CONTENTS

       COVER

       TITLE PAGE

      COPYRIGHT

      PART ONE

      ONE

      TWO

      THREE

      FOUR

      FIVE

      SIX

      PART TWO

      ONE

      TWO

      THREE

      FOUR

      FIVE

      SIX

      PART THREE

       ONE

       TWO

       THREE

       FOUR

       FIVE

       PART FOUR

       ONE

       TWO

       KEEP READING

       AUTHOR’S NOTE

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

       PRAISE

       ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

       PART ONE

       THE GARDEN

      ‘For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church … to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.’

      JOHN A. T. ROBINSON

      Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969

      Honest to God

       ONE

      ‘We all need, more than anything else, to love and be loved.’

      JOHN A. T. ROBINSON

      Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969

      Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963

      I

      I never meant to return to the scene of my great disaster. But one day, after yet another wasted weekend among alcoholic adulterers, I took a wrong turn on the motorway and saw the sign to Starbridge. Immediately I tried to escape. I drove up the next slip-road, but as I crossed the bridge to complete the U-turn I made the mistake of glancing south, and there, far away in the gap between the hills, I saw the spire of the Cathedral.

      1988 dissolved into 1963. I glimpsed again my Garden of Eden, and as I hesitated at the wheel of my car, the rope of memory yanked me forward into the past. I forgot the U-turn, I forgot the motorway, I forgot my wasted weekend. On I drove to Starbridge along that well-remembered road which snaked between the hills before slithering to the floor of the valley, and ahead, appearing and disappearing with each twist of the road like some hypnotic mirage, the Cathedral grew steadily larger in the limpid summer light.

      The city stood in the heart of the valley, but it was the Cathedral, eerie in its extreme beauty, which dominated the landscape, and as I stared at the spire I saw again that vanished world where the Beatles still had short hair, and skirts were yet to rise far above the knee and the senior men of the Church of England still dressed in archaic uniforms. Then as I remembered the Church in those last innocent days before the phrase ‘permissive society’ had been invented, I thought not only of those scandalous risks taken by Bishop John Robinson when he had written his best seller Honest to God, but of the scandalous risks taken by my Mr Dean as he had run his Cathedral and dallied with disaster and indulged in his dangerous dreams.

      I reached the outskirts of the city.

      It was very old. The Romans had built their city Starovinium on the site formerly occupied by the British tribe the Starobrigantes; the Anglo-Saxons had converted Starovinium into Starbrigga, a landmark in King Alfred’s Wessex; the Normans had recorded the town as Starbrige in Domesday Book, and Starbrige it had remained until the author of an eighteenth-century guidebook had fabricated the legend that the name was derived from the Norman bridge across the River Star. Starbridge then acquired its modern spelling, but the link with its remote origins lingered on in the Bishop’s official designation. In theory married to his diocese, he was entitled to use ‘Staro’ as his surname whenever he wrote his signature. I had no idea who the current bishop of Starbridge was, but I could remember the bishop of twenty-five years