It would be fair to say that I was not, when young, a great fan of the Bible – in fact I detested it with some vigour. The reason – as it usually is for energetic childhood loathings, whether of food, relations or religion – was over-exposure: every Sunday from infancy my parents took me to Holy Communion. There was no Sunday school nonsense about the kiddies departing early in the proceedings to a side room with custard creams and pictures of the Prodigal Son to be coloured in with wax crayons, either.
Our rector, a gaunt and brilliant Anglo-Catholic, took the view that there was no such thing as starting too young. So from an early age, Sunday mornings meant sitting silently on a hard oak pew, listening to Old Testament readings about interminable begattery, followed by gobbets from St Paul’s nagging epistles, in an agony of ennui whose like I have subsequently experienced only at my son’s school prizegivings.
