But there was a wooden box in the lower right corner of the picture that filled me with dread. Recently I read that it was probably a seventeenth-century foot warmer, but back then I imagined it was a trap or an instrument of torture. It meant that this dreaming, fleshy, cobalt-blue-wrapped girl was going to get caught.
Brethren were proud of their roots. My father would defend the radical puritanism of the very first Brethren, sometimes passionately, long after he’d left the Brethren and given up his belief in God.
‘It started out right-minded,’ he’d say. ‘But it went wrong. They weren’t intending to start their own Church. They were just good men walking in the Lord together, trying to find a way of living according to Paul’s gospel.’
If I had any chance of understanding what my father had called the Nazi decade and its aftermath – the turbulence we lived through as a family in the 1960s, seventies and eighties, the separations, the suicides, the scandal, the schisms, the gambling, my father’s addictions, embezzlement and prison sentence – I was going to have to understand how the Brethren crossed the line from being right-minded, as my father had put it, to being wrong-minded. I needed to find out how they turned into a cult.
The handful of Brethren history books I consulted all confirmed my father’s story. In the late 1820s a few young men, repelled by the corruption, decadence and in-fighting they saw in the Anglican and Catholic Churches, had come together to break bread in sitting rooms and hired halls in Dublin. Certain that the world was fast approaching its end, they decided to return to the principles of the early Christian Church as laid out by Paul’s gospel – adapted, as they thought fit, for nineteenth-century believers:
No priests.
No ritual.
No intermediaries.
No incense.
No hierarchy.
No sacred ground.
No altars or pulpits.
They were not a denomination, they insisted. They were simply following The Spirit, and preparing for the End Times.
A charismatic ex-barrister and ex-curate, John Nelson Darby, had eventually taken a lead. None of them would be saved, he told his followers, unless they separated completely from the rest of the world. They had to prepare a clean house for the Lord’s coming.
When I was growing up there were framed photographs of Darby on the walls of most Brethren sitting rooms. Two elderly Brethren sisters called the Miss Ellimans used to give us sweets on the Lord’s Day from a drawer under a glass-fronted cabinet in which they kept their framed photograph of Darby. Though Brethren talked about him as a kind of saint, he always looked to me, as he glowered out from behind the glass door of the cabinet, like the kind of man who’d shout at you if he opened his mouth.
John Nelson Darby.
Darby is famous for having ‘invented’ the idea of the Rapture. He’d had a vision, he told his followers, that there would be two Second Comings, not just one. First, Christ would arrive and take the Brethren off the planet, in a sudden, secret exodus to heaven. It was all there in the scriptures; hadn’t the Apostle Paul told the Thessalonians that the Lord’s people would be ‘caught up’ into the air? As soon as the Rapture had taken place, all the people left behind, the worldly people, would suffer the Great Tribulation. The Bible didn’t specify what this was exactly, but we all understood there’d be terrible storms, earthquakes, plagues and famines.1
Christ would return a second time, Darby wrote, for the Judgement Day reckonings. There would be people saved at that point, but they’d be in the second ranking. The most privileged of the residents of heaven would be the Rapture people, the ones who’d gone in the first exodus: the elite, the first-class travellers, the emigrants.
That was us, my people, the Brethren.
They told us children that all we had to do was take the Lord Jesus into our hearts and ‘withdraw from iniquity’ to be certain of a place in the much-longed-for upward rush of the Rapture. But despite my most strenuous efforts, I never managed to withdraw from iniquity for very long – and that meant, of course, that I knew I’d be left behind.
The Brethren visitors who came to our house for tea between Meetings were from all over the world. Once people like Grandpa Mallalieu had started the missionary work back in the nineteenth century, Brethrenism had gone everywhere. By 1845 there were 1,200 Brethren breaking bread together in a hall in Plymouth. By the end of the nineteenth century there were assemblies right across Europe, in Australia, New Zealand, America, Jamaica and Canada, Brethren breaking bread in tents, or assembling in corrugated-iron churches built from kits, in fields and jungles and in the outback.
There were quarrels and schisms right from the start. When Darby returned from preaching in Europe in 1845 and found that the Brethren at Plymouth had reintroduced priests, he first denounced them, and then withdrew from them. This was the first withdrawal of many. The religious-tract war that followed, with Darby accusing his adversaries’ leader, Benjamin Newton, of being ‘a blind instrument of Satan’, led to new rifts. When the Brethren of the Bethesda assembly in Bristol broke bread with some of Newton’s followers, Darby withdrew from all of them. He wrote to all the rest of the Brethren assemblies around the world, telling them that ‘to receive anyone from Bethesda is opening the door now to the infection of the abominable evil from which at so much painful cost we have been delivered’.2
Abominable evil. Infection. That was the way they talked. When we left the Brethren I was surprised to discover the rest of the world didn’t talk like we did. Darby’s way of seeing the world was absolute. He was certain he was right. Evil was real, he told his followers. It was everywhere.
The Brethren tract wars attracted newspaper attention from the start. In 1869 James Grant, editor of the Morning Advertiser, described Brethren as living in ‘a state of constant antagonism’ with each other and with the world. He reported the violent behaviour he’d seen at Brethren conferences; but it was, he wrote, ‘the effect of Darbyism on family life’ that was ‘perhaps its most awful feature’.3 He reported numerous cases of families broken up by Brethren rules.
Brethrenism has always devastated families. It’s a measure of the Brethren’s faith, they say, that they are prepared to put the Lord before ‘natural ties’. When they say ‘natural ties’ they mean family bonds, those complex threads of affection and loyalty that weave between siblings and parents and children. Those threads are good, they believe, but not if they lead to Brethren rules being broken. That’s when you have to take a knife to them.
My father always had a bit of a thing for Darby’s black-and-white, brooking-no-compromise asceticism. I was impressed by it too in my teens; it reminds me of the excitement I felt when I later read Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau on civil disobedience. There was something brave and bold, I thought, about these people refusing to kowtow to the Church authorities, rejecting the incense, the idolatry, the angels-on-a-pinhead High Church nonsense of it all. They’d gone their own way; they’d done their own thing. I liked that.
But the trouble is that if you persuade people that this world is a mere waiting room for the next, they’ll come to despise it; if you teach people to believe that Satan is using all of the people outside your Meeting Room to try to stop you from going up in the Rapture, they’ll come to think that all those people are tricksters and devils, or infected with evil; and if the promised Rapture doesn’t come, pretty soon they’ll become paranoid, impatient and obsessive, and they’ll be looking for ways to separate harder.
2
I found the Dublin auction house – one of the places where those first Brethren had met together in the 1830s – on Google Street View. It had become a shop. I scrolled in close, but couldn’t get past the door. I would have liked to have gone inside to find the room where the Brethren brothers and sisters had laid out a circle of chairs around a table, shaken out a white cloth, and placed a freshly baked loaf and a cup of wine in the centre, just as we had done. Afterwards, I knew, they’d have stepped out into
the noisy street, clutching their Bibles, feeling purged and clean, steeling themselves against Satan’s world out there, the dirt and the devil of it, just as we had done.
My father grew up a hundred or so years later amongst Brethren who broke bread in the Iron Room in Kenilworth, a corrugated-iron shed assembled on wasteland down by the river, one of many Brethren tin tabernacles across the world, either purpose-built or requisitioned from other dissenting groups who’d traded up or shut down. At the centre of all that corrugated iron there was always a table with a white cloth, a freshly baked loaf and a collection box, inside a circle of chairs.
The Iron Room had once stood at the end of a terrace of Victorian houses called The Close, but it was demolished in 1982. When I went to Kenilworth to try to find it, the man who worked the adjoining allotment full of sweet peas and cabbages told me he kept pulling up sections of corrugated iron from his soil, even the occasional window frame. It had mystified him. He had no idea that he had the remains of a church underneath his dahlias. A local historian found a photograph for me.
The corrugated iron of Brethren Meeting Rooms testified to the sect’s indifference to the world and its materialism. Their God didn’t need fan vaulting or gold leaf. He came because of them. Nor did they need to consider longevity when they built these rooms – they didn’t think about rust, mould, leaks, heating, or frozen pipes – because they were certain the Rapture was only weeks or months away. Eventually, of course, the pipes froze, the windows leaked, the iron rusted, paint flaked, mould spread; journalists came and angled their long-distance lenses to peer in through those high windows. To keep them out, the Brethren frosted their glass, fitted curtain rails inside and railings and razor wire outside.4
Satan is abroad, Darby had told Brethren. Satan is stalking the streets of Dublin, Paris, London, New York. He’s got into the churches, he’s in the pubs, the law courts, the pulpits, the theatres. ‘Satan is the god of this world,’ he wrote, ‘the prince of the power of the air, and the manager of this stupendous system.’ And Brethren, he preached, had to separate themselves completely from all this. They had to disconnect from ‘business, politics, education, governments, science, inventions, railroads, telegraphs, social arrangements, charitable institutions, reforms, religion’.5 Telegraphs, invented in the 1830s, were a particular obsession for Darby, certain proof that Satan had got hold of the air.
‘The Iron Room’ in Kenilworth before it was demolished as part of a drive to amalgamate small Brethren assemblies in the 1960s
There were so many things to separate from. Even the air. It all required so much vigilance.
Splitting, withdrawing – sometimes Brethren called it ‘circumcision’ – became the Brethren way. They did it dramatically, defiantly, over and over again. It happened all the time in our Meeting when I was growing up. There were always people my grandparents would be tutting about or praying over, sometimes people I knew, or people in other Meetings I’d heard about. If my grandparents were praying for someone it usually meant they were in big trouble. It almost always meant they’d be withdrawn from, and then we wouldn’t see them again.
After Darby and his followers split from the large Brethren assemblies in Plymouth and Bristol in 1848, people began to call them the Darbyite Brethren, the Exclusive, or the Close, or Closed, Brethren.
When I think of the word ‘close’, I hear Keep close, Come close, Be close, We’re close. There’s a hushed, whispered sanctuary to it, something intimate, protective and secretive, warm, perhaps with a hint of stale air. When I think of the word ‘closed’, I hear doors banging, gates slamming, drawbridges shuddering into place, keys turning. Closed room. Closed shop. Closed is not the same as private or keep out. It means We were open once but now we’re closed. We might once have let you in but now we won’t.
The Exclusive Brethren went from close to closed. They went from drawing close to shutting out. In or around 1848 this strict, close community began to shun.
I’m stepping gingerly here, because I hear Brethren women – cousins, aunts, ancestors – gathering in the wings. They have something to say. They’re whispering that Darby was right; they’re telling me why my educated, sceptical, secular way of seeing things is so impoverished. They want to tell me that God loves me, that he wants to make everything right in the world, that he suffers with us, with me, that he died for my sins. They remind me that everything and everybody in this world, including me, is riddled with sin, and only Jesus can redeem us from that. They tell me to look at the pornography, the internet, the self-harm, the levels of depression and the empty churches. These are all signs of Satan’s dominion, sure signs of his evil working in the world.
These women have my big bones and wild hair; they are serene, gracious, dignified. My grandmother is in the room. I can hear the swish of her silk skirts, can smell her lily-of-the-valley talcum powder, I can hear her talking about the Lord Jesus as I stand on a chair at her kitchen sink blowing bubbles through my tiny fingers. They’d tell a different story if I let them. But I have to tell my father’s story. And mine.
3
The Rapture was coming. It might come next week or next year, but it was always coming. I was sure I wouldn’t be the only one left behind when it came. I was pretty certain that my brothers and most of the Brethren children in our assembly wouldn’t make it either.
Once all those thousands of Brethren grown-ups around the world had disappeared up into the clouds with their Bibles, I knew my brothers and I would have to get through the Tribulation as best we could. The trouble was that not only the not-good-enough Brethren, but all those dangerous worldly people outside the Brethren would be left behind too. We’d have to find a way of hiding from them and getting to high ground so we wouldn’t drown when the tidal waves came. I thought about that almost every day.
I knew my brothers wouldn’t be much good in an emergency. I’d have to take charge when the time came, find a place for us to hide. I’d gone to look at the coal bunker in our house, but decided against it. It was too dark and dirty. There were spiders. It would flood too when the tidal waves came. The garage at my grandparents’ house was a much better proposition. It was higher up. There’d be less chance of flooding. My grandmother kept stacks of crates of strawberry pop in little glass bottles there; there were candles and boxes of jam tarts from the family business. I knew where she kept the key. We’d be fine there for a few weeks, I thought, if we were careful not to be seen going in.
Because I knew I’d be left behind, I spent much of my childhood preparing for the Tribulation. My dreams were full of floods and lightning and earthquakes. Most of the games I played had boats in them. They were thrilling.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, my father and grandfather ran a Brethren wholesale grocery called Stott and Sons from a cavernous and labyrinthine old warehouse in Shirley Street in Hove. If my father had sole charge of me and my brothers, he would sometimes leave us to play unsupervised in the darkened storerooms while he did something ‘important’ in the office next door. We were not to tell our mother.
Though the Stott and Sons warehouse drivers who came and went would protest about our safety, we’d scramble up the cliffs made by stacks of rice and flour sacks, slip over the top and down into the inner chambers we found or made there. We’d squeeze down rockfaces made by piled-high boxes of tinned asparagus or tomatoes, and hoist ourselves up on the chain winches that ran through the trapdoors in the wooden ceiling to the upper rooms where the boxes of sweets and crisps were kept. We’d hide under crates in dusty back rooms we’d found up tiny staircases that seemed to appear from nowhere. There were no eyes on us in the warehouse.
Before we went to school, my brothers and I had no children’s stories or fairy tales or cartoons to shape our play. They were banned. Instead we made up games based on mixed-up Bible stories from the Old and New Testaments. We transformed the darkened rice mountains and valleys and walls of boxes of the warehouse into the landscapes of the Holy Land. We’d
march round the walls of Jericho, wade across the Jordan, rescue Jonah from the whale and then raise Lazarus so he could fight alongside David as he took on Goliath.
While my brothers were fencing with swords they’d made from sticks of wood I’d be scrambling up those rice-sack mountains, scraping my knees raw on the rough hessian, fleeing lashing rain and rising floodwater. I’d make arks out of any inner chamber I found, pulling old sacks across the top to keep out the relentless rain and lightning. As the smells of muscovado sugar or paprika or brown rice rose up around me, I’d be pressed into the ark’s hold, feeling the swell of the waves or easing a white dove through an imaginary porthole. Or I’d be Jonah inside the belly of the whale, listening out for the sound of gulls through the whale’s flanks, sounds that would tell me we were near land.
That ark was mine. I unfurled the sails. I stood at the helm on the deck. I got to decide which way we sailed.
Sometimes beautiful and incomprehensible lines from the Bible drifted into my daydreams or play: ‘Hast thou entered into the storehouses of the snow,’ the Lord had asked Job as he and Satan took turns to torment him, ‘and hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail? … By what way is the light parted, [and] the east wind scattered upon the earth?’ Or I’d repeat my favourite sentence from the Bible, four words that come after verse after verse of flooding, wind and rain, destruction and desolation:
In the Days of Rain Page 4