I still had no friends except among the junior members of the house, to whom I did not disguise my dislike of the seniors; I found the juniors were on the whole a decent lot of fellows. Towards the end of this year, in the annual boxing and gymnastic display, I fought three rounds with Raymond. There is a lot of sex feeling in boxing—the dual play, the reciprocity, the pain not felt as pain. This exhibition match to me had something of the quality that Dr. Marie Stopes would call sacramental. We were out neither to hurt nor win though we hit each other hard. This public appearance as a boxer improved my position in the house. And the doctor now allowed me to play football again and I played it fairly well. Then things started going wrong in a different way. It began with confirmation, for which I was prepared by a zealous evangelical master. For a whole term I concentrated all my thoughts on religion, looking forward to the ceremony as a spiritual climax. When it came, and the Holy Ghost did not descend in the form of a dove, and I did not find myself gifted with tongues, and nothing spectacular happened (except that the boy whom the Bishop of Zululand was blessing at the same time as myself slipped off the narrow footstool on which we were both kneeling), I was bound to feel a reaction. Raymond had not been confirmed, and I was astonished to hear him admit and even boast that he was an atheist. I argued with him about the existence of God and the divinity of Christ and the necessity of the Trinity. He said, of the Trinity, that anybody who could agree with the Athanasian creed that ‘whoever will be saved must confess that there are not Three Incomprehensibles but One Incomprehensible’ was saying that a man must go to Hell if he does not believe something that is by definition impossible to understand. He said that his respect for himself as a reasonable being did not allow him to believe such things. He also asked me a question: ‘What’s the good of having a soul if you have a mind. What’s the function of the soul? It seems a mere pawn in the game.’ I was shocked, but because I loved him and respected him I felt bound to find an answer. The more I thought about it the less certain I became that he was wrong. So in order not to prejudice religion (and I put religion and my chances of salvation before human love) I at first broke my friendship with Raymond entirely. Later I weakened, but he would not even meet me, when I approached him, with any broad-church compromise. He was a complete and ruthless atheist and I could not appreciate his strength of spirit. For the rest of our time at Charterhouse we were not as close as we should have been. I met Raymond in France in 1917, when he was with the Irish Guards; I rode over to see him one afternoon and felt as close to him as I had ever felt. He was killed at Cambrai not long after.