Sins of the Father

by Fleur Beale

  Phil was relieved to return to Australia and immerse himself again in work.

  Despite all the buzz and excitement of his burgeoning business, he never forgot that his actions had deprived his kids of their mother and he didn’t want them to forget her. Neville had scuppered the attempts to keep in touch by letter, but it might be worth trying again to renew the contact now that his father was in prison.

  He managed to track down Sandy’s phone number, hoping that with Neville out of the way for the time being, Sandy would be free to be a mother even if only by phone. The children were excited; they were going to talk to their mum for the first time in four years. Crystal and Andreas were curious about her; Crystal had vague memories but to Andreas she was a complete stranger. The older four just wanted to hear her voice. Did she still remember them? Did she still love them? They weren’t sure what to say to her, though. What would they talk about?

  Israel put the call through with the phone on the speaker function so that they could all hear their mother talk. When Sandy answered, Israel managed to stammer out, ‘Mum, it’s Israel,’ but was too emotional to say any more. The second that Dawn, Justine and Tendy heard her voice they burst into tears. Mum was there, talking to them. This was her voice. Memories flooded back.

  Sandy was terrified. Why were they crying? Something awful must have happened. What was wrong?

  Eventually she managed to calm them down enough to talk to them. There was nothing wrong? They were crying because they were so happy to talk to her? Well, whose fault was it that she couldn’t be with them all the time? Their father’s, that’s whose fault it was. She switched from being motherly to preaching a diatribe cataloguing their father’s sins.

  The children cowered from the torrent of words. Israel and Dawn were old enough to have some understanding of why she was lecturing them about the terrible things their father had done, but it made no sense to the younger ones. They loved their dad and they knew he loved them, but they could detect no love in the way their mother spoke to them. None of them contacted her again for a long time.

  Sandy’s behaviour, Phil feels, shows how strongly she believed the community version of Neville’s imprisonment. Phil was the villain who had made a martyr of his own father.

  Neville served 18 months and was released early for good behaviour. He was reported as being a model prisoner who kept to himself and caused no problems. When he returned to Gloriavale he stepped down from his position as leader, saying that ‘the bishop must be without blame’. Sandy’s mother Naomi who was still in the community at the time said that after a few weeks God spoke to him and he stepped up again.

  The community’s pamphlet for visitors (Life in Common: the experience of the Gloriavale Christian Community) provides an insight into its daily life, in which Neville rejoices, and which for Phil proved impossible. As at Springbank, its ideal is of life according to Christian principles in a true Christian society where members love one another and put aside their own wills, independence and selfishness. Supporting biblical quotes are given: ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24); ‘He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved’ (Mark 16:16).

  Community living, the pamphlet explains, is the ideal way of organising, caring and providing for their large families, where ‘it is hard to live a worldly, selfish life, but easy to find God’s will and live in daily service to God.’

  The Garden of Eden story is cited as evidence that God gave leadership to the man, and accordingly in Gloriavale women may not preach or expound on a biblical text; they may only read from the Bible. Despite this, all are considered equal, with leaders not privileged or exalted above others. (However, ex-members speak of a type of caste system where Coopers receive perks and privileges unavailable to non-Coopers.) Decisions on important matters are said to be made by the consensus of all, but whether that includes women is not stated.

  Formal religious meetings are held on Sunday – or First Day. Everyone attends the First Day service to sing, listen to scripture, hear testimonies and break bread. Baptisms are conducted at these meetings, and foot-washing or prayers for the sick. Religion is part of daily life and informs everything a person does. Pagan references are abhorrent, thus the Easter bunny, Father Christmas, wedding rings and the tooth fairy are not welcome at Gloriavale. And as previously mentioned Christmas isn’t celebrated and neither are birthdays.

  Meals are shared in the dining hall where Neville/Hopeful often takes the opportunity to preach or rail against the outside world. Dress is modest and without adornment. Sexual purity is mandatory outside marriage. ‘We do not tolerate homosexuality, fornication, adultery or remarriage of “divorced” people.’ Divorce itself is not tolerated.

  In the absence of contraception, many children are born, and are given names to inspire them. Although the pamphlet doesn’t say so, Neville’s is the final word on suitability. Appropriate names include Charity Love, Victory Overcomer and Willing Disciple.

  The community borrows no money – an extremely challenging policy for Phil when he was running the business that kept the Springbank community financially viable in the late 80s.

  Today, Gloriavale with its multi-million-dollar turnover, is economically important to the West Coast. The community spends locally, and takes no government benefits such as old age pensions. Their industries are run entirely with their own, unpaid labour: the pedigree Jersey herd has over 1200 cows; around 1400 deer provide venison, velvet and trophy heads; deer offal is rendered down and sold in powdered form. Gloriavale’s men have always been innovative and have recently developed their own machinery to process sphagnum moss collected from the swamps of Glen Hopeful. These excellent mechanics run the only helicopter and aircraft maintenance business on the Coast. The extensive agricultural, building and mechanical activities provide employment and training for the young men.

  Women’s roles are much more limited. Their time is organised to let them meet their work commitments alongside family responsibilities. The baby centre, toddler centre, then play school, allow ‘our mothers to contribute to the housework while their children are cared for’ until they’re old enough to start school. Unmarried women, ‘single sisters’, do more than their share of the women’s work, knowing that once they are married, they will have the same assistance. However, it is reported that there are more young women in Gloriavale than there are young men to marry them and so a number won’t be able to fulfil their calling, which is to marry and bear children. The recently established outreach community in India may provide a solution to the problem although that is not its stated aim.

  Family is all-important: children are welcomed, and old people cared for, although some absconders say that no allowance is made for age and infirmity. Everyone is required to work as hard as they always have. Babies are born at home with the community midwife in attendance, although if there are problems the mother is hospitalised.

  The section in the pamphlet entitled ‘The Ladies’ Realm’, details the women’s work. They cook around 7,000 meals and launder some 8,000 items weekly; the sewing women make all the clothes including underwear and concert costumes. Some supervise preschool and a few work in the office, and as telemarketers to overseas customers of the sphagnum moss industry. All this when they are also required to bear child after child, and do any seasonal work such as bottling fruit, or cutting up a butchered carcase for the freezer.

  The community runs its own school which is inspected regularly by the Education Review Office whose reports are consistently good. Children go to school in the morning and work in the afternoon, doing community tasks. When a skill is needed that the community doesn’t possess, a young person will go on to tertiary education, usually by distance learning.

  Relaxation takes the form of picnics, music, and parties to celebrate weddings and other special events. Families also get several days of holiday each year when they may stay in the holiday house on the Glen Hopefu
l property, or take a community van elsewhere on the Coast.

  As leader of his own utopia, Neville/Hopeful is a law unto himself, as his marriages also show. He said initially that if the leader’s wife died, then the leader must remain celibate for the rest of his life. However, not long after Gloria’s death, he married again, to a woman of 80. When she died he chose a new wife. She was 17 and he 50 years her senior. He now has a second family by her.

  Towards the end of 1996, Neville’s community was to receive one of his granddaughters back into the fold.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: DARK DAYS

  It was awful, but I thought, okay Dawnie – you’re going back to see Mum. ISRAEL

  Bev’s life had been quiet and ordered before she moved in with Phil and into the maelstrom of his life. There was more to come, and what followed was hell for her, and for Phil the hardest period of his life.

  Dawn’s behaviour worsened as she entered adolescence. The dynamic between her, Israel, Justine and Tendy was changing as they all grew older. Partly this was due to Phil’s increasing absences as the business absorbed his time, and partly it was normal teenage rebellion. While Crystal and Andreas still looked on Israel as their parent, Dawn, Justine and Tendy began to challenge his authority. Israel was 14, Dawn 13, Justine 11 and Tendy 10 when the girls began to gang up on him. They would tell him he wasn’t the dad and they didn’t have to do what he said. He retaliated by chasing them and when he caught them, would throw them into the swimming pool and make them cry. Life since their arrival in Australia three years before had never been smooth, but now it was increasingly chaotic, exacerbated by Phil’s time and energies being consumed by his business.

  One day Phil was horrified to discover the three girls in the bathroom, playing with matches, to the extent that the house was in danger of burning down. He was angry and the ensuing row sent Dawn fleeing to the sanctuary of Carol and Nina’s house where she ranted against her father. The upshot was that she accused him of molesting her.

  Officers from the Department of Community Services called Phil in for an interview. He had nothing to hide and naïvely believed that if he told the truth then all would be well. In answer to their question about whether anything inappropriate had ever happened between him and his daughter he told them of a night soon after they had arrived in Australia. Dawn had climbed into his bed for comfort, as all the kids did more often than not. He woke abruptly from a deep sleep to find that he had his hand on her. He got such a fright he leapt straight out of bed and stood there shaking. Thoughts of his father’s behaviour raced through his head and he was so upset that he might be following in Neville’s footsteps, even unwittingly, that he rushed off to see a doctor in the morning. The doctor was reassuring. Phil had been dreaming, nothing had been intentional and no, he definitely shouldn’t talk to Dawn about it. She hadn’t woken and he hadn’t actually done anything to her. The doctor advised that, as a single man, it would be best not to have the children in his bed, but he acknowledged their need for comfort and therefore, on balance, it would do more harm than good to ban them from their father’s bed.

  Even though Phil showed the Community Services officers the doctor’s report, the story was enough to condemn him in the eyes of the Department. The officers interviewed the other children at school, bewildering them. Why were these people asking such strange questions? Why did they want to know if their father ever touched them? Tendy told them that her dad would give her a whack on the backside sometimes, and a woman took her away to see if the marks were still there. But they all said no, their dad never did anything bad to them and they couldn’t understand what the whole drama was about. When they got home, Phil took them to the beach where he tried to explain that Dawn was going to be living with a foster family, and why. They were upset to see their father crying and couldn’t grasp what he was trying to tell them about their sister.

  Carol and Nina offered to foster Dawn but they were deemed unsuitable foster parents due to the fact that they both said they’d been sexually abused as children. Dawn was sent to strangers, and after a day or two, she rang up saying she wanted to come home, but Bev had to tell her she wasn’t allowed. Dawn, who had so sorely missed her mother, was now adrift without any family at all.

  The family later found out that Carol and Nina had played on Dawn’s desperation to have a mother and had coached her in what to say in an accusation against Phil, telling her it would mean she could come and live with them. The other children now suspect that the Department of Community Services knew Phil was innocent but they had to be seen to be doing the right thing. Their solution to the problem was to give Dawn the choice of going to live in foster care, or of returning to her own mother. As far as Dawn was concerned, the choice was easy. She knew little of the reality of the community whereas she loved her mother fiercely. Her accusations had cut her off from the other mother-figures in her life and she craved a motherly presence. She chose her own mother – who was living under the aegis of a convicted paedophile, an aspect of the situation that was ignored by the authorities. It worried Israel and Phil deeply that they didn’t take that into consideration. They knew what had happened in the community and should know that abuse might still be going on.

  Phil did his best to prevent Dawn having to return to the community. He gave the Department of Community Services copies of the documentaries, telling them that this was what she would be going back to. ‘I will never see her again, and you are signing her death warrant.’

  They replied that she was going back to her mother. Phil had the option, they said, of going through the courts to gain custody, but in any case they would make sure somebody in New Zealand monitored the situation and send him reports. That didn’t happen.

  He considered taking it to court, but the odds were so heavily stacked against him that he knew it would be useless to try. He had no money, whereas the community by now was wealthy. He’d not long met Bev and was trying to keep everything together and balanced, but the other children were being pulled apart by what was happening. He felt more vulnerable than he ever had, so in the end decided to let this one child go for the sake of the others.

  It was a decision that cost him dearly because, ever since, the guilt of it has weighed on him. Should he have fought harder? Could he have?

  When the children learned that Dawn was going back to their mother, they didn’t realise it would be forever, and they suspect she didn’t know it, either. As part of the community, she wouldn’t be allowed to have a relationship with her Australian family, and Phil was aware that he would probably never see her again. He pretended optimism in front of the others, telling them not to worry because Dawn would come back and they’d all be together again. One part of him was happy, excited even, that Dawn was going to be with her mother, and he hired a private movie company in New Zealand to film their reunion at Christchurch Airport. The movie would be just for the family, a reminder of Dawn and reassurance for them all that she was happy to be back with her mum. They bought her comics and puzzle books for the plane trip and went to the airport to see her off. Tendy envied Dawn and for a long time afterwards, whenever she was in trouble, would say that she wanted to go and live with her mum, but she and the younger ones had no understanding of what that would mean.

  Carol and Nina hadn’t got what they wanted, but Israel was bitter that their actions had further fractured his family. He would hear his father crying at night for weeks afterwards. Dawn’s accusations made Phil revisit the question of whether he’d done the right thing in taking the children away from their mother, even though it had meant rescuing them from Neville. Israel remembers him saying that Neville was right after all; he, Phil, was cursed because God was taking his children away from him.

  He had done his best to fight the bureaucracy so that he could keep his family intact, but he had lost. Dawn had gone and he had to accept it.

  The whole episode nearly broke Phil. The question dogged him all through their growing up: would the children be be
tter off if they’d stayed with their mother in the community?

  After she’d been back in the community for a couple of years, Dawn wrote to Phil, apologising for lying. Nina too later apologised to Phil for her part in the deception. She even went so far as to travel to Gloriavale to try and persuade Dawn to leave.

  Phil hasn’t seen Dawn since the day she left and isn’t allowed to contact her. It was six years before her siblings saw her again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: CHAOS OF THE TEEN YEARS

  Dad would try all these new rules, trying to organise us all. We’d sit down and have this big family meeting at night. I used to hate it and be dramatic about it – I just wanted things the way they used to be. TENDY

  Towards the middle of 1996, everyone rejoiced at the happy news that Bev was pregnant. Tendy felt special when Bev told her before she told the other kids.

  In 1997 Phil’s business was doing well enough for him to buy a property in the country where he built a shed to use as a base. He took on six employees, but with his usual generosity in helping others, he would give a job to the neediest person rather than to the best one.

  The move to the country didn’t help the family dynamics, and chaos sometimes reigned unchecked when the children were alone. Phil tried to impose order, with family meetings in the evenings to introduce schemes that involved lists of chores and rewards of stickers. Tendy who was 11 when they moved to the country hated it all. She looks back now and can laugh at memories of getting all dramatic at the meetings, when she would keep repeating, ‘I just want it to be like it used to be.’