The Blue Touch Paper by David Hare Read Free Book Online Page B

After that one sentence, there would never be any question of my going anywhere with Mr G____ again. Feelings of guilt had already consumed me when the elderly gentleman had exposed himself a couple of years earlier to me and Michael Richford. The more people reassured me that the incident was in no way my fault, the more disturbingly certain I became that it was. When a police car drew up in Newlands Avenue outside our house, and I was summoned down from my bed in my dressing gown to answer exhaustive questions, when I was given a special mug of hot chocolate and a plate of digestive biscuits, I felt, in the very lowering of everyone’svoices and the elaborateness of their concern, that I was judged complicit and judged bad.
    Is this why I became a Christian? I don’t know. Something inside me was susceptible when I started reading the Old Testament and believed it to be true. Maybe I just inherited my mother’s Presbyterian guilt about daring to exist at all. I remember weeping on my knees beside my bed in terror at some of God’s bloodier threats, and believing that I fell clearly in the group singled out for eternal damnation. Fifty years later, an incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury would make me happy by praising the perceptiveness of my writing about the Church of England, but the original reason for my six adolescent years as a believer had not been at all high-minded. Simply, I was impressionable. I was vulnerable not to Christ, but to His Father. The prospect of hell seemed real.
    Religion was one of the many things my mother approved of in principle, but did little about in practice. So it was at my own initiative that I started attending Sunday School at St Stephen’s Church up the road, and then, more enthusiastically, Crusader class in the afternoons. There I enjoyed weekly evangelical uplift. Under Crusader auspices I could also go off to annual summer camp – white cloth tents pitched in fields twice outside Aviemore, and twice at Studland Bay in Dorset, both bracing locations well suited to lung-filling open-air hymns and frying sausages. I even once stepped forward, in a moment of miserable foolishness, at the end of a Baptist service to declare myself for Christ, à la Billy Graham. Walking home, even I apprehended that this had been an embarrassing thing to do, and I avoided the follow-up meetings which were scheduled to make sure that I would stay born again. When I was pilloried at school by a boy who claimed to have seen me coming forward,I lied and denied it had ever happened.
    The onset of religion made me sanctimonious. My insecurity, my own deep certainty that I was unlikeable, was now lacquered with a glossy layer of stupid ideology. My sister and I had a fight on the stairs at home over ownership of a Bible and I screamed at her, ‘It’s the word of God.’ She laughed and said it wasn’t one word, it was many. Religion to me was an alternative, a second life which might vitiate the pain of the first. I liked being in a relationship with Our Lord because it meant I had something which nobody else could touch. It didn’t give me immunity, but it did mean that what I regarded as the dismal story of my life wasn’t the only story. But piety also offered me a shield against the discomforts of class. To a group of rough boys who assaulted me on the way home from school for no other crime but going to a private establishment and wearing its distinctive blazer, I shouted again, ‘Christ would be ashamed of you.’ Looking back, it’s hard to say who Our Lord would disown quickest in that encounter, but I would be the leading candidate. Christ would certainly have had something to say about my mother’s fear of being thought common. To be fair, it grew not out of a dislike of the working class but out of a heartfelt fear of them, fuelled by so many nights as a young woman in Paisley scurrying past drunks. But considering how little money we