I was born the child of Victorian parents, strict believers of
the Christian evangelical school. My early religious education
was therefore of the same pattern: family prayers, church three
times every Sunday, a severe puritanical attitude to pleasure,
especially on the Lord's Day. My parents were virtuous and,
according to their lights, deeply sincere in their conformity; they
were poor, but being industrious and thrifty they spared their
children the full rigors of poverty only too prevalent in England
at the beginning of the present century. They were also am-
bitious for their children, determined that they should benefit to
the full from the rapidly improving educational opportunities of
those times. I attended elementary school from the age of three,
won a scholarship to the local grammar school, and from there
proceeded in due course to Cambridge. My education had cost
my parents only the expense of feeding and clothing me; but
that was a sufficiently large sacrifice to the poor of their genera-
tion, and I cannot adequately express my thankfulness to them
for their love and devotion and unfailing encouragement.

When the first war broke out I was nine years old: my father
served in the Royal Navy, and saw his brother's ship go down
with all hands at the Battle of Jutland. The years 1914-18 were
terribly anxious years for naval families; they were also fearful
years for children as the technique for bombing civilians ad-
vanced, but they were incomparably easier than the years 1939-
45 in which my own child grew up. The early 1920s were a time
of disillusionment and doubt. For us in Britain the war had been
won, but the peace was obviously lost: many thousands of heroes
returned to unemployment; the poor became poorer still. These
were the years in which, along with perhaps the majority of my
contemporaries, I lost faith--the faith, that is, which I had been
taught by my parents. Being what is called a clever boy, I read
voraciously the rationalists, the agnostics, the atheists; I was
persuaded that the mind was the measure of all things; I applied
my reason to the dogmas of Christianity, and my reason rejected

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