Materialistic Assumption 5: An Innate Sense of Human

navigating materialistic minefields

How did Peter die? Well, I had some part in it, although an innocent part. After leaving school at fifteen and a half I started work in preparation to become an apprentice engineer in a firm of manufacturers of pulley blocks and lifting tackle. The factory was situated in Bute Street, Cardiff, more popularly known as ‘Tiger Bay’. One of the very first mosques in the UK was in the same street as the factory, but I didn’t know anything about diversity in those days, even though a cross-section of the world had gathered in Tiger Bay.

My wages at this time were £1 and 15 shillings a week, a huge increase over the money I had earned as a paper-boy. I gave my mother, Doreen, all my wages, out of which she gave me back the 15 shillings (75 pence in today’s money). I was anxious to spend this money, so I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder and happily spent hours recording songs from the radio. The start of the 1960s exploded with new music, new stars, new freedoms, and I was excited to be part of it. Peter, like many younger brothers, wanted what his older brother had. So, after school one day, he took my tape recorder onto the garden lawn, fixed up his home-made extension lead and happily lay down to listen to the songs. Mother was talking to a neighbour while sitting on the garden wall. Then it happened; one of the two bare wires making up the extension lead disconnected. How this happened is still the subject of speculation. Peter leaned over on the humid grass, caught hold of the live wire and instantly electrocuted himself. Massive internal brain damage, we were told; death by misadventure, the coroner’s verdict. The most heart-rending thing is that my mother saw this horrific scene – her son being electrocuted in front of her eyes and she could do nothing to save him! Coincidentally, the song he was listening to on the recorder was ‘Halfway to Paradise’, a popular song by pop star Billy Fury at the time.

Dad’s response to Peter’s death was to switch off to enquiry, watch TV and automatically assume there is no God, because if there was how could He let such a terrible thing happen to an

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