On religion

Like all of my peers I was baptised when I was a few days old. The ceremony took place in a pleasant Victorian church, situated in one of the squares of Barnsbury, North London and built in yellow London brick that had become sooty with age and urbn pollution. This rite of initiation was conducted at the request of my maternal grandparents, who felt that it would not be respectable unless I were received into the Church of England. My father acquiesced even though he, like his father and grandfather, was an atheist and a radical. As far as I know, my mother had no particular preference.
In those days there was a much greater sense of orthodoxy about religion than there is now. Anyone who failed to declare his or her faith was classified as 'C. of E." by default. A person who explicitly stated that he or she had no religious affiliation was considered rather odd and sooner or later there would be bureaucratic complications manifest in the puzzlement of an official who had to fill in some form. Other than that, religion demanded few outright obligations--it was a question of choice. However, the Church of England still has a statutory obligation to conduct baptisms, marriages and funerals on demand, although increasingly the people who want such services have no other connection with the church and are regarded by the clergy with despair as lost sheep or with contempt as godless. In modern Britain, Islam is probably a more successful religion than Anglicanism. It is certainly more militant and less troubled by its own contradictions.
When I was young, all of that was far in the future. Anglican worship was an irritating ritual inflicted on children in the hope that it would make them reflect about their morals. For most of them, it did nothing of the sort.
In the Autumn, we ten-year-olds were led in procession from Peartree School along the lane to the ancient church at Shephall, a rather Spartan building adorned only by some early eighteenth-century monuments that bore in spidery text the names of the local landowning family, a minor branch of the Hertfordshire county nobility. In the church there was a display of seasonal fruit and vegetables: piles of apples and potatoes, intensely orange pumpkins, shiny vegetable marrows, rows of tomatoes. In Harvest Festival we sang the words of the old hymn, "We plough the fields and scatter, the good seed on the land...." None of us had any direct contact with farming, which, in any case by then had metamorphosed into agribusiness. We were very far from ever ploughing and scattering seed. So the whole ritual meant very little to us, except, perhaps, that it marked the passing of the seasons, and it reminded us that our food must have come from somewhere before it reached the shopping bags of our mothers.
In assembly every morning at school we said prayers and sang hymns. For the sake of decorum, it had to be done while standing and those pupils who had low blood pressure fainted--perhaps one or two a week out of four hundred. At the risk of appearing callous it made the proceedings more interesting, or at least less dreary.
At high school the prayers were led by the Deputy Head Mistress, a spinster by the name of Miss Margaret Carr. She was nicknamed 'Holy Carr' as she was also the member of staff who taught religion (in those days strictly Christian religion, with only a passing mention of the other faiths, and C. of E. as the Catholics went to other schools). The poor old lady did her best to connect her lessons with our daily lives and concerns, but there was no escaping the liberal helping of dogma that we had to swallow. During morning prayers Miss Carr led the singing, accompanying herself (and us) on the piano, which she played tolerably well. The headmaster stood on the stage, gripping the lectern and miming grotesquely to the words in his hymn-book.
Most adolescents go through a phase of flirting with orthodox religion, and a minority remain with it, devout and committed, for the rest of their lives, which gain strength and motivation from the experience. For the rest, the fascination rapidly disappears and other concerns take its place: music, dancing, the opposite sex, the latest fashions. Adolescence is a time of great conformism, but paradoxically morning prayers did give us a chance to open our minds, for we were forced to stand there in the assembly hall, respectfully silent, for up to half an hour and one had to think about something. Often it was the opposite sex. The great advantage of a co-educational school is that they were there in front of us and by our sides. True, attraction was reduced by the fact that until we were sixteen we had to wear uniform. Moreover, it was particularly unflattering for the girls, in fact it was more suited to matrons of fifty than adolescent wenches. But there was no holding back. By the age of thirteen we had had lessons in the biology of human reproduction and now we were raring to know what it felt like. Nothing could have been less religious. On the other hand, those of our class who "got religion" were invariably the least attractive; they were the fat, the spotty and the ugly. Nuns are sometimes termed "Brides of Christ", and what a raw deal He has had!
I recall one particular incident that occurred when I was seventeen. We had a physics teacher called Brian Peach. Mr Peach was the antithesis of his name; large, gruff and sardonic, he enjoyed terrorising his pupils by shouting at them. When I was seventeen he was in charge of the sixth form, which meant us. The singing in morning prayers had dwindled away to nothing. The assembly hall echoed to Miss Carr's wavering contralto, while the Headmaster, J. Leslie Rose, MA (Cantab.), mouthed the words as if he were a cormorant trying to swallow a herring. Peach, irritated by this lassitude, cast his beady eye over the sixth form and suddenly roared "Sing, damn you!" So we decided that the only legitimate form of protest--or perhaps of defence--was to sing as loudly as we could. And we did, lustily.
I had received too much instruction in the political connotations of organised religion from my father to be a True Believer ("Church of England--the Tory Party at prayer, my lad!"). But I did come to believe staunchly that people should make up their own minds about what they believe. And now things are entirely different. In modern, multi-cultural Europe there is an exaggerated respect for different religions and almost a reluctance to promote Christianity for fear of offending the protagonists of other faiths. A recent study by the Church of England revealed that young people no longer have any conception of 'sin', but they do have a sense of morality. Nevertheless, it is hard to say whether the liberation from dogma is enough to balance the lack of spirituality.
As an afterthought, in those relatively tranquil days the only brush we had with the clash of religions took place each year on the Fifth of November. On that day in 1668 Guido Fawkes and ten other Catholic conspirators were discovered trying to blow up the English Parliament by placing wooden barrels full of gunpowder in the cellar underneath it. They were tried amid a great public furore and hung a few days later. This "Popish plot" had a profound impact on the psyche of the nation, but the shock effect gradually subsided from righteous anger and pervasive anxiety to tolerance of Catholicism: it could hardly have been otherwise, given the huge influx of Catholics from across the water (including my southern Irish ancestors, who were Catholics too). The one abiding legacy was to transform November the Fifth into "fireworks night", when effigies of Guy Fawkes are by tradition burned on bonfires, and large quantities of pyrotechnic devices are let off all over the country (except, perhaps, in some of the more Catholic parts). As one satirist observed, the revenge of the Papists is that people are burned and maimed by fireworks on that night and a huge amount of property is damaged by fire. But as a child I enjoyed it ("Remember, remember the Fifth of November/Gunpowder treason and plot", as the doggerel rhyme goes). I still have a photograph of one November the Fifth in about 1965, which I shared with my next-door neighbour, a Scottish lassie called Betty, who was dark-haired, pretty and therefore interesting. There we stand, in the dark, muffled up against the damp cold of a misty November night, holding sparklers in our hands. But it was not to be the beginning of a romance.