A Good Boy Tomorrow

First published in 1907, Father and Son recounted Edmund Gosse's
fundamentalist upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren. A hundred
years on, A Good Boy Tomorrow tells a similar story.

Wheeler grew up in the idyllic surroundings of the Lake District of
northern England. But when he was eight years old, his father returned
from war service and the family moved south to their cramped home in
north London. There they joined an "assembly of saints" of the Open
Brethren; and so began eight years of a strict evangelical upbringing.

Sexually assaulted by an older boy at sea scouts, forbidden to write to his
childhood sweetheart, and subtly pressurized into conversion, Charles
twice came close to making his escape-first by running away to the
Shetland Islands, and later, wracked by guilt over making a false
conversion, by using his father's service revolver.

His escape was finally achieved when he joined the Royal Navy at the age
of sixteen; but his conversion to Catholicism and marriage to a Roman
Catholic caused a tragic family schism, and it was not until long after his
father's death that he was at last able to find intellectual equilibrium in
Spinoza's concept that we are all one.