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much-wanted third child and live happily ever after? No. Lyle was by this time approaching the menopause and our daughter continued to exist only in our imaginations. Lyle became increasingly upset. I became increasingly upset. Meanwhile the two boys were big enough to be perpetually fighting, yelling and smashing everything in sight. The marriage limped on.
    The reward for our endurance of this apparently endless ordeal finally arrived when Michael followed Charley to prep school and Lyle and I found ourselves on our own for two-thirds of the year. It was then that the terrible truth dawned: we were happiest as a childless couple.
    I was so shocked by this revelation, contrary as it was to all the modern Christian thinking on family life, that for a long while I found myself unable to speak of it, even to Lyle, but eventually I forced myself to discuss the matter with my spiritual director.
    Jon reminded me that family life had not always been a Christian ideal. He also suggested that my duty was to be myself, Charles Ashworth, not some ecclesiastical robot who mindlessly toed the fashionable Church line on domestic matters.
    I felt obliged to say: ‘But I can hardly preach on the joys of being a childless couple!’
    ‘ You could preach on the heroism of those who feel called to bring up other people’s children.’
    I denied being a hero, but when Jon answered: ‘You are to Charley,’ I was comforted. Charley’s idolising of me ranked along side Lyle’s devotion as my reward for all I had had to endure in the early years of marriage. Moreover this hero-worship by my adopted son went a long way towards compensating me for the difficulties I experienced with my real son, Michael.
    And now, having exposed the less palatable side of my marriage, I must nerve myself to describe the effect on my sons of the skeleton in the family closet. I need to explain why and how they became the young men they were at that time in February 1965, when we were all steaming forward towards the abyss.
     

 

     
     

    IV
     
    Of course I thought of Charley as my son. Of course I did. I had married Lyle in full knowledge of the fact that he already existed as a foetus, and I had accepted full responsibility for him. I had brought him up. I had made him what he was. He was mine.
    Yet he was not mine. He was unlike me both physically and temperamentally. I understood early on in his life why many adopt ing parents go to immense trouble to find a child who bears some chance resemblance to them. They need to forget there are no shared genes. A benign forgetfulness makes life easier, particularly when the child has been fathered by ‘one’s wife’s former lover. Even after I believed Samson to be forgiven, living harmlessly in the nostalgia drawer of my memory alongside Edward VIII, Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood and Shirley Temple, I could have done without the daily reminders of that past trauma, but I taught myself to overlook Charley’s resemblance to Samson and see instead only his resemblance to Lyle.
    The bright side of Charley’s inheritance lay in the fact that he possessed Samson’s first-class brain. This was a great delight to me, particularly when Charley became old enough to study theology, and it made us far more compatible than we had been during his childhood when his volatile temperament had persistently grated on my nerves.
    It had grated on Lyle’s nerves too. Lyle was not naturally gifted at motherhood, and although she loved the boys she found it difficult to manage them when they were young. This lack of m anagement meant the boys became hard work for anyone deter mined to become a conscientious parent – but I have no wish to blame Lyle for this state of affairs; after all, life was hard for her during the war, particularly during those years when I was a pris oner, and no doubt she was not alone in finding it difficult to be the sole parent of a family. If I appear to criticise her it is only because I need to