From Growing Up Pains-A Sacred Diary

Early photographs show that I was little more than a huge pair of ears mounted on two long skinny legs. In most of those early pictures I look slightly troubled and very earnest. Each week I attended the local church at the other end of the village, an activity that seemed to me to have very little to do with God. The Roman Catholic chapel in Rusthall was a converted private house, and therefore lacked the atmosphere of sublime mystery and divine confidence that I rather enjoyed on our occasional visits to St Augustine's, the huge and ornate mother church in Tunbridge Wells. There were few points of interest for a small child in an hour spent in one of three physical postures, listening to someone speaking a language that he didn't understand, to a God who seemed as distant and irrelevant as the dark side of the moon. Some of those services seemed to be several days long. Afterwards, my father, my two brothers and I would proceed sedately back along the path into the village, all my little springs of boredom and tension popping and pinging into relaxation as I looked forward to Sunday lunch and the traditional midday comedy half-hour on the radio. Nowadays I have a great respect and fondness for the Roman Catholic Church and many friends who are members of it, but if you had asked me at the age of eight or nine to tell you what I enjoyed most about the mass, I could have named only one thing. I did rather look forward to that point in the proceedings when the priest placed a wafer in the open mouths of the communicants, as they knelt in a semicircle around him. There was a satisfyingly repellent fleshiness about all those extended tongues, and a fascinating vulnerability about the grown-ups, waiting like baby birds to be fed with something that, once inside them, (I was told) would turn into the body of Jesus Christ and nourish them in a way that I couldn't begin to understand. That the church seemed to me to have very little to do with God may have had something to do with the fact that, while my father was a convert to the Catholic Church, my mother, whose religious background was the Congregational Church, remained a Protestant and didn't come to church with us on Sundays. We frequently experienced our own domestic version of 'The Troubles' and I can recall how, as a small child, I felt painfully bewildered about the religious separation between my parents. Why didn't mummy come to church with us? Did she know a different God? No? Well, in that case why didn't she come to church with us? I would understand when I was older, I was told. The shadow of conflict darkened those Sunday morning ser-vices throughout my early childhood and had a strongly negative effect on my feelings about God, who clearly wouldn't or couldn't sort out our family. If my poor father had been a more secure man the boredom of the services and even the parental conflict over religion might not have mattered too much. As it was, his inability to trust the love of his family resulted in twenty-five very difficult years for my mother, and, in my case, a very confused and troubled perception of what love, adulthood and Christianity meant. Two incidents spring to mind as being typical of the kind of emotional half-nelson that he was expert in applying and which must have contributed heavily to the emotional constipation which led to a breakdown in my own life years later in 1984, and from which I am only just emerging as I write. The first concerned my father's black prayer book. It was a small, plump, much thumbed little volume, whose wafer-thin pages were edged with gold. As a child it seemed to me a miniature treasure chest, filled with immense wealth that had somehow been compressed into a tiny space for easy portage. Dad's prayer book was part of him, like the little round boxes of Beecham's pills, the tin full of old and foreign coins, the trilby hat, and the tortoise-shell reading spectacles that made my sight worse when I wasPlass, Adrian is the author of 'From Growing Up Pains-A Sacred Diary' with ISBN 9780310278573 and ISBN 0310278570.