It was not the beginning of my interest in, or involvement with, the language and the associated culture. At Cambridge I had a dear friend named Damian Carr, who became a doctor. His father was English, but his mother was the daughter of a Polish woman with a Hassidic background and the only general to lead an offensive action, on horseback, against the invading German tanks in 1939. I have not forgotten declaiming to Damian, in his student digs off Gower Street in London, Miron Białoszewski’s hilarious poem about the loss of a stove, in the translation by Czeslaw Miłosz: ‘I have a stove/ similar to a triumphal arch!// They take away my stove/ similar to a triumphal arch!!// They took it away./ What remains is/ a grey/ naked/ hole’. I subsequently learned that Białoszewski was gay. Was that what drew me so unswervingly to his poem?

Polish classes at the faculty in Bari were given by Jerzy Pomianowski who, like many professors, travelled down from Rome each week. So did the professor of German, Aloisio Rendi, a rather grim, bespectacled figure who committed suicide not long after I left. They were surrounded over lunch and during any free time in their weekly visits by an admiring group of followers and aspirants. The air of the metropolis and of other, far off lands they brought with them was extremely precious in the vernacular isolation of Bari.

I do not think I know the half of Pomianowski’s adventurous life, for example during the war when, as a Jew escaping to the Soviet Union, he had to negotiate the harshness of Stalinist dictates in his work as a journalist. One day he told me sternly that he did not believe in the concept of ‘collective responsibility’. I had no idea what he was talking about, or what debate this particular, momentous phrase could form a part of. His life companion was a strikingly beautiful actress named Aleksandra Kurczab, also Jewish. Once she observed to me, in the back of the car in which we were negotiating the Roman traffic: ‘Christopher, what hope can there possibly be for a language in which “love” is “mee-woshch” and “the moon” is “ksheng-zhich”?’ I had in fact first seen Aleksandra onstage, when she figured in a production by Giorgio Pressburger based on Proust’s novel, during which the entire cast processed repeatedly in turn of the century costumes down a majestic staircase to the strains of Berlioz’ Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale.

The two were good friends of the exiled writer Maria Kuncewiczowa. I ended up going together with this woman and her husband to midnight mass at Christmas in the Church of the Aracoeli on the Palatine, where a doll of the child Jesus is displayed to the excited faithful. Some time later, Jerzy and Aleksandra showed me with relish the passage in Kuncewiczowa’s published diaries where she describes attending mass in Rome in the company of a Scottish Calvinist. If only she had known that, with my Jesuit education and my background in the Glasgow Irish immigration, I was what they call ‘more Catholic than the Pope’!

Pomianowski was an altogether more jovial and approachable figure than Rendi. He organised an evening in my half of the seaside bungalow where a group of his students spent what felt like laborious hours grating potatoes, in order to fry traditional Polish potato cakes. Unfortunately we were not skilled enough to drain the mixture properly of water. The whole business was a distressing failure which left us not just exhausted and frustrated, but also hungry.

Lidia Signorile, if not a colleague, was at any rate a friend and helper of Pomianowski’s, who would later inform me that another member of the Polish class had told her: ‘Just watch. I am going to marry that Scotsman.’ Her chances of success were small. As well as being the stage at which I began learning Polish, that Bari spring marked my period of gay activism. I became a member of a group known as FUORI, which means “out” in Italian, but is also an acronym standing roughly for Union of Revolutionary Italian Homosexuals. Do not forget that this was 1976! Reports of Paris in May 1968 were fresh in our memories. One of our more entertaining projects, which we never put into practice, was to organise a “kiss-in”. Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point was still a cult film. The idea was for a group of us to” invade” a straight disco, go onto the dance floor, and start kissing one another provocatively in full view of all those present. No one at the faculty ever challenged me about my militancy, which was actually reported in the newspapers. ‘Chris, a Scottish man living in Bari’ was enough to give the game away. The situation elicited from Lidia an unforgettable remark: ‘You have to understand that, in Bari, everyone knows everything about everybody else. Plus a further 25% which is pure invention’.

Attending my first ever FUORI meeting had its comical side. I saw a notice pinned up in the entrance corridor to the faculty and decided that the time was at hand to do some experimenting. Who was ever going to discover, in Glasgow or even in Rome, what I had got up to while teaching in Bari? When it came to the point, I walked up and down in the street outside for fully 20 minutes, doing my best to summon up the courage to go in. Technically, where men were concerned, I was still more or less a virgin at that stage (these things are never absolutely black and white). My fantasy was that I would walk through the door and immediately get laid. I’d be hard put to it to say whether the prospect excited or appalled me. Perhaps the first emotion was predominant. And of course, when I did go in, longwinded and cavilling political discussions were what I found in progress. No hope of an orgy. In Italian, the word for a man is “uomo”, and the word for “homosexual” is “omosessuale”, without the initial “u”. After all, the implication of “omo” is “the same”. One of the group insisted on saying “uomosessuale”, which was perfectly logical and distinctly appealing. Nobody bothered to correct him. For him, it meant somebody who preferred to have sex with a man.

Moving to Rome, and starting work as a “lettore” at the La Sapienza university in the huge, fascist-style campus of the Città Universitaria, did not diminish my interest in Polish. I enrolled for evening classes, where a fellow student became a dear friend and would subsequently occupy the chair of Polish on one of Rome’s new campuses. She fondly remembers me upbraiding her gently for failing to do her homework.

That summer – it was 1980 – I travelled to Cracow, determined not to abandon my plan of visiting Poland even though our teacher had failed to secure me a place on the summer language course. Incredibly, I was able to buy a railway ticket which took me from Rome via Vienna to Cracow, and then via Budapest and Belgrade on to Thessaloniki in Greece, where my Italian partner would be attending the language course he had chosen. The cost was minimal and I was allowed to stop off wherever I wanted on the way.

Paola, another student at the evening classes, had given me the name of a certain Pani Jadwiga Stolfa who, she told me, would be more than happy to rent me a room in her flat if I said Paola had sent me. Memories of the train journey from Vienna to Cracow, my first experience of crossing the Iron Curtain, crowd my brain when I think back. You needed two distinct visas for crossing through Czechoslovakia, one for entering and one for leaving. Getting off the train was totally forbidden and would have been unthinkable. At the border, officials dutifully went along the carriages outside, beating on the metal casing to check no one and nothing was hidden behind.

Then came the seemingly interminable, melancholy forests of pine and birch across the Polish border. I had to get off at the industrial centre of Katowice and wait there for another train. Everything was so grimy and miserable it felt like living in black and white, or rather, sepia grey. The whole enormous station building was permeated by a penetrating odour of pee. I arrived in Cracow too late to trouble Pani Stolfa, so checked in at the youth hostel for the night. When I took my luggage upstairs to the dormitory, a distinctly attractive youth followed me, sat down on a bed opposite and said that, if there was anything I felt unhappy about, or did not like in my surroundings, I should tell him, and he would see to it. Can he possibly have been working for the police?

Though that was the summer of 1980, nothing concerning the unrest in the shipyards at Gdansk percolated through to me in Cracow. Using a guide written in German, I painstakingly explored the historical centre of the city and the former Jewish ghetto, took an organised trip to the salt mines at Wieliczka and another to the Tatra mountains. And in a shop on the main square, I came upon a vinyl recording of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto with Wanda Wilkomirska as the soloist and Antoni Wit conducting. A further door had opened on the richness of Polish culture in the 20th century. And not only then.

One of my earliest, still powerful erotic memories is connected to the masked man, no doubt a prince in exile, who discovers the abandoned children under a tree in Babes in the Wood. I had been primed by the cowboy on horseback in the television series The Lone Ranger, always introduced by fast music from the overture to William Tell and invariably accompanied by his faithful Indian follower, Tonto. If no one speculated about what the two of them got up to after they had bedded down for the night, perhaps that is just as well.

Theatrical experiences of a more conventional nature were limited till I moved to Budapest in 2005, after which I had occasion to experience a living, uncomplicated theatrical culture. Audiences of all ages were in the habit of seeing shows every couple of weeks during the season. Even on Monday nights the capital’s theatres were often full. Hungarian audiences approached the experience with an easy naturalness I never found in Scotland, possibly because, unlike in Calvinist Edinburgh of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, theatre had never been outlawed in their country, or banned by the ecclesiastical authorities. While still at school, I attended a production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre which shocked me to the core with the violence of its action and its ruthlessly explicit, cruel language. That counts among a series of plays from the fallow years before Budapest which stand out in retrospect. Another was a production of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño which the Stary Teatr of Cracow brought to Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre during the 1988 festival.

An uncanny instinct steers us in the direction of books, paintings, places and pieces of music which are destined to fulfil a revelatory, emblematic function in our lives, without any rational explanation being available as to how we pick them out. The phenomenon is similar, but not identical, to what happens when a remark let drop with seeming casualness, or one we overhear, refuses to “go away”, even though its meaning appears straightforward and it has no conceivable basis for haunting us. It is as if we sensed that here lies an issue which pertains to us at the most profound and intimate level. A key has been delivered into our hands which we will cast aside at our peril. If we do not take the opportunity to unlock the door in question and face whatever lies beyond, we may well find we ourselves pushed across that threshold when we least expect it, under considerably less propitious circumstances.

I had that feeling about Calderón’s drama, which explains why I bought a ticket. I went alone, often the ideal condition for connecting with a play or a piece of music. You do not have to worry whether the person sitting next to you is enjoying themselves or not. Nor do you have to engage in superficial conversation during the intervals, or put up with uninsightful, unsympathetic commentaries, as they tell you how disappointed they have been with a spectacle which you find utterly moving and captivating.

Everything that evening was in Polish. We all wore headphones through which a voice, always the same, not varying for character or situation, conveyed the English meaning of what was being said. Somehow that did not detract from the power of the production. It reminds me of attending Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel, in a stunning mise-en-scène directed by Mariusz Trelinski for the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw earlier this year. The contralto singing Renata, whose role is the axis the whole opera revolves around, had lost her voice. While this woman acted and mouthed the words, a singer specially flown in from Moscow sang her role from the side of the stage. The effect of the estrangement was to heighten the impact of the production rather than weakening it.

In a gesture towards Ariosto, at the very start of Calderón’s play Rosaura and her accompanying “gracioso” Clarín, the rough equivalent of the Clown in Shakespeare’s dramas, tumble off the back of a hippogriff amidst mountains in Poland. Mountains? In Poland? Well, in the end they are no more improbable than a sea coast in Bohemia. In this production, Rosaura, cross-dressing as a man and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, advanced with her companion from the back of the auditorium, then clambered up onto the stage. Immediately we were all agog. Riveted, without the actors needing even to pronounce a word. What on earth was going on? And what could be about to happen?

The backbone of Calderón’s drama is the common enough folklore motif of the “king for a day”. When the court astrologer foretells that the son of king Basilio will rise up against him and dethrone him, he decides to have the boy reared amidst wild beasts in a tower amongst the mountains. When the boy is an adult, suffering an attack of contrition, the king has him drugged. Sigismondo awakes in the royal palace, where he is treated like a king and behaves like a beast. He attempts to rape a woman and murders a courtier by throwing him from a window.

The next morning, he reawakens in the tower. Basilio’s subjects, however, rise up against him and their leaders arrive to proclaim Sigismondo the new king. Convinced this must be another dream from which he will inevitably awaken, Sigismondo eventually decides that he “may as well” behave properly. (‘Let me embrace you,’ he tells the man who was his gaoler. ‘What are you saying?’/ ‘That I am dreaming, and that I want/ to act well, as even in dreams/ acting well is not without effect.’) Acting honourably is a free choice which Sigismondo reaches under conditions of total ontological uncertainty.

Several moments remain impressed upon my memory. The very first man I had a serious relationship with was an accomplished astrologer who lost no time in casting my natal chart and discussing its implications with me as we lay in bed. I was riveted by the point – which I have never located in the Spanish text – where Basilio is made to kneel, and a sword is placed in his son’s hand, so that he can strike his father. Sigismondo looks up and says: ‘Now the stars must wait and see what I decide to do.’

Rosaura, who first meets Sigismondo while she is in male attire and he chained up, encounters him again at court where, as a woman, she is seeking reparation from the man who should have become her husband. She astonished me with a speech where alternate sentences begin: ‘As a man, I request you to… But as a woman, I want you to…’ The effect of cross-dressing in the theatre of Calderón, where women’s roles were given to real, flesh and blood women, is quite distinct from in Shakespeare’s plays, where they were given to boys whose voices had not broken.

Probably I loved most of all the scene during Sigismondo’s first day as a king when he confronts his father, and is able to tell the man how much he loathes and detests him due to the unjust treatment he has received. (‘I am afraid to hug you.’ ‘I’ll get by perfectly well without that/ as I have done until now;/ seeing my father treats me/ with such savagery,/ banishing me from his side/ in demeaning circumstances,/ rearing me like a beast,/ handling  me like a monster/ and planning my death,/ it matters little/ that he didn’t hug me,/ if he doesn’t see me as being human.’) How I would have loved to get the opportunity, to summon up the courage needed to lambast my own father for what he did, in exactly the same way!

My own family consistently gave me the impression that I had no right to be there. No right to a life or an identity. It was as if had to beg their forgiveness for getting born, with all the trouble and inconvenience that had brought them. So the words which Rosaura overhears, in Sigismondo’s first soliloquy, rang powerfully for me: ‘Heavens, I want to find out/ given your treatment of me,/ what crime I committed/ against you by being born;/ yet I realise that, getting born/ was itself a crime;/ your justice and severity/ had sufficient grounds/ since the greatest crime somebody can/ commit is, being born.’

More than fifteen years later, I attended another production of the same play at another Edinburgh festival, this time in the excellent English translation by my dear friend Jo Clifford. Sigismondo’s total disorientation reduced me to tears that evening. Nothing that is happening around him makes sense. He cannot trust what he sees because in all likelihood it is a dream. In the same way, I could make no sense of behaviours in my family, nor could I trust my own perceptions, because I believed the other family members must be sane, while I was mad: ‘Heavens, if I really am dreaming,/ cut my memory off,/ as there cannot possibly be room/ for so many things in a dream’. And again: ‘My soul, let us dream, let us dream/ another time; but remaining/ attentive, and aware/ that when the time arrives/ we must awaken from this illusion;/ keeping that in mind,/ the shock will be less/ since taking precautions/ can make a fool of harm.’

What I saw onstage was my own ontological confusion as a teenager at St Aloysius, forced to draw ongoing conclusions about how the world operated and how I myself should behave in a situation where no one could be trusted, I had nobody to turn to, and where what I saw around me made no sense. Representation brings relief. Seeing my predicament of so many years before acted out onstage, a predicament which made me the person I was, meant I was no longer alone with it. Several hundred spectators all around me were sharing Sigismondo’s dilemma. Any grounds for shame had vanished.

When we assembled, my impression was not favourable. Proceedings were dominated by a sort of elderly guru in an armchair, a man I later heard rumours about, to the effect that he was not at all averse to bedding his female students as and when the occasion presented itself. I had no way of checking the reliability of these rumours. Suffice it to say that when I mentioned them to another of the trainees, she laughed and shrugged her shoulders, as if the matter were par for the course. No cause for concern.

It did not feel like a safe space. This man’s evident authority defined it for me as governed by a brand of patriarchal power I have always perceived as untrustworthy, and what is more, hostile to me as a person. From the very start, almost without thinking, I decided it would be better to keep my mouth shut and give as little as possible away, getting through the day with minimal upset so as not to displease my friend. I briefly considered asking for my fee to be returned but dismissed the idea. When we had to explain what we were feeling at the start of the day, I said I was unsure. On which the guru, over my head, addressing the trainees, asked if they had any experience of “scapegoating”. He had diagnosed my own background with unfailing immediacy.

Morag’s partner Diane came from Tranent, a town east of Edinburgh which locals call Turnent, with the accent on the second syllable, and which is mostly Scots-speaking still today. When she put down the phone after a conversation with her family she would speak broad Scots for about half an hour, then gradually make the transition back to the mixture of Scots and Scottish English she habitually used. From Diane I learned that when Edinburgh people say ‘See you later’ it does not indicate, as in Glasgow, that you are going to meet them again on the very same day. Just that another meeting is in prospect for the not too distant future. I stopped being startled by the phrase.

Diane was a redhead and an enthusiastic footballer. In terms of height she came up more or less to my shoulder. Once I asked if she was not afraid walking home alone in the dark in Edinburgh, not an especially safe location on Friday and Saturday nights when heavy drinking was in progress. ‘Christopher,’ she said, ‘I’ve got “lesbian” written across my forehead’. And when the question of an additional lodger came up, we thoroughly enjoyed mimicking the prejudices gays like ourselves were still liable to come up against. ‘We don’t want any of those peculiar heterosexual people in here now, do we?’ she said with a serious expression and a sneer, after which both of us burst into uproarious, conspiratorial laughter. And in fact the Italian lodger who moved in, Giuseppe, was gay, and had a visit over Easter from his boyfriend Daniele.

The four of us lived in a sane world, which the world of my family definitely was not. Being the designated scapegoat puts you in a peculiar position which infuses everything with an air of madness. Either you are right and they are wrong, or you are wrong and they are right. Statistically, the chances are heavily weighted in your disfavour. Anybody who is not mad will, in a similar predicament, carefully contemplate the possibility that they really could be off their head. In my case, as far as I could tell, my parents and two of my siblings concurred in one version of what was going on. Theirs was a proffered reality which I had to accept, for pragmatic reasons, until I was well into my thirties.

Unfortunately, this meant discounting a whole range of extremely precious sensations and intuitions. Let me give one example. After my first nephew was born, my brother and his wife brought the child round to my parents’ flat in a basket. I still have not forgotten the impression those two brilliant, unfathomable eyes made upon me, staring out from the sea of blankets in which he was swathed. My immediate reaction was: ‘Don’t bring him in here! The air is poisoned, and he will get infected!’ There was nothing I could do or even say with what was, in my judgement today, an utterly accurate assessment of the situation. So I labelled the reaction as “mad”, which drove me further into a lamentable corner of isolation and self-doubt.

The third sibling, a mildly schizophrenic brother, lived in his own quirky and at times disconcerting version of reality. Unlike the other children, he never rebelled against the Catholic religion, but adjusted its dogmas instead, according to his own idiosyncratic lights. Checking his interpretation of any doctrinal issue could be alarming for somebody like myself, with an accurate recollection of everything the Jesuits had instilled into me, following the guidelines of St Thomas Aquinas, a presiding spirit of my Glasgow adolescence.

The decoration of this brother’s bedroom was a miracle of its own. Graphic pin-ups from the third pages of different tabloids jostled with pictures of the Pope and images of the Virgin Mary, without him perceiving any contradiction or conflict between them. I couldn’t help wondering if the Pope depicted there might sometimes crane his neck out so as to peer round and gauge the statistics of the ample breasts displayed on a faded page of newspaper print just next to him. Once, hilariously, when the television in the sitting-room could not be persuaded to work, my sister, my father and I retreated to this room to watch a video recording. No one made any reference to the vivid collage surrounding us, behaving as if it were not there. That gave the whole experience a surreal tinge. But then, pretending that what was going on was not actually happening was the guiding principle of life in that family.

Michael’s gullibility meant that he was not always treated as honestly as he deserved to be. One summer, the guest of my sister and her family in Manchester, it turned out on the last day that an important part of his holiday had been omitted. As a convinced Scottish nationalist, Michael had expressed the wish to set foot in Wales, the other area of the shared island that was not England. So they got into the car, drove him to a point in the hilly country close to Derby and announced that this was Wales. Michael got out, took a photograph, and was perfectly contented to return to Manchester and then Scotland the next day.

It is extremely difficult to talk about the experience of being a scapegoat because it involved accepting, and putting up with, a whole range of unfair, demeaning and cruel behaviours, while raising no objections. Part of the indoctrination was that such treatment was appropriate and deserved, given who I was. Or should I say, the role I had been cast in. It proved very difficult to shake that training off in adult life. In retrospect it feels shameful to admit that you allowed it all to happen. Another troubling issue is that having been the scapegoat clings to you like a smell. Even decades later, certain individuals will sniff it on you, like trained hounds, and do their level best to push you back into the position that was yours as a child. It is an uncanny and frightening phenomenon, because the old, helpless defencelessness can so easily take hold of you once more. You feel powerless to block the old situation from recreating itself.

Being the scapegoat has a further connection to madness because of the paradoxes of your position. On the one hand, it is made abundantly clear that the other family members wish for nothing more than to see you off the premises as swiftly as possible. Winning a place at Cambridge meant I could conform with their wishes when I was not yet 18 and, as the French so elegantly put it, “foutre le con”. But the message about the best thing for them being your absence – even, your non-existence – is contradicted by the huge importance of the role you have been forced to assume. Whatever they cannot confess to, including the fact of your victimisation, everything they must deny as if their psychological survival depended on it, is loaded on to you. Your collaboration in accepting and carrying that load will determine the survival of the reality by which they live. If you threaten it, the very basis of their lives is threatened.  Such a contradiction imperils the sanity of the scapegoat, because there is no way of reconciling the two opposing halves.

The question at stake is what is actually going on. With an exaggeration that is comical only in part, I wonder at times if everything might not have been simpler had my mother one day grabbed the carving knife, tugged my father’s head back and slit his throat while the remainder of the family looked on. That way everything would have been out in the open. No one could have denied the truth any longer. She would have done us all a service. Actually, one of the many restless nights I spent beneath that roof came after she had insisted on being given an electric carving knife for Christmas. I found it hard to understand how any of us could sleep sound in our beds with such a threat hanging over us. And my mother adored electrical gadgets!

If you have been the scapegoat, you reach for every possible shred of evidence which is not based on your own subjective perceptions. When my mother’s ashes arrived back from the undertakers, my father allowed a few months to elapse before returning them. The undertakers could dispose of material he had no idea what to do with. Several years passed before the occasion arose, and before I summoned up the courage, to ask my brother what they had done with my father’s ashes. I learned they had been treated in precisely the same way.

At a time when I still imagined that a cathartic, honest conversation would sort everything out, I rang my parents’ doorbell, determined to talk openly. My mother was not at all happy, as they were watching the tennis tournament at Wimbledon. When I put my foot down, the television was grudgingly switched off. I started by saying that I had always felt unwanted in the family. ‘I didn’t feel unwanted in my family,’ my mother said at once, ‘I felt unliked’. ‘Stop this,’ my father broke in, ever the bully.’Talking this way upsets your mother. Look, she’s crying.’ ‘But this is how she feels all the time,’ I put in. Upon which my mother turned to my father and said: ‘You taught me how to cry’. That particular conversation got me nowhere. I wanted to talk about my relationship with my parents. The focus shifted without preamble to their own relationship, and I disappeared from view.

The child who is designated as the scapegoat is the carrier of the family secret, which no one wants to admit to. Banishing and excluding him or her conveys an illusory security that the secret can be buried once and for all. For the scapegoat, betraying the secret means betraying the family. At whatever cost to him or herself, it must be kept under wraps. Articulating it will mean losing even the pathetic semblance of a family that was all he or she ever had.

Not long before she died, one of the presents I gave my mother at Christmas was a big blue notebook which I thought was rather beautiful. ‘It’s so you can write down memories about the family,’ I told her. ‘Things you remember about us when we were small.’ Her answer, delivered in belligerent tones, was: ‘Why should I? It’s all bad.’ My mother failed to grasp that even “bad” experiences conceal a blessing. Provided you confess to them, and talk about them openly.

One of the contributing factors is easy to place in time. On my thirteenth birthday, so October 29th, 1965, I informed the priest in the confessional that I was homosexual. The realisation, to the extent of giving it a name, was prompted by an incidental remark a schoolmate had made. He was Italian, son of the Italian consul in Glasgow, and was competing with me to be the closest friend of a vaguely effeminate, waspish-tongued and very clever boy from the south side of the city.

With great foolishness – but this was the time of sexual awakening, and I was questioning, exploring and investigating like any “normal” boy, only along a rather different path – I had commented on the unshapely quality of the backsides of several of our classmates. ‘Are you one of them?’ asked the Italian. I had no idea what he meant. ‘Like Oscar Wilde, I mean?’ (Years later, a friend confronted with the same question answered: ‘And are you heterosexual? Like Attila the Hun?’) It did not take me long to put two and two together and reach the obvious conclusion. An image of two warriors clad in armour on the Vietnam item from the Flags of the World cards which had given me such delight when I was six or seven, the illustration of Odysseus, stripped to the waist and with a pleasing musculature of the chest in a book on Greek mythology and the fact that, musing, I had thought about what I would like to happen between us and decided that, when I became an adult, perhaps I could pay an actor to go through certain scenarios with me, in the personage of this hero, were unequivocal proof.

The priest naturally assured me that this was a phase I would come through. I knew only too well that, even age thirteen, I was beyond salvation. I suspect that I already had an inkling of the links that connect eroticism, sensuality and creativity within the personality. Having sex is for many “ordinary” people the single most significant creative act they will ever carry out. Small wonder if, with those who are intended to be “creative” in other, less carnal ways, there are strong undercurrents of connection between what they do, or would like to do, in bed, and what they produce on a canvas, or a computer screen, or when groping their way towards a new composition on the piano.

Being gay meant that I lived in tremendous, unrelenting danger. I think the conviction was justified. A friend at Cambridge who grew up in Tonbridge, Kent, when he told his parents, was sent to a psychiatrist who, among other cures, encouraged him to substitute images of a naked woman as soon as he reached a stage of genuine excitement during masturbation. The consequences of being discovered to be homosexual within the Glasgow Catholic ghetto, as a pupil at a Jesuit academy, could have been considerably less ingenious and more unpleasant. For me, it was as much as my life was worth for anybody to find out.

As you would expect, the burgeoning of sexual drives anyone goes through at that age interacted with Jesuit dogma and Catholic prohibitions, leading to a clash that threatened my mental balance. My saving strategy was to accept that I was mad, but not obviously enough for anyone to find out. Just I was gay, but devilishly clever and contorted enough to keep the fact a secret till I was laid in my grave. After coming out to my parents aged twenty-three, I continued to work on the basis that I was mad, but capable of masquerading convincingly as sane, till well into my thirties. Habits of thought like that can be difficult to break.

The religious doubts were a torment. At what point, when your eyes fell on an attractive male, did the thought become sinful? When did you make the transition from noticing the attraction, in a manner you could do nothing to prevent, and entertaining thoughts which in themselves were sufficient to send you to Hell? The Jesuits, I learned, used the term “nocturnal pollution” for coming during the night, involuntary orgasms while you slept, a frequent and no doubt necessary event with adolescent males who fail to jerk off frequently enough. That could not be sinful. Each time I masturbated, however, exciting myself with narratives and images that were absolutely unequivocal, I entered a state of mortal sin from which I could only gain release in the confessional.

Saturday was a day of torture. Even in my sixties, the arrival of Saturday afternoon continues to generate a vague unease in me. Confessions were held in St Peter’s parish church from 4 till 6 in the afternoon. What was I do to? Steel myself and go, admitting to the priest how shamefully I had behaved and how guilty I was, so that I could take communion when the family attended mass the following morning? Or should I be recalcitrant, holding out for one week longer, with the terrifying awareness that, were an accident to befall me, I would be condemned to an eternity of horrendous pain? No wonder I could not bring myself to read Dante’s Inferno.

As I approached fourteen, I began washing my hands over and again. The skin on the back grew red and painful. My sister, without expressing any concern or looking for an explanation, christened me ‘Lady Macbeth’. If that was what they call obsessive compulsive disorder, there was no shortage of other obsessions. I got up repeatedly during the night to check that each of the gas burners in the kitchen was turned off properly. Otherwise, if there had been a leak, and I were to die, I would be guilty of suicide. The imponderable nature of thought processes, and the hairline transitions they involved, gave me no peace. If I were to make a vow, then I would be bound to carry it out whatever the circumstances. And if I made that commitment inadvertently? Or almost inadvertently? Where was the boundary, and how did it get crossed?

This is when the real madness started. One of the vows I most feared making was, to become a prisoner in a Soviet Union concentration lager. When the family spent a summer in Aberdeen, and I had a room under the eaves to myself, brilliantly lit from dawn by the early sun of a northern summer, it seemed to me I had taken a vow to smooth out every single crease in the white sheet covering me.

Looking back, I feel able to make sense of at least some of the obsessions. The gas taps were connected to my fervent wish to die. There was no point in leading the life I did in the bosom of that family, no joy and little hope of release. The next explanation may sound crazy, but the point of the Soviet lager was that there I would have experienced a level of cruelty lower than what prevailed in my birth family. Doctors and therapists who deal with post traumatic stress disorder claim that soldiers exposed to horrendous situations in Vietnam could nonetheless look back to an experience of safety, love and respect in their upbringings. The child born into a dysfunctional family has no access to such a “before”. An environment in which his very right to exist is placed in question, and ridiculed, constitutes the only world he knows of. The resultant stress levels, and the damage done, may easily be higher.

Perhaps the grimmest aspect of all was having no one to turn to. Family, church and teachers formed an impenetrable wall with no breaches it. As far as my parents could manage, both reading and television were strictly selected and censored as was, of course, discussion, and the information disseminated within the schoolroom. What saved me was music. A message immune to censorship. A world of emotions and experiences that knew no limits. A world that was disembodied, true, but precisely for that reason capable of passing undamaged through the most resilient of barriers, of penetrating prison walls there could be no hope of dismantling.

Being mad, in a way no one around me could guess, meant that letting anybody come close enough to see who I actually was represented an intolerable threat. The point at which I was forced to abandon that illusion came on a rickety couch in a rented flat on Glasgow’s Hyndland Road in the spring of 1986. I started crying uncontrollably, and could find no way to stop. That was when a dear astrologer friend told me that she thought I would benefit from psychotherapy.

Within ten days she had given me the name and telephone number of a Swedish lady therapist at Wellspring in Leith. At our first meeting, I sat down, looked across at this woman and heard myself saying: ‘My parents would be happier if I were dead.’ I was on the road to sanity at last.

The Catholic matrons who assembled for the “ladies’ nights” my mother regularly took part in never got up to anything quite so mischievous, or deluded. Or if they did, I failed to get wind of it. Nor can I be sure that they actually exchanged holy pictures, though they almost certainly did compare the sizes of their children’s mortgages, discussing with less than total veracity the careers and achievements of their offspring, both male and female. My mother had some highly entertaining stories which indicate that her attitude to these reunions was not devoid of irony.

Around nine in the evening, whoever happened to be hosting the event would retreat to the kitchen, returning fifteen or twenty minutes later with tray upon tray of sandwiches and cakes, served with milky tea in the very best cups and saucers to be had. Reluctant to miss out on the chat while she was busy preparing these refreshments, Kathleen Tierney was unwise enough to switch on the tape recorder with a deft and unobtrusive movement as she left the room. She had forgotten a truth we would all do well to bear in mind, namely that when we walk out of a room or, at a party, move from one group to another, we inevitably become the next topic to be discussed, not always in the manner we might have chosen. When poor Kathleen ran back the tape, what she heard was: ‘Kathleen isn’t looking her best this evening, now is she?’ ‘If you ask me, she hasn’t even washed her face!’

The relevant husband was banished to the kitchen for as long as the guests were present, my father being no exception. And naturally, being a male child, it was out of the question for me to be present at those conversations, a feature which endows them in retrospect with an aura of the secret and the forbidden. Alberto, whose mother grew up in the very heart of Naples, while his father was a member of the minor aristocracy from still farther south in Italy, claimed that his mother and her friends were in the habit of discussing their sex lives when they gathered. They would roll their eyes expressively as they purported to bemoan the excessive demands made upon them. In that particular game, the woman facing the greatest demands was of course the winner.

I could swear that similar arguments were never broached in the bow-windowed sitting-rooms of Glasgow’s West End. The phrase “woman trouble” was used as a euphemism for a range of gynaecological ailments. When a cousin who already had five children had a device inserted which would prevent her conceiving any more, while continuing to attend mass and take communion as if she were not contravening the explicit dictates of Mother Church, her boldness was talked about with a mixture of shock and inadequately camouflaged admiration.

I cannot help wondering if males were more seriously affected by the naked and shameless discrimination exercised against Catholics in western Scotland at least until the close of the century, and far from forgotten today. Separate schools for Catholic children, supported by the state, offered a safe heaven in career terms, where religion, and perceived racial origin or inferiority, could not count against you. The only party Catholics could sensibly vote for was the Labour party, given the overt hostility towards them of the Conservative and Unionist party. Here “unionist” indicated, determined to fight to the bitter end in favour of the 1921 partition of the Irish island. If I am not mistaken, unquestioning alignment on the side of Labour, while a consequence of reprehensible discrimination, contributed to the uninterrupted hegemony of that party on, for example, Glasgow City Council, all too liable to result in corruption, nepotism and other nefarious practices. My father never succeeded in progressing from being principal teacher of English to a job as headmaster. But when he was in line for one, we three boys were drafted out to deliver leaflets on behalf of the Labour councillor campaigning in a distant housing scheme. What can the connection possibly have been?

The names of certain women who attended the “ladies’ nights”, of their daughters, and their friends, continue to exude an air of poetry for me: Eileen Lightbody (did she really take such infinite care of her weight?), Cassie O’Brien, Paddy Sherry, Agnes O’Callaghan. And most of all, with its alliteration, rich vowels, and the associated image of the dark, broad-brimmed hats which formed an integral part of the uniform of girls attending fee-paying secondary schools, Margaret Mary MacAweaney. In Glasgow at that time, even without giving your surname, a Christian name was enough to betray your Catholic affiliation. No Protestant would have been called Gerald, Martin, or Daniel. Not to mention Fintan, Declan or Desmond. Catholics in their turn shied away from names like Scott, or Stuart, or Ross.

My brother and his wife chose what sounded in my ears like aggressively Catholic names for at least two of their children, Nicholas John and Marie-Claire. And a cousin called Patrick O’Brien, who became a doctor in the army, supposedly could not be posted to Northern Ireland because the name in itself would have constituted a provocation. How well-founded were these murmurings?

Among the teacher friends of my mother, some were married. Others were not. They lived with their sisters, and with ageing parents, comparatively well-off and with a degree of freedom, of time on their hands, which their colleagues struggling with households and with children may have envied. My mother had a particular fondness for Janie McMenamin and I, too, liked the woman, attractive, with fair hair and blue eyes, a compulsive smoker like my mother. Janie cast a detached, humourful and disenchanted gaze on what surrounded her, yet also showed a warmth and sense of fun that were irresistible. I had no way of telling whether these spinsterhoods were a matter of deliberate choice or of misfortune. In the case of Eleanor Sherry, Paddy’s sister, who lived next door, it was rumoured that, after a year with a husband who proved to be an alcoholic, she returned home. Divorce and a second marriage were naturally out of the question. The first time I found myself face to face with a woman I knew to be divorced, in Eastbourne in summer 1973, I could not take my eyes off her. Such exotic plants might flourish along the southern coast of England, with France almost in view. They had no hope of surviving in chill northern climes such as our own.

Gaining information about our mother’s life before she married was a daunting task. Rumour had it that she failed to graduate from Glasgow University because she spent her time playing poker in the women’s union – there were separate buildings for males and females even when my sister attended in the late 1960s – invariably with a lit cheroot between her teeth. Aunt Mona was supposed to have let slip that Elfra had been engaged three times before she married our father. Our mother stubbornly refused to be drawn on the subject. The two of them met at the Falcon Tennis Club in Maryhill just before the war, which must therefore have accepted both Catholic and Protestant members, surely an exceptional occurrence. My father came from a working-class family in the Catholic ghetto in Maryhill, known to embrace several quite specific streets. His father was an iron-turner, and the family also ran a small store, in the back room of which a Catholic sodality known as the Knights of St Columba used to meet. My mother claimed the reason my father had proposed to her was, she was the only person who wrote to him assiduously while he was on service with the air force in West Africa.

They married in August 1944, with the war still in progress, and moved to Sleaford in Lincolnshire, where my father worked as teacher in the forces. The little they let slip about their early married life did not suggest great happiness. My father once described walking through the small garden to the front door of their home, asking himself which particular crisis he would be confronted with when he stepped over the threshold. My mother spoke of setting the meal she had prepared for him on a tray which promptly slipped from the dresser she had perched it on, emptying everything over the carpet. Most telling of all is perhaps their calling their first child Judith, in honour of St Jude, because they had been engaged in a novena to him. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases. What exactly can have been hopeless in my parents’ situation?

There were seven girls and one boy in the McCrossan family. A second brother, Jack, died tragically of tuberculosis in his late teens, after which my grandmother had a breakdown. That was offered as the principal reason for sending my mother away, a punishment not inflicted on any of her siblings. The eldest, May, joined the order of the Sacred Heart and, after spending a period at a convent in Vienna, taught German for the remainder of her life. It was through this connection that my mother made it to Armagh. Later May joined the staff at Kilgraston, an upmarket girls’ boarding school housed in a magnificent Adam building just outside Bridge of Earn in Perth. One of the more hilarious letters she wrote to my mother, after the Second Vatican Council brought about a major reorganisation, communicated the news that ‘just before Christmas all our sisters became mothers’.

Once the family acquired a car, we would visit the school at Kilgraston outside term time. Only a few forlorn individuals whose families could not accommodate them during the vacation were left on the premises. The treat for me was getting access to the school library, where I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and asked to be given it as a present for my thirteenth birthday. On another visit I was offloaded for the day with the domestic science teacher, a Hungarian woman who involved me and her visiting daughter in the tricky, endlessly sticky and exhausting process of making strudel pastry, stretching it out on greased baking paper, adding the filling, rolling it all up then putting the assembled cylinders into the oven. On one occasion we were served tea in the downstairs lobby by a young nun who looked so deliriously happy I concluded she must be either drunk or taking drugs.

The aunt behind bars was a sister only slightly older than my mother named Oonagh. She belonged to an enclosed order whose premises, occupied exclusively by women, were referred to as a “monastery”. The distinction between a “monastery” and a “convent” does not depend on the sex of the inhabitants, but on not being overlooked.

My mother would speak of ‘going to Carmel’. When we arrived, we were ushered in by a young sister, often a novice, whose responsibility it was to deal with visitors from the outside world. We would enter a dark ground floor room and take our seats. In front was a metal grille extending from wall to wall with spikes pointing towards us, the outside world. A wooden partition was folded across and secured so we could see nothing of what lay beyond.

We would hear the nuns arriving, upon which an exchange of Latin phrases would begin, my mother and her sister responding to one another in turn. I have no notion what they were saying and no means now of recovering the phrases, much as I would like to. We were never permitted to see Oonagh alone. One or two other members of the community were always with her. Was it their task to check up on what she might be saying? Perhaps. The atmosphere was invariably friendly and welcoming. Indeed, the oddest aspect of these visits is that they inspired in me a respect for communities of women dedicated to prayer and manual tasks which has never faded. As a child, I noted that Oonagh had a faint moustache. My mother told me it was forbidden for the nuns ever to see themselves naked, so they would wash in segments, uncovering one body part at a time.

Again going by what my mother said, their father had been against Oonagh’s joining the Carmelites, insisting, when she announced her plan, that a year be allowed to elapse before she put it into action. When eventually she did leave, she had a mental breakdown and was sent back home to recuperate. For as long as she was with the family, all mirrors in the household had to be covered. Oonagh had been told that if she looked into one, then she would see the devil. Her name as a nun was Sister Mary of Jesus, and her letters were written in a beautiful, ecclesiastical hand using blue ink from a fountain pen.

For me the first months at Cambridge were a time of enormous pressure. I had never spent more than three days away from my family. The combination of a totally new environment, challenging social interactions which included intermittent encounters with the peculiar world of the English upper middle classes, and losing everything that had been familiar to me risked becoming more than I could cope with. I still prayed regularly, went to mass and took communion, managing for nearly three years to abandon masturbation, so that my sexual drive was close to being successfully suppressed. Until the last term in my final year. In distress I looked everywhere for support, including to my Carmelite aunt. Oonagh had a volume of Schubert’s piano sonatas splendidly bound for me, in pale beige leather with an embossed pattern, her own and her community’s handiwork.

The Catholic chaplaincy at Cambridge was a welcoming environment. On the very first Sunday I attended mass, during Freshers’ Week, when the time came for coffee and biscuits I realised that I must either stay where I was next to the wall, and “die” socially, or make a move. So I introduced myself to the man beside me, started talking, and did not look back. I made at least two good friends there.

In the final year, we adopted a practice which still moves me when I think of it. Mass was held in individual student rooms, and communion dispensed before, having fasted, we tucked into a bread and cheese lunch. But piety and belief were being progressively unpicked. Another Catholic named Geoffrey Smart, whom I later visited in the English seminary in Rome, where the gay antics of certain inmates disgusted me, informed me that Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were not just gay but also formed a couple. He encouraged me to sleep with no clothes on, a procedure which, the first times I tried it out, left me with an indefatigable erection the whole night through. No substitute for a proper sex life.

My elder sister told me that I had no chances of getting myself sorted out for as long as I had truck with the Catholic church. By this stage she and her husband were already paid up members of the Fourth International, enthusiastic Trotskyites whose bookshelves boasted a complete edition of the works of Nicolae Ceausescu in English, and a part of whose monthly salaries went to funding the movement. One of my closest friends came out clamorously as gay, upon which I grew a beard and acquired the semblance of a girlfriend. That was a conscious cover up. I knew I would have to investigate the truth more honestly, hopefully after leaving for Italy. That would also mean bidding farewell once and for all to Catholic piety and doctrine. What I regretted most was losing the liturgy of the mass, which I had always loved, especially when it was in Latin, and you used another language for addressing God.

Which brings me to the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29th 1973, which was when I told my mother that no, I would not be attending mass on that Holiday of Obligation or any future one. The die had been cast. My new existence as a born-again pagan had already begun. Having one aunt behind bars offered no antidote.