Heimlich or Unheimlich

Yesterday I decided to call by the church and found a group of young fellows in the porch - not just the early-teenagers I've been seeing a lot of lately, but also a few older lads who were around a lot a couple of years ago and have been absent for quite some time. I eyed them up a bit to make sure nothing was obviously amiss and then headed off for a bit of visiting.

As the light declined I thought I'd pop back to check all was in order, and found Candlestub Clem talking to two young police officers of mixed sexes. He'd got into some sort of altercation with the older boys and been shoved. He is very obviously not the most hale and hearty of men and this was no joke, clearly. While the police were tying all that up and I was sweeping chips out of the porch, another chap, who seemed to have some problems in both physical and learning respects, came over and complained about people barging into him, paying no attention to his disabilities. 

Today is the end of the Week of Prayer For Christian Unity and I was not at Swanvale Halt but at the Baptist Church in Hornington as their guest preacher. There I met a man whose son, a man with learning difficulties who used to live in the village, came to worship with us now and again. 'He's settling in very well in his new place', he told me, and then went on, 'Swanvale Halt is a hard place to live sometimes. There's a lot of families who have a hard time and people with disabilities don't always get treated very well. Hornington is more middle-class and although people may be a bit more careless they aren't usually positively unkind.'

This is not the image 'the village' has of itself, and which everyone almost without exception reports to me, that it's 'friendly' and that people look out for each other. But the existence of a substratum of casual unkindness is no surprise, and worth thinking on.