Harrogate

“Jehovah appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”

— Jeremiah 31:3, ASV

A School in Yorkshire

In the early 1880s, when Amy was about twelve, her parents sent her across the sea to a girls’ boarding school in Harrogate, in Yorkshire. Harrogate was a spa town, prosperous and respectable, full of hotels and pump rooms where the well-to-do came to drink the sulphurous waters. The school she attended was run on Methodist lines, which is a reminder that the Carmichaels, though Presbyterians, did not draw tight boundaries around their evangelical faith. What mattered to them was that their daughter would be well taught, and taught in a Christian setting.

It was a long way from Millisle. For a girl who loved the shore and the open air, the regulated life of a Victorian boarding school, with its bells, its walks in pairs and its rules, cannot have been easy. Amy was clever, but she was not a model pupil. The stories that survive from these years show her as she had been at home: high-spirited, inclined to lead, and impatient with rules she thought pointless.

The Comet

One story from Harrogate has been told so often that it has become part of the legend, and it is worth telling with a little caution. In the autumn of 1882 one of the brightest comets of the century, now known as the Great September Comet, was in the newspapers and could be seen in the early morning sky. The girls of the school wanted to see it, and they were forbidden to stay up. According to the story, which her biographers took from her own later recollection, Amy organised a party of girls to slip out of bed and watch for it at night, and when they were found out she was very nearly sent home in disgrace.

Whether every detail is accurate, the story fits everything else we know about her. She was not a girl who accepted limits easily, and she was a born organiser. Years later she would gather hundreds of children into a well-ordered community, and she would be the one setting the rules. Those who think of her only as the saintly invalid of her last years should remember the girl who wanted to see the comet.

A Children’s Mission

The most important event of her schooldays came in 1883, when she was fifteen. A children’s mission was held in Harrogate, of a kind that was then common in Britain. The Children’s Special Service Mission had been founded in 1867, the year of Amy’s birth, to hold meetings for children and young people, on beaches in the summer and in schools and halls through the year. Its speakers told Bible stories, taught simple choruses, and spoke plainly about the love of Christ and the need to respond to it.

The movement had begun in a small way. Its founder, Josiah Spiers, had started holding meetings for children in London, and soon afterwards he gathered a crowd of children on a beach in North Wales by writing a text in the sand. The idea spread quickly, and by the 1880s the mission’s workers were a familiar sight at the seaside in summer and in schools through the year. They were mostly lay people, many of them young, and they spoke to children as if what children thought and chose really mattered. That was less common in Victorian Britain than it should have been. To be addressed in that way, as someone capable of a real response to God, could be a powerful thing for a child.

Amy later said that it was at such a meeting that she put her trust in Christ for herself. The details of what was said have been retold in different ways, and some later accounts add a hymn or a particular moment of silence that cannot now be checked. What she remembered was the substance. She had known about Jesus all her life. She had prayed since she was a small child. But at fifteen, in a school far from home, she came to understand that the love of God was meant for her personally, and she received it.

It may seem strange to speak of conversion in a girl who had grown up in such a devout home, and some Christians would hesitate to use the word. But it was the language of her tradition, and she meant something real by it. There is a difference between living inside a faith and owning it. Many children of Christian homes cross that line so quietly that they cannot name the day. Others, like Amy, remember a time and a place. Neither way is better than the other. What matters is that the faith of the parents becomes the faith of the child.

An Everlasting Love

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the prophet Jeremiah, speaking to a people in exile: “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” It is a verse about the initiative of God. The love comes first, and it is everlasting, which means it was there before the people knew it. The drawing comes after, and it is done with kindness, not force.

That is a good description of what happened to Amy Carmichael at Harrogate. She did not discover a God who had been absent. She discovered that a God who had always been present had been drawing her all along. Her later writing is full of this sense of being drawn, of being wooed rather than driven. It was a long way from the hell-fire that frightened some Victorian children into faith. She would one day teach small Indian girls that Jesus loved them, and she would refuse to frighten them into believing it.

It is worth noticing, too, that this decisive moment came through a children’s mission. Amy Carmichael never forgot that she had been reached as a child, by people who took children seriously enough to speak to them about God. When she later found herself responsible for hundreds of children, she did not treat them as too young for real faith. She believed that a child could know Christ, and she organised a whole community around that belief.

The End of School

Her time at Harrogate did not last much longer. The Carmichael business was in difficulty. The flour mills of the north of Ireland faced hard competition in the 1870s and 1880s, as cheap grain and flour came in from abroad and the old local mills struggled to keep up, and David Carmichael’s fortunes declined. About 1883 the family moved to Belfast, and Amy was brought home from school. Accounts differ on the exact year, and on whether the move came before or after the worst of the losses, but the direction is clear. The comfortable life of Millisle was ending.

In Belfast her father seems to have tried to make a new start, and for a time the family still lived in a respectable part of the city. But money was tighter than before, and the children who had been growing up as the sons and daughters of a prosperous miller were growing up instead as the children of a struggling one. For Amy, the eldest, that meant responsibility. She was expected to help her mother with the younger children, and she did.

A Girl of Her Time

It is easy to forget how limited the options were for a girl like Amy in the 1880s. A daughter of a middle-class Presbyterian family in Belfast was expected to help at home, to do charitable work, and in due course to marry. Higher education for women was only just beginning, and few women from her background went to university. A career outside the home was unusual and, for many families, faintly disreputable. Missionary service abroad was one of the very few ways in which a single woman could do serious work in the world, and even that was only beginning to open to women on their own.

Amy Carmichael did not yet know that she would be a missionary. She did not yet know what she would do at all. But she came home from Harrogate with two things that would shape the rest of her life. She had a personal faith, which she knew to be hers and not merely her parents’. And she had a strong will that was beginning to be brought under the control of something stronger than itself. The comet had shown the will; the children’s mission had shown the faith. The next years in Belfast would show what happened when the two came together.

A Reflection

Christian biographies often hurry past their subjects’ conversions, as if the important part were what they did afterwards. But for Amy Carmichael the moment at Harrogate was the root of everything. She was not, in later life, a woman who talked much about her own experiences. She preferred to point to Christ. But when she did look back, she saw her whole life as the story of being drawn, step by step, by a love that had been there before she knew it.

The verse from Jeremiah was spoken to Israel at a time of loss, when the nation had been carried into exile and the old securities were gone. It was not a promise that the losses would be undone. It was a promise that love would hold. Amy was about to lose a great deal: her father, her family’s comfort, and much of the life she had expected. What she had gained at fifteen would have to carry her through it.