When we parked in front of the hall for the evening meeting, I was in charge of choosing our seats, and I carried Dad’s Bible and hymn book in with mine and put them on the seat next to me ready for when he joined me. He used to be ‘on the door’, which meant he stood in the foyer in case a stranger came to the meeting, so he could say hello and welcome them and loan them a Bible and hymn book. When the meeting was due to start, Dad would close the big doors that opened onto the street and slip in next to me, which is why I always chose two seats at the end of a row.

I used to worry that perhaps a stranger was just running late, and that Dad had closed the big doors and turned them away by accident. It seemed concerning that you could lose your chance at eternal life if you left home a bit late or caught the wrong bus. I asked Dad about this, but he said if someone was seeking God, they’d find a way, and he had to close the doors because otherwise people slipped in when the service was on and rummaged through people’s coats and bags in the cloakroom and stole things. I said surely it would be okay if they stole one of our loan Bibles – we always had a pile for strangers and members who forgot them for some reason – but Dad said they never stole the Bibles, only the purses.

I used to look up at the board that had the hymns we would be singing that night and put little bits of paper in the right pages to make it easy for Dad, which he always thanked me for. I didn’t often listen to what was being said, but I felt quite happy sitting next to him. I loved his strong, fine singing voice, and he always smelled of Old Spice, which is what we kids gave him for Father’s Day every year, along with nice cards and other things we made for him. Sometimes I would just take in lots of deep breaths to breathe him in. I felt proud sitting with my dad at the meeting. It made me feel I would start the week being the best child he could ever have. Unfortunately, by Monday morning something happened and I always seemed to mess it up.

Not too many other kids my age went to the meeting on Sunday nights. It was mainly old people and a group of over sixteens who were members of the youth group, and who were allowed to go into Rundle Street afterwards to have a milkshake at Mr Randall’s shop, which was open until ten. In my opinion, from watching them closely, they didn’t really come for the service. They spent most of it passing notes, looking at each other and smirking if they thought they would get away with it. I was pretty sure they just came so they could go partying afterwards, because most of the parents wouldn’t let them out on a Sunday night if they didn’t go to the meeting first. I used to like noticing who sat with whom, because this told me the latest on girlfriends and boyfriends, and my best Sunday school friend, Anne King, was mad for this kind of information and quizzed me every week on what the seating arrangements had been the Sunday night before. She said she was pretty sure she was going to marry a boy called Bruce Bacon, who was sixteen and who I thought was out of her league.