Kings Norton Parish

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.’ (Cicero, Roman consul & orator, 106-43 BC). 

There is much looking back at the past in this month’s edition. Articles about the history of Kings Norton are not rare in these pages; but this month, we have a superabundance in the form of three different windows into our parish’s past. 

As she approaches her 90th birthday, Margaret Jelfs tells Michael Kennedy about her youth in the village which she and generations of her family have called home; Sylvia Fox brings us insights from the funeral of a previous curate of St Nicolas’, the Reverend Brian Pearce; and we embark on what will be at least a year-long odyssey through the recollections of a former member of the church choir, Alf Rogers, who used to delight readers of this magazine in the early 1950s with his series entitled ‘Looking Back’. It’s time his memories were revived. 

If you add to that a story from the Old Testament and another from the days of the Norman Conquest, you have quite a collection of tales about ‘what occurred before you were born’. Cicero would have approved. 

Then there is the Easter story, which appears to be firmly fixed in the past until you study it more closely and realise that it takes us outside time altogether, reaching simultaneously backwards and forwards to change both history and the future. Our individual pasts and futures too, if we will let it. No wonder it’s sometimes called the ‘Paschal Mystery’. (from ‘Pesach’ - ‘Passover’ in Hebrew). To find out more, do join us during Holy Week. You would be most welcome. Dates & times are on p.11.