Where the Halling Valley River Lies - Carl Halling (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

the 2000s worshipped at the altar of romantic rebellion as much as they’d always done…but perhaps not to quite the same degree as those of David’s poor generation, who came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack; and who can say what effect it had on them, this music...tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a generation of hipsters.
To the David of the Christian years, Rock – far from being just another music form - was a total art, involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that…a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation.
He fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock music for a brief period in 2003, which made him feel inclined to destroy all traces of Rock music in his possession, even though he’d long lost any real taste for Hard Rock by then. However, by the summer, his attitude had mellowed to the extent that he was prepared to write about an hour’s worth of Rock songs in response to a request from his dad for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend. But these were as far from Hard Rock as it’s possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul.
These songs, some new, some upgrades of old tunes, were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, and were generally well-received despite having been so crudely recorded. His father even went so far as to suggest that he record them properly in a studio, and so some months after recording them, a semi-professional demo was recorded on a friend’s computer, but when David sent this to a music publishing company for assessment, their response was far from encouraging. So it was back to the drawing board again for David Cristiansen.
As if disillusioned by constant failure, David decided he wanted to write creatively as of January 2006, although the real motive for his doing so was altogether different. In fact, it was a period of sickness that spurred him towards a serious literary career.
This began with a panic attack in central London, which grew into a flu-like illness, but it wasn’t until he developed a painful condition affecting a singularly delicate section of his tegument that he decided that he’d no further interest in maintaining optimal physical attractiveness, and so felt he had little to lose by writing.
The truth is that soon after becoming a Christian, David had destroyed most of what he’d written up to that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as a Christian, until it seemed to him as if God was calling a halt to his writing. So, once again, he started destroying any writings he managed to finish…sometimes dumping whole manuscripts into handy dustbins, or dispensing with them one sheet at a time down murky London drains.
Then in about 1998, he more or less gave up altogether…that is, until he felt compelled to break his literary silence as a result of the aforesaid extended bout of sickness. Thence, he started posting articles to the Blogster web site, which went on to form the basis of his memoir, ”Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child”.
In terms of activities of note in the following year of ‘07, he rehearsed an album of popular standards with his father which was finally released in the spring of 2008, although it only went on to sell a handful of copies, the majority remaining firmly ensconced in the box in which they’d arrived from the recording studio, where it had been recorded at Pat Cristiansen’s expense.
Later that year, he completed a first draft of his memoir after a full two years of labour.
Around about the same time, his beloved former mentor Dr Elizabeth Lang died in her adopted village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire. The executor of her will, who was also the publisher of her final book, asked him to read one of the lessons at her funeral and deliver a eulogy in the capacity of a former student. This took place in the parish church of St Martin's in the beautiful village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, along with fellow members of the Malborough family.
It was such a sad experience for him to be reunited with Elizabeth in such a way after nearly a quarter of a century, while being unable to communicate with her as he’d have been able to had he thought to make contact…even a handful of years earlier when she was still a published writer. It made him realise how important it is to stay close to friends and family before a time comes when it’s no longer possible to reconcile with them:
“Then it’s too late,” he thought to himself, “they've gone, and the world is always so much the poorer for their sudden absence and silence.”
Then, in the summer of 2010, David decided to turn his memoir into a novel, or perhaps roman a clef, placing it in the third person, with the character of David Cristiansen doubling as himself. As to the other names in the novel, most, with the exception of celebrities were partially or completely changed, and in one version of his story, the vast majority of the names of institutions were also changed.
Dialogue had already been added, and was as David remembered it, as opposed to being reproduced with 100% accuracy. Either that, or it was based on ancient informal diary notes, and then edited for inclusion in his writings.
By the beginning of 2011, there were so many versions of his story in existence that David no longer knew which, if any, was the definitive one, and he occasionally teetered on the verge of dejection, as if his image of himself of a writer had been terminally shot to pieces. And he saw himself, and not for the first time, as a loser, in fact not just a loser but a king-size loser, a loser among losers, a loser supreme.
The contemplation that he was the best at what he did afforded him some satisfaction at those times of the day when his status in life meant the most to him, such as in those last few hours before he turned in for the night. But when all's said and done, this was scant consolation to him.
Yet, is it not so that among those who ultimately come to faith to Him though Jesus Christ are men and women who would be judged failures in the eyes of the world, and yet having lost in life, have yet found a purpose that eludes life’s victors…among whom they may once have been counted?
The answer is of course yes, and the ultimate example of a high achiever who became the ultimate loser once he’d given his life to Christ was the Apostle Paul, the former Saul of Tarsus born into the Tribe of Benjamin who as an impeccably pious high-ranking Pharisee was yet a ferocious persecutor and murderer of Christians.
Yet, as a Christian, he suffered losses that most contemporary Western believers have no experience or even conception of. For while he was mocked and despised for his beliefs, he was also flogged, beaten, stoned, starved and repeatedly imprisoned, before being ultimately put down as if he were a sick and aging dog.
But that is not to say that all Christians come to faith in Christ through a violent Road to Damascus conversion after having undergone some unspeakable loss, far from it, for many – perhaps even most - come gently to faith without having suffered in any dramatic way whatsoever.
Yet the Damascus converts are deeply valuable to the Body of Christ, for they serve as living proof of the fact that anyone can be saved, regardless of their background. And their testimonies are as precious as they are for their very relative rarity
It could be said then that David was foolish to lament all he had lost in terms of opportunities for great wealth and success, for fame, status and glory and all the wondrous things that accompany these, for after all, these are things that one cannot take with us when we quit this earth, and life is short, so terribly short that it is described in the Word of God as a “vapour”.
And while for the most part his still handsome eyes failed to see this truth as if they’d become clouded o’er by the tears he often shed at night for his wasted past, and for the pain he felt when he thought of all he had lost, at other times, it became gloriously, brilliantly clear to him, and he rejoiced as the most fortunate of men. Yes, he was a loser, and yet yes, he’d gained so much more than he’d lost. Yet, it could have all been so different.

Book Four – Where the Halling Valley River Lies

Chapter One – The Heroic Life of Phyllis Mary Pinnock

In the Beautiful Valley of Tamar

My paternal grandmother Phyllis Mary Pinnock grew into a remarkably beautiful young woman with dark hair and green eyes, and an exquisitely sculpted mouth.
She'd been born sometime towards the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century, possibly in the Dulwich area of South East London. And given her father had been what is known as a gentleman, which means he forswore all labour, it may have been she was a scion of that part of the upper middle class known as the lower gentry.
And according to my father's account, her first true love David was a scion of the Wilson Line of Hull which had developed into the largest privately owned shipping firm in the world in the early part of the century.
But like so many young men of that dutiful generation, immortalised in cruelly beautiful poems such as Owen’s "Anthem for Doomed Youth" which speaks to us of "sad shires" decimated by an inexplicable conflict, he died young during the First World War. And she subsequently married an officer in the British army, to whom she bore two children, Peter Bevan and Suzanne, known as Dinny.
When her children were little more than infants, she elected to join her husband as a tea planter in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. And it was on that breathtakingly beautiful island, in a tough and typically isolated environment that she met the two men, tea planters like herself, who were destined to become her second and third husbands.
They were a British engineer by the name of Christopher “Chris” Evans, and my Danish namesake Carl Halling.
Carl had evidently once been a successful businessmen within the linoleum industry before some kind of reversal of fortune found him on the famous tea fields of Ceylon, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once described as being “as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo”.
Mary’s third child, my father, was born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, in the beautiful Tamar Valley, but raised as Carl's son in the great city of Sydney.
And according to Pat, Carl and Mary eked an existence in various fields of endeavour, including fruit farming, gold prospecting and real estate. While Mary was at some point a primary school teacher, and another, a journalist for the Sydney Telegraph. But it was a hard life according to Pat, especially after Carl contracted the multiple sclerosis that would ultimately kill him.
One blessing being that all three children were exceptionally gifted musically, Patrick as violinist, Peter as cellist and Suzanne as pianist; but of