You’re quite famous as an atheist; the word “militant” is often used to describe your atheism. But your grandfather was a clergyman.

Yes.

I was wondering what your religious education was like growing up.

I am seventy-two years old, so I grew up before the changes in the language of the liturgy of the Church of England. My grandfather was a Victorian. He was born in 1890 something, a very old-fashioned man in many ways. I loved him dearly. And the Bible he knew was the King James. That’s the Bible I grew up with. Then the church services I went to—and I did go to church every Sunday when I was a boy, sometimes in my grandfather’s church, sometimes elsewhere—were conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer, which was the 1662 book where the liturgy of the English Church was kind of fixed and formalized.

So it’s that language, the language of the seventeenth century, that surrounded me. And I’ve always relished the sounds of it. The hymns, too—although they were not seventeenth-century, necessarily, some of them are full of the most marvellous language. “His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form, and dark is His path on the wings of the storm.” What wonderful language that is. I was responding to that more in an aesthetic, sensuous way than I was to what the words meant. But if Grandpa told me that God was in Heaven, and that I’d go to Heaven, too, if I was a good boy, well, I saw no reason to doubt it.

What changed?

It was when I became a teen-ager and started reading for myself that the faith fell away. But that didn’t mean that I sprang into the world as a militant atheist. What I’m against is what William Blake called single vision—being possessed by one single idea and seeing everything in terms of this one idea, whether it’s a religious idea or a scientific idea or a political idea. It’s a very bad thing. We need a multiplicity of viewpoints. So I’m perfectly willing to entertain the prospect of “The Secret Commonwealth”—this world of fairies, ghosts, witches, and so on—side by side with the world of reason. I wouldn’t want to be governed by one or the other.

Your father was in the Royal Air Force, and was killed in a plane crash in Kenya when you were small. How old were you?

About seven. I think he died in 1954.

Was that a defining tragedy? What was your relationship with him like?

Well, we hardly knew him, my brother and I. All our lives, he had been off posted somewhere else. We knew him occasionally as a large, genial presence with an upswept R.A.F. mustache and a cigarette, and probably a pint of beer, as well. He was that sort of character. We knew that he was in Kenya helping the British Empire dispose one of the groups of people that wanted to dismantle the British Empire, the Mau Mau, and we look back on that time now with horror because of what the British did—in Kenya, and all around the world, practically. But, to a little boy of seven, his daddy was doing the right thing. And when his daddy was killed, obviously, he was a great hero. That’s all I knew as a boy. It wasn’t until I was grown up and able to ask my mother and other people about it that I found out a bit more.

And what did you find out?

That he and my mother were on the verge of divorce. I had no idea about that. Another shock was having been allowed to think, as it were, that he’d been shot down in battle. And then realizing what he was actually doing was dropping bombs on people with spears and knives. I saw his death in a different light, really.

And then you found out not long ago that he had died in an accident.

Yeah. He was on a plane with someone else, either a passenger or an observer or something, and they crashed into a hillside. Now, he was a very good pilot, and he’d been flying for, you know, fifteen years. And so I don’t know why he would have crashed. It’s a mystery, and, at this distance and time, I will never find out.

What was your mother like?

She was a woman whom the war had also affected. She was the daughter of the country clergyman, my grandfather. Her younger brother, my uncle Tony, was sent to a good school and became a doctor. But, a clergyman’s salary being what it is, they could only afford to educate one child. So my poor mother, who was certainly bright enough to have got in a university and got an interesting career, never did. And she always felt deprived by that.

She did write. She wrote a great deal of poetry when she was young, during the war, poetry about dashing pilots who flew off in the moonlight and that sort of thing. I’ve still got some of them. She could have written, I think. She was a great reader. But it never seemed to work out.

And when she remarried, you moved to Australia for a while?

Yes. She married a year or two later. He was also in the R.A.F., and he was posted to Australia, so my mother, my brother, and I went out there to join him. What was most interesting was travelling by sea, because that’s the way we did in those days. And I still remember a lot of the details: the color of the sea in different parts of the world, the way the waves were longer somehow around the Cape of Good Hope. I’m very grateful, really, for the childhood I had, because it did take me to Southern Africa, to Australia, and, eventually, to North Wales, where I spent all of my teen-age years.

North Wales is an important place for you.

Very. Because it was there that I became an adolescent. I started learning to read things that I wanted to read. I started to discover that I was intoxicated by poetry. I wrote a great deal of poetry. It was also the time when such things as the Beatles and Bob Dylan were occurring. Every child, everybody who was a teen-ager in those years, was affected in some way by them.

You were a teen-ager in the best time to be a teen-ager probably ever.

I think that’s it. I’m very lucky.

And I gather that you continue to think highly of adolescence. Which is not everybody’s opinion.

Well, it’s a very interesting time. When I became a teacher, I was teaching children who were eleven to thirteen, that sort of age. Their lives were beginning to open out in terms of intellectual curiosity, in terms of emotional maturity, in terms of physical changes. It’s a complete earthquake of a time. And I’ve always thought it was very important. It’s the change, as William Blake puts it so well, between innocence and experience.

That’s one of your great themes. But one thing that occurs to me is that sometimes teen-agers can have a kind of nostalgia for their childhoods, even though they’re not that far removed from them. It’s the dawning of an awareness that, for the first time, they’re moving past an age, or a period of life, that they’re not going to be able to recover.