"AND NOW," to quote Python "FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT."
I majored in English Literature .... or should've done. I completed two of three years of study, but changes in my home life (my parent's separation and subsequent divorce), together with my towering religious influences colluded to become a guaranteed distraction. I abandoned a classical education short of graduating so as to earn money to escape to Bible College.
Still. somewhere within me an enjoyment for literature began to cohabitat with my dormant sexuality. What I couldn't find in religion, I could discover in literature.
At this juncture, I should point out, whatever I thought, felt, visualized or dreamed sexually, had almost no expression. I was twenty four before I allowed myself to touch another male intimately. Even after "coming out" I retained a voluntary celibacy. So while, in hindsight, I have often mused the "what-ifs" at the time there was little remorse as I bade adieu (or at least au revoir) to academia for the sacred fortress of Pentecostal truth.
What if I had graduated? How different would life have been? My school (Wellingborough Grammar) had good academic credibility with a healthy stream of Oxbridge fodder. What if I had been provided the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of my literary heroes (both writers and spies) and accepted a place at Cambridge. It was not beyond the realm of possibility.
WHAT'S IN A NAME
In 1992, on my father's death I adopted my mother's family name after her twin Paul who, at age two, was drowned while the family were living in Castleblayney, Ireland. My father's name was Scroxton, an ancestry that is relatively easy to trace back to the English Civil War.
Cambridge is forty miles from my home town of Rushden. By taking the backroads through Kimbolton and St. Neots, it was the perfect panorama for picnics and outings. When I began researching family ancestry, It was once suggested to me that given the family's close proximity to Cambridgeshire, we may have come from Croxton, a small rural community just thirteen miles west of Cambridge. This village appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Crochestone. By the late eighteenth century, the community went into decline and by 1826 all the houses in Croxton were gone. Today, the church is all that remains of the original village. 
ST. JAMES, CROXTON - MAYBE MY ANCESTRAL CHURCH HOME. PARTS OF THE CURRENT BUILDING DATE TO THE 13TH CENTURY.
Alas, personal research has yet to uncover any record of a Croxton family living in Croxton, however they do appear just 4 miles east in Elsworth as early as 1500. By 1560, a Thomas Scroxton had appeared in Burton Latimer (Northamptonshire) 34 four miles further east; the place from which both Croxtons and Scroxtons have their roots. In the 17th century Northamptonshire and neighbouring Huntingdonshire gained notoriety as anti-royalist, conceiving the gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament in the reign of James I; and also as becoming a bedrock of Cromwellian support during the Civil War.(1642-51). Burton Latimer's Anglican rector was run out of town by Cromwell supporters.
It could be that it was just bad spelling that ushered us into being, given that the Croxtons also became an established family in the area. However. it's not beyond reasoning that the family may have divided on political or religious grounds and opted for a variation of the name. Richard Scroxton (b.1665) begat a healthy lineage of non-conformists, heretics and trade unionists from whom I am honoured to be descended.
In 400 years the Scroxtons travelled little. That said, I'm not the first to settle on another continent. In the 1880s, Ann & Jane, sisters of great, great, great grandfather Noah Scroxton, converted to Mormonism and moved to Utah to join the relatively young Mormon community. Since then, relatives of both my parents settled in Canada (Manitoba, Saint John NB and later Toronto) and Australia.
A generation before the sisters moved the the USA, John Scroxton, elder brother of Eusebius (1769-1862) my great, great, great, great grandfather, was one of the first students to attend William Bull's academy for non conformist ministers in Newport Pagnell. John went on to be a Baptist preacher. His son, John Harris Scroxton (1806-1890), became an author and poet of some repute, having an entry in the Oxford Book of Local Verses. I recently acquired a 1st edition copy of his Imaginary Conversations - a series of dialogues, in blank verse, between key players in the English Civil War.
In the mid nineteenth century, Rushden began to see rapid growth due to the development of shoe manufacturing. Between 1881 and 1901 the town saw 350% growth in population as people from the rural areas moved in. Edward Scroxton (1851-1923) son of Noah and grandpere great great, settled in Rushden for the next three generations; [Arthur Herbert (Bert)1877-1930; William Reginald (Reg) 1898-1966; John Philip (Phil) 1927-92 (my father)], where they dabbled in a variety of entrepreneurial projects. It was Reg's clan who converted to Pentecostalism.
The Scroxton Family Business
AN ALTERNATE GENEALOGY
I have been a fan of E.M.Forster, from the first time I read his posthumously published Maurice. Other homosexual themed short stories were published in The Life To Come. It was through his most recent biography (Wendy Moffatt 2010) I gained new insight to Edward Carpenter. Carpenter (1844-1929) was to Forster, as Walt Whitman had been to him, and later Forster fulfilled that same older mentor role to Christopher Isherwood. Carpenter could be regarded as the first pro-gay voice in religion and politics in Britain. I only regret that I had not been more familiar with his writings in my Mattersey days; (Mattersey is about forty miles from Millthorpe, Carpenter's home for much of his life) it may have changed the direction of my life .... of course, that would call into question the will of God; but then, said will, is often rewritten.
Sheila Rowbotham's biography of Carpenter, A Life of Liberty and Love (2008), is a great insight, not only to Carpenter's life but the cultural revolution that was going on around him. Carpenter, for many years a Christian Socialist, seems to infer that Oscar Wilde's (also a contemporary) middle class decadence set the cause of homosexual rights and equality back years. Of course, this argument of freedom of lifestyle versus the politics of equality has continued for the hundred plus years since.
For many of these heroes, there is a rejection of God in the box, as alongside their social commentary comes a rethinking of traditional religion. Indeed, I believe that literature is the avenue of free thought, something that is rellgion's Frankenstein. Certainly, some of our best writers in defense of gay spirituality have been literary academics, for they have gained a freedom, that so many in religion still dream after.
DICKENS AND FRANKENSTEIN
I have collected books for many years, pruning the collection each time I move, but then acquiring twice as many in the following year or so. For more than twenty years I have lugged more than a thousand volumes with me across the Atlantic and up and down the Americas. By far, the majority of these have been to do with theology, the Bible and Church - books of the trade, although recently it has become better proportioned. I'm a selective reader, but also obsessive. When I find a writer I like, then I have to read everything they wrote: witness Dickens, Agatha Christie, Stephen Donaldson, more recently E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood. I research in similar fashion.
I collect DVDs with the same selective obsession though less voraciously so. I love dramatizations of Dickens' stories, and it has often been the screen adaptations that have sent me back to the book. I also have more than a dozen Frankenstein movies (see below), most of them adaptations of the original story.
So what's with Dickens & Frankenstein? In a literary world of romantic novels Dickens authored incredible social commentaries of poverty, prisons and workhouses, sly schemes and scandals. His unlikely heroes are often women and youth (Great Expectations, Little Dorrit) but they often die (Nell in Old Curiosity Shop and Nancy in Oliver Twist).
Mary Shelley's original text of Frankenstein is much darker that the movie adaptations. In a conversation between creator and created, the under priviliged and outcast speak out about the injustice of their creation.
Both authors are a reactionary voice on the emerging science and industry movement of the nineteenth century, and how slavery is recast in coal mines, steel mills and science experimentation where the poor become slaves to wealthy masters. Unquestionably, it has been the lineage of gay or bisexual writers that join the voices of subversion, from Shelley to Carpenter, to Forster, to Isherwood, that has given literature its renewed life for me. Maybe it's a lineage of ideology, passionate against the injustice of England's social repression, that I also have been adopted into.
MY FRANKENSTEIN MOVIES
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) James Whale & Boris Karloff
Curse of Frankenstein (1957) Peter Cushing's first
Flesh For Frankenstein (1973) Andy Warhol's
Frankenstein (1931) James Whale & Boris Karloff
Frankenstein (2004) the mini series - long but follows the book.
Frankenstein (2004) This was a pilot for a TV series that was never made.
Frankenstein Unbound (1990) John Hurt & Raul Julia with a touch of sci-fi
Frankenstein: The True Story (1974) Screenplay by Christopher Isherwood
Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
Gods and Monsters (1998) A brilliant movie!
Gothic (1986) How Mary found her inspiration
House of Frankenstein (1944)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) Kenneth Branagh's version Munsters Go Home (1966) - Fred Gwynne is magnificant Munster's Revenge (1981)
Munsters: Scary Little Christmas (1996)
Son of Frankenstein (1937)
Terror of Frankenstein (1977) Probably the most accurate adaptation to date.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - just a jump to the left
Young Frankenstein (1974) Simply the best!
BRINGING DICKENS HOME TO LONDON
My annual Christmas ritual revolves around two things: A Christmas Carol and a Dickens Village. On my maternal grandfather's passing I inherited a partial set of Charles Dickens (Odhams Press c.1930). In the following years I was able to complete the sixteen volumes. The reading of A Christmas Carol (or viewing one of ten DVD versions) has become as much of a Christmas tradition as singing carols or eating mincepies.
As part of my Brit nostalgia I also began collecting Department 56 "Dickens Village". These are high quality ceramic lighted houses, with equally high quality accessories. To date I have 135 buildings, and in excess of two hundred accessories. Ironically, this fabulously detailed and literary acurate representation of Dickens books and characters is not available in the UK; and much rarer in Canada, so, as it were, I have brought Dickens home to London (albeit London, Ontario). Each year (sometimes more than once) I build a diorama - sometimes a city scene, sometimes a village, sometimes a country estate. This year, due to limited display space there is a Victorian Christmas and, returning to the basics, Charles Dickens reading "A Christmas Carol."
Town & Country (2007)
BELOW: "My Country Estate" (2008)
