Dad said Catholics left all the hard work to the priests, and that Catholics hardly knew what the Bible said or went to youth class or midweek Bible class or Saturday night special classes or Bible conferences or Sunday school or Sunday night meetings.

Dad said most of the government was run by Catholics who put their spin on everything, which he didn’t think was right. I asked why the Christadelphians didn’t try to take over the government, but Dad said Jesus in the Book of Matthew said, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s’, and that this meant we could not interfere in the running of the world because everything was God’s will, and we might accidentally do something that wasn’t in His plans.

This is why Christadelphians don’t vote. They might accidentally vote for the wrong man and then they would be getting in the way of God’s will, and he might get pretty shirty about it. And you have to admit, if God gets shirty, he really gets a huff up. He drowns people, sends plagues, turns them to salt, kills their families and makes them walk miles and miles in the desert from one country to another without any real houses at the end of the walk.

Mum seemed very worried that if we had Catholic friends at school, they might tempt us over to their club somehow, and at the first sniff that a friend might go to the Catholic Church, she told us we shouldn’t play with them at school or go to their houses afterwards. As a result, the three of us had made a pact not to tell Mum or Dad about the Catholic kids at school, because we thought most of them were pretty nice, and it seemed a shame to stop talking to them. Not once did any of them ask us to say things in Latin or say bad things about Jesus or try to stop us going to Sunday school, so we thought it was a good secret thing to do.

Maynard wasn’t Catholic. His family was Church of England. He said his father called it the ‘one true religion’, but his oldest brother said it only existed because a horny old king wanted to get rid of his old wife and marry some young girl and made up the whole church so he could change things to suit himself, and then he got sick of her anyway and had her head cut off. I knew at least most of this was true, because I won a book on the Tudors as a Sunday school consolation prize, and there was a picture of Anne Boleyn in it, and one of Henry the Eighth who had the biggest calves I’ve ever seen. So I couldn’t see why this church was better than ours, because I’m pretty sure no Christadelphians had killed anyone and divorce wasn’t allowed so no Arranging Brother had ever changed the rules so he could marry another Sister as far as I knew.