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By Root 1441 0

and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, and I believe the last was the first adult narrative brought to my attention, though I cannot remember it. I remember first reading it with pleasure and excitement in my middle teens, but years later my father told me he had read it to me when I was wee – perhaps four years old. The story presents an evolutionary view of the human faith through the quest of a black girl through the African bush. Converted to Christianity by an English missionary she sets out to find God, not doubting he can be found on earth, and encounters in various clearings the gods of Moses, Job and Isaiah, then meeting Ecclesiastes the Preacher, Jesus, Mahomet, the founders of the Christian sects, an expedition of scientific rationalists, Voltaire the sceptic and George Bernard Shaw the socialist, who teach her that God should not be searched for but worked for, by cultivating the small piece of world in our power as intelligently and unselfishly as possible.

The moral of this story is as high as human wisdom has reached, but I cannot have grasped it then. My father told me that I kept asking, “Will the next god be the real one Daddy?” No doubt I would have liked the black girl to have at last met the universal maker like my father: vaster, of course, but with an equally vital sense of my importance. I am glad he did not teach me to believe in that, for I would have had to unlearn it. But my first encounter with this book was in a pre-history I have forgotten or suppressed, though I returned to it later. It was a beautifully made book with crisp clear black woodcuts decorating covers, with title-page and text in a style reminiscent of Eric Gill. Like the text it convincingly blended the mundane and exotic.

This was all on the middle shelf of our Riddrie bedroom bookcase. The shelf above was blocked by the orange-red spines of Left Wing Book Club, four-fifths of it being the collected works of Lenin in English: dense text with no pictures or conversations in it at all. The bottom shelf was exactly filled by the Harmsworth Encyclopaedia, because the bookcase had been sold along with the Encyclopaedia by the publisher, who owned the Daily Record in which they were first advertised. This contained many pictures, mostly grey monochrome photographs, but each alphabetical section had a complex line drawing in front, a crowded landscape in which an enthroned figure representing Ancient History (for example) was surrounded by orders of Architecture, an Astronomical telescope, glimpses of Australia and the Antarctic with Amundsen, and an Armadillo and Aardvark rooting around a discarded Anchor. I gathered that these volumes contained explanations of everything there is and had been, with lives of everyone important. The six syllables of the name EN-CY-CLO-PAED-I-A seemed to sum up these thick brown books which summed up the universe, so saying it gave me a sense of power confirmed by the pleasure this gave my parents. But the four colour plates showing flags of all nations and heraldic coats-of-arms gave an undiluted pleasure which was purely sensuous. I was fascinated by the crisp oblongs and lozenges holding blues, reds, yellows, greens, blacks and whites combining in patterns more vivid and easily seen than anywhere else, apart from our Christmas decorations.

Healthy children exercise their imaginations by playing games together. I was not healthy. My imagination was mainly exercised in solitary fantasies fed by films and pictures and books. From these I sometimes got the feeling that life could be glorious, a feeling often inspired by sexual episodes in books and not always the best episodes. I felt it in 1984 when Winston saves the girl he detests from stumbling in a corridor in the ministry of Truth, and finds after she has given him a note saying, “I love you”; also when David Copperfield gets the courage to propose to Agnes, who then tells him she has always loved him. Also in Peer Gynt, when his mother Aase and fiancée Solveig save him from The Great Boig by ringing the church bells and that vast