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the priest in arguments about the existence of God and the purpose of life. Sometimes, if the argument went on too long, I left the church feeling a little dizzy, and with an underlying certainty that stupidity and futility were the inescapable warp and weft of living. These periods of depression sometimes lasted for days. (One such priest, I remember, advised me to read nothing but newspapers for a year, telling me that I was suffering from mental indigestion from reading too much. I was delighted later when, in Fox's Journal, I read about the priest of Mancetter who advised him to take tobacco and sing psalms.[1]) I had passed beyond my period of militant atheism. The idea that there was no God no longer gave me a feeling of freedom. In my childhood I had been greatly given to praying mentally while I walked around; I was an incorrigible talker, and enjoyed keeping up a one-sided conversation when there was no one else to talk to, frequently apologizing to God when my attention was distracted and I lost the thread of the discussion. Now I would have been glad to pray—except for the gloomy certainty that it would be mere emotional dishonesty. I had begun to read T. S. Eliot's poetry at this time, stimulated by some remark of the French master about his obscurity. In the first few lines I read, I found the words:

    And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain

    and
    Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
    Immediately I felt I knew what he was talking about. After that, I tended to repeat Ash Wednesday as a form of mental prayer. It furnished a sort of antidote to depression and exhaustion that Shaw could not provide.
    When I was sixteen, I left school, having passed my School Certificate. I had wanted to take some job where I could study for a B.Sc. (My chief ambition was still to be a scientist.) Unfortunately I needed five credits to be exempt from matriculation; I only had four, and had to take the maths exam again. In the meantime, I took a job in a warehouse; it involved weighing crates of wool when they came into the warehouse, keeping a number of girls and machines supplied with hanks of wool, and 'weighing out' the wool when it had been wound on to spools. I was not particularly miserable, but the hours were longer than any I had known before—from eight till six, with a break for lunch—and the work was heavier. After a while, the job began to bore me, and I tried various remedies to counter-act my growing detestation for it. I read a great deal of poetry, because I found it relaxed me and refreshed me; I planned short stories and a long play while I worked, and wrote them in the evenings. After two months, I passed my maths exam with the necessary credit, and left the warehouse without regrets. I hated hard work.
    In comparison, my job as a laboratory assistant at my old school seemed like a holiday. But I now found that I had lost all interest in science. I had written three acts of an immensely long play, designed as a sequel to Shaw's Man and Superman , and was convinced that I could make a living as a writer. I had my first short story published at about this time—it was in a factory magazine printed in Yorkshire. An uncle who worked in Durham had submitted the story for me, and the editor had written saying he thought I had talent, and would be glad to receive further contributions. The magazine collapsed about a month later, but by then I had conceived and begun to write another half-dozen short stories and some one-act plays. I wrote a long dialogue, set in the Temple at Jerusalem, between Jesus (aged sixteen) and a member of the Sanhedrin, putting my own arguments into Jesus's mouth, and the views of the priests with whom I had talked into the old man's. (I left this lengthy play on a bus shortly after I had finished it and never recovered it.)
    I was causing an increasing dissatisfaction among the science masters at school. I spent