From the time I knew them, neither of my parents was a practising Christian, although each had taught at Sunday Schools before their marriage. However, because both were the children of German rather than British parents, they believed that an understanding of the Christian faith as practised in an Anglican church was a desirable part of our upbringing for life in what was then an Anglo-Celtic, Christian community. On 26 September, 1920, I was baptized at the Anglican Church of St Theodore, Rose Park, where I subsequently went to Sunday School and was confirmed at the age of 12. I was even then sceptical about the truth of Christian teachings, but occasionally with boy friends (and later with the hope of meeting some girls) went on Sunday evenings to one of the local churches, St Theodore's or the Congregational church across the road, until I was 17 or 18 years old. Since then, I have attended churches only for official events: marriages, occasionally baptisms, and deaths. I am still interested in religion as a widespread human activity (an ‘anthropological’ interest) but I am without religious beliefs myself—I accept the ‘unknowable’. At times I was intolerant of what I saw and still see as the evils of some Christian teaching, especially that of evangelical Christians, and the Roman Catholic prohibition of contraception.