Why they called me Joy I don’t know.

When the midwife asked my mother for my name, she thought she heard the reply “Joey”.  If only.  They needed a boy, to inherit the family butcher business.  I was the last in a string of girls born to the extended family, six little cousins in all.  My sister was two years older than me, and there couldn’t be another try – no room now for a boy in our cottage – so I was effectively the full stop.

Lionel Miskin: Butcher's Shop, Mr Dungy Hacking Beef; The Box, Plymouth

A few months after I was born, my grandfather – the Master Butcher who had set up H.C. Hall Butchers and been proud later to add “& Sons” – keeled over at an early age.  I am sure there was much hand-wringing and distress, and a good deal of helplessness.  The two big figures in my family, my grandfather and his father, had died within a decade of one another.

My family were Strict Baptists.  Permission to share in communion was only granted to people formally admitted to the “restricted/Strict” congregation.  Cultish, in other words; certainly Calvinist.

My great-grandfather, the Reverend Alfred Barnabas Hall, led the congregation until his death in 1947.  He had trained at Spurgeon’s College, set up in the name of the sad but despotic clergyman Charles Spurgeon.  Spurgeon ricocheted between anxiety and depression throughout his life, but made sure his legacy imprinted the grim Calvinist mindset onto other gullible souls.

His college trained young men in fire and brimstone preaching – Spurgeon was a fan of fear.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the Yanks took the roof off our ancient chapel trying to land a warplane at our airfield.  That rickety old building had been built in the 1700s, and we were paid a good few dollars in compensation.

The new building was built of pink bricks, with a whole hall for the Sunday School (this proved somewhat optimistic) and a chapel for a modest congregation.  Us.  Not many villagers beyond our extended family showed up for services, although the free childcare offered by the Sunday School attracted a bit more interest.  No new minister was employed after the death of my great-grandfather.  Lay preachers came from far-flung Strict Baptist chapels around the county, and scared us with their sermons.  We barely knew them.

Peter Coker: Butcher's Shop No.2; Danum Gallery

My grandmother became the unofficial matriarch of the chapel and my uncle was one of the deacons, or elders.  He was landed with two impossible tasks: shoring up the family business, which was dangerously on the slide; and keeping the chapel going.  My father was his younger brother by seven years and was expected to play the baby of the family even after marriage and fatherhood.  I don’t think he was bullied by his brother, exactly; but he was easy to push around.  He had a dreamy kind of mental absence, which meant he was sometimes called “a daft apeth”.

As quite young kids, back in the 1960s, my sister and I were roped in to scour some roadside verges for £200 of the firm’s money which my father had lost.  Out on the butcher’s rounds, toilet breaks meant relieving himself into some country ditch, far from anywhere.  The roll of notes must have slipped out of his pocket. But which ditch?  Where?  It was a lot of money, and we never found it.

Edward Callam; 'From His Own House', the Back of Elstow Village, Bedfordshire; Wardown Park Museum Luton Culture

My father was tasked with corralling his wife and kids into chapel twice on a Sunday, on top of Sunday School.  Often my mother refused to go, claiming that my sister was sick, or that I was sick.  If we managed to get there, chapel was a warm and loving space; my adored grandmother was there and, with any luck, my cousins. It was our place, and it felt good.  The sermons didn’t scare me that much, since I knew I was set fair for Heaven.

The thing is, I am a Calvinist through and through.  I soaked in all those sermons; I own the moral high ground as far as the eye can see.  No amount of Buddhist meditation can erase the judgementalism seated in my heart; and God knows I’ve tried.

I believed it all until I hit adolescence, when unfortunately education lifted me above the primitive belief system of my family.  I could no longer swallow it. Besides, as puberty hit, I outgrew the small child my mother wanted me to be.

It was a terrible thing to lose, at fifteen, my God, my Christ, my whole worldview and hopes for an afterlife, and it was not all my doing.  I did announce that I didn’t believe any more, I did fling my bible into the open coal fire in our cottage - but equally I did fish it out before the pages were more than singed, and I was engulfed in guilt and fear about what I had done.

Such acts of rebellion played into my mother’s hands and I was to be shunned.  She knew the words for that; she owned the playbook.

I am still a moral mess.  I can belt out the best Baptist hymns to this day, and YouTube is awash with them if I want a top-up.  But I am an atheist.

I think my Protestant Dissenting ancestry has contributed to my iconoclasm, my lack of respect for authority, my impulse to shout out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.  I am a rabble-rouser.  I still like to sing.