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wonder why I didn’t think through more of the possibilities. Why did I assume that God, if He was watching, necessarily disapproved of how I was spilling my seed? Why did it not occur to me that if the sky did not fall in as it witnessed my zealous and unflagging self-abuse, this might be because the sky did not judge it a sin? Nor did I have the imagination to conceive of my dead ancestors equally smiling on my actions: go on, my son, enjoy it while you’ve got it, there won’t be much more of that once you’re a disembodied spirit, so have another one for us. Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth and whispered complicitly, “I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel.”

Chapter 4

    At primary school, we had our voices tested. One by one, we went up to the front of the class and tried to sing an easy tune to the teacher’s accompaniment. Then we were placed into one of two groups: The High Voices or The Low Voices (a musical Rest of the World). These labels were kindly euphemisms, given that our voices were years away from breaking; and I remember my parents’ indulgence when I reported, as if it were an achievement, the group into which I had been put. My brother was also a Low Voice; though he had a greater humiliation in store. At our next school, we were tested again, and divided—my brother reminds me—into groups A, B, and C by “a repulsive man called Walsh or Welsh.” The reason for my brother’s continuing animus more than half a century on? “He created group D especially for me. It took me some years to stop hating music.”
    At this school, music came every morning attached to a thunderous organ and nonsensical hymns. “There is a green hill far away / Without a city wall / Where the dear Lord was crucified / Who died to save us all.” The tune was less dreary than most; but why would anyone want a city wall built around a green hill anyway? Later, when I understood that “without” meant “outside,” I switched my puzzlement to the “green.” There is a green hill? In Palestine? We didn’t do much geography now that we were in long trousers (if you were clever you gave it up), but even I knew it was all sand and stones out there. I didn’t feel an anthropologist among the anthropophagi—I was now part of a quorum of scepticism—but I certainly sensed a distance between words familiar to me and meanings attached to them.
    Once a year, on Lord Mayor’s Prize Day, we would sing “Jerusalem,” which had been adopted as the school song. It was a tradition among the rowdier boys—a posse of unreformed Low Voices—to launch at a given moment into an unmarked and frowned-upon fortissimo: “Bring me my arrows [ slight pause ] OF-DEE-SIRE.” Did I know the words were by Blake? I doubt it. Nor was there any attempt to promote religion through the beauty of its language (perhaps this was regarded as selfevident). We had an elderly Latin master who liked to stray from the script into what posed as private musings but which were, I now realize, a calculated technique. He came on like a prim and sober clergyman, but would then mutter, as if it had just occurred to him, something like, “She was only an Arab’s daughter, but you should have seen Gaza strip,” a joke far too risqué to retail to my own school-teaching parents. On another occasion, he grew satirical about the absurd title of a book called The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature. We chuckled along with him, but from a contrary angle: the Bible (boring) was obviously not designed to be read as literature (exciting), QED.
    Among us nominal Christians, there were a few boys who were devout, but they were regarded as slightly weird, as rare—and as weird—as the master who wore a wedding ring and could be made to blush (he was devout too). In late adolescence, I had an out-of-body experience once, possibly twice: the sense of being up near the ceiling looking down at my untenanted flesh. I