“I recall carrying the thurifer. Or was it thurible?” Peter Ackroyd is remembering his days in the late 1950s as an altar server in his local Catholic parish church in Acton, west London, close to HMP Wormwood Scrubs. The award-winning historian in him is keen to clarify which is the object and which the person carrying it, but Ackroyd isn’t making connections with any emotions that come with going back to his Catholic childhood. “It’s just memories. Neither happy or unhappy, regret or nostalgia. I just happened to be what I was.”