There but for the grace...

Just a superstitious old saw or a necessary reckoning with the multitudinous near misses that let us carry on while others are snuffed out?

The first time I heard the phrase and played it back in my head, I was in my mid-20s and working on a motorcycle magazine in south London. As I remember it now, news had just reached us that a colleague on a rival title had crashed and died on an overseas bike launch. This happened from time to time: the margin for error on the fierce superbikes of the mid-2000s was knife-blade narrow, and it was our job to ride them in a manner our readers would aspire to. To earn respect as a bike journalist, you had to be either extremely skilful, a daredevil or a psychopath. I was just a scared country bumpkin with an undiagnosed eye disorder, but I was in too deep to change course.   

“There but for the grace…” intoned the editor faux-gravely, the phrase petering out into elliptical silence as he wafted past, eyebrows raised in mock surprise, on his way to the toilet. When I say “faux-gravely”, I can’t be sure. Perhaps he was being serious, but as usual it was hard to tell. Overt seriousness was a risk too far in our line of work. Our magazine still ran as its pull-out centrefold a topless model draping herself over a bike (always female, of course, since no biker was anything less than 100% hetero male), and convincing ourselves that this was still cool required a high-wire dance of dissociative thinking. As the death throes of lad culture jerked through our consciences, our style guide, if we had one, was permanent irony.

To invoke God in earnest would have been an embarrassing slip. Instead, He dangled off the end of the sentence mysteriously, catching my attention. Why was our staunchly atheist editor crediting to God the fact it was the other man, not him, lying dead in the wreckage? What did it mean, “the grace of God”, the granting of a reprieve, a second chance for which another life had had to pay? My minimally religious education left me guessing, but there was something compelling in those few words, something so much more than it could have been me.

There seemed to lurk in the saying the insinuation that the other person’s ill fate saved you from coming to the same or similar grisly end – their shoes shuffled off so as not to be filled by your feet. That seemed solipsistic, even snide, but I could relate to its appeal. It reminded me of a happening from a few years earlier when I might have been tempted to utter the phrase myself, had it been in my mental phrasebook.

One summer’s day not long after joining the magazine, I was returning from a lunch break, ambling down the busy high street, when suddenly the air around me was engulfed in an almighty crunching sound. What the…? A bomb without an explosion, an earthquake without a tremor. I turned around to a foreground whited-out by the back end of a delivery van – so close I could have reached out and touched it. Its front half was buried in the shop I had just walked past, framed by shattered glass and mangled metal.

Hesitantly, fearfully, I peered through the gap between van flank and jagged glass, still trying to fathom what had happened. Deep inside the shop beyond the van, amid the debris, I could have sworn I saw a pair of bloodied legs. As I stood there gawping, my mind pussyfooting around reality, a youngish woman dived through the gap, crawled to the front of the van and crouched beside what I had now to accept was a human in dire need. Coming to my senses, I took out my tiny Nokia and dialled 999 – just in case no one else had thought of that. By the time I’d been told the ambulance was already on its way, a human chain of helpers had assembled in front of me. In a daze of shock and shame I shambled back to the office.

There but for the grace of God had gone, in my place, a woman – lifted off her feet and carried on that tidal wave of three-tonne van through lacerating glass and steel. Her fate was mine but for the separation of two paces, three at most; the time it takes to read this sentence. All the minuscule delays – a dawdling shopper, a persistent chugger, a tram at the crossing – that could have put my feet where hers fell, my body between shop and van. The local newspaper’s report of the incident – rushing delivery driver, forgotten handbrake, runaway van – seems to have vanished from the internet, as if it never happened, but I’d swear it said the woman survived.

I want to take seriously the notion that there was grace in that gap, or that the gap itself was grace, with causes and effects beyond empirical grasp. In theological terms, grace is defined as as an unmerited, spontaneous gift from God; the granting of a second chance. Almost as soon as you begin reading about the concept, you become mired in theological tangles dating back to the early church. Whether we need grace because we are inherently fallen; whether God has already decided who’s saved and who’s fallen (predestination); whether we make ourselves eligible for grace through good works (Catholic) or solely through faith (Protestant); whether we’re obliged to honour grace, once we receive it, by acting in a certain way; and whether it’s possible to fall from grace.

If my being just past the shop when the runaway van struck was a free and unmerited gift from God, extending His mercy to me more or less randomly, what now? An evangelical Christian would no doubt reply that receiving grace confers a responsibility to respond with gratitude and obedience, transforming one’s life to be as devoted and Christ-like as humanly possible. More compelling to me (as an agnostic) is the freely given nature of the gift, granted for no reason with no strings attached, and how it leaves wide open the question of how to respond. There but for the grace of God go I – to do what? The gift of life: an unquiet question, insistent freedom.

---

While pondering the origins of the phrase, it amused me to discover that it’s attributed to a Bradford. Uncle John, as I like to call him. No, I’m not claiming to be a direct descendent of this particular John Bradford, but who knows.¹ Born in Manchester in 1510, Bradford was just 24 when Henry VIII left the Catholic Church. While studying law, he followed the king’s lead, converted to Protestantism and became a prominent Reformer. Such was his clerical profile by the time Mary I came to the throne in 1553 that he went straight to the top of her hit-list. Within a few months he had been arrested, charged with heresy and thrown in the Tower of London.

The origin story has it that, at some point in his life, Bradford saw a prisoner being led to the gallows and remarked: “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.” Let’s not get hung up on the lack of hard evidence or speculate as to why he was referring to himself Trump-like in the third-person. The point is, Bradford was humbly identifying with the convicted criminal to call attention to the fact that even he, ‘Holy Bradford’, was prone to error and downfall – influenced here by the Calvinist belief in the total depravity of human nature. By this doctrine, humankind is corrupt to the core and incapable of doing good without the gift of divine grace.

In July 1555, having refused to recant his Protestant beliefs, Bradford was burnt to death in Smithfield market. As the flames licked at their feet – according to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a classic hits compilation of Protestant martyrdom – Bradford “sweetly comforted” the fellow martyr next to him, a “godly young springal of 19 or 20 years old” named John Leaf. Later accounts add the rousing flourish that Bradford embraced Leaf and, with tears of passion rather than pain in his eyes, assured him: “Be ye of good comfort, brother, for we shall have a merry supper with the Lord this night.”

Being burnt alive probably isn’t conducive to such eloquence but what we can’t doubt is Bradford’s conviction that grace would save him. Suffering in the short term, slap-up meals with the Messiah ever after. I’d like to adopt his version of the phrase as my own – “there but for the grace of God goes Uncle John” – to remind me that this goes so much deeper than feeling humble rather than smug when someone else is suffering. If grace means anything to me, it means a reckoning with the improbability of existence, the sheer unlikeliness of having got here, to the island of this moment, the midstream now.

On a recent trip to Manchester, straying briefly from the unholy temptations of Canal Street, we stumbled upon this plaque on the wall of the city’s cathedral

Staying alive can seem easy these days, with life expectancy up from about 40 in John Bradford’s day (given 30% infant mortality) to around 80 today, and peril sealed off at our borders, for now. Cosseting talk of wellness and resilience. Sheltered from contingency, our lifespans stretched by science, we keep schtum about the daily breakdown, the squeaking doors of irreversible change. I don’t believe we’re damned by design, nor that it’s all Eve’s fault, but I do believe that what keeps us keeping on amid this slide towards chaos are unmerited interventions and unfathomable evasions; graceful forces. Every day our immune system snipers down cancer cells that wanted to run riot; with every breath, our biology sidesteps the runaway van.

In my own body, a single ‘spelling mistake’ among the approximately 3.2 billion base pairs of genetic code is causing the photoreceptor cells in my eyes to melt away like polar ice caps. But more astonishing to me is the scarcity of errors, that the rest of the letters make sense enough to keep this cryptic beast-machine going – at least for now. Not just going but tasting and shitting, hoping and crying, doubting and loving. I don’t need unbroken eyes to see that the rest of the me-code reads like a dream, that the rest spells GRACE.

If grace means anything to me, it means a reckoning with the improbability of existence, the sheer unlikeliness of having got here… the midstream now

It’s not just our own genes. Consider all the incidents and accidents in and among the bodies and minds of our ancestors that have made each of us possible. Take just one example: 13 years before my mother was born, the man who would be her father volunteered for the RAF and got stuffed into a ‘flying suitcase’, the Handley-Page Hampden, an aircraft so cramped, slow and unreliable that, by the time it was withdrawn from frontline operations in 1942, 714 of them – half the entire fleet – had crashed or been shot down. Many ran out of fuel and fell out of the sky. 1,816 young men who didn’t get a chance to grow old.

On one of my grandfather’s first operations, on 19th July 1940, his Hampden was hit by flak which pierced the canopy and the head of the pilot, 31-year-old Wilfred Walker. Somehow they dragged him from the cockpit, my grandfather bandaging his head while the navigator took over at the controls. Somehow they made it back far enough, with enough parts working, to crash land at Brackley airbase. “I nursed Walker’s head in my lap to soften the jar as we touched down,” wrote my grandfather. “He died as the ambulance drove out of the gate on the way to the hospital.” There but for the grace of God went he, went my mother, went me.

Six weeks later, on 29th August 1940, my grandfather’s Hampden was hit again. No limping home this time. He and the navigator bailed out, deployed their parachutes and were taken prisoner of war, but the 19-year-old pilot went down with the burning plane. There but for the, there again, went we. I have thought often of that teenage pilot whose face, like that of Wilfred Walker, must have haunted my grandfather night and day. Perhaps I was hoping for a photograph when I typed his name into Google, perhaps I wanted just to spell it out: CEDRIC DUNKELS. What I found was a trace as raw as the day it was written: a letter from his father Otto – typed on the eve of one month gone – to Cedric’s closest friend, no one closer ever again, the “last link” to his son.

Saturday, 28th September 1940

My dear Derek,

By the time this reaches you, you will have had Joan's letter giving you the terrible news, and there is not much that I can add, but as you were Cedric's best friend I know that you will be interested in anything which adds to that which Joan wrote to you.

Even now, almost a month after Cedric made his final trip, it is difficult to believe that so young a life, full of charm, personality and youthful enthusiasm, has ceased to exist. We kept on hoping against hope until the last telegram from the Air Ministry saying that according to the Red Cross International Society at Geneva Pilot Officer Dunkels, previously reported as missing, is now reported as killed. Only a miracle, I feel, could bring him back to us alive. A Flight Lieutenant and Adjutant, stationed at Cedric's last Aerodrome, paid him a fine tribute: “He was a charming lad and as keen as mustard to take his part in the scheme of things. It is this indomitable spirit of youth which will see us through this war. There is little I can say or do to afford you comfort at this distressing time, but it must be a consolation to you that he always did his job unflinchingly and cheerfully, well knowing the danger it entailed, and the memory of a brave son is something to be treasured.” We, who loved him, can but add little to so eloquent a testimonial. He died so young, but he will live in our hearts and memories.

During his last leave about the beginning of August, Cedric had his photograph taken. We have ordered some more and you can select one when you come to see us. Joan told you in her letter that you are the last link between Cedric and us. Apart from that we shall always like to see you because we are fond of you.

Our mind is so full of Cedric and this letter is, too, but before terminating it I should like to express my profound admiration to all you young fellows in the R.A.F. for your glorious exploits which are not always recognised by decorations. England and the great cause for which she fights owe to you all a deep gratitude. No truer words were ever spoken than those of the Prime Minister when he referred to the debt of so many to so few.

Kindest regards and best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Otto Dunkels.

P.S. Your letter to Cedric is here. Would you like me to return it to you?

1. At around the same time, I made a startling discovery on Ancestry.com: my 12th great-grandfather was the granduncle of puritan separatist William Bradford, the so-called Pilgrim Father of the Mayflower voyage of 1620.