Peter Hitchens Return to Faith

The wind caught the pages first. I stood a few yards off on the edge of the playing field, hands in my pockets, watching the boy from the year below kneel and strike another match. The pale blue cover curled but would not catch. He blew on the flame until his face reddened, and the rest of us shifted our weight from foot to foot.

Most drifted back toward the buildings before he finished. The book lay half-blackened on the grass. He picked it up without looking at anyone and walked away.

I saw him again the next term, louder now, using words the masters pretended not to hear. He picked on the boy in the wheelchair more than once, and I remember the silence that followed when the rest of us realised we had laughed. He did not apologise. Years later he would list that among the things no one could atone for.

We left school and the country changed around us. I went into newspapers; he went further into the arguments that filled the papers. We crossed paths at conferences and in newsrooms. He spoke with the same certainty he had shown on the field, only now the certainty had names attached: science, the state, the end of old illusions. He and his brother argued in print and on air, two voices that could empty a room or fill it depending on who was listening.

One winter evening in the late eighties I found myself on the same train as him after a long assignment. We sat opposite each other for an hour. He spoke about the streets he had once walked at night, the motorcycle, the arrest that could have gone either way. He did not ask for understanding. He simply laid the facts out, one after another, the way a man counts the change in his pocket.

Marriage came. Children came. I noticed the difference first in small things: the way he listened when someone else spoke at a table, the absence of the old need to win every exchange. He still wrote sharply, but the edge had shifted. When his brother’s name came up he no longer reached for the quickest insult.

In 2009 I sat across from him again, this time in a quiet room with a tape recorder between us. He had just finished a long piece about belief. He said the return had begun with ordinary days that no longer felt ordinary. He mentioned the safety of the village where he grew up, the buses with conductors, the cream horns after school. Then he stopped and looked at the table.

He did not describe any single moment of surrender. He spoke instead of the slow recognition that the old rebellion had left him with nothing he could keep. The arguments he had once trusted began to sound thinner the longer he examined them. He said he had reached the point where continuing as before would have required more faith than turning back.

We met once more after that, at a memorial service for another journalist. He stood at the back, head slightly bowed during the hymns. Afterwards he spoke briefly about his brother, the peace that had come late and without announcement. He did not claim credit for it.