Interview with Reggie Holme
RAE Holme:
I am sitting with Dorothy Prescott in her flat in Blackheath, London. She is an author, so my first question is going to be what kind of books she writes and what she can tell us about the influence they have?
Dorothy Prescott:
I am really a compiler of books for schools - books mostly of true stories for the various ages from little ones up to big ones. I have been doing it for 30 years now and they say that altogether I have done some 35-40 book. The last lot have been for the school assembly stories and they really do go round the world now. I hear they use them a very great deal in Australia. I have to collect my stories as best I can.
The publishers say that a million children a day have access to the books. That does not mean that they all read them every day, but that they could. I met a girl on Waterloo Station the other day. We were sitting side by side and got acquainted. When I told her what my name was she said, ‘Oh yes, when I was at school and we had morning assembly I never listened to a word anybody said until they began to read from your books, then I always listened.’
I had a letter from Australia some time ago now from a boy. He told me in this letter that he had been the leader of a gang and that they were all smoking. Through reading one of my books, he decided that was wrong and he not only stopped smoking himself but was able to lead the gang in the right way and get them all stopping smoking too. He even sent me a photograph of himself.
The infant books are all very simple little stories for quite small children which can be used at home or at school. Then you come to the junior ones which are more complicated. They have a lot of animal stories which juniors like very much, and they also like stories about people at home. Then we have the middle school who are getting a little bit older and they can take something a bit more mature. The seniors don’t really like stories, they like them to be called readings.
I really started writing books in self-defense because all my brothers were footballers. I couldn’t play football and had to do something so I began writing. After a time, I had a certain experience in my life which made me want to give my life to the best thing in the world, which was the will of God. The thing he seemed to want me to do was to write books. Collect books. I began by collecting books for the schools and after a bit discovered that the thing they really wanted was stories, if possible true stories, on all the age group So, since then, I have been compiling and collating these books of stories for schools. I have made careful indexes so that they can pick out the subject that they are talking about and find a story to match it.
The stories come in the most extraordinary ways! I even found one in a dustbin once. It was the story about the man who taught people to be kind to their horses and revolutionized horse-riding throughout Europe in the 19th century. People give stories to me. I find them in papers. I find them on the TV or the radio. They come, somehow, and they always seem to come with the age group that I am working on and when I have finished that particular book the stories seem to switch to the age group that I am going on to. It is most interesting.
I ran away from home very politely, because I couldn’t get on with my family, particularly my mother. I went to Africa and took a teacher’s training there. While I was there two young men, South Africans, who had been in Oxford and had found a new life through meeting Dr Frank Buchman, decided they want to bring some of their friends from Oxford over to meet their friends in Africa. I met them and, because I had 5 brothers, I very much wanted them to meet my brothers because I thought they were such a sound type of young man. They said, ‘Well you will have to help your brothers, we don’t know them, we can’t help you.’ So that made me have a sense of need, which I hadn’t had before. Then I had what is known as a “Damascus Road experience” - in which Jesus Christ called me to his service. I then began to realise that my writing was meant to be used in God’s service and I began to study how to do it.
What happened was that I went down to Grahamstown Cathedral in the evening to a service, because the man who was accompanying these young men was going to preach, and I was used to defeating religious people by intellectual arguments. I went down to study him and find out how I could meet him in argument. As I came inside the church and knelt down, I felt the presence of the Lord Jesus behind me and I knew that he loved me and needed me.
I, there and then, gave my life to him. That was how it happened.
Then also these young men told us that if you listen to God he speaks to you. It was what Mahatma Gandhi used to call the ‘inner voice’ and I found that was true. After a time, the inner voice began to tell me that I must go back to my family. That it wasn’t they who were wrong, it was me, and I must go back and apologise. This was very difficult because I had settled in to Africa and I hadn’t much money. But eventually I did go back and, as a result of that, my brother, who was living a life of high amusement but not very effective in the world, found a new purpose in life. He worked for many years out in Rhodesia helping with the situation there.
I invited my brother to come and meet some of my friends. He wasn’t very enthusiastic, but he came to see what religious girls were like. He went into the bar before he came and arrived very merry. I thought ‘what have I let myself in for?’. But it so happened that the man who was going to lead the meeting had had the thought in the morning not to put his clerical collar on - my brother would never have spoken to him if he had - and after the meeting I introduced my brother to this gentleman and they talked about the new life that I had found. This man suggested that my brother should make the experiment of listening to God, which he did. And the thought he had was, ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon’. He was working in Thomas Cook’s at the time trying to make all the money he possibly could. The man who was leading the meeting said to him, ‘I think you should go back to your rooms and think it out and decide whether you want to give your life to God or not.’ and he did that. He stayed there till 12 o’clock that night and decided to do it.
And then a very extraordinary thing happened to him - he went back to London to his job and on the Sunday morning he had the thought, quite clearly, to go to church. He didn’t do that as a rule. He thought ‘Go into the first church you see.’ and he went into a Quaker meeting house in which they had a long time of silence. My brother had the thought to stand up and tell them what happened to him. He didn’t know that a young journalist was going round London churches and recording everything she found there. My brother found his new experience in the national news the next day.
When he went back to Oxford, actually he hadn’t been to Oxford, he dodged Oxford, he decided he wanted to make money, and then he decided that God wanted him to go to Oxford and finish his education, which he did. While he was there he was able to help a great many other young men and by the end of his time there were 16 of them who were living this new spiritual adventure. They ended up with a great big dinner which the Dean called a ‘spiritual binge’ and hardly anybody went to the ordinary dinner in Hall that night - they were so anxious to hear what these young people had to say.
Apparently the Dean was delighted with the effect on the college. He said it had certainly needed something different and he was so glad these young men had brought it.
After that, my brother travelled with Frank Buchman and his force all over the world. He recently died, but the last 3 years of his life he spent working in Rhodesia, with black and white, to bring the kind of settlement we were hoping to see. My brother and his wife met everybody there, from the Prime Minister and his son (Smith) to the church dignitaries, black and white, young and old, and he told them all the same stories. When my brother died we had a letter from Bishop Muzorewa saying how grateful he was to my brother and how often they had knelt round the table in the Bishop’s sitting room to pray for Rhodesia, and how they then listened for the voice of God to tell them what they could do to bring peace closer.
The first time I met Frank Buchman was very painful really. I had been invited to meet him in Durban, where he had come. The first thing he said when he came in was ‘Shall we have spiritual direction?’ I knew by this time what that meant and we sat quietly waiting for the thoughts of God to come into our minds. The only thought that came to me was that I had told my children at school a lie because they had not read their school holiday task and I was ticking them off for this. One of the cheeky little girls said, ‘Have you read it?’ and I said, ‘Of course I have’, and went on to the next point. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. I realised I would have to go back and apologise. Just at that moment Dr Buchman said ‘Amen, now shall we all tell each other the thoughts we had in that moment of quiet?’ So, somebody who had brought me stood up and said,’ There is a lady here who ought to introduce herself,’ so I stood up and introduced myself. Dr Buchman said, ‘What thoughts did you have in that time of quiet?’ I could only tell him about the dishonesty that I had recognised. He said, and he never missed a trick, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ So, I said I would have to go back and apologise to them. I met him next day and he said, ‘That was a great bit of yours, last night!’ and from that moment I realised that we were friends and fellow sinners.
Dr Buchman was the only person who could really manage my mother, who was a bit of a terror. One day my brother rather timorously invited Buchman to come to tea with us and mother said, ‘By all means, so long as he comes on time.’ But they had been to a meeting and so many people wanted to ask Dr Buchman questions that they were half an hour late and mother had had the tea cleared away. Dr Buchman walked in, greeted her very graciously, and then said, ‘I would like my tea now please,’ My mother knew instinctively that she had met her match, the tea came back, and there was a great happy time together. After that mother always said, ‘Well you are terrible people, but you have a wonderful leader.’
Of course, I had to write and apologise to my mother. I found the letter only the other day, my humble apology to mother, saying that it had been my fault. It was quite difficult at first, getting together again, but we persevered at it and finally when my mother was about to die she said, ‘The one reason I don’t want to die is because Dorothy and I were going to have a wonderful holiday together and we had such a happy one last year that I am very disappointed to have to miss it.’
Before my letter of apology and my running away, our relationship had just been criticism and competition and a real lack of love on my part, as well as a certain amount of distress about my sight. I have rather poor sight and my mother felt that she was in some way responsible. I think that possibly affected her psychologically and made it difficult. I only quite recently found out the cause of mother’s distress about me. It was because, when she was a young girl, she had a horoscope cast which said that she would be a great doctor or a great musician if she didn’t let love come in the way. I only found this in her jewellery box quite recently. When I was born and had this rather strange sight, she immediately felt it was a judgement on her for having done the wrong thing. Every time she saw me she had a guilty conscience which made our relationship extremely difficult. I think that was the root of it all. Of course, she didn’t mind with the boys because she found boys easier to get on with than girls. In the end we found great unity over everything really, because mother came to live the same life as we were living. She also took on to bring about a new world through changing the people in it.
My sister and two of my brothers and I have very unusual sight - we are totally colour-blind. They think we only have night-eyes, which means that we can’t take bright sunlight. But it doesn’t affect our living, it certainly doesn’t affect my writing, only it did affect my power to play games and my brothers’ power to play football. Two of them had to take up rowing because football was impossible for them. The others were very successful with football though.
RAE Holme: what was the situation in S Africa in the 1920s when you went there?
DP: Dr Buchman used to talk about the need for personal, social, national and international salvation, and I began to see that happening. I saw personal salvation in my own change of heart and then social salvation. The students had been on strike when I was there, to my astonishment, I had never been in a student strike before. The leader of the strike after we met this new way of living apologised to the authorities and peace was restored. Then national salvation was that, when I got there, I was told that you must never trust a kaffir and all Dutchmen are ‘slim’, which means crooked. I was told that as part of my philosophy of life and I accepted it. After this new spirit came into the university the Dutch and the English all began to fraternise with each other, and we developed a totally new attitude to the black and coloured people. As for international salvation, we simply saw it developing all over the world starting where we were.
I have travelled in Denmark, where we had a big conference and I was responsible for finding 1,000 beds for all the people who were coming. I have been in Europe quite a bit in Switzerland and France, and I was in Rhodesia for a few days, but mostly in South Africa. My brother now farms in Africa and I have been able to go and visit him there and watch the developing work going on particularly in Kenya. I have watched the wonderful new developments there after the death of Jomo Kenyatta when everybody expected that the new President would be a nobody and he turned out to have been very well trained by Jomo Kenyatta. He has taken tremendous leadership and they say it is one of the happiest countries in the world at the moment. (quote from Sunday Telegraph, June 1979)
I came back from South Africa with very little money and no job, and one of the first thoughts I had was ‘Go and buy a very smart hat’. I thought this was quite ridiculous. However, I obeyed it and then I went to call on my very fashion-conscious brother and the first thing he said was, ‘I like the hat’. He had been expecting me to appear very dowdy, with a bun at the back and carrying a bible. He couldn’t believe that I could turn up with this remarkable hat. It did really begin his interest in following up what I was doing.
The second hat was his hat and that had a hole through the brim. He had been with Thomas Cook’s in Spain and he always hinted that this had been the result of a duel over a senorita. We thought this was very glamorous and exciting. Then after he became a new man and decided to live his life by the four absolute standards, particularly the first one which is absolute honesty, it came to him to tell all of us that the hole in the hat had been caused by a firework. He was very disgusted at having to tell us. It was the hardest thing he had to do, but he did it.
The next one in the family to get interested in this new life was my little sister, who was 19 years younger than I was. Soon after I came back from Africa my mother said, ‘I am putting your little sister to sleep in your room’. I was absolutely furious because I thought she might at least have consulted me. I also realised that I would have to sit up in the morning and write my thoughts from the Lord in my notebook and Elizabeth would be sure to ask what I was doing. Sure enough, I was starting in the morning and the two little eyes were looking over the bedclothes at me, saying ‘What are you doing?’ I told her that I was listening to God, and her response was, ‘Can little girls listen to God?’. I said ‘yes, I suppose they can. I never met any’. Then she said, ‘What is the littlest little girl you know what listens to God?’ So, I said ‘Well I know a little girl of about 8 I think.’ There was a long pause and a big sigh and she said, ‘Only 2 more years to wait’. Thereupon we gave her a notebook and she started writing down. She wrote various simple things such as ‘Be good and be hapy (sic)’ and ‘Be kind to the people who live in the house as well as the people who come to the house’, and ‘Be kind to animals’. I felt that perhaps wasn't quite all she had got and so I said, ‘What does that mean?’ She replied, ‘Don’t pull the pussycat's tail.’ From that she went on to a great life. She became a musician, a violinist, and she travelled right across Europe playing with some of the best theatre orchestras in Europe, with one of the MRA plays The Good Road. She died a little while ago.
My father at first was very worried - he was a solicitor and a very shrewd businessman. He was very much afraid that all my money would be frittered away, I wouldn’t have anything and I would be dependent on the family. Also, when Kit, my brother, decided to go to Oxford and take his degree, my father didn’t feel he could give him any more money than he had already given him for his business training. So, we had to live on what was known as faith and prayer, which is doing what God tells you and allowing him to supply the means. That applies whether you have jobs or not, because God usually asks you for things that are way beyond your means and then provides the required funds. But it really was quite difficult with my brother when he went up to Oxford, because he had nothing at all and yet it always came. In fact, he was the only man in the college who paid all his bills on the day on which they came - though once he didn’t get the money until 6.30pm. There was one day when he came back from vacation and he said, ‘I just haven’t the money for my college fees and the bill will be coming any minute. What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘Let’s go up in your room and pray.’ So, we went into his room and prayed for the money and then I suddenly said ‘Goodness me it’s teatime and I must go and tell my visitor Vera that she must come down to tea,’. So, I went into her room and she was lying there and she said, ‘I have just been thinking about some money that I have been given and that I don’t actually need, do you know of any particular needs?’ So, I went back to my brother and said, ‘You can stop praying, it has come!’
The only thing I really am sorry about was that father didn’t live long enough to join our family team which became such a united force. I am sure he would have been very happy to be with us. My mother became a very valiant fighter for the Lord and travelled all around the place, particularly in Denmark. Many people got to know her - people are always telling me how much she helped them in their spiritual life.
Frank Buchman more or less became a member of our family and was very close to us in many ways. I always remember that my brother was in charge of some fairly big spiritual operation at a conference we were having. I wrote to him and said mother wasn’t very well and would he consider coming home? My brother felt he couldn’t possibly leave anything so important. But Dr Buchman said, ‘You go. My thought is you go.’ Rather under protest my brother came home and it was mother’s last illness. We were all able to be together with her over the last weeks. I am so grateful for the thought that Dr Buchman had which meant that we were together during those days.
He (FB) always lived on the basis of appreciation with us and with everyone, rather than a basis of criticism. I remember after this famous occasion when he had met mother and he had won her by his firmness, as he was saying goodbye and thanking her for his tea he said, ‘Mrs. Prescott, you have gems of children.’ That really won mother’s heart and from then on she was his loyal supporter.
The care Frank had for our family was very deep. I remember one Christmas quite early on we were all sitting with him in wherever we were, and he said to us, ‘Now all of you tell me what has happened since this time last year.’ And I told him that our father died and Frank said, ‘Oh, and you never told me!’ He took it as a personal hurt that we hadn’t included him in our family life to that extent.
My mother fought all the way to coming into the spiritual life. The story of her first time of listening is quite a classic because she didn’t believe that God could speak to people. She always queried it. One day she thought she really would experiment. She went up to bed with a notebook and pencil, but she also took with her the fish account book. She said, ‘If nothing comes to me in the morning I shall add up the fish book.’ But something did come into her thoughts and the fish book didn’t get added up at that time.
The only book for adults that I have done was a collection of Daily Readings, called ‘A New Day’. It has been going now since 1957. There have been three editions of it and it covers all the things that happen to mankind. I have tried to get on each page under the particular subject what all the people that I can find have said on that subject, right through the ages. It is very fascinating and people do say that the reading for the day is just what they want, which was what I hoped would happen. When I got the headings I sat on the floor with them all round me for about a month and put them all together in the order that I thought they ought to be in. They do seem to have hit the need. I am very grateful for that.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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