This article appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 17 September 1995.
Me and My God
Tom Sharpe talks to Frances Welch
Ever since he was 17, the comic novelist Tom Sharpe has suffered from panic attacks in church. He dreads being overwhelmed by an urge — similar to that suffered by victims of Tourette’s Syndrome — to scream obscenities.
“It’s a ‘what if’ scenario, and I feel I want to shout these awful words because it’s the complete opposite of what’s going on.
“I hate seeing people adopt a public demeanour. They’re perfectly cheerful outside the church then become solemn as soon as they get inside. I hate the idea of people sitting in silence in the thrall of a Führer in the pulpit.”
At the same time he confesses to being very affected by hymns and often moved to tears. “I get very weepy and then I have these old ladies offering hankies and saying, ‘Are you all right, dear?’”
Tom Sharpe is an avowed agnostic. He echoes his doubts with hesitations over his answers; he will sometimes have three run-ups before finally clearing the hurdle. I ask if he ever believed in God.
“Doubting Thomas has got nothing on me. How can we know — even in extremis? Apparently, when people drop off mountains they don’t say ‘Oh, God’; they say ‘Oh s—t’.” He laughs irrepressibly.
This strength of feeling against organised religion can probably be traced back to a reaction against his father, a Unitarian Minister. He was a powerful speaker and a frightening man who occasionally beat his children. He named his son Thomas Ridley in celebration of a family connection with Bishop Nicholas Ridley, the Reformation martyr who was burnt at the stake for heresy.
The Reverend Sharpe was also a Fascist, who numbered William Joyce, the future Lord Haw-Haw, among his close friends. He aroused controversy by delivering pro-German sermons during the War. “He would say the evil lay in Bolshevism and that we should be supporting the Germans against the Russians.
“He certainly made anti-semitic statements, but he liked Jews. Fortunately, he died in 1944 before they opened up Belsen and Buchenwald. He’d have gone off his head.”
“Did you pray as a child?”
“I was a very literal child. When I was told that some bloke went to the River Jordan and had his leprosy cured, I’d think, ‘That’s where I’ll go when I get leprosy.’ But none of my prayers were ever answered.”
He became an Anglican while at school and was confirmed by the Bishop of Hereford, despite the fact that, in Unitarian tradition, he had never been baptised.
“I remember, aged 14, attending confession to get out of a meeting to discuss my progress with the teachers. I consulted a book and came up with ‘fornication’ and perhaps even ‘sodomy’. The beastly chaplain said it was a brave confession but then he sent me off to the meeting anyway.”
Sharpe had the first of his panic attacks in Lancing College chapel and resolved from that day to avoid churches.
In 1987 he nearly died of a heart attack while on Spanish television. The experience did not affect his views on religion nor did it convince him of an after-life.
“I can’t see why there would be one, but then I can’t see why we are here in the first place. I hope to God my father hasn’t been watching me over the years. If I saw him, how would I speak to him? All the terms of reference have changed. How could I tell him they’ve landed on the moon?”
He talks jocularly of his own plans for a traditional burial, although his father was buried in an unmarked grave and his mother buried at sea.
“The way my mother looked at it, this world was a Vale of Tears. The body meant nothing. You can’t get more unmarked than being buried in the Channel. Mind you, every time I do the crossing I feel a bit funny.”