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unacceptable for a would-be priest. Knowing my father would be wondering if I’d picked a successor to Debbie, I created a smokescreen by running a platonic romance in tandem with my sex exploits; this meant that I took a nice girl home and introduced her to my father so that he could see how virginal she was and deduce how well I was behaving. I need hardly add that I didn’t take home girls called Doreen, Angie and Tracy. I took home girls called Celia, Lavinia and Rosalind, girls I met from time to time at the tedious upper-class parties that for some reason people expected me to enjoy.
    At the beginning of 1968, the year of the Christian Aysgarth affair, the year I was due to be ordained, I was sleeping with Tracy and taking home Rosalind. ‘Sleeping with Tracy’ meant a quick swill at the Adam and Eve in Starbridge’s Chasuble Lane, a quick binge at Burgy’s on the Market Place and a quick retreat to her bed-sit which, like Debbie’s, was down at Langley Bottom by the railway station. (It was actually quite difficult to find working-class girls with bed-sits; they tended to live at home with Mum unless there were family problems.) On the other hand, ‘taking home Rosalind’ meant a leisurely stroll through Starrington from her house to the Manor, a leisurely listen to my Beethoven records and a leisurely call on my father in his cottage by the chapel. Sometimes we would dine at Starbridge at The Quill Pen in Wheat Street and attend a performance at the Starbridge Playhouse. Hands were held. A goodnight peck on the cheek became part of the routine. There was the occasional friendly letter. It was all light years away from the world where I bucketed around the bed-sits of Langley Bottom.
    This may sound to some people as if I had my private life in perfect order, but as an ordinand to whom religion was not just a dead letter but a vital part of life, I knew the apparent order masked a dangerous chaos. I found it spiritually exhausting to lead a double life, and this knowledge that I was becoming increasingly debilitated made me realise how far off-course I was. In other words, I knew that what I was doing was not only objectively wrong, violating a moral code which I planned to devote my life to upholding, but subjectively wrong in that it was preventing me from being integrated, dividing me from my true self. Why then, it may be asked by the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure, didn’t I pull myself together and abandon this disgraceful behaviour which was so utterly unworthy of an ordinand?
    Why indeed.
    But I think at least two of the great saints of the Church would have sympathised with me. ‘For the good that I would I do not,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ ‘Lord, give me chastity!’ St Augustine had pleaded to God. ‘But not just yet.’ I bet those two knew all about how tempting it is to use sex to escape from one’s problems, and of course they would have understood that ordinands aren’t supermen, automatically sanctified by their calling. Ordinands are only human; I knew I wasn’t the only student at that College who scooted around on the quiet in his spare time, and if the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure are now flinging up their hands in horror and gasping: ‘Surely not!’ may I remind them that this was the 1960s when the Church was being shaken to its foundations by the permissive society.
    If the Church had become the idol of the scared traditionalist die-hards who ran the Theological College, then sex without doubt had become the idol of the secular world which existed beyond the walls of the Cathedral Close. The Theological College staff thought they could avoid one form of idolatry by turning to embrace another, but they were wrong. You don’t beat idolatry by holding fast to idols. You beat idolatry by holding fast to God, but that’s easier said than done.
    I lived my double life for over a year. Then in 1968 my nerve finally snapped and