Yet, he recalls in "A Memoir of My Father," churchgoing or "Chapel, as such, was a thing of the past by the time I was old enough to care about such matters. Reacting against his upbringing ... my father had turned his back on any form of worship and, I suspect, on the Christian faith as well." Christian morals he nevertheless retained and insisted upon, and his son could react--with only partial success--against them. The incongruities of human nature (a staple theme of the poems to come) appear in his father's despair about his son's shortcomings: "he ... put them down to my complete lack of religion." They quarreled about politics and art: "He wanted me to like Gilbert and Sullivan and took me to
The Pirates of Penzance and
The Yeoman of the Guard; I meanly exaggerated their boredom." Once at least his father took him to cricket at Lord's, the Yankee Stadium of British cricket, and met his son's rare enthusiasm by offering to arrange coaching in cricket for him--but his son claimed to be "working too hard for exams" to take such lessons.
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