God bless Aunty Sally, one of the good people

APEEL of thunder rang out directly above the house this week and it was so loud it actually hurt the old ear-drums.

I thought of my Aunty Sally because, whenever I see lighting and hear thunder, I always think of her. Even in Borneo once, as I stood in a wooden hut watching the worst electrical storm I have ever witnessed, my thoughts turned to dear old Sally.

It was Monday afternoon when skies turned black and started to rumble, triggering memories of my mother’s sister. Decades ago she was baby-sitting for my parents when an electric storm hit our West Somerset village and I guess the memory remains strong because, at the age of just six or seven, I had never seen an adult scream before.

Maybe Sally had a thing about thunder and lighting, I don’t know, but her intense alarm was caused by the fact that me and my brother John insisted on watching the lightning from the metal-lined windows of our council-house. I can still hear that lovely, generous, woman’s urgent demands that we should come away, or be fried to death.

“What would I tell your mother?” she demanded. I still have a vision of mum coming home to a pair of charred lumps looking forlorn and very dead on the living-room floor.

And so, as the storm continued for over an hour on Monday, I thought of Sally. On Tuesday her brother, my Uncle William, phoned to tell me she had passed away at her Wellington home with her immediate family by her side.

God bless Aunty Sally.

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” says Matthew 5:5. I make a rare reference to The Bible in this column because Sally was a great believer.

The whole family was, and many still are. My early years echoed to the sound of preachers raging in the little tin tabernacles of the Brendon Hills where the fear of God seemed to be upon a great many people.

A fear that, for some reason I was never able to discover, suddenly evaporated for my parents when I was about eight.

However, a profound reverence for the Christian God continued strong in Sally and in other relatives from that part of our clan. The other reason I quote Matthew 5 is because, if the edict is correct, then Sally will be one of the folk inheriting the earth.

When I think of callous warmongers like Putin or vainglorious braggarts like Trump, I sometimes see their antithesis.

She is a small white-haired woman – a person I last bumped into while shopping in the Wellington branch of Waitrose.

She is – or was – my aunt. Sally was the exact opposite of those appalling people.

Indeed, if a vast army of Aunty Sallys ruled the globe, the Putins and Trumps would not get a look in and there would be no wars.

There’d be no nastiness in politics. No cheating, or lying, or crazy jingoism, or getting one-up on others.

There would be a lot of “chapel” and a planet-full of prayer – but there’d not be a single thing designed to hurt, harm or upset others.

I write all this, not only in honour of my aunt’s passing, but also because I grew up in a West Country which was full of such people – and sometimes I wonder where they have all gone.

If you rattled off a list of words to describe these lost folk of the western hills, you’d highlight ‘god-fearing’, ‘decent’, ‘honest’, ‘respectful’ and ‘respected’. And if there was a little computerised bar under each word declaring just how decent, honest, respectful etc the person was, it would always read 100%.

I’d like to think I’m all of the above, but I doubt my readings would give such high scores. Far from it. I might be wrong, but I do not think we live in a world of such high and demanding moral standards any longer. Or, a lot of us don’t.

You could put that down to religious belief and the increasing lack of it. Back in the West Country I grew up in, just about everyone went to church or chapel - and the stringent codes laid down from the pulpit were to be found throughout everyday life. Now… well, you don’t need me to paint the picture.

The last time I thought about any of this was when I took a cab from London to Gatwick and the Syrian driver told me about his community.

The world he described reminded me a lot of the rural West Country I knew as a boy in the early 1960s. A world dominated by a profound reverence for God and filled with decency, honesty and respect. I was impressed.

But at the same time I know just how different we individual humans are.

When some people experience a crash of thunder they hear the voice of God.

Others think it’s the sound clouds make when they crash together and some know it is the noise made by a shockwave caused by an extreme expansion of air created by the heat of a lightning bolt.

The truth is out there, it’s just a different truth for different people. Aunty Sally was never in any doubt, God rest her soul.

‘The West Country I knew in the ’60s ...was filled with decency, honesty and respect...’