the worst thing would not be the end of the world — close perhaps, but not the end.
But if I was an insecure, mixed up and introspective kid, I did have close friends, one a neighbour at home and the other at school, and with both I still have occasional contact. And I did get on quite well with my father. Many of his insurance clients were farmers, and he sometimes took me in the company car to visit them, usually on market day in one of the rural towns around Exeter. He liked to tell a story which both amused and horrified me, and then provided the same delicious thrill for my own children when I retold it: A farmer once took him to lunch in the village pub where they enjoyed a hearty meal, the standard “Soup, meat and veg., apple pie, and cheese,” washed down with a pint of ale — all of which the farmer pronounced so good that they would have the meal again, which they did.
On weekends, father played golf at the Warren links, where in fact he ended his days as club secretary. He often took the Exeter city clerk as his guest, and I’m sure it was entirely coincidental that he insured the city buses. I sometimes went along to carry his clubs, or to take our dog, Chips, for a run in the sand dunes. It would be wrong to say that father and I were close; I never discussed with him my feelings or problems, nor he with me. After he died, my brother and sister discovered when going through his papers that he had been paying maintenance for an illegitimate daughter, born in 1947. As he had obviously not wanted us to know about it, they decided not to try to identify the mother or the child, and in fact did not for years tell me, in Canada. Somewhere, I may have a half-sister. My father had been living on his pension and left almost nothing, but my brother sent me a pair of gold cufflinks. I suppose that I never really knew my mother or my father, but at least my father and I were comfortable with each other, which is better than some father-child relationships of which I have heard.
I quite enjoyed school, which was of course a formative influence. My family was not religious; I was not christened, which could have been because of my health, but I don’t recall ever going to church as a family. However, the school a few hundred yards from our first house, to which I was sent at the age of three or four, happened to be much influenced by religion. It was called Mount Radford, but was better known as Vine’s, after the proprietor and headmaster, Theodore Vine, a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a form of Lutheranism combining, says my dictionary, elements of Calvinism and Pietism. There were perhaps a dozen boarders who lived in the big house with Mr. and Mrs. Vine and were mainly the sons of missionaries serving abroad. The masters tended to be enthusiastic Methodists, and the hundred or so day boys, of which I was one, were mainly the sons of shopkeepers and other small businessmen. Sons of farmers were let out early, to the envy of the rest of us, so that they could catch trains to their homes in the country. We followed the national board of education curriculum, preparing us for the Oxford school leaving certificate. But Vine seemed to me to put a special emphasis on Bible studies, with prayers and a hymn every morning, and occasional visits from missionaries who, in return for our pennies, told uplifting and sometimes entertaining stories about converting the black heathen.
Vine was an excellent teacher but an austere man who stalked about in a mortarboard and black robe in which there was a pocket for a bamboo cane, a hidden intimidator seldom used but always threatening. I was a casual student, interested in history, English literature, and composition, a class in which I somehow internalized rules of grammar and syntax which I can’t articulate but which send an alarm signal when something is wrong. These days I get signals with almost every newspaper or book I read. I accept that language and usage change, and that I became obsessive about some rather silly rules, such as split infinitives. But I insist on drawing the line at misusage that changes meaning. For example, even the most respected writers misplace the word only in sentences and so change meaning. To explain this to students, when I was teaching at Carleton University in Ottawa, I invented a handy guide:
“Only I drink sherry in the morning,” means that no one else does.
“I only drink sherry in the morning,” means that I do nothing else.
“I drink only sherry in the morning,” means that I drink nothing else.
“I drink sherry only in the morning,” means that I do not drink it at other times.
A student once remarked that if I drank less sherry I might not have this obsession with usage, so I changed sherry to coffee. But I trust this guide will now lurk in the mind of every reader, and rise to worry them when they write a sentence using the word only.
I enjoyed some mathematics because numbers are so reliable — they always add up the same way, or they ought to — but science was and remains a mystery; I never did figure out whether the 2 in H2O referred to the parts of hydrogen or of oxygen. It could be either, couldn’t it? I was hopeless at French; Vine gave up in disgust after I got two marks out of fifty despite his special coaching. Maybe it was the illogicality of irregular verbs that got logical me down. And then there was the Bible. Vine taught us the Gospel According to St. Paul in preparation for our leaving exam, and it involved verse-by-verse scrutiny and a good deal of memorizing. Shakespeare, incidentally, was taught in the same way, with the assigned play in my year being The Tempest: all that wonderful language reduced to nit-picking analysis and mental drudgery. But I read recently that London cabbies actually enlarge their brains when they memorize “The Knowledge” of streets and addresses, which they have to do to obtain a licence, so maybe forcing kids to memorize texts did pay off.
But back to the Bible, as they say. I can’t remember exactly when I came to the conclusion but, ever the detached analyst, I left school an agnostic. I should explain my reasoning, but I do not wish to give offence to those of other opinions, so let me say at once that I do not claim to know the truth. Indeed, it is precisely because I see no conclusive evidence either for or against the existence of some sort of directing or superior power that I am an agnostic. Nor do I mock faith by saying, as I think Oscar Wilde did, that faith is believing in something one knows to be untrue, or as H.L. Mencken put it, faith is having an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. Faith may be given to some and not to others, and for all those capable of faith in a kindly God it must be a comfort in our turbulent and uncertain world. But that is not for me. While I am prepared to accept that there might be some sort of superior power, I see no evidence whatsoever that there is a loving God who sees every sparrow fall and has a personal interest in me — and I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. The Old Testament God was clearly far from loving. We are told that when he became displeased with his handiwork in creating the world, he drowned almost every living thing. The God of the New Testament is hardly better; he is said to have arranged matters so that his son had to be crucified in order that the rest of us might have a chance of being forgiven our sins and admitted to his presence. Some loving father.
Who Jesus was, and what he actually did and said, is still being debated after some two thousand years, but the notion that he is worthy of worship because he gave his life for us hardly bears scrutiny. Lots of mortals have endured torture and death for much less without being proclaimed gods. But perhaps Jesus has suffered the fate of many prophets: In trying to translate the master’s hazy vision into regulations for the faithful, disciples become bureaucrats and the essence of the teaching is lost — or, worse, turned into a tyranny. St. Paul was perhaps the first Christian bureaucrat, mullahs seem to mess up Mohammed, and Lenin made the worst of Marx. The question remains, however, of why, if there is no God and no accountability at the end of life, we behave even half decently instead of indulging our worst instincts. The best answer I have is that it is in our own interest to treat others as we wish them to treat us, and if that comes from the Sermon on the Mount I don’t think it proves Jesus to be anything more than a wise man. So, lacking conviction, I have to be content to do the best I can to make the world a slightly better place, or at least no worse than I found it, without asking or expecting divine help. But, and this is a sobering thought, questions such as these may not bother modern children who seem hardly to be aware of the Bible which, right or wrong, has been such a central part of our cultural history.
It
