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responsibility, not God’s, to protect my wife’s health, and so the question which bothered me most about contraception was not whether I should practise it but how it could be achieved. “French letters” may have been widely available since the end of the First War, but a clergyman can hardly be seen to purchase them. Nor can he seek help from his doctor, who might be scandalised by such a questionable resolution of the Church’s murky official attitude.
    I knew from the start of our marriage that the responsibility for regulating the arrival of children must be mine; it was inconceivable that Grace should be soiled by knowledge which should belong only to fallen women, and after Christian’s birth I made the sensible decision to ignore the ancient religious disapproval of coitus interruptus . This form of contraception has a dubious reputation, but if one regards it as a discipline which is capable of developing one’s control and thus enhancing one’s performance, the obvious disadvantages soon cease to be intolerable.
    I confess I didn’t practise this discipline all the time. That would have been too demanding, even for a man who enjoyed a challenge, but Grace’s monthly health was so regular that it was easy to work out when special care was required. After Christian’s birth in 1927, Norman arrived in 1930, James in 1933 and Primrose in 1937. No exercise in family planning could have been more successful, and that was why we were so shocked by Alexander’s conception. None of the other children had begun life as an accident.
    After he was born I pulled myself together, made the necessary unpalatable deductions and began my travels in “mufti” to the port of Starmouth to forage anonymously for French letters. I disliked these sordid expeditions very much. I felt they constituted conduct quite unbecoming to an archdeacon, but I refused to regard my behaviour as morally wrong and I had no doubt that Christ, who had held marriage in such high regard, would forgive these unsalubrious machinations to protect my wife’s health, maintain my emotional equilibrium and preserve my happy family life.
    By this time that happy family life had become more than a little frayed at the edges, and although my new approach to contraception prevented further unravelling, I became conscious, as time passed, that the frayed edges were failing to repair themselves as swiftly as I had hoped. In fact by the May of 1942, when I met Dido, I had begun to be seriously worried about Grace as she struggled to survive the stresses and strains of life at the vicarage.
    It’s not easy being a clergyman’s wife. Parishioners make constant demands. Social obligations multiply. Her husband requires her support in a multitude of ways both obvious and subtle. Even in a peaceful country parish these responsibilities can be oppressive, but we were no longer living in the country. The Archdeaconry of Starbridge was attached to the benefice of St. Martin’s-in-Cripplegate, a famous ancient church in the heart of the city, and I was also an honorary canon—a prebendary, as they were called in Starbridge—of the Cathedral. I knew everyone who was anyone in that city, and as my wife, Grace was obliged to know them too. Grace was a cut above me socially; her father had been a solicitor in Manchester, but people from the north can be intimidated by people from the South, and Starbridge, wealthy, southern Starbridge, was not a city where Grace could easily feel at home.
    Alex had appointed me to the archdeaconry in 1937, shortly before Primrose had been born. Christian had been away at prep school, but Norman and James had still been at home. Struggling with two active small boys, a newborn baby, a large old-fashioned vicarage, unfamiliar surroundings, a host of unknown parishioners and an increasingly elaborate social life, Grace had slowly sunk into an exhausted melancholy. Alexander’s arrival had been the last straw.
    In vain I suggested