Mum and Dad didn’t like us to have Catholic friends. They said that Catholics made up their own bibles that weren’t really properly the word of God but written to suit themselves. They had priests who were men who wore long dresses and lots of jewellery and did the job fulltime, whereas in our church the baptised people voted for all the positions in the church, and you had to do your ordinary job as well as your church job on the weekends and you didn’t get paid anything for it. Mum and Dad said the Catholics worshipped idols, which I knew for sure God said you shouldn’t do, and they had lots of crosses and statues of saints and things they would bow and scrape to, and this was very wrong. Dad said they also just gave jobs to other Catholics, which wasn’t really fair, and that’s why he was grateful Mr Bednarski didn’t only give jobs to other Jews.

I asked once if we could go and look at the Catholic heathens, but Mum and Dad both said they wouldn’t set foot in one of those churches. They said the men in dresses who ran the show walked around swinging balls full of smoke and that would give Caleb asthma and we wouldn’t like the smell. They said we wouldn’t understand the services, which were in Latin and deliberately impossible to understand so the men in dresses could keep all the secrets and the money and the power.

Mum said they made you stand up and go to a big step at the front and kneel down on the cold floor and they put a circle of white plastic stuff on your tongue, and then made you all drink out of one big wine thing and the priest wiped the dribble off your chin afterwards. We liked the way the Serving Brothers at our church passed the dishes of fresh white bread and little glasses of wine down the rows so we could help ourselves. Caleb said yuck about wiping the dribble off your chin and then made a really long string of spit and leaned over until it was almost touching the ground and Mum smacked his leg, but only gently.

Mum said Catholics had to go into a little room with a screen and tell the priest all their sins and then he would say amen and away you’d go with not a worry in the world. This seemed like getting off pretty lightly to me, and Mum said yes, it was ridiculous because only God could hear your real thoughts and read your heart and it was up to each of us to develop our own relationship with him and to work hard for his forgiveness.

She also said, ‘Besides, Dorcas, you would have to just live in one of those confessional boxes you’d have so much to say.’ We all laughed and Caleb said he’d bring me a mattress and pillow if that happened.