War chronicler turns his focus on men of God

The work - and at 71, increasingly conscious of his own mortality, he is working harder and harder - is done during the week. He is up at 5am most days and in his darkroom by 6.30. At weekends, he shares this beautiful house with his third wife, 42-year-old Catherine Fairweather, travel editor at Harpers & Queen, who lives in Notting Hill during the week ("the age difference is large, yes. It was very daring of her") and their fouryearold son, Max.

There are four more grown-up children, three by his late first wife Christine, and another by Laraine Ashton, the founder of IMG models. McCullin is still rather nobly handsome, and has, undoubtedly, always loved women. "I met Catherine when she asked me to do some work for Harpers & Queen but I fear I was looking at her bright red lips rather than listening to what she said."

It has been a long time since he went to war, yet he confesses to "twinges" when he reads of Iraq and Afghanistan. "I mustn't be untruthful here," he says. "I get the odd moment of wanting to go back to it. But my body wouldn't support those twinges. I have terrible arthritis in my hands and feet. I notice my body becoming thinner and weaker. I used to like the adrenaline, of course, but that is an indulgence, too. Looking back, it was a kind of freaky drug trip, like I was drugging out on other people's misery, and I had to stop that. I had to start wising up and asking myself who I was." He also thinks that those wars are now "almost uncoverable".

"If you're 'embedded' with the army, you don't have the real freedom to be among the population. You're basically a dog on a leash, and who wants to be like that? It's so different now. When I was in Vietnam with the American army during the Tet offensive, I could do what I wanted. I was sleeping under tables, yards from dead Vietnamese bodies. I photographed dying and terribly injured American soldiers. I'm sure the Americans wouldn't stand for that now."

It still rankles dreadfully that, according to McCullin, he was prevented from going to the Falklands 25 years ago by Margaret Thatcher's Ministry of Defence. "They had decided the press were an unwholesome untrustworthy bunch. People were hand-picked to go - I'd have brought back the real price of sacrifice, and that's what they didn't want. I even went to the Imperial War Museum and said I'd go out there for a pound a week, that's how badly I wanted to be there."

YET age has brought with it a new reflectiveness, too. I ask whether British newspapers should publish pictures of wounded British soldiers in Iraq, should they receive them. "No, I don't think so," he ponders. "I've got wiser as I've got older. I certainly wouldn't want to see a son of mine splashed over a newspaper with his brains hanging out. And I certainly don't think we should show dead British or American soldiers - yes, that's another piece of hypocrisy because I took exactly those photographs. When you're young and stupid and trying to make a name for yourself ..."

He pauses, mid-thought. "God, how awful to think I was trying to make a name for myself ! But there's no point me trying to flannel you. There's a huge half of me now that feels this ghostly kind of guilt about it all."

Indeed, though he hates the pictures of celebrities that now fill every quality of newspaper, he does not want to look any more at the kinds of photographs he himself took. He is moved, with raw emotion, by the pictures of starving or sick children used by charities to encourage donation, but sees no place for "the ghastly bloodied human beings" which were once the stuff of his daily working life.

"I don't actually think it's necessary to see that. People shooting each other in cold blood, terrible, terrible wounds. As you get older, life becomes much more precious. No one has exposed their nerves more than me. I've really OD'd on it, and that's it. I've had enough."

For years, McCullin suffered from flashbacks. Can he ever forget what he's seen? "Impossible," he says immediately, though he laughs when I ask whether he's ever tried to get psychiatric help. He talks of the starving albino boy to whom he gave a sweet, the only thing in his pocket. "And I thought, 'Please don't look at me, just don't look at me.' And then, a little while after, when I was busy with something else, I suddenly felt something light touch my hand, and it was him, trying to hold my hand. And I thought, 'Oh God, what am I going to do?' I don't want to see that boy's picture come up in the developer ever again. I'm done with it."

McCullin spent his own childhood in wartime Finsbury Park, and in exceptional poverty. "We were real juvenile delinquents. There were hundreds of houses where I lived with the doors and windows blown out, and we used to wander in and out of these bombed rooms looking at other people's lives."

His father, an acute asthmatic, died at the age of 40, when McCullin was just 13, and his mother kept the family by loading lorries at Euston Station. "She had muscles like a man, and when she hit you, you really knew about it."

Yet, when McCullin pawned for a fiver his very first Rolleicoid camera, bought with his life savings during National Service, it was his mother who rescued it.

His first published picture, famously, was of seven young hoodlums framed within a derelict house, used by The Observer in 1959 shortly after the murder of a policeman in Finsbury Park by a similar gang. It amuses McCullin that, today, the boy-gangsters in his photograph have an annual reunion at the Conservative Club opposite the London Mosque.

After that, he took off to Berlin to photograph the erection of the Berlin Wall, and - already in possession of that instinctive, incisive eye - promptly won the World Press Award. His career in newspapers began. It was ended 24 years later by the arrival of Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times, who sacked him.

Perhaps the one truly defining event of McCullin's life, however, occurred in 1989, when his first wife Christine, whom he left for Laraine Ashton, died of cancer. It's an episode he brings up himself several times during the course of our conversation, as if trying to make sense of it still.

Horribly, Christine died on the morning of their son Paul's wedding, and it was McCullin who found his ex-wife's body. "The night before, I was sleeping downstairs on the floor of this tiny house we used to share. That morning it was a nice sunny day like today, but in August, so warm too. I went upstairs and found her dead. She had a whole set of new clothes for the wedding hanging in the closet. I found it very traumatic and have ever since. All the things I've seen and done, yet I was tested most in the confines of that little house."

Later, he says he still finds it surprising that, particularly after Vietnam, he did not go mad. "I think my mind must be amazing, that it hasn't been destroyed or taken me into the darkness of insanity. A more sophisticated person might have cracked, I think."

His memories still sear, and his nerves are shot, but his life is not melancholy and he does not fear death, he says. "I'd like to have another 10 or 15 years so that Max is older than I was when my own father died. He asks what will happen when I die, and - here's the religious hypocrisy again - I tell him I'm going to heaven."

For now, there is an imminent deadline for "what I hope will be my last great book" - a long essay on England, its people, culture and landscapes. But on a bright winter's day like today, unable to take pictures, he likes to sit by the fire and read. I ask what. "Oh, books about war," he replies, smiling broadly. "I really can't seem to help myself."

Faith and Church: Portraits by Don McCullin opens at the National Portrait Gallery on 3 February.