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weren't afraid to get up in the morning.'
    Their names were everywhere in my childhood. They fell like unsettled dust from the roof beams and attics of ancient memory. There was Laurence Anderton who wrote
The Protestant's Apologie
under the pseudonym John Brerely. There was Robert Anderton, a student at Brasenose College who acknowledged Elizabeth I but said he would not oppose the Pope and was later executed for his trouble on the Isle of Wight. The Anderton name is often to be found on the recusancy rolls, and when I was five or six my father would sometimes take me by the hand through the graveyards of Wrightington, Ince Blundell or Hindley. I can still see dragonflies hovering over the grass and darting between the stones.
    One of my last memories of my father is on such a day, at a graveyard outside Wigan. 'You see,' he said, bending down at a grave and scraping the stone with his fingernail. 'Anderton. Cotton-mill worker, it says.'
    'Not the one that got executed in London?'
    I remember him making a friendly frown and his blue surgeon's eyes swallowing me and the graveyard, its trees and its toadstools too. I can see him so clearly with his good hair and the pale sun at his back, my father reaching out for my wrist and squeezing—it seems now—for all the years that he wouldn't know me.
    'We didn't only die for God,' he said.

    The Mother Lodge stands in Main Street. It is a rather gaunt building of reddish local stone. Dalgarnock people call it the 'Number Nothing', for it houses the oldest Masonic establishment in Scotland, Lodge No. o. Members are wont to defend the title against the claims of the Edinburgh lodges with reference to compelling medieval hearsay and land rights going back to the foundation of the abbey.
    My first winter in the town, a group of men were standing outside as I passed. Some of them had grey hair fairly shining with pomade, and they chewed gum and wore training shoes, each man seeming to be in preparation for some kind of cardiovascular event. They began to laugh as if to communicate how stupid it was for a Catholic priest suddenly to waft past them in the street wearing his dog collar, but their smiles turned sinister when I lifted my hand to wave back and return the smile, as if war songs suddenly echoed in their blood at the sight of my insulting friendliness.
    The men at the door of the Mother Lodge made me feel as if the sight of me was hurting their eyes. Some younger ones came out of the door behind them and froze. I stared for a few seconds. 'Good day,' I said, and though I seldom really hear the tone of my own voice, I heard it then, sounding, I'm sad to say, not unlike the Lord Privy Seal.
    'On yer way!' said one of the youngsters.
    'I beg your pardon?'
    'Away ye go, ya papish scum.'
    The older men retreated to the top of the steps, as if the matter was now out of their hands and out of their league. But one of them, a rather distinguished-looking gentleman, seventy-something I'd have said, a venerable statesman with white hair and ruddy cheeks, leaned forward and winked at the younger fellow. 'That'll do fine,' he said. 'We don't want any kinda trouble here.'
    'Don't worry, auld yin. I think he's got the message.' He looked again. 'That's right, I'm talking aboot you, ya English bastard.'
    He glared at me. He was wearing a Rangers football top. I was surprised by what he said and how he said it, but I suppose my surprise would have insulted them further. The older men seemed friendly with the younger ones but also somewhat embarrassed by them. It seemed possible to me that something had changed lately in terms of how those people inhabited their great beliefs and prejudices. The younger men growled like people rather sure and rather proud of their injuries, and this man in the football colours—his drunk eyes, his thin, begging laughter—appeared instantly to assume the wisdom of common authority. The younger men had an eager proximity to violent action, as they