Background Geoff wrote for this website. It isn’t in the book: Building the Iron picks up the story.
The men, he hissed, in the company of their women, who were ‘Jezebels dressssed in rrred!’
When you’re new you don’t ask too many questions in case people think you’re a bit twp. So I decided ‘free will’ was just the admission fee, and watched the collection baskets go round.
Visiting preachers were the real entertainment. One talked about rewards in heaven, and I knew about rewards: they meant money, for information. What information could I give him, and how much would I get? They just don’t explain these things properly, do they?
Then came the lay preacher from some remote village, sent to attack the heathens of the big town. Slight of build, with an Adam’s apple that bounced as he poured out his venom, he left the pulpit to look into the whites of our sinners’ eyes. We should have been in chapel every night, he said, not “propping up the bars, playing darts, playing skittles and drinkin’ alco’l.” The men, he hissed, in the company of their women, who were “Jezebels dressssed in rrred!”
He hadn’t noticed one of the chapel’s oldest members in the back pew, well into her eighties, there for Easter in a bright red outfit with matching hat and gloves. Every head in the chapel turned. At the last hymn she slid quietly out of the door and into the night, and wasn’t seen again for some time.
