by Susan Price
Being made to leave a warm bed in the dark, on a stingingly cold morning, and then being made to recite prayers while you are still hungry and sleepy, chilled in your stomach as well as your limbs, with fingers blue to the knuckles and toes numbed and heavy as bricks, is not the way to bring anyone to God. But my atheism goes deeper than that. I have always lacked the ability to stop myself asking "Why?'' and the knack of forgetting that I asked the question if no comfortable answer immediately presents itself. Both these abilities, it seems to me, are essential to faith.
I do not come from a religious family. My father, although he attended church, did so merely to avoid paying the fine, and was not a pious man. He mentioned religion only when he was swearing, and was amused by the fact that England had been first Catholic, then Protestant, then Catholic again, and was now, once more, Protestant. He thought that this uncertainty in itself, made a mockery of belief, and I suppose that even as a child of seven I took something of this attitude to school with me.
There I was told that God answers prayer; but it does not take a great deal of experiment to discover that Nothing answers prayer. The tutors' reply was that if God did not grant our requests, then we were being selfish and asking for the wrong things; but I did not always ask for selfish things. Sometimes I asked for a friend to be spared punishment, or to be sent a present on his birthday - and what is more selfish than asking for your own salvation? This is not an argument that I would set much value on now but, when I was a child, it caused me, in a wordless way, to doubt. At school the masters tried to make us fear God, and certainly managed to make us fear them, but when they followed a sermon on a god who preached ''Love thine enemies,'' with a prayer which begged that same god to "Root out out thy enemies in the state, oh Lord," I thought that I detected an inconsistency. And when, at University, I read Puritan and Catholic pamphlets, both claiming that the religions they represented worshipped the one true god of love in the only way possible, it strengthened my belief that all religious dogma and theory, including the story that it is all precariously mounted on, have been invented by and for the use of men.
Atheism seems right and obvious to me in a way that no religion I have ever studied does. It is simple and uncomplicated, and is therefore, I think, the more likely to be true. There is no god, no heaven, no hell - though it is not hard to guess why they were invented. Every child, if its companions will not do as it asks, threatens them with Daddy, or big brother, or the bogey-man. Atheism makes it impossible for anyone to be intimidated by the hope or fear of an after-life, and it does not demand impossible righteousness, or the kind of unquestioning obedience which keeps people ignorant and, by so doing, makes them prejudiced.
I cannot imagine what makes people persist in religious beliefs unless it is fear; and what is there to fear? There were three other scholarship boys at my college; one of them shared a room with me, while the other two shared the neighbouring room, so that we were thrown together and, for a while, we stuck together. But after a week I began to feel unwanted. Two of the others were much younger than I, and the third was the son of a parson and intended to be a clergyman himself. All that kept us together were our shared suspicions of the fee-paying students who surrounded us.
I watched these other students, waiting for them to show signs of that sombre dignity which I had been led to believe all the rich possessed. I saw them flicking porridge and bread about in the dining-hall, and waiting in groups at corners of the corridors to trip people up - but while I was watching them, and being aloof and haughty, their curiosity led them to make a friend of me.
There were some, naturally, who did not consider a joiner's son and a scholarship boy a fit person to be seen in company with, and whom I, therefore, did not wish to be seen with; but with many of the others I had more in common than with the scholarship boys. My education had been the idea of my father and my headmaster, and I did not share whatever ambition they had for me. I didn't want to learn the subjects being taught at the University. I resented the rules, the tutors and the routine, and I had neither a religious upbringing nor a religious nature.
These new friends and I encouraged each other. I was able to tell them all my views on religion, which would have shocked my room-mate; and I found that many of them agreed with me, although many more hedged. I soon became generally known throughout the University as an atheist - I was safe enough from the fellows, since the students never voluntarily told them anything.
My friends lay in bed late; they wore any clothes they pleased, even in chapel; they grew their hair long, and curled it; wore earrings and finger-rings; contradicted their tutors, and sat drinking and talking and gambling until three and four in the morning. I would have liked to do all these things too, but could not hope to get away with any of them because my father did not pay for my place at the college. I fancied an earring - a single, plain, silver earring - and a black jacket. I couldn't afford either, but I promised myself that if ever I had the money...
I envied my friends most for the casual way they went to all the forbidden places of public entertainment. It irritated me to see them going off to enjoy themselves, and laughing at me as friends do when they are leaving you behind, and eventually the irritation became so unbearable that I scraped together every farthing I could save from my allowance, and joined them.
On most of these outings we went to a tavern, bought a meal, talked, watched the other customers and got a little drunk, but there were other ways of passing the time. There was bull-baiting and bear-baiting and cock-fighting. I went with my friends to see bears and bulls set on by dogs, and I cannot say that I did not enjoy these shows. There is nothing more fascinating and absorbing than seeing any creature fighting - as it thinks - to defend its life; every bite, every wound, increases its urgency, increases the fascination; and it is impossible to stop watching. And the end of the fight, whether or not it is as you wished, brings a pleasurable relief.
Cock-fighting, however, was not the same; at least, not for me. A bear, or a bull, is a large, fierce animal; you feel that it more than pays the dogs for their bites. It usually kills several of them. At the first cock-fight I attended there was a bird which did not want to fight, but its wings had been clipped and it could not escape except by hopping and stumbling, which made it look silly and undignified, and made the people watching laugh. The other bird jumped at it and slashed at it, and made it bleed; and it screamed, and flapped, and squawked, and fell; and everyone laughed again.
I laughed too, because everyone round me was laughing, but I did not think the sight of the poor bird funny. It was so plainly terrified, was so desperate to escape, that I could only pity it; and then I felt disgusted at finding myself there, of my own choice, watching the poor creature being cut to pieces.*
I remembered the bull and bear-baitings, and realized that those animals had been afraid too, but, because they were so large, I had not considered their pain or their fear. And the dogs I had not thought about at all. They had attacked willingly and I had seen them only as a kind of tool, used for goading the bull or the bear into entertaining us. I had not realized until then how callous and how selfish I was - and am - capable of being and, seeing myself like that, I could not stay until the end of the cockfight, but left; and I have never attended another.
I did go to a bear-baiting, a week or so afterwards, but found that I could no longer convince myself that the animals were not afraid and again I left before the end. I went to no more baitings, or cock-fights, or dog-fights.
Some friends, thinking that I was merely bored with such entertainments, invited me to go with them to see a man hanged. I refused, saying that if I wished to keep my scholarship, I had better do some reading; but my real reason was that if I could not endure the sight of a bird's fear, then how could I watch such a close mockery of myself as another living man swinging in the air, his whole weight supported by his windpipe?
The best entertainment the town had to offer was the theatre. The deaths there
were never lasting, few people died in pain or fear, and even the villains had dying speeches which gained them sympathy. Yet the theatre was far more disapproved of by the University authorities than the bull-rings and bear-gardens. The audiences at theatres, it was said, were made up of the "lowest sort". Only sinners went to playhouses; and the actors were nothing but glorified liars. When I first visited a theatre, I almost made my eyes sore by swivelling them round in their sockets to look at the audience, but sinners don't wear notices round their necks saying, "I am a sinner"; and so I missed them. All the people there seemed very ordinary to me.
The play, though, was wonderful. I had seen plays before; but they had been school plays, with costumes made from worn-out or borrowed clothes, and half the cast afraid to say their lines. I had expected a play put on by a professional company, in their own theatre, to be different, but I was astonished at how different. The actors moved and spoke in a way that was recognizable as human, but unlike anyone you might meet in a shop, or drinking-house, or street. The lives of the characters were laid open for us to see and hear; they made their plans in loud whispers, courted their lovers and murdered their rivals, disguised themselves, or unmasked others, concealed corpses - and made speeches about it all, speeches that flew straight up and left the plots behind.
Down in the pit we all stood listening, our heads back and our necks cricking; eating apples and hot pies and whelks and oysters with sucking, crunching, grunting noises; then forgetting to eat and holding our breaths as, perhaps, the executioners drew closer to the heroine and, after she had died with courage and grace, letting out our breaths again and whooping in each other's ears. Then we remembered that it was only a play, a pretence - but while it lasted, I believed it all and hardly gave a thought to myself as I stood there, the end of a crust of bread unchewed in my mouth, as I watched each tiny look and gesture.
After the play my friends said they would introduce me to the tavern where the actors always went to drink after a performance - the Old Bear, just across the street from the theatre. I drifted with them, still a little deaf from the noise in the theatre, still a little dazed from being so absorbed in the play. We were all subdued. When we were all seated in the Bear, and the actors began to come in, I wished that I'd gone back to college. They looked so drab and shrivelled, as if they'd been taken from the stage and boiled until they had shrunk and lost most of their colour, and then sent out of the theatre still bedraggled and wrinkled. They weren't even lewd and godless, as I'd been promised; they were simply tired. They seemed to be pleased that they had pleased, but what interested them more was how much money they had made, and they all gathered together round one table and argued for a long time over the profit, and how much each should get of it. I was disappointed by them at first, but later I decided that this mundane, drab side of them only made their performances on stage the more remarkable and fascinating.
I went back to the theatre often. Not all the plays I saw were as well done as that first one, but if the play was bad then I went to see another in order to forget it, and if the play was good, then I went hoping to see another like it. I even learned to enjoy that strange feeling of bewilderment and distance from everyone and everything round you that comes after an absorbing play has ended. How can a series of invented and unlikely events have the power to disturb in this way? I was very curious about that, but it was one of the many things which the University did not teach. However, the University did, for a time, put an end to my independent studies of the subject.
I was sent for by the Dean and, when I arrived at his office, found my tutor with him too. The Dean told me that my impudent disregard for the rules which had been laid down for my guidance and protection was very well known, and my work, never of the highest standard, had deteriorated. Could I give them any reason why they should not dismiss me at once and send me back to my father with a letter explaining to him exactly why I had been expelled? Well, of course I could not, and I stood in front of them with nothing to say. They waited. Finally the Dean asked me why I had broken the rules. To see the town, I said.
Yes, but where had I gone? I guessed that if I said anything about the theatre, they would probably expel me; so I admitted only going to taverns, which are fairly respectable, and prepared myself to deny everything else.
But I did not have to deny anything. They sat in silence for a while, and then the Dean said that I was going to be given another chance - on condition that my work improved, and that I reported to my tutor four times a day: after chapel in the morning, at twelve noon, after chapel in the evening, and at nine at night. It was to be hoped, the Dean said, that I appreciated the great trouble my tutor was putting himself to, in order that I should be given this second chance. So I said that I did appreciate it, and bowed to him and thanked him very much for allowing me to report to him, and I thanked the Dean too, although I disliked him even more, and then I returned to my interrupted lesson.
For two months I kept the rules, and four times each day I reported to the tutor, apologized for disturbing him, recited a list of the places I had been since I had seen him last, and thanked him for taking the trouble to listen to me. It was hard, especially as it seemed I could do nothing right and was birched every week, for running in the corridors, or arriving late at a lecture, for refusing to lower my head in prayer - and once for "standing in an insolent attitude when rebuked".
My work did not improve, because I was forever wishing to be somewhere else, doing something else.
When a lecture, or a sermon, or a disputation seemed to go on so long and so monotonously that it was almost painful and I felt that I must, I must, walk out, I tried to divert myself by remembering the plays I had seen. I pictured the actors in my head and set them moving again, and tried to hear the speeches again as they had said them - or, failing that, I gave the sense of the speech in my own words. This became a habit with me whenever I was bored, and the more I forgot of the plays, the more I had to invent; so I never noticed crossing the line between imitating the plays of others and writing my own. But one day it occurred to me that I could write a play, and sell it, and see it performed.
I did not begin until one night when my room-mate and I had been in our beds for some hours. I was lying awake, thinking about writing. I kept imagining my hands holding a pen and moving it over paper. I got out of bed, put on my jacket, found a candle and lit it; found paper, pen and ink, and wrote about five lines, the lines I had already composed in my head. While they dried, I put away the pen and ink and blew out the candle. The paper I hid under my mattress before returning to bed. When I woke in the morning I had no desire to add anything more to those five lines, and a week or so later I burned them; but writing them had partly overcome my fear of beginning to write.
I had always invented stories, even though I had not written them down. The boys at school asked me to tell them because my stories were more frightening than those of others; I had realized that, in a story, a mountain of severed heads is commonplace; it is the unexpected cold hand in the dark which makes the audience gasp. It never occurred to me, then, to write them down; but after I had written out those five lines, I couldn't stop. I wrote every day, beginning on some half-thought-out idea, which would last for a page, ten pages, a paragraph, and then vanish. Then I would leave it, and, the next day, begin on another idea. Prevented from wasting my time in watching plays, I was wasting my time in writing them - and breaking another rule.
My work suffered. I failed the examination at the end of the year, and was warned that if I failed next year I should be sent home. Go home to Hawksmere? Once I would have been pleased with that idea, but now I wanted to stay in the town where the theatres were. I meant to be a writer. And since I had no money of my own, and would have to earn my living by writing, I needed that year at the University in which to write and sell a play.
From that time on, every play I began was going to be the first I sold - but none of them was even finished. Although I worked harder a
t my writing than I ever had at my studies, I could never reach the standard of the plays I had heard at the theatre. I wrote some passages which were better than others, but when I read them through they did not have the same effect on me that the words in other people's plays had. I began sneaking out to the theatre again. I had to go; the theatres were the only places where I could learn what it was my writing lacked.
It was difficult. I had to report to the tutor at noon, arrange with my friends to cover for me if my absence was noted; climb over the college wall at some place where I wouldn't be seen; and then be back to report to the tutor by a quarter past six at the latest - which occasionally meant that I had to miss the end of a play.
These months of writing, and working, and play-going seemed ordinary enough while I was living through them, for I was only doing what was necessary. I needed to go to the theatre, and so I went; I had to keep up with the lessons, and I had to write, so I did; and I had to be up in time for chapel, and so I always was. I didn't have a quiet moment. Sometimes, as I closed my eyes in weariness, not prayer, as we stood in the chapel, I felt that I had been running races in circles for days past. But I was quite prepared to go on living in this way for the entire year.
I did not realize how hard I was finding it until my tutor told me that my father was marrying again, and I was to be given a week's leave to attend the wedding. The news gave me a shock; but then, the thought of a whole week's leave made me feel so relieved, and so tired, that I could hardly keep awake until nine, when I had to report again.
