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glowed in his voice. It seemed to offer fellowship and certainty.
    Within a few weeks I had joined what was then a fiindamental-ist Christian sect. I had done exactly as my father told me to do.
     
    I had left school, joined the Post Ofifice and been a good son. Now I was doing something for myself.
    I met Bobby Kinghorn at the Chapel. This was his secret life. We were in a kind of cult, it seems to me now, a sect that resembled the Plymouth Brethren or the 'Wee Frees', the rigid schismatics of the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church. It was a powerful magnet for a young man looking for a centre to his life. Looking back, I can recall little except an extraordinary arrogance - the members of the Chapel were better than everybody else, they were saved, they were exempt from normal rules and they were certainly above compassion. I didn't know it, but I was now living in a matchbox with people who thought they could rule the world. This was, after all, a church with but one chapel which financed its own missionaries to Africa and Asia.
    The Chapel was famous for the extremity and ferocity of its preaching. The minister, J. Sidlow Baxter, who was a real fire and brimstone orator, reminds me of those tent gospellers who now make fortunes on television channels in the USA. An accountant before he found the Lord, he relished the tabulation of human weakness. He would rant, cajole, pray, threaten and demand; his sermons were the high point of our services, which were otherwise pretty routine affairs with announcements, readings and hymns.
    What held me there was a kind of sociability I had not been used to, and a genuine, if transitory, conviction of their rightness. I was utterly fascinated by the sonorous mysticism of the Book of Revelation, as I was by the driving certainty of the narrative in the Book of Genesis. I went to Chapel several times a week: to two Sunday services, and once or twice during the week. There were also sedate social occasions, teas and fundraising efforts. And of course like any sect it had 'policies' about things you could do and a great many more about things you could not, like going to the cinema, to dances, pubs or watching the new medium of television. They would have banned the radio too, but it was too well-established by now and they all listened to it anyway.
    The older members were immensely bitter and obsessed with status. If newcomers or visitors occupied a pew which an older member felt that he or she had a claim to, the interlopers were the object of furious resentment. These were petty divisions, petty angers, small minds. But for all that they made me feel welcome. Ewart, my proselytizer, was still my closest contact in the group. I discovered that he made a speciality of recruiting young men and that he was genuinely interested in trains: a fairly unique form of evangelism.
    The Chapel, however, inevitably cut into my profane pleasures, my expeditions around the country and my collection of industrial information. And my membership further strained my relations with my parents, who were desperately upset and worried about it. It was as though my intensity of commitment to almost anything I did was bound to alienate those who loved me.
    All this time I was living at home, expected to be in at certain times and to behave properly; this was a disciplined Scottish family. My parents had never liked me swinging off on my bicycle, my disappearances in search of railway engines, my quiet intensity. My bonds with them were thinning by 1939; we could never talk easily, and the distance between us now grew. I felt boxed in at home, and resented my father's timetables the more I boxed myself into the tiny world of the Chapel.
    Apart from Chapel, I had little social life. I had no girlfriends; there were very few women of any age in the Post Office, for girls went into nursing or catering, and in the Civil Service as soon as a woman married she had to give up her job. There had been a girl called