A Book Review by Tony Lambert

Troubled Journey—A Missionary Childhood in War-torn China by Faith Cook

This is a well-written and significant book by the wife of a distinguished minister of the gospel in the UK. Faith Cook has written several books, including biographies (such as of William Grimshawe, the 18th century revival preacher), and devotional works (including a delightful book of Samuel Rutherford’s letters put into verse). This book I am now reviewing is altogether different – it charts the author’s troubled childhood as the daughter of devoted China Inland Mission (CIM) workers in war-torn China.

Why is this an important book which needs reading, particularly by missionaries and full-time Christian workers? Because it gives an unusually truthful account of the sufferings endured in the past by MKs (missionary kids) and, by implication, warns against repeating past mistakes today. In the past, some missionary biographies and histories tended to gloss over the painful aspects of mission work – the failures, heartbreak and sometimes devastating impact on the children. Some books were

hagiographical biography rather than truthful accounts.

Faith Cook had a difficult childhood and adolescence, but through the grace of God, survived the experience. She writes without bitterness, and shows how, despite suffering, she came to rely wholly on the grace of God. Her theological reflections are particularly valuable.

She was born to missionary parents in China in the CIM Borden Memorial Hospital in Lanzhou in late October 1937. Her father had sailed for China in 1931 in answer to the appeal by the General Director of the CIM for 200 new workers. There he had met and married, in 1935, another CIM missionary who was to become Faith’s mother. Their field of work was the remote and backward province of Ningxia.

Six weeks after Faith’s birth the young missionary couple set off in a mule-cart on the dangerous journey to Pingluo in Ningxia across frozen and treacherous mountain tracks. Faith comments that it would have been wiser to wait for better weather, but to her father, his missionary labours were his overriding concern in life, so he insisted on setting off, even though he subjected his two small children to serious risk. On arrival in Pingluo his wife became seriously ill with typhus fever and he himself found his eyesight deteriorating rapidly. So by 1940 the family were sent home to London to receive proper medical treatment and recuperate – only to find themselves facing the terrors of the blitz as German planes rained down bombs on the city.

In 1941 they returned to NW China to find the country suffering from the full impact of the Japanese invasion. Fifty million refugees were heading west to escape Japanese atrocities and 900,000 people had perished when the Yellow River dykes were deliberately breached by Chiang Kai-shek in a vain attempt to stem the invading armies. In 1942 the family were sent to Zhongwei in Ningxia.

Their two young children were now completely bilingual. But in summer 1942, Faith’s elder brother Christopher, now only aged 6, set off with his father on an 800 mile journey to the CIM school in Leshan in Sichuan (removed from the original one in Chefoo in Shandong which had been overrun by the Japanese who had interned all its staff and even the children.)

This policy of placing children in boarding school was then generally accepted in Great Britain, and was at the time the only way in which MKs could be assured of getting a proper education. However, Faith shows that it could be heartbreaking for the parents and sometimes devastating for the children so affected. In 1944 Faith herself was sent to boarding school, and much of the book is an honest account of her struggles far from her parents.

In late 1944 the Japanese offensive threatened the little CIM school so Faith was airlifted to safety first to Kunming and then to a new boarding school in Kalimpong in northern India. “News from China was limited and unreliable and letters between parents and children irregular at best. Toys were also unobtainable but soon we began to manufacture our own games. Stones gathered from the hillside were carefully laid out to form aeroplanes. Books, too, were scarce.” Faith and her brother developed an independent spirit which sometimes brought down well-deserved punishment, but on other occasions, unwarranted punishment from over-strict teachers.

The war finally ended in August 1945 but it was not until June 1946 that the two children were able to return to China. Their father travelled to Shanghai to meet them. Faith had not seen him for two years. Christopher, now ten, had not seen him for four years. With almost unbearable pathos Faith portrays his bewilderment. “Would someone introduce me to my father?” he asked after he learnt his father had arrived. They returned with him to Tianshui in southern Gansu often travelling in the back of open lorries.

Back at the mission station Faith was tested to the uttermost. “The place was infested with rats. The communal toilets, large open pits in the yard with two planks across filled me with unimaginable panic. Peering into the murky depths I could invariably see shining rat eyes looking up at me or catch a glimpse of the quick whisk of a rodent tail.” Shortly after, her health deteriorated and in late 1946 she travelled with her family via Hong Kong back to the UK. The long sea voyage on the P & O ‘Canton’ was a joyous too brief spell of luxury and quality time with her parents. On returning to England, the doctor diagnosed that she had been suffering from TB, probably contracted in India.

The interlude in the UK was taken up with an exhausting round of deputation and in the summer of 1948 the family returned to China – now in the final throes of the civil war between Communists and Nationalists. Faith was now ten years old. She and her brother were now sent to the CIM school in the picturesque and delightfully cool mountains of Guling in Jiangxi. Something of the awesome majesty of God gripped Faith’s heart. However, school was sometimes strict – even books by Enid Blyton were banned as unsuitable! However, the genial influence of the headmaster, Stanley Houghton and his wife generated a more relaxed atmosphere.

This soon began to change as the new government tightened restrictions. Scarcely had her parents returned to Pingluo than the message came from CIM HQ in Shanghai that all missionaries were advised to leave the country and the school was disbanded. The children had to destroy their treasured collections of letters from their parents in case there were any innocent comments which might be used against them by the authorities. In November 1950 she and her brother set out on a 700-mile journey mainly by train. They were met by their father in Xi’an and then had to travel a further 1,000 miles to Pingluo. In the squalid inns in remote villages along the way “fleas and bedbugs abounded!”

By March 1951 the family were placed under house arrest. As every avenue for Christian service became closed to them, Faith’s parents finally packed up and made the heartbreaking journey (now in reverse) back to the coast and to Hong Kong. By late April they were back in England and Faith suddenly found herself placed in the Christian-run Clarendon boarding school for girls in North Wales. Unsurprisingly after her experiences in China “with little idea of the decorum expected at such a school, I posed constant problems for the school matron.” Today, we would no doubt say that she experienced a tremendous dose of reverse culture-shock readjusting to the inhibited culture of 1950s middle-class England.

However, she developed a close relationship with the headmistress, Miss Swain. It was this lady who gently broke some devastating news to her. “Her voice was kindly – but betrayed some emotion. Puzzled, I sat down. ‘Do you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ?’ was the starling question she put to me. Although I had often thought on spiritual issues, had often found consolation in God in times of crisis or distress and had often prayed for forgiveness for my many sins, such thoughts were not prominent in my mind at that period of my life. I managed to stammer out: ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Well, you must trust him today as you have never done before,’ continued the headmistress tenderly. Tears began to course down her cheeks as she told me as gently as she could that my younger brother Philip, aged seven, had been killed in a road accident. The austere headmistress and the bewildered child wept together.”

Although very close to her brother, Faith was not allowed to attend his funeral as her parents probably felt, mistakenly, she could not bear it. But as her parents faced this new loss with quiet courage she learned a new respect for them.

However, this has not stopped her from being gently critical of the “stiff upper-lip” theology which was then currently in vogue. Her thoughts on the “higher life” teaching of various “holiness movements” are valuable.

“In later life I came to see that such fortitude, though admirable, could act to cloak sorrow and delay that inner healing through faith so necessary. Never, either then or in the future, did my parents ever speak to me of our loss in a personal way or discuss the bereavement with me. A triumphalist teaching that frowned on any admission of weakness, sin or spiritual failure had produced an artificial and harmful stoicism among many Christians. Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones, the famous preacher of Westminster Chapel in London where both my parents were members, touched on this very issue in a kindly letter he wrote to them: ‘As we would expect from you, your letter is full of triumphant faith. But we are not meant to be unnatural, and you are bound to feel the loss and absence of such a bright spirit very keenly. We know that God’s ways are always perfect and we must rest in and on that knowledge.’”

If the Lord Jesus Christ himself was incarnate and wept over Lazarus, there is no shame in tears and sorrow over death and suffering. Only in heaven will all tears be wiped away. Faith Cook’s book is a moving testimony to the reality of human suffering, and the true Christian response.

(Cook, Faith. Banner of Truth Publishing, 2004)