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He had painted signs and sold rope, sailcloth and groceries in Port Seton, worked on building sites in Brighton; now Brighton Brethren helped my grandfather secure a job as a travelling salesman for Dubarry, the perfumers. He was going up in the world. During the week he drove hundreds of miles in his company car to peddle fancy perfumes and soaps with French names that promised Compelling Loveliness, Soft White Hands, or a Matte, Velvety Complexion. On the weekends and in the evenings he preached.

Three years later, when he took a sales job at Roger et Gallet, the French soapmakers, he virtually tripled his salary. He and Kathleen bought a detached house in Kenilworth in the Midlands, right in the midpoint of the country, far from the sea, at the centre of Robert’s new sales territory. They painted a nursery for their baby, David, employed a nurserymaid, and parked the shiny family Austin outside. Robert stacked the perfume, talc and soap samples in all the spare cupboards and in the attic. Three times a week, sometimes more, they put on their best clothes and hats and pushed the pram the short distance to worship with the Kenilworth assembly in the Iron Room down on the allotment land by the brook.

Brethren were expected to live in detached houses as near to the local Meeting Room as possible, because detached houses minimised contact with worldly people, and proximity kept the local fellowship close and in sight. Robert Stott was now the head of his detached household, a respected ministering brother of the Iron Room and at the centre of a commercial sales network that stretched north beyond the border between England and Scotland.

My father was born in June 1938. Although my grandparents gave their other two children Biblical names, they must have named my father Roger after the fancy French perfume company that paid my grandfather’s wages. There’s no other explanation for this worldly name. Was it a curse or a blessing? Did it set him at odds from the start? Did that account for him being the rule-breaking, hedonistic cuckoo in the nest, the aesthete born amongst puritans? Was it an ill omen, or the best kind of one?