All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colours,
He made their tiny wings…

When I was still quite young, Father Tunks sought to put me in the choir, for I possessed a most delightful soprano. There were some hymns I could sing too, and apparently beautifully, such as All Things Bright and Beautiful and There is a green hill far away and just for a moment there, my mother could look upon me with pride. A rare and unique event, to be sure. I stood in the choir stalls, radiant and angelic, the most divine and innocent little boy in the world. It might have been right then that I first began to doubt the sincerity of religion.
    I was wonderful—in my little white cassock I stood at the congregation end of the front row and frequently did superb solo renditions. All the other mums looked upon mine with envy and admiration. Life aspired to a perfection that was surely unreal, and proved to be so. Just when it was reaching its crescendo, puberty struck—early as fate would have it—and while my testicles dropped that critical inch, my voice fell right through the floor.
    Naturally this event took place in the middle of one of the solos. Since these matters had never been discussed with me, I persisted pathetically with the hymn while my mother hung her head in shame and all the other mums sighed with sympathy. Afterwards, the other boys told me jeeringly that my voice had broken—by then they were speaking the obvious—completely shattered I would have said, had I dared speak. In fact my voice had crashed to the most excellent bass baritone imaginable, but Father Tunks was not interested in the lower ranges since hymns were written for angelic voices, not those of the depths of you know where. Father Tunks banished me from the choir that very day, and from then on, I would go through life with people constantly complaining that my voice was too loud and gave them head or ear aches. I tried to modulate my tones in a sort of controlled whisper which I did with reasonable success except when I got excited­, or in later years, drunk, whereby I would threaten to crack the plaster or shake the crockery off the shelves. All this did nothing to aid my essential introversion. I was an awkward boy who couldn’t think, read, or write, couldn’t move without menacing the surrounding breakables, and now I couldn’t speak either. Was there anything left?