I Was A Teenage Quaker, I Still Am

My period as a teenage Quaker was brief,
briefer than my being a teenager. I found them
through being the first secretary of my local CND,
whose early meetings were held in the Quaker meeting house,
a building that was put up in 1704, 60 years after the peak
of popular Quaker belief amid the English civil war,
after which, when non-conformism was rife,
it meant exclusion from the instutions of the state,
and Church of England, such was the strength of self reliance
that was required to survive being ostracised by the state.

I was a very weak outsider: my commitment as a Quaker
foundered rather fast. In the world I might have liked
I would like to have had Quaker parents. 

Though even in the comfort of the 1970s it was a hard path to follow. 

I left the Quakers To 'sow my wild oats', until eventually
I had my own front door in a quiet place, from which
to shut the world out, where I could realise I was 'there',
whereever 'there' is - the place of radical quiet and rest
that was what attracted me in on that Quaker Room,
in the Gansborough in which I was a restless teenager.