The Smoking Ruins

Last week Church Club was a surprise; this week, it was a disaster. I offer you an account only because it shows that I can be doing something for twelve years, and the church for about sixteen, and it can all still go haywire out of the blue. 

We arrived at school to be told that all the Year 1s were out at Sports Day at the local secondary school. We looked at the rain, the first significant precipitation hereabouts for weeks, and thought of the bedraggled six-year-olds making their way back like half-drowned rats. The school has only just re-started mixing year groups in its activities after the pandemic, so this term we only have two Year 2s in Church Club, meaning we started very quietly indeed with two unprecedentedly sensible little girls. 

Sure enough, about twenty minutes into the session the Year 1s began to return, damp and tired - but small children don't express their tiredness as you or I might, by having a nice lie-down for ten minutes, but in activity which is even more frantic and less focused than usual. Despite Sandra's scepticism I thought we would still be able to get through a truncated version of the story (the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders) and the craft (making a little card house), because we always have in the past. The children's inability to listen to anything was marked, as was, once we began the craft, their tendency to do anything but apply themselves to the task in hand. The limited time seemed magically to melt away and we were nearly at home time with me, Sandra and Jill desperately trying to help the children complete something to take home, while a couple of the girls made unfeasibly-elaborately decorated houses and the less-careful Year 1s, more satisfied with their efforts, wrested toys from the trays on the far side of the hall and tore around with them. It was bedlam. I rounded up such children as I could for a final prayer, not without, I fear, some ill-temper on my part as Aaron responded to my demand that the toys be replaced in their trays by getting more out. 

We returned the children to their parents, a few minutes late, and not without trauma. Bobby was in tears as it became horribly clear that he wouldn't complete his house to his satisfaction; Evie was inconsolable as her roof kept coming off. I was mentally composing an email of apology and not far off weeping myself. We looked at the wreckage, and got a broom to sweep up the bits.