I am in the dark of the confession box; it is my first confession. The shutter slams back and I try to speak, but my voice will not work. My mouth moves, my throat moves, but no sound comes.

Tell your sins, says a solemn voice in the dark. At regular intervals in the dumbstruck silence, Tell your sins.

The voice is not a friendly, coaxing voice. This is the command of an unfriendly God, who knows you have sinned. You were conceived in sin, born with a sin on your soul, so how could you not have sinned, even if you're only seven?

Over and over, in the weeks before that first confession, I had rehearsed what I was going to tell. I had sins by heart to mention, sins with long names, sins of omission and sins of commission. Why, then, did my voice fail me? Who was the God that struck me dumb? Why did no one inform me that there was another God, within me, who would not tolerate this rigmarole of guilt?

But Father Tell–your–sins won the day. The order of the universe could not be disturbed. The cards were shuffled and dealt, shuffled and dealt again and again, until the suits at last were four columns in perfect sequence on the table, Ace up to King, King down to Ace. I recovered my voice, and it mentioned a few technical transgressions.

‘For your penance, now, say three Hail Marys. And a good act of contrition – Oh my God… Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis …’

Father Tell–your–sins left his mark on me: in my confusion, I wasn't really sure if I had made a Good Confession, and Mrs Feehan had warned us about the depravity of making a Bad Confession. If you died after making a Bad Confession, your soul would go straight to Hell.

I had seen in the parochial hall a play about Robert Emmet's lover, Sarah Curran, produced by the nuns from the convent and acted by their senior girls. The play terrified me: Sarah Curran was portrayed as spending most of her time on her knees praying for a United Ireland, and being visited incessantly by the Devil, whose arrival was announced by a wooden clappers and lights going off and coming back on.