by John Bourne
For more than 18 years of my life, I served as a Police Officer in Kent, in southeast England. In that time I saw many dreadful sights, I saw the depths that human behaviour can sink to, I saw and experienced hatred and violence. I also found comradeship, courage and human decency in adversity. As part of the self-discipline that being a Police Officer requires I kept a diary of those years, and learned to be a student of human behaviour in all its many forms.
After 18 years of service, I experienced the call of God into the Christian Ministry and left the Police to begin training for the ministry.
During this time, I had the opportunity to visit one of the world’s poorest countries. We live a privileged life in the West compared to so many of our neighbours in the so-called Third World. We have all been touched by television and newspaper reports of starvation and drought and its terrible consequences for millions of people. Most of us have seen so many images that suffering has less impact on us, we become tired of requests for help and our hearts can become hard and our purse strings closed. However, if we actually went to a poor country, walked among the poverty, saw the suffering, smelt the decay; surely then the effect would be life-long. That was certainly true for me, when I visited Bangladesh in 1989 with four friends. It was for all us, a life changing experience, an experience that we desperately wanted to convey to others. One of the ways we sought to convey something of our experience was by means of a diary. I kept notes during the visit and produced a 60-page diary on our return. The diary sold over 1000 copies and attracted many comments about the writing. The reaction to it struck a chord with me, I had always enjoyed writing and hoped to have the time, one day, to do some more.
The following year I completed my training for the Christian ministry and was ordained into the Church of England. Over the next dozen years, I managed to revisit Bangladesh twice more, cycle 300 odd miles from Kent to Cornwall to raise funds for the Church, go on a mercy mission to Romania and form a link with a disadvantaged parish in inner city Liverpool. After each adventure, I wrote and produced a diary. They circulated within Church circles and were all well received, and each one kept my interest in writing alive.
One of the things that worried me about being a Vicar was the requirement to preach at least once, and often three times or more every week. What could one say that was different, week in and week out? I liked the story of the new Vicar who delivered his first sermon on how Christians should show the love of Christ in their lives. It was a great sermon and warmly received. The next Sunday he preached exactly the same sermon, and the Sunday after that, and the Sunday after that. A Churchwarden was given the task of challenging him about this, which he duly did. The Vicar replied; “When you are all living out the love of Christ I’m preaching about I will move on to another subject!” I found that the way to prepare a different sermon every week was to continue with some of the discipline from my police days; to be a student of human nature, an enthusiast for current affairs, an observer of life and nature. From those sources there would be endless material to build a sermon on, applying the word of God to everyday circumstances.
Ill health forced me to retire in 2003 and I moved to the Sussex Coast. Finally, I had some free time. I now spend my days in writing. My first book Coppering The Cannon was about my first 6 years in the Police. Death of Innocence followed, together with quite a few short stories. I am just completing another novel before embarking on the task of finding a publisher. I have the plot for another novel in note form and I want to write some more biographical books, including my journey into the Church. I have much to learn, I am far from the finished article, but they say ‘practice makes perfect’. I do not believe that perfection is attainable but improvement and proficiency are. I have no particular system of writing. I try to have an outline prepared and then work to it. I am not the most disciplined of writers so I do meander away from my plan. I like to imagine the scene and I live the story and sometimes feel led in another direction or the idea does not work. In the novel I am working on now, I had plotted out the story, which involved the death of a group of people. When I came to write it, I lived the story and became so upset at the deaths that I changed it. The power of being a writer!
The idea for Death of Innocence came from my experiences in the police, where temptation is something often encountered. It comes in many forms but always has consequences. In my story temptation arises which seems to have no consequences, but of course it does. If one thinks about it, nearly every time anyone succumbs to temptation they do so believing that they will get away with it. Prisons are full of people who made that mistake, and for every one in prison there are many others who avoided that penalty, but have to live with disgrace or shame, the pointing finger, the reluctance to trust again or any other of the myriad consequences of yielding to temptation. In my story the consequences of temptation are awful, the discovery of unsuspected depths of evil shocking, and the call to reassess life’s values compelling. I enjoyed writing it; I hope you will enjoy reading it.
John Bourne was born in 1949 in Brighton, on the south coast of England. In 1970 he and his wife settled in Kent where John joined the Kent Police. In 1990, Bourne resigned to study for the Christian Ministry. He was ordained at Canterbury Cathedral in 1991 and became Vicar of Marden, Kent, and Chaplain of Her Majesty’s Prison Blantyre House. He retired in 2003 and has taken up writing, a long held ambition. In the last two years he has published one book, “Coppering the Cannon”, and two short stories.
The Death of Innocence by John Bourne is available in eBook format at the DPPstore, www.dppstore.com
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