Bierton Strict And Particular Baptists, A Testimony of David Clarke

212 with double gates and half moon drive way. We owned this house apart from a £24,000 mortgage.

We were able to purchase a three bedroom detached bungalow in Snailbeach for £37,000, which we purchased out right with no mortgage.

When we came to sell it and move back to Luton in 1988 it was sold for £41,000. This value had risen by £4000. At that time we bought Graham Gardens for £78,000 and had to raise £42,000 by way of mortgage. This was only a small 3 bedroom detached house however the awful thing to us was our old house in Bierton was up for sale for £199,000. These house prices had risen so much due to inflation we had to buy a house way down on valuation the list. Had we stayed at Bierton we would have owned a house worth nearly £200,000 or alternatively moved from Bierton to Luton we could have owned the Luton house with no mortgage. Instead we were in an inferior house worth only £78,000 but with a mortgage of £42,000.

Both my wife and I found this difficult to swallow and I felt robbed. This was to be a hurt to me for many years.

Whilst at Luton I began to recover but was still unhappy about the church situation.

I did not fell ready to re enter the Gospel Standard cultural set up due to the awful problems I had encountered whilst at Bierton. At the same time I was not free to get involved in churches which where not Calvinistic due to my experience in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. So we found our selves un-churched again. However I began to feel a lot better coming out of sever depression and I began to enjoy the simple things in life again and I could smile once more.

Discipline A Problem Teaching At Luton College During all this time I still held on to my job and taught at Luton College.

Discipline however was not my strong point. How to keep control of a class of 24 teenage students from various ethnic backgrounds was not an easy task. I adopted my own methods, one might say a manic method.

When I was training to be a teacher at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic one teacher, taking the subject of discipline in the classroom told us only of one method. This was my course in classroom management.

This lecturer had to teach a class of craft students and wanted to assert his authority before they got out of hand. Craft students are noted generally to be awkward to manage. He decided this would make sure he would have no problems with them later on in the course.

During the class when he was teaching technical drawing, he asked one of the students to go out to the building sight and bring to him a large plank of wood. When the student returned with the wood the lecturer took it from