Talking of religion

Blasphemers united

Henny Green

Every Tuesday and Thursday after morning Assembly at Clipstone Junior Mixed, the school split into twin streams flowing into adjacent classrooms. Old Testament to the Left, New Testament to the right, and it would be difficult to say where disenchantment was the more deeply rooted, with the Christian Qintingent reconciled to further acquaintance With Peter and Paul, or their Jewish contemPoraries resigned to the recurring nightmare of David and Solomon. What I can say with absolute confidence is that we envied the tiny Infidel residue we left behind us, Smet (Greek 01:thodox), Bey (Islam), the Rayarus (Hindu), with a passion that was positively malicious. The twin streams were of roughly equal size, and it was clear to all of us who comprised them that the whole business was palpably absurd — not just the splitting into rival groups, but the attempt to teach Scripture at

all.

, I attended that excellent school from the time I was three until I was nearly twelve, and

!lever once did I come across even one pupil in Whose life, or in whose parents' lives religious passion played any part. Naturally You heard cases of people who attended one or another of the various Houses of God scattered through the district, every Saturday ,_Or Sunday, depending on which stream they belonged to, and of course there were cases of dire personal extremity where people prayed with the kind of desperate fervour which is often mistaken for religious passion; but effusions of faith of that kind are really nothing more than rehearsals for deathbed repentance, and are no more proof that their performers believe in the existence of God than the flapping arms of a man who has fallen out of an aeroplane are proof that he believes he can fly.

In fact, ours was not even an atheistic or agnostic community, because terms like that imply at least a court case followed by a thumbs-down verdict. In our lives there had been no court case simply because nobody could bring himself to take seriously the idea

of either a defendant or aplaintiff. As to our moral health, that frail commodity was in

excellent condition for, as we all knew without actually realising we knew, the moralist who believes in nothing is the most moral moralist of all, because he is being good for goodness's own sake and not in exchange for a ticket to paradise. At last that was our standard argument against the evangelisers who descended upon us every now and then, and it was always persuasive enough to strike them dumb.

The only other loophole any of us could see was that if we were wrong after all, and there really was a deity silly enough to mess about with fire and brimstone, it might not go too well with us when Judgement Day came. But that problem too we rationalised into nonexistence. Our argument was crude of course, but it was more or less a juvenile paraphrase of the famous conversation between the dying Heine and his wife:

Mrs Heine: Do you think God will forgive you? Heinrich: 'Course he will. That's his job.

Once a week there came a curious moment in my life when I found myself poised, as it were between the sacred and the profane, and the unusual form which this limbo took was football. Every Wednesday evening Clipstone Junior Mixed gave over its classrooms to a Hebrew-teaching school who included among its pupils a violently unwilling me. The Hebrew classes began at 5 pm; School ended thirty minutes earlier, which meant that once I was out in the playground after normal school, I was free of the jurisdiction of the Hebrew-teachers until I stepped back inside the building. And of course I rarely ever did step back inside it, preferring to practice ball control and left-foot volleying in full view of biblical teachers who gazed out of the windows at me kicking and tackling, without being able to bring me to heel. Many years later when Sir Freddie Ayer told me that he did after all have a religion, and that it was football, I understood him better than he knew.

As it happened, football and God eventually clashed in my life in such a violent way that only my complete lack of religious ethics or theological curiosity saved me from one of those tortuous Newmanesque Crises. What happened was that at fourteen I joined a youth club which was technically Jewish but which in fact barred nobody from membership, had long since dropped even the pretence of religious ritual, and had very sensibly elected to get on with the much more important business of letting us do what we wanted, in the hope that in the process we would learn something about responsibility. Now there were several reasons why I was a fanatically devoted member of this club (the only organisation of any kind, by the way, to which I have ever voluntarily belonged, and in whose cause I might be willing to compose any gasconades of praise). For one thing they had a piano which was in tune, and for another, a magazine which was very much out of tune, and was therefore willing to publish anything I wrote for it. But the best thing about this establishment was that it had some football teams. Football was the great passion of my life, and it grieved me sorely that every week our teams used to get slaughtered with a soul-destroying regularity.

I resolved that before I reached club re tirement age (181/2), I would muster a good side even if it meant going into the streets to recruit new players.

And that is exactly what it did mean. Being non-denominational, my policy was untrammelled by any godly considerations; all I did was to draw on the plentiful talent which I had gone to school with, so that by the time my last season came round I had mustered a side which went through the 1945-6 season, with only two defeats, nineteen wins and a draw, three victories of more than 20-0, and a reputation for an extremely elevated sporting morality. Who were these eleven co-optimists, and what gods, if any, did they worship? I find it somehow significant that in a community where priests and rabbis trotted through the streets with the plenteousness of rabbits in the outback, my last football side, just to show its impartiality, insisted on playing on Saturdays and Sundays.

In goal we had a trainee-chef at the Savoy; in the dim past there had been Roman Catholic antecedents, but at fifteen he had indulged in the apostasy of becoming a West Ham supporter instead, and his dexterity between the posts saved us from disaster many times. One of our full backs was the only son of two diminutive Russian-Jewish immigrants, and by the time he joined us he had grown to so great a height that if his father had stood on his mother's shoulders, he, the father, might just have been able to pat his boy on the back for becoming an England basketball international, which he did during the late 1940s. Our other full back was the inheritor of a quarter-share in a kosher butchers, and therefore born with a vested interest in piety, but I must say he managed to conceal his religious concern to a marvellous degree in the days when I played alongside him.

One of our wing-halves had red hair and the kind of face that historians have in mind when they talk of the Ancient Britons, while the other was a lad called Hymie who worked in a hairdressing shop and perfected a twofooted tackle which might easily have tempted him to switch jobs and become a bonesetter. I was the centre half and I believed in very little. One of our wingers was a flaxen haired descendent of Hereward the Wake, and the other was half-Jewish, half-Christian. Our centre forward was also Jewish, but our inside right refused ever to tell us what he was, apart from an inside right, because he said it was irrelevant. Our other inside forward was Bey, whose grandfather's face was on a Malayan stamp, but who attached far more importance to the fact that if you hit the ball with the outside of the right foot while flinging the body to the left, you could make the ball go round people. I think we were a very good side, and I think also that we practised an impeccable religion.