IGET very queasy about all these childmolestation trials, ancient “dossiers” and (horrible phrase) “historical childabuse”.

It’s appalling.

That children should be taken advantage of in this way for the sake of a disgusting adult’s perverted appetites is one of the great crimes crying to heaven for vengeance.

I am entirely on the side of Our Lord Jesus Christ who said, ferociously: “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depths of the sea.”

But I wonder if, like me, you’re a bit perplexed?

I mean the sheer amount of news and comment coverage given to paedophilia makes you suspect it’s the nation’s favourite sport next to football. I wonder, is there more of it going on than there ever used to be?

When I was growing up in the back streets of Leeds in the 1950s, I heard mysterious whispers which I never really understood about “Him who’s messin’ around wi’ his daughter”. Altogether though, you got the feeling that the sexual abuse of children was the exception rather than the rule or standard practice.

I never got the impression that it was endemic like the chicken pox. Maybe I’m still labouring under a colossal naivety. I still was back in the 1980s. It was like this… I’d just written a book and my publisher took me out for lunch in York. Nice steak and chips at Lew’s Place by the river. Bottle of claret. Just the job.

Making conversation with the publisher, I asked which other authors he was publishing.

“Oh, I’ve just brought out a memoir by Jimmy Savile. You want to steer well clear of him. D’you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Well now, how about this? I’ve done my bit and produced the book. Now get me a ten-year-old girl. I’ve earned it’.”

I was 42, thought myself a man of the world, but it still came to me as a shock. And yet there was something else lurking in the back of my mind which meant I was not entirely surprised.

You see, I could go a long way further back than the 1980s. To my early teens in the 1950s. We 14-year-olds thought Leeds was the bees knees, the mecca of popular culture and lively entertainment. In one of the ancient arcades off Briggate there was this cavernous place of bright lights and exciting sounds called the Mecca Locarno.

We recalcitrants from West Leeds High School would bunk off in the lunch hour, get the tram into central Leeds and, for sixpence (two-an-a-half pence) crowd into the dance hall to listen to the disco: Bill Haley and the Comets, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Elvis and “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” And who was spinning the turntables? Jimmy Savile with a fat cigar and that – even then – scarcely believable chirpiness.

There were nice lasses there of our own age. It was main reason we went, to be honest.

And some of these girls told us stories about Jimmy Savile. Of course we never believed them. This was, after all, St Jim of Leeds General Infirmary who was indefatigable at cheering up young kids who happened to be patients,smoking his fat cigars and sort of fixing it for everyone.

What did Pontius Pilate say? “What is truth?”