Tono Bungay

But I didn’t expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me.

It was.  It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the coarse feel of my aunt’s black dress beside me in contact with my hand.  I see again the old Welsh milkman “wrestling” with me, they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation.  And I was holding out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and hopelessly damned.  I felt that they were right, that God was probably like them, and that on the whole it didn’t matter.  And to simplify the business thoroughly I had declared I didn’t believe anything at all.  They confuted me by texts from Scripture which I now perceive was an illegitimate method of reply.  When I got home, still impenitent and eternally lost and secretly very lonely and miserable and alarmed, Uncle Nicodemus docked my Sunday pudding.

One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of wrath, and that was the younger Frapp.  He came up to me in the afternoon while I was confined upstairs with a Bible and my own thoughts.

“’Ello,” he said, and fretted about.

“D’you mean to say there isn’t—­no one,” he said, funking the word.

“No one?”

“No one watching yer—­always.”

“Why should there be?” I asked.

“You can’t ’elp thoughts,” said my cousin, “anyhow.  You mean—­” He stopped hovering.  “I s’pose I oughtn’t to be talking to you.”

He hesitated and flitted away with a guilty back glance over his shoulder….

The following week made life quite intolerable for me; these people forced me at last into an Atheism that terrified me.  When I learnt that next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed, my courage failed me altogether.

I happened upon a map of Kent in a stationer’s window on Saturday, and that set me thinking of one form of release.  I studied it intently for half an hour perhaps, on Saturday night, got a route list of villages well fixed in my memory, and got up and started for Bladesover about five on Sunday morning while my two bed mates were still fast asleep.