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family background of attenuated belief combined with brisk irreligion, I might, as part of adolescent rebelliousness, have become devout. But neither my father’s agnosticism nor my mother’s atheism were ever fully expressed, let alone presented as exemplary attitudes, so perhaps they didn’t justify revolt. I might, I suppose, if it had been possible, have become Jewish. I went to a school where, out of 900 boys, about 150 were Jewish. On the whole, they seemed both socially and sartorially more advanced; they had better shoes—one contemporary even had a pair of elastic-sided Chelsea boots—and they knew about girls. They also got extra holidays, an obvious advantage. And it would have usefully shocked my parents, who had the low-level anti-Semitism of their age and class. (As the credits rolled at the end of a TV play and a name like Aaronson occurred, one or other of them might observe wryly, “Another Welshman.”) Not that they behaved any differently towards my Jewish friends, one of whom was named, rightly it seemed, Alex Brilliant. The son of a tobacconist, Alex was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry which pulsed with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He was better than me at English, and took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him. Down the years I would occasionally imagine his presumed success in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learnt that such biography-giving was an idle fantasy. Alex had killed himself—with pills, over a woman—in his late twenties, half my life ago.
    So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance, which felt more heroic than it was, to the mild regime of God-referring that an English education entailed: scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, the annual Thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. And that was it, apart from the role of Second Shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptised, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, weddings, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was.
    My brother had marginally more liturgical experience than I did. As a Wolf Cub, he went to a couple of regular church services. “I seem to recall being mystified, an infantile anthropologist among the anthropophagi.” When I ask how he lost his faith, he replies, “I never lost it since I never had it to lose. But I realised it was all a load of balls on 7 Feb 1952, at 9:00. Mr. Ebbets, headmaster of Derwentwater Primary School, announced that the King had died, that he had gone to eternal glory and happiness in Heaven with God, and that in consequence we were all going to wear black armbands for a month. I thought that there was something fishy there, and How Right I Was. No scales fell from my eyes, there was no sense of loss, of a gap in my life, etc. etc. I hope,” he adds, “that this story is true. It is certainly a very clear and lasting memory; but you know what memory is.”
    My brother would have been just nine at the time of George VI’s death (I was six, and at the same school, but have no memory of Mr. Ebbets’ speech, or of black armbands). My own final letting go of the remnant, or possibility, of religion, happened at a later age. As an adolescent, hunched over some book or magazine in the family bathroom, I used to tell myself that God couldn’t possibly exist because the notion that He might be watching me while I masturbated was absurd; even more absurd was the notion that all my dead ancestors might be lined up and watching too. I had other, more rational arguments, but what did for Him was this powerfully persuasive feeling—a self-interested one, too, of course. The thought of Grandma and Grandpa observing what I was up to would have seriously put me off my stroke.
    As I record this now, however, I