The Rage Against God

by Peter Hitchens

  The change imposed by the Suez catastrophe visibly diminished my own father, because one effect of the defeat was the rapid scrapping of much of the Royal Navy in which he served and the enforced retirement of thousands of officers and men. I can just remember the later parts of the crisis itself, through a haze of five-year-old incomprehension. There was no fuel for our family car, because the blockships sunk in the Suez Canal had held up the oil tankers. As a result, my father had to struggle across Dartmoor in the autumnal winds on a decrepit bicycle, at that time definitely not thought of as fitting transport for an officer and gentleman.

  This was a nasty foretaste of much greater indignities to follow. Not long afterward, my father found himself unexpectedly forced to retire from the abruptly shrunken fleet in which he had spent his entire adult life. He had to lay aside his splendid uniform and go off to work in an ordinary office in a civilian suit, far from the sea and the wind that he loved. It was easy to tell he did not much like the change, and nor did I. In those pre-terrorist times, officers in the British armed services still wore their uniforms in public places rather than hiding their occupation, as they do now. And they were proper uniforms—not camouflage overalls, but assemblies of brass and braid more-or-less Victorian in their splendor.

  I can recreate in my mind the terrible explosion of jealousy and regret I felt when a schoolfellow’s father, who had survived the post-Suez cull, arrived on a visit to our school one winter evening, in the grandeur of a naval commander’s rig, greatcoat, gold braid, and epaulettes. He swept into the high eighteenth-century hall looking enormously tall and confident, as he was meant to do. The boy in question had until that moment seemed to me to be insignificant and dull, a bespectacled, silent nobody. But that night I would happily have been him instead of me.

  Our school was in those days very emphatically naval. Every one of the chilly dormitory chambers in which we wept silently for our far-off homes, before surrendering to sleep on our hard, iron-framed beds, was named after a great warrior on the seas. I can remember the sequence to this day: Blake, Hawke, Benbow, Rodney, Grenville, Frobisher, Howe, Hardy, Sturdee (the sick bay), and finally—for the senior boys—the greatest of all, Drake and Nelson, saviors of their country from the foreign menace. It strikes me now as interesting that Blake—Oliver Cromwell’s “General at Sea”—was excused for his anti-monarchist revolutionary sympathies, in a thoroughly royalist and conservative school, by virtue of having been a fine seadog. Two of my teachers were known by their naval and military rank, one a naval commander, one a captain of marines. We all assumed that the ingeniously sarcastic man in charge of our physical education had been a sergeant-major in the army. Even the headmaster’s own apartment, with its interesting personal library (the socialist thrillers of Eric Ambler jostling with Fyodor Dostoevsky) and its fearsome Edwardian bathtub, all brass levers and mysterious valves, bore a wooden plaque commemorating Admiral Lord Samuel Hood.

  We were expected to follow in this tradition, if we could, though I was to find out around that time that my eyesight did not meet the exacting standards of Her Majesty’s Navy. My school, it was clear, would never name a dormitory after me, and I would not, after all, be perishing nobly at my post in cold northern seas in some future war. My old Wonder Book of the Navy, with its stiff pages and ancient illustrations of grinning bluejackets coaling dreadnoughts and ramming shells into the breeches of enormous guns, had specially inspired me with the story of sixteen-year-old Jackie Cornwell, Boy (First Class) aboard HMS Chester at the Battle of Jutland. Mortally wounded, he had dutifully stayed by his gun. His captain, Robert Lawson, wrote to Jackie’s mother:

  He remained steady at his most exposed post at the gun, waiting for orders. His gun would not bear on the enemy; all but two of the ten crew were killed or wounded, and he was the only one who was in such an exposed position. But he felt he might be needed, and, indeed, he might have been; so he stayed there, standing and waiting, under heavy fire, with just his own brave heart and God’s help to support him.

  How I had envied him.

  But now it was obvious that Jackie Cornwell (who was originally tipped into a nameless mass grave and only later canonized as an official War Hero) would not be needed in the future. In fact, I began to suspect that in my England he might even be jeered at for staying at his post when he should have been jostling for urgent treatment in the sick bay and perhaps saving his life.

  I had begun to wonder, with increasing urgency, what I might do instead of joining the navy. During brief spells spent outside the confines of school, where I could see how rackety and exhausted my country was becoming, it was also growing plain to me (though I would never have expressed it so clearly at the time) that I had been brought up for a world that no longer existed. I think I realized this, finally and irrevocably, on the dark, cold January day when they propped a small back-and-white TV on a high shelf in the school dining hall, and we watched on a fuzzy screen the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill—which was also the funeral of the British Empire—ending with his coffin being borne into the deep countryside for burial, on a train hauled by the steam engine bearing his name. It had been taken out of retirement for the occasion. After it was all over, the funeral train was brusquely towed back to the depot by a workaday diesel.

  There was to be no more picturesqueness of that sort. A cheap and second-rate modernity was to replace the decrepit magnificence we had grown used to. The timetable for the funeral train’s run still exists, noting that it “passed” various signal boxes and junctions at certain set times (though not mentioning the thousands of people who somehow knew that they ought to line the track in the January chill). Read aloud, so that “passed” sounds the same as “past,” the timetable is a sort of elegy on rails, as the body-bag of Imperial England is zipped up ready for final disposal.

  Moral Decay—At a Distance and Close Up

  This loss of confidence, combined with the knowledge that I could not, would not follow in the expected tradition, must have gone deep. It combined with the effects on me—and everyone I knew—of the Profumo Affair, Britain’s great political sex scandal. This was the moment when the ruling class that had failed morally and martially at Suez failed in another equally morally important way, as they perched lubriciously around a country-house swimming pool. How odd it all seemed to me as I tried to decode the unhelpfully incomplete accounts of the affair in the newspapers. I was more sexually innocent than it would nowadays be possible to be and had no idea what had got into all these characters. We used to practice target-shooting in a dusty loft—the smell of gun-oil and lead still brings it readily back to me—and I would imagine myself on the African Veldt or the Western front, a hidden sniper training his sights on the hated foe. What—apart perhaps from driving a steam locomotive—could be more fun? Yet here was John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War (a title now abolished in case it upsets people), a man with access to all the wonderful toys of war, from submarines to tanks, accused of spending his time with…girls who also dallied with Russian spies. It was incomprehensible when he had so many guns to play with. What could be wrong with the man?

  I was barely aware of what was going on—twelve-year-old schoolboys of my class were not then expected to understand what government ministers might have been doing with call girls, even if the headlines could not be kept from us completely. As for osteopaths, Soho drinking clubs, and West Indian gangsters—the other characters and locations in this seedy melodrama—who knew what to make of them? Certainly not I. I had no idea what a call girl was (or an osteopath) and, as I recall, very little curiosity about what they did. The mere idea of a Soho drinking club gave me a headache, as it still does. We were more interested in the fact that the girls had also been associating with Russian diplomats, presumably spies.

  This was also the time of the first James Bond films, of SMERSH (the KGB’s special murder squad), and of knives concealed in the shoes of Soviet assassins. Spies were easy to understand, though surely it shoul
d be our spies sharing women with Russian defense ministers rather than the other way around? We always won, didn’t we? A Russian naval attaché must, by definition, be an emanation of evil. What was a Minister of the Crown doing in such company? Why were the Russians even allowed to maintain such a person in London? By contrast, I rather liked the look of Mandy Rice-Davies, one of the call girls, and I have long treasured her eloquent and timeless dismissal of a politician’s denial of his role in the scandal “He would, wouldn’t he?” Many, many years later I actually met the naval attaché involved: poor vodka-wrecked Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a babbling human husk, his memory gone, his navy a rusting memory like ours, sinking into his final darkness in a Moscow apartment. So much for the glamour of spies.

  While we small boys in our knee-length shorts did not really understand what people such as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were for, we knew that their presence in our national life was a bad sign. We knew it had gone rotten, that what we had been taught to revere had lost its nerve and lost its virtue. How right we were. At that time there was only one boy at my school with divorced parents, a fact we whispered about with mingled smugness and horror. Now it is commonplace to find divorced boarding-school parents. To give some idea of the change that has overtaken us, I should also record my reaction to hearing on a news bulletin that some pop star and his girlfriend were to have a baby out of wedlock. I found this unimaginable, impossible. Weddings came first, babies afterward. This was the natural order. I was convinced the baby would be physically abnormal, and my mother had to talk me gently, if elliptically, out of my distress.

  Oddly enough, around the same time as the Profumo Affair, a miniature moral scandal exploded at my school. A popular (as it turned out, too popular) master suddenly disappeared. He had been in the habit of entertaining some of the better-looking twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in his room, playing jazz records, and introducing them, perhaps a little early, to the joys of wine. That, alas, was not all he introduced them to. Somebody talked, as someone always does. Justice—or at least retribution—descended swiftly and silently in the night. One morning he was not there, and his classes were taken by others, without explanation. His name was not mentioned. The local newspaper was not in its wonted place on the table in the hall. Several of the older boys made it their business to get hold of a contraband copy, so we were introduced to the mysterious phrase “indecent assault” for the first time. It would not be mysterious for long.

  The change that followed was not slow or gradual, but catastrophic, like an avalanche. Small children now know and use swearwords as punctuation. (Mostly they know no other punctuation.) Sexual acts are openly discussed on mainstream broadcasts and explained in British school classrooms with the aid of bananas and hockey-sticks, and boys not much older than I was then are (unsurprisingly) fathering children. The astonishing swiftness of the change, like the crumbling of an Egyptian mummy to dust as fresh air rushes into the long-sealed tomb chamber, has been one of the features of my life. It suggests that our old morality was sustained only by custom and inertia, not by any deep attachment or understanding, and so had no ability to withstand the sneering assault of the modern age.

  What happened to me next was, as I shall contend, entirely normal and usual for a boy of my sort in any age or country. But in this context of decay and collapse, it was far more dangerous and far more prevalent.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Seeds of Atheism

  “Thou hast loved to speak all words that may do hurt.”

  (THE 52ND PSALM)

  I briskly informed my preparatory school headmaster I was an unbeliever when I was about twelve, which would put it in 1963 or 1964, just after John Profumo and Mandy Rice-Davies had burst into my life and well before Winston Churchill’s burial. I do not think I volunteered the declaration. I think he had suspected that something of the kind was fermenting inside me, since I was in many ways the tolerated and indulged school troublemaker, expending his subversive energies on complaining about the food and remodeling the school newspaper. (I am told it took years to recover.)

  He asked the question expecting the answer he would get. No doubt he had heard it many times before from bumptious outsiders like me. He avoided argument and made a mild riposte about how the deaths of those I loved might later alter my view, which I scorned at the time but which I never forgot and later found to be accurate. I did nothing about it and made nothing of it for some time afterward, being too busy passing some rather difficult examinations, changing schools, and picking my way clumsily through the dismal swamps of early puberty.

  A Failure of Christian Education

  Although I was extremely well educated by the standards of 2010, I was hopelessly ill-equipped by the measures my grandfather (an accomplished and fearsome teacher and an uncompromising Baptist) would have applied. In my early teens he would sometimes stomp around his living room—where he liked to shave toward midday with bowl, brush, and open razor—deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. “What is sociology?” he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.

  This was no longer the age of faith, so my Bible knowledge was lamentable when compared with that of boys of my class brought up twenty years before—let alone with that possessed by my Anglican aunt and my Calvinist uncle, both of whom knew the King James Version more or less by heart and read and re-read it regularly.

  Some of my older teachers, rigorously schooled in a more serious faith, did their best to instruct us as they had been taught. The classes were still referred to, without embarrassment, as “Scripture.” Later they would be called “Divinity.” Later still, there would be “Religious Education.” In modern Britain the young are taught about the religious beliefs of others, as if they were an anthropological peculiarity. While teachers are quite ready to be prescriptive about contraceptives (good) and illegal drugs (acceptable if taken with care), they are generally reluctant to urge Christian belief on any of their charges. Some Roman Catholic schools take a stronger line, and Muslim schools certainly do, but those of the established Church of England cannot be relied upon in such things. In a state-maintained Church of England elementary school close to my home, the religious education class recently consisted of instruction in how to draw a mosque. A private school known to me, strongly Anglican, devoted several classes for ten-year-olds to the functions of imams and rabbis, but none to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England.

  By comparison with this, my Christian education was intensive, purposeful, and single-minded. I still recall classes on St. Paul’s travels, which must have been identical to those taught fifty years before, and I cannot get out of my head a mnemonic, itself absurdly Edwardian, which was supposed to fix in my head the route Paul had taken around Asia Minor. “Ass Papa!” it ran, “I Like Dates.” The last bit referred, I can still recall, to the cities of Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. The rest is lost to me, but I am struck by the fact that the teacher expected us to know and remember such details of Holy Scripture as a matter of course.

  Too often we were left to our own devices, supposedly “searching the Scriptures,” a misguided scheme, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of small boys, that involved pasting Bible quotations in an exercise book while supposedly also looking them up and learning them. We did, in my memory, much more sticking bits of paper in exercise books than reading, let alone learning. But our general familiarity with the Bible would still be astonishing in a child of today.

  There can have been very little religion at home. I can hardly recall going to church during the school holidays. We were not a church-going family. But since this was quite normal for our class of persons in the 1950s and 1960s Britain, it never struck me as odd, and I never looked for an explanation. The same was true of my parents’ marriage, in the wholly secular Caxton Hall in London. My father had most certainly had a Christian r
eligious upbringing—the boys were brought up Baptist, the girls in the more Protestant part of the Church of England. He was familiar with the liturgy and hymns of the Church of England from his own mother’s affiliation and from the Royal Navy’s weekly observances at sea. Since then, I have guessed that my mother, whose childhood is a mystery to me but whose mother was partly and unobservantly Jewish, did not have any church background at all and decided to leave her children’s religious upbringing to the schools. But she too—especially during her wartime years in the Women’s Royal Naval Service—would have picked up enough from public ceremony to be able to cope with the (in those days ) numerous occasions when our schools required a basic knowledge of Anglican practice. I do not think my father or my mother were actively hostile to faith. I certainly was not withdrawn from Christian religious instruction, an absolute lawful right for any British child if the parents wish to exercise it. I suspect my parents just felt more comfortable for others to be doing this, given their own childhoods and lack of a common faith. But this lack of religion at home has had an odd but powerful effect on my attitude toward Christmas (and, to a lesser extent, Easter).

  Christmas at my West Country boarding school was a long festival of anticipation, pleasing to the senses of taste, hearing, and sight. Once Remembrance Day (also known as Armistice Day) was over, we began to prepare for the still-distant feast. We rehearsed a great Carol Service. We were invited to stir the enormous school Christmas pudding, so large and deep that the smaller boys were in severe danger of falling into its rich mixture of dried fruits and spices. The term ended with various happy festivities, including an exhibition where we could show off the items (often quite intricate) that we had spent the term making in woodwork classes, and a Christmas party of a wonderfully old-fashioned English kind, only really possible in a large country house, filled with games and cake until we were exhausted and sated with sugar. This party was always preceded by a long cold walk in the December gloom while normally dour members of the school staff decorated the normally austere hall.