The Gospel According to Angel Cake

In Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s, Sunday school was not negotiable. You went to school, you played endless games of Kick the Can on the patch of wasteland we called the Bank, and on Sunday you were scrubbed, buttoned into something uncomfortable, and marched off to the Ebenezer Gospel Hall on Wern Fawr Road. Nobody sent you there out of burning religious conviction. You went because it was expected, and because it bought the grown-ups an hour's peace. The hall was squat and smelled of floor polish and damp hymn books, and it was run by Mr Godsell, a name that practically came with the job attached. I couldn't tell you now what flavour of Christianity it offered. Something Baptist-adjacent. What I remember is the pit. Most of the year you'd never know it was there. It ran under the floorboards in the middle of the hall, boarded over and carpeted, so that for weeks at a time you could sit through a service directly above it without the faintest idea. Then one Sunday the…