Perhaps my mother was not a very good driver. Of course, I have known this factually for many decades, but we all cling, as long as we can, to our infant beliefs that our parents are faultless and heroic, as in many important ways they are and will forever remain. Only when we find our own great faults are we properly equipped to see the small failings in our mothers and fathers. Also, I am not a very good driver myself, so I am in no position to criticize. It is just a fact. But her lack of skill at the wheel contributed to two of my most vivid recollections, preserved in full color, with sound, standing out in the fog which is, in general, my memory.

The first was when we lived in Naval married quarters in Scotland: regimented, austere houses in a horseshoe-shaped road, with a patch of grass in the middle, where some romantic had planted a few saplings to soften the grim effect. We lived at the top, closed end of the horseshoe, which sloped down to a main road. I was sitting in the back of our rather big black car, as my mother backed it out into the road. I became aware that something was wrong as we continued to roll backwards long after we should have turned, bumping over the Scottish tussocks of the ill-kept grass, and gathering speed in a rather exhilarating way, until we fetched up amid the saplings, and the drama was more or less over. The best part of this memory is that nobody, including me, screamed, swore, or showed any signs of dismay. We sat up straight, as we had been taught to do, and awaited developments in a proper British way. What would have been the point of making a fuss? We just rumbled lumpily backwards, with branches thwacking against the car, until we stopped. I have no idea what happened next. Nobody was hurt. The cars of the time, the early 1950s, were built to withstand this sort of thing. My mother had endured the Liverpool blitz and served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (everyone used to know they were called “the Wrens,” but I find this rather charming term is forgotten now). So what was this, compared with bombs and war? I revisited the road a few years ago and found that most of the saplings had survived and some had grown into substantial trees, a poignant expression of the passage of years.

On the next occasion, we were somewhere on the edge of an abandoned wartime air base, on high ground a few miles from the sea, where the wind comes in off the Atlantic in great rolling billows of power and makes solid buildings shake when it hits them. We had just become a two-car family, but only in a rather ridiculous way. Our auxiliary automobile was a Heinkel, made by a German aircraft company whose menacing bombing planes had until recently been dropping high explosives on innocent people from Warsaw to Wolverhampton. I have never understood how they managed to sell their machines in a post-war Britain which they had so recently helped to bombard. (My mother in those days couldn’t even bear to hear the sound of German being spoken.) I suppose a cheap price and the Teutonic reputation for reliability conquered such feelings. There were many of these cars. Another marque, sportier and more menacing, was offered by the Messerschmidt company, prevented by post-war restrictions from continuing to make their excellent fighter aircraft, which had tangled with the Royal Air Force over English hills and fields back in 1940, then not so long ago. They were known as “bubble cars” though they looked rather more like enormous eggs than bubbles. A large front door was the only way in or out. The machinery was very German and very simple. People who rode in them invariably made jokes about parachutes. Our car was pale blue. It was amazing how many people you could get into it.

Anyway, we had set out from the nearest village happily enough, on our way home, and were burbling along reliably when the engine stuttered, moaned, and died, in a way that German things are not supposed to do. The lights all went out. We were in the uttermost darkness, there was no moon, and great deep cloud banks flowed above us, obscuring the stars. The sea wind began to buffet us, and it occurred to me that, without our human ballast, the whole thing might just roll over. My mother produced a loud yammering noise from what I now know to be the starter motor, turned knobs, pulled out the choke, whatever that was, and achieved nothing. I have seldom experienced such a total silence or such a dense darkness as those which then fell upon us. What could we do? Yet my father, swiftly realizing that something was wrong, came out searching for us in the other car, tracked us down and worked out in the course of a minute that my mother had failed to turn on the fuel tap. I recall this so clearly because I am thrilled (though sometimes also frightened) by darkness and I increasingly long for the rare chance to experience it. I think my enjoyment of the dark may be thanks to childhood years spent in some of the deepest, most remote countryside in England, before the current frenzy for illuminating everything took hold. Generally, down near the edge of Dartmoor, darkness arrived together with a cool, exhilarating wind. If you were inside, it was hugely comforting to think of that blanket of the dark, settling over miles of hill and moor, keeping the noisy garish world, which I already did not much like, far away. In these shadowed, cloudy regions, the imagination could flourish more, and the ancient, after which I hankered, did not seem that far away.

It was in the same part of the world that I first encountered the sweetness of Christmas carols and heard the great Bible passages which still summarize Christmas for me, read out loud. In some strange way I cannot quite explain, I always picture them as being read, in an ill-lit and enormous hall, by a far-off voice of great command and authority, much as the B.B.C. radio news used to be. The truth, read by gentlemen, as we used to say.

And this brings me to another oddity of memory and imagination. Eventually, I arrived at Jerusalem, and had to cope with the curious fact that a city which lived in my mind as a hilltop fortress of myth and miracle had a railway station and a municipal waterworks. Oddly, it was when I traveled there by train, by the old (and now abandoned) Turkish-built route through the Judaean hills, screeching and clattering through gorges and rocky outcrops, that I felt I had at last got to the Holy City in a fitting way. Every other time I had arrived by car. The train pulled quietly into a dusty station near the city walls, into a powerful silence, and the journey (as train journeys often do, in peaceful old landscapes) felt ancient and fitting. How I wish that train went on down to Jericho, or over the Jordan, perhaps crossing somewhere near “Bethabara, beyond Jordan.” I am told that scholarly opinion says the place where John the Baptist preached was in fact a little east of Jericho, very close to where the ugly, incessantly blown-up Allenby Bridge now stands, and where nobody is now likely to build anything as handsome or as benevolent as a railway line. But even so, this is where John was busily baptizing and had the wonderful conversation with the priests and Levites sent out to question him about who and what he was. This is gloriously set to music by Orlando Gibbons in “This is the Record of John”: “And they asked him, ‘What then? Art thou Elias?’ And he saith, ‘I am not.’ ‘Art thou that prophet?’ And he answered, ‘No.’” Is it just me, or is John, despite his austere garments and his unappealing insect diet, laughing at his interrogators?

Thanks to my childhood, I imagine these gigantic events taking place under the deep December skies of the English West Country, with the Jordan river itself rushing (as it generally does not) over mossy stones and a strong clean wind blowing. Christ’s questions to the multitude are among the most poetically mysterious words in all scripture “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.” And it is on that wintry plain that I also see the events described in Palestrina’s Advent responsory, “I look from afar: and lo, I see the power of God coming, and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go ye out to meet him and say: Tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people Israel? High and low, rich and poor, one with another. Go ye out to meet him and say: Hear, O thou Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep. Tell us, art thou he that should come?”