Highlights In The Shadows: 5 - My Father's Apprenticeship
“He had an intimate knowledge of the Bible having studied it intensively at school. He displayed this knowledge in his later years when Jehovah’s Witnesses called at his home. He would invite them into the house and debate the Scriptures with them. He would soon have them checking through their Bibles, often to no avail, trying to win their argument.’’
Owen Clement recalls his good-humoured father.
My father's five years as an apprentice were probably the most carefree of his life. I could fill many pages recounting the many pranks and amusing incidents he and his fellow apprentices got up to during those years.
It is important to remember, that my father was a storyteller in every sense of the word. Because of this, as children, my sister Gloria and I continuously questioned his credibility by saying, '"Is that right Mum?" My mother could not lie to us. The opposite was also true. If we ever confronted her with something with which she did not wish to perjure herself, she would always say, "Go and ask your father."
As children we were fascinated by his amusing and adventurous stories based on real or imaginary events, especially those during his years as an apprentice. When our school friends came over to play, we often asked Dad to tell them about the cobra, or the tiger, or what happened when - etcetera. He seemed to further embroider those tales with each telling. Gloria and I would be as entranced as our friends as each time he relived the event with his eyes either sparkling with glee or wide in terror, as the occasion demanded.
Dad was also an inveterate tease and had, what can only be called, a wicked sense of humour. Mum was always saying a 'Ru-pert', followed by her giving him a playful smack on his arm, after which she would inevitably start giggling.
Despite his sometimes-ribald humour he was a good broad-thinking man who behaved more as a Christian than many of those who regularly attended church. He had an intimate knowledge of the Bible having studied it intensively at school. He displayed this knowledge in his later years when Jehovah’s Witnesses called at his home. He would invite them into the house and debate the Scriptures with them. He would soon have them checking through their Bibles, often to no avail, trying to win their argument.
I remember him telling me once that Jesus could not possibly have been a blue-eyed fair-haired Anglo-Saxon as he is often portrayed, but "a small muscular hook-nosed Jew burnt brown from working at his carpenter's bench out in the hot Middle-Eastern sun". I am reminded of this every time I see the religious icons depicting the traditional fair-haired blue-eyed Christ.
© Clement 2006
