by Neil Cross
And the fact that he was here, now–in a shop that sold the kind of books he didn’t really like–was an affirmation of that. But I didn’t say anything. I just blushed.
The first books I bought with my own money, were The Stainless Steel Rat and Han Solo at Stars End, in which Han Solo owned a ’droid whose name was Bollux. That was the funniest thing I’d ever read.
In subsequent, British editions, the ’droid had another name: they changed it to Zollux. But I had the American import. So it was always Bollux to me.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints building in Edinburgh was clean-lined in brick, with a sloping roof and a spire. Inside, it was like a modern school: a main corridor with a squeaky floor, doors leading off it. The meeting hall was at the far end, behind double doors that opened inwards. It was a bright room, full of blonde wood pews. The service was led by Bishop Steele. He was a pale, thin, ginger man of milky infirmity.
After an introductory prayer and a hymn, Bishop Steele introduced us: Brother and Sister Cross, and Neil. We stood. The congregation turned its head. A shine of smiles passed mouth to mouth, line to line.
When the service was over, we herded with the rest of the congregation into the corridor. We were swamped in handshakes and more smiles. Everyone was delighted to see us. Grown men called me Brother Cross, and welcomed me. I said thank you. Mum was engulfed in kisses and joyful hugs. Derek grinned. He shook hands. He turned in a circle, shaking hands. He said how happy he was to be here, at last.
After all that time, after all those places and all those people, after all those ideas and all those books, after all those years in the arid wilderness, Derek Cross had found a place to be.
Mum and Derek hadn’t told the missionaries they were living in sin. But, before they could be baptized, they had to get legally married. So they did it in secret.
I accompanied them to the Register Office. Bob Cruickshank went along, too, to act as a witness. So did Derek, the deputy-manager of Derek’s shop. He was a tall, stooped, raw-boned man with curly hair to his collar. There were no flowers or rice or confetti. There was just five of us in a little room. Nobody dressed up. When the wedding was over, Mum and Derek thanked the witnesses and we caught the bus home and had our tea.
We were baptized on 5 May 1978. The baptismal room was small, white-tiled and humid. There was a small congregation. We were dressed in white, and we were barefoot and, one by one, we were led into the pool. It was waist-height, warm as a bath. Elder Follett held me round the waist and raised his right arm, bent at the elbow. He said, ‘Being commissioned by Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,’ and he dunked me under the water.
There was a moment of full immersion. Bubbling water closed over my upturned face, my screwed-up eyes. Then I was up again, it ran in rivulets from my eyebrows. The assembled faces were smiling. I stepped out of the pool, the white shirt and trousers clinging to me, instantly cold: you could see the outline of my vest. Someone wrapped me in a big towel and I stood there, shivering, as Elder Follett baptized Mum and Derek, too.
They wrote to Elder Baxter, who by then had been shifted to another ward:
The church is a very wonderful thing. When we go there we feel we could just stay for ever. We are indeed very grateful to you for knocking on our door, that evening just a few weeks ago and for the wonderful friendship that Elder Bolz, Elder Follett and yourself have shown to us. We will treasure it for ever as we progress in our knowledge of this true religion. We knew from the very beginning it held something special for us if only we would reach out and hold on tight to it.
The letter is in my mother’s handwriting, and it is signed by her. I own a photocopy of it. But it’s in Derek’s voice. I can see him, standing with his hands in his pockets and rocking on the balls of his feet, as he dictates to her.
Very quickly, the church came to dominate even our weekday lives. The first of these obligations, family home evening, was held every Monday. It was given over to prayer, scriptural readings, refreshments and spiritual discussion then rounded off with games and sometimes food.
As new members, for several months we attended them at other people’s houses. I was a bad guest: nervous, too polite, uneasy about other people’s way of doing things.
At the house of a big family called the Aitkens (the father wore sandals), a big, steaming bowl of spaghetti Bolognese was passed along the dining table. I choked back tears of anxiety. I fretted that I’d take too much, or too little, or that I’d spill tomato sauce on the tablecloth.
Even worse, the food had cheese in it. I was still powerfully revolted by cheese: I could detect it in minute quantities, the way baying dogs could smell escaped convicts. If I entered a room where it had recently been cooked, I vomited. But neither Mum nor Derek noticed the cheese in the spaghetti. They were too busy talking across the table. And I was too polite and scared to do anything but eat.
Belonging to the church had changed Mum and Derek’s spoken language. Sometimes it made me feel weird to hear it. Mum saying, ‘Thank you, Sister Aitken’, or Derek making casual, smiling reference to ‘Our Heavenly Father’.
Eventually, we began to hold our own family home evenings. But we felt self-conscious, trying to apply a formal structure to what until recently had been quite normal: spending an evening in each other’s company. So we cheated. Derek asked me to say an opening prayer, then he read from The Book of Mormon or The Pearl of Great Price– not much, a verse or two. When he closed the book, he asked mum to say a closing prayer. Then we turned on the TV and relaxed.
Also, during the week, Mum had ‘sisterhood meetings’ and Weekday Relief Society, where the women prayed and discussed home-making. I had youth club and Weekday Primary. Derek had priesthood meetings. And there were many informal social evenings: Mormons loved to spend time in each other’s houses, praying and discussing Heavenly Father.
Saturday evening was free, but only because, as the song had it: ‘Saturday is a special day: It’s the day we get ready for Sunday.’ Nevertheless, on that evening, we almost reverted to former patterns of behaviour. Derek sat there with his ukulele, playing three chords and singing country and western songs. My new favourite was ‘You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille’. I sang it, word for word–a long, maudlin ballad about the errant wife of a good man–and at the end Mum and Derek clapped.
But now, Derek drank water, not lager. And, when the singing was done, he said a prayer of thanks. He thanked Heavenly Father for this special time and for the special love that we shared. And he said these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Mum joined him in saying Amen.
On Sunday, there was more Relief Society and another priesthood meeting. And there was more Primary for me, a kind of Sunday School. Its purpose was to help children learn and live by gospel principles; to remember and keep their baptismal covenants. It was to teach us to build strong, enduring testimonies.
After Sunday’s auxiliary gatherings came the sacrament meeting. It was taken by the bishop. The bishopric sat on an elevated platform behind him, facing the congregation. We sang an opening hymn; my favourite was number 196, ‘We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet’. It had a stirring tune, not unlike The Dam Busters.
When the hymn was finished, a member of the congregation approached the front to say an opening prayer. After that, testimonies were given. The speakers had been assigned this duty the previous week: as you were leaving, the bishop pressed a folded square of paper into your hand. You spent all week dreading it; but it got easier with time. Mormons were expected to become confident public speakers, in order to better proclaim their faith. The testimonies were about two minutes long and in essence identical. They were about being lonely and unhappy, then being filled with joy and love. They were about knowing this to be the true church and knowing that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God.
After the testimonies, a prayer was given to bless the sacrament: small chunks of bread and plastic c
ups of water symbolizing the savage, blood atonement of Jesus Christ. This was passed round in metal trays. The young men who performed this duty were called deacons: they were boys who, from the age of twelve, had entered into the Aaronic priesthood. This was the first ministry of God and–unlike the Melchizidek priesthood, which was conferred upon all worthy males aged eighteen and above–it was open to black men.
This was a gracious concession on the church’s part, because being black was a badge of divine execration. To be born black was to be punished for sins committed in the pre-existence, and so constituted much more than a life sentence: it was a demonstration of God’s timeless wrath. Not even the crucifixion could save a black man from his blackness. In case any Mormon be left uncertain, Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, proclaimed that: ‘No person having the least particle of Negro blood can hold the Priesthood.’
This doctrine helped persuade Derek of the church’s eternal truth and its fearless integrity. But he was irked by its too-compassionate decision to allow black members more latitude than, theologically speaking, they merited. This indulgence was perhaps best articulated by Elder Mark E. Peterson of the Council of Twelve Apostles who said in 1954 that:
…we are generous with the Negro. We are willing that the Negro have the highest education. I would be willing to let every Negro drive a Cadillac if they could afford it. I would be willing that they have all the advantages they can get out of life in the world. But let them enjoy these things among themselves.
I think the Lord segregated the Negro. And who is man to change that segregation?
It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, ‘What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Only here we have the reverse of the thing–what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.
Think of the Negro, cursed as to the priesthood…This Negro, who, in the pre-existence, lived the type of life which justified the Lord in sending him to the earth in their lineage of Cain; with a black skin and possibly being born in darkest Africa–if that Negro is willing when he hears the Gospel to accept it, he may have many of the blessings of the Gospel. In spite of all he did in the pre-existent life, the Lord is willing, if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. If that Negro is faithful all his days, he can and will enter the Celestial Kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get Celestial Glory.
Then, on 9 June 1978–shortly after we joined–the church issued a press release that gave notice of a radical doctrinal change: the most radical, in fact, since the policy on polygamy was rescinded, a century earlier. The Prophet Spencer W. Kimball announced that the ‘long promised day’ had arrived, from which non-whites would be permitted to enter into the priesthood.
It was a pragmatic acquiescence. The church was becoming ever more popular in both South America and Africa, countries where many Mormons could be found who had more than the least particle of Negro about them. Such was the rapidity of the church’s expansion, it had become unworkable to keep shipping in white priests from Europe and America. The church, after all, was a lay organization.
Although still a new member, Derek was saddened. It was self-evident to him that coons should not be permitted to enter into the priesthood of God: it made him shudder to think of their impudence, even to imagine that Christ’s blood had been shed in their name.
Nevertheless, he recognized the sagacity of the new revelation. And besides, he had become accustomed to the fact that kaffirs always got something for nothing. It was no surprise that even their salvation could, in the end, be ascribed to the toil and charity of righteous, hard-working white men.
Derek entered the Melchizidek priesthood on 25 May 1978. The first black men were ordained into it less than two weeks later. But not in our branch.
The sacrament meeting ended with another communal hymn and a closing prayer. Then there was some happy milling around in the corridor, after which a couple of missionaries came back home with us, to have lunch.
The missionaries lived in a large, stone building that sat in grounds next to the church. It might once have been a Victorian private school, and the regime they tolerated there wasn’t so different. They weren’t allowed a social life: they prayed, slept, ate and studied there; they walked the streets looking for converts. They went to church. They were never alone, not least because solitude promoted masturbation. They were even encouraged to keep the door open while showering or engaging in other ‘toilet activities’. They weren’t allowed to do anything except be missionaries. Most of them were about nineteen.
So on Sunday, Mum and Derek invited them to our flat, two by two. Here they became louder; they laughed and gossiped. Much of the gossip took the form of candid anecdotes about the misery of being a missionary; of spending two precious years being laughed at and spat on and having doors slammed in your face.
These stories were always told about some other missionary, in a different city, a friend of a friend, and they were designed to make you laugh. But at the heart of each was a queasy core of unhappiness and homesickness.
Mum laid their plates before them. There weren’t enough little tables, so I balanced my dinner on my lap and so did Derek, in his deckchair. While the food was passed out, the missionaries grew solemn, because a prayer was coming up.
Whoever was elected to say grace dutifully folded his arms and tucked in his chin and closed his eyes. He thanked our Heavenly Father for what we were about to receive. And when Amen was said, he became nineteen again. He picked up his fork and began to eat and tell stories and laugh.
While they ate, Derek listened, smiling. He topped up their glasses of Schloer sparkling grape juice. When their plates were clean, they rubbed their bellies and frankly praised the meal and offered to wash up. Mum never let them. So, while she did the dishes, the missionaries secured a length of string across the room, using Blu-Tac. And they removed their dark jackets and plain ties and rolled up their white shirtsleeves and we played feather volleyball.
You kept your arms clasped behind your back and blew up on the feather to keep it aloft, or blew down on it to slam it to the carpet on your opponents’ side. The missionaries howled and laughed. When I scored a point they clapped my shoulder and roared.
They made great use of audio cassettes. They used them to record letters home–it wasn’t so easy to admit how homesick you were, talking out loud into a microphone. And they gave us tapes of the Prophet Spencer W. Kimball talking in the temple in Salt Lake City. They were tapes of tapes of tapes, hissing and warbling and faintly sinister, with the Prophet shakily expostulating behind a storm of white noise.
This inspired Derek. He began secretly to record the Sunday lunches. It was better than filming them. When the missionaries had gone, he produced the mono cassette recorder and immediately rewound the tape. We sat still and mostly silent when he played it.
I looked at the spools going round and round. Sometimes, Mum cooed and laughed at something a missionary had said–Pass the wadder, she always liked that–and Derek sat there with a grin on his face, reliving and revelling in what had just ended; confirming it. The burst of life and noise and happiness and spirit in that quiet little flat.
One night, two new Elders knocked at the door. Both had recently been transferred to Edinburgh. One had curly ginger hair, clipped close at the back and sides, unruly on top like an unsprung cartoon mattress. In his hand he clasped a roll of Super-8 film. He’d been told that Derek owned a projector. His family had sent him a film. He wondered if we’d mind.
I was ill that night. I had a fever. I lay in bed listening as the ginger Elder yelped with surprise and joy as his sister smiled jerkily for the camera and waved, projected on the warped screen.
The noise kept me awake and the shouting worsened my headache. When the film was finished, the missionary came quietly into my room, followed by Mum and Derek. He lay his hands on my forehead and spoke
to me, softly. It was like being touched by a doctor. He said a prayer to Our Heavenly Father that I be healed. When he said Amen, I began to feel better. I turned on my side. The elder, Mum and Derek left the room.
Behind them, they left Jesus. He stood at the edge of my bed in his white robes and his long, clean hair and his auburn beard, a bit forked, and those smiling, infinitely indulgent eyes.
My grandfather Claude was there too. I’d never met him, because his allegiance to a religion called Christian Science had caused him to die, preventably, shortly before I was born. But now he stood to the right of Jesus, and just behind him.
I didn’t actually see them. My eyes were closed. But I could feel them there: Jesus softly glowing, like a nightlight; Claude in shadow, looking down on me, until I slept.
16
I tried to keep the church a secret.
The worst thing about it was getting there. It was important not to be seen by anybody who knew me; anybody who might guess where I was headed in my shirt and tie, with my mum and dad.
Collington Road wasn’t far, less than a mile, and relative safety was closer than that. We walked along Dalry Road for a bit, then turned up a steeply rising, high-walled alleyway that edged the vast, fearful Dalry graveyard. The crumbling wall was topped with broken glass, contrived to keep children from scrambling over. It didn’t work: occasionally, my classmates would speak of their adventures in there. I thought them insane. The graveyard was full of aged gravestones, leaning and collapsed. They were Edinburgh grey, and green with moss and lichen. All of this was subsumed by a twisting mantle of grass and dandelions and overhanging trees.
In dreams, I often found myself in there, trapped in the wordless and spreading dark. The sun was setting and the glass on the high walls shone malicious in the fading light: white and bottle green. I ran through the twisting undergrowth, towards the great gates. But they were obstructed by a huge black pyramid. It was veined and knotted with vines and creepers. I never learned what it stood in monument to, because I always woke up when I saw it.