingly great for hide and seek – all those gravestones! Poor Mr Knight had to channel an exasperated sheepdog in rounding us up and coaxing us indoors each week. Once inside, the younger children were herded into the small annexe and coloured in religious pictures, while we older ones sat in the pews and reluctantly listened to terrifying Old Testament tales of retribution and death.
Once a year in summer the chapel organised a trip to the seaside for the children of the parish. For a nominal sum to cover the coach cost, we would be driven to Porthcawl and let loose on the beach. I don’t ever remember rainy weather on these trips, so they had clearly been blessed from above. As a young thing of seven nothing delighted me more than digging in the sand all day; the next year, we grown-up eight-year-olds applied suncream and giggled at our mags (Jackie! Blue Jeans!), then took daring unsupervised walks to the arcades to watch people play the slot machines.
At some point in the late 1970s, an ROF churchgoer set up her own Sunday school at Monkswood church, and the parents seized their opportunity to do less car driving on the day of rest. That put an end to our Sundays in the chapel, and it must have devastated the attendance figures at the Sunday school. I’m willing to bet that Mr Knight was secretly relieved.
