My reactions to all priests and monks are based partly on my own early memories of my convent school and on my father’s healthy anti-clericalism. ‘Feudal barons . . . that’s what they are, nothing but feudal barons’, he used to roar about the Irish bishops of the thirties and I think he still would have said it had the rooms been bugged and the threat of the salt mines hanging over him. Still, he realized that you couldn’t, at that time (and possibly even now in Ireland), beat City Hall or rather the Archbishop’s House and so he sent me to the care of the nuns. I have written about my hatred of their mixture of hypocrisy, snobbery and sanctimonious smugness elsewhere. All I can say on the credit side of my attempted brainwashing is that its harshness was like Commando training in that nothing, I feel, will ever be quite as bad again. My school days left me with the shaky idea that the Almighty was a Furious Old Man for most of the time and that there just might be a hell, so I went to Mass on Sundays to pacify him and I gabbled daily prayers as if presenting a shopping list.

Years in England practising as a psychiatrist diluted whatever bits of bogus religion I had left. This worried me at first, so conditioned was I to the crackles of hellfire if you didn’t go to Mass. I was a reluctant unbeliever and so I tried to do something about it. I mentioned my doubts to a priest in Confession and he said ‘Its your age’ (I was 31 at the time!). I felt just as indignant as most women patients do when their doctor rakes this up when he doesn’t know really what’s the matter with them. Feeling that there ought to be a sort of spiritual clinic where people like myself could bring their symptoms of accidie and religious ennui I even went back to my old enemies, the nuns, because a friend told me that a day retreat might help me. It didn’t. I was put into a small room and given a boring little book written by an old Jesuit whose fertile output gracing the Irish church book-stands must make him the Harold Robbins of the holy book world.