In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  The social stigma would have lasted for a long time after the war ended. Conscientious objectors describe being ostracised for decades: people wouldn’t shake your hand; with a prison record you couldn’t get a job; if you ran a business people wouldn’t buy from you.

  The Stotts decided to move the family business south. It wasn’t just the shame of David’s having been a conscientious objector that was making life difficult in Port Seton, my father said. The great herring gold-rush was over, the stocks depleted by overfishing. Neighbours were shutting up shop, selling their boats where they could find people to buy them, moving away. Lizzie’s youngest brother had decided to emigrate to Australia. One of her cousins had moved to Hastings on the south coast of England.

  ‘My father knew he and his siblings would never find Brethren to marry in Port Seton,’ my father said. ‘There were just not enough young Brethren left. If they wanted families they’d have to go south. My father had been taking the train down to London several times a year for the big London Brethren Meetings. He’d even starting seeing a Brethren girl in London, but he’d kept that secret from his parents. He got his sisters to cover for him.’

  I found a photograph of the family taken a year or two before they left Port Seton to go south. They’d dressed up, I guess, for the picture, gone out into the garden behind the shop to get the best of the light. They look nervous and awkward, unsure where to put their hands. Except for my grandfather. He’s standing behind his father, looking straight at the camera. He’s carefully dressed and groomed, sure of himself. He looks like a man who wants to impress. He looks like a man who might have a secret romance.

  The Stotts photographed in 1925. From left: Lizzie, Morton, Greta, Bessie, Robert, and David Fairbairn Stott

  In 1927 the Stotts moved to Brighton, a seaside town a hundred times bigger and worldlier than Port Seton. Lizzie had cousins thirty miles along the coast in Hastings, but a Brighton Brethren builder had offered the two Stott brothers work on a building site and found them somewhere to live. I imagine the four young Stotts walking amongst day trippers, both fascinated and shocked by street gang fights, piers, parks and a royal palace. Their Scottish accents would have singled them out amongst Brighton Brethren as well as in local shops. They’d have caused a stir in the Brighton Meeting Room.

  While Robert and Morton worked on the building site, Greta and Bessie went to Pitman’s College to study secretarial skills and accountancy. After a year, Hastings Brethren helped David to buy a wholesale chemist’s business in the town. The family moved into a flat above the shop and joined the Hastings Brethren assembly. The two Stott brothers, by now in their twenties, would have been looking about for potential Brethren wives. Brethren fathers would have been sizing them up too.

  In 1930 a well-known Australian ministering brother called Hugh Wasson arrived in Hastings with his two pretty daughters, Kathleen and Betty. He’d grown up in a big family in Northern Ireland before emigrating to Australia, and he’d promised his daughters a grand tour of Great Britain and Ireland. Robert and Morton offered to accompany the Wassons when they visited the Highlands. Two years later Kathleen sailed halfway round the world again, from Adelaide to Tilbury Docks, to marry Robert. Betty followed two years after that, to marry Morton.

  My father’s memoir had begun here, with my grandmother’s sea voyage. Kathleen Wasson, exotic, elegantly but demurely dressed, the daughter of an eminent and established Australian Brethren brother, the granddaughter of a Brethren missionary, had sailed across the world to marry my Scottish grandfather.

  9

  He had painted signs and sold rope, sailcloth and groceries in Port Seton, worked on building sites in Brighton; now Brighton Brethren helped my grandfather secure a job as a travelling salesman for Dubarry, the perfumers. He was going up in the world. During the week he drove hundreds of miles in his company car to peddle fancy perfumes and soaps with French names that promised Compelling Loveliness, Soft White Hands, or a Matte, Velvety Complexion. On the weekends and in the evenings he preached.

  Three years later, when he took a sales job at Roger et Gallet, the French soapmakers, he virtually tripled his salary. He and Kathleen bought a detached house in Kenilworth in the Midlands, right in the midpoint of the country, far from the sea, at the centre of Robert’s new sales territory. They painted a nursery for their baby, David, employed a nurserymaid, and parked the shiny family Austin outside. Robert stacked the perfume, talc and soap samples in all the spare cupboards and in the attic. Three times a week, sometimes more, they put on their best clothes and hats and pushed the pram the short distance to worship with the Kenilworth assembly in the Iron Room down on the allotment land by the brook.

  Brethren were expected to live in detached houses as near to the local Meeting Room as possible, because detached houses minimised contact with worldly people, and proximity kept the local fellowship close and in sight. Robert Stott was now the head of his detached household, a respected ministering brother of the Iron Room and at the centre of a commercial sales network that stretched north beyond the border between England and Scotland.

  My father was born in June 1938. Although my grandparents gave their other two children Biblical names, they must have named my father Roger after the fancy French perfume company that paid my grandfather’s wages. There’s no other explanation for this worldly name. Was it a curse or a blessing? Did it set him at odds from the start? Did that account for him being the rule-breaking, hedonistic cuckoo in the nest, the aesthete born amongst puritans? Was it an ill omen, or the best kind of one?

  10

  My Australian grandmother Kathleen had intonations in her voice that were different from everyone else I’d heard. Her father was Northern Irish. Her mother’s father, the man in the portrait on our sitting-room wall, the man we called Grandpa Mallalieu, had been born in Leeds, and in the 1880s had emigrated to Australia, where he’d established all those Brethren tent assemblies. People sometimes stop me and ask where I’m from: South Africa? they say, Australia? My voice has my grandmother’s mongrel tones too.

  She’d show me on the atlas where she’d been born and all the places where she’d lived. She talked to me about the Lord Jesus and about her mother, who’d been taken away to an asylum. She’d lift me onto a chair so I could blow bubbles between my fingers at the kitchen sink. She taught me how to cut crosses into the base of Brussels sprouts. She showed me how to use her hostess trolley, the one she used for entertaining Brethren guests and Brethren visitors from overseas. Her house was always full of guests. She was, other Brethren women told me, an especially spiritual woman.

  When she was eighty-eight years old she sent me the transcript of an interview she’d just given to the local oral history group. Now that she was very old, she told me when I visited, her memory was doing strange things. When she sat in her room at the back of my aunts’ house looking out over the garden, watching the birds fly between the feeders, she’d suddenly find that she was looking out over the grounds of one of the houses she’d lived in as a child in Melbourne or Adelaide. Or she’d wake up staring at the patterned wallpaper of her bedroom in the Adelaide house. When she closed her eyes she saw giant redwoods, she told me. She could smell eucalyptus.

  My grandmother had told the interviewer that when her mother had been sent almost a hundred miles away from their home in Melbourne to a mental asylum at Ballarat in 1914, she and her sister, then nine and six years old, were sent to live with Aunt Marguerite, their mother’s sister, who ran a school in a tiny timber-mill town called Beech Forest on Cape Otway, two hundred miles south, in a redwood forest right at the tip of one of the southernmost peninsulas in Australia.

  I liked the sound of Aunt Marguerite. She’d lost a leg in her childhood – no one knew how – but, my grandmother said, that had never stopped her from doing anything. The two Mallalieu sisters, Ada-Louise and Marguerite, had been raised among the Box Hill Brethren in a suburb of Melbourne. Marguerite had studied hard, become a school teacher
and then in her early twenties married a young labourer who wasn’t in the Brethren, and who already had a prison record. She had her first and only child, a daughter, a year later, and when her husband disappeared she’d taken a job in a school as far from her father’s preaching territory as she could. She never remarried.

  Brethren relatives called Aunt Marguerite ‘the man hater’, but she seemed like a pirate adventurer to me. I imagined her striding out to school in that remote town along the railway sidings between the tall trees, her wooden leg hidden under her long skirts, her daughter running beside her. The school had fourteen pupils; most of them travelled long distances from outlying farms every day on horseback through the forest to reach it.

  My grandmother told the interviewer about the bullock wagon that came to meet her and her sister Betty at the station, and the journey along what she called ‘corduroyed roads’ – muddy tracks with wooden slats laid across them – through giant redwoods and past waterfalls.

  Kathleen and Betty spent the summers with their young cousin wandering the forests between the scattered farms on horseback: ‘There were big bushfires sometimes,’ she told the interviewer. ‘At night we saw showers of sparks where branches suddenly broke off in the fires on the hills.’

  My grandmother might have remembered those bushfires when, decades later, she and her husband and sons crouched under the kitchen table during the air raids on nearby Coventry, their eyes fixed on the explosions in the sky beyond the window. Robert, her husband, was at home in Kenilworth throughout the Second World War, working as a firewatcher, too old to be drafted into the army or to register as a conscientious objector. When the planes came, she told my father, Robert read from the Psalms by the light of his torch under the kitchen table.

  My father made up a prayer for his memoir to illustrate the kind of Brethren prayer his father gave under that kitchen table where the family took shelter during the bombing raids. ‘Our God and Father we cry to Thee,’ he wrote, ‘we cry to Thee that Thy protecting hand may be over us in this house tonight. We pray that Thou wilt use this fear and our sense of danger to make us more dependent on Thee. Help us to realise Thy power as well as Thy love and mercy. We think of all the saints who love Thee and we ask Thee to have them especially in Thy care. And that men and women who do not know Thee may repent and turn to Thee in their hour of need.’

  My father must have learned to speak – or mimic – this language long before he could read. He would have heard so much of it, just as I had. All the Brethren men made the same strange sing-song noises when they preached, pausing for long periods of time, tuning in so that the Lord could guide the direction they were taking, then starting up the zig-zag cadences again. Ministry was impromptu. That was the Brethren way, though some of the longer addresses must have been pre-scripted. In the circles of seats, Brethren brothers and sisters said amen or made assenting noises that sounded like half-awake hums, or quiet moans, or almost a kind of singing. You were supposed to make those sounds, my father said, once you were ‘in the Spirit’.

  When I read the prayer my father put in his memoir, it’s my father’s voice I hear, with that strange tremor that would appear occasionally when something in the scriptures moved him and he seemed about to cry.

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  The Brethren childhood that my father described in his memoir was very similar to my own, but much less circumscribed. Brethren rules were strict in the forties, but nothing compared to the prohibitions introduced in the sixties, when I was born.

  What had it been like to grow up as a boy in the Brethren? I’d always felt so cross as a small Brethren girl – not a sulky, smouldering kind of cross, but a fire-out-of-control-sweeping-across-landscapes kind of cross. But I did not dare show it. I was supposed to like being subject. My grandmother did. She’d lower her head when my grandfather was having one of his rages, as if submitting to her bullying husband was a way of serving the Lord Jesus. Sometimes I’d have to bite my lip so I wouldn’t howl with rage when I watched her. It was so unfair. Why did women have to do exactly as the men said? Just because Paul had said so? Who was Paul, that he could say such things and have everyone follow his instructions blindly like that? Even thinking those thoughts was a terrible sin, my grandmother would have told me. It was against scripture.

  But what if I’d been a Brethren boy? My father would have grown up knowing he’d be head of his household one day, head of the family business, even an important ministering brother if he was good enough at talking about the scriptures. He could preach in Meeting. He could shout in his house. I didn’t much like any of the Brethren boys I knew. They called me ‘just a girl’, and I grew up knowing that I’d be ‘just a girl’ until I became ‘just a woman’. Would I have liked the Brethren boy my father had been? I don’t think so. He’d have probably called me ‘just a girl’ too.

  ‘If we were at home for the Lord’s Day,’ my father wrote, ‘we set out on foot for the eleven o’clock Meeting at The Iron Room. We were expected to walk quietly and sensibly: my brother and I usually walked ahead and my father and mother followed, pushing my baby sister in the pram. Each of us carried a hymnbook and a Bible. This was part of our testimony – amongst whom ye shine as lights in the world.

  ‘But there weren’t many people about to shine on,’ my father complained. ‘There’d have been Baptist and Methodist services in Kenilworth at the same time and there was certainly a Holy Communion at St John’s Church in the other direction but,’ he wrote, ‘we only ever saw Mr and Mrs Bert Clayton and Mr and Mrs Foster, the two Brethren couples who also lived in Waverley Road. They were either ahead or behind walking on the other side of the road. We never walked with them. I have no idea why. Mr Foster had a long neck and a very prominent Adam’s apple. He was tall and thin and he walked quickly in a kind of stalking manner. His much shorter wife struggled to keep up with him. My father called them “the long and the short of it”.’

  In the forties and fifties all the Brethren sisters wore hats. In the scriptures, the Apostle Paul had stipulated that women’s heads should be covered when they were ‘in the temple’, my father explained, but that men were to have their heads uncovered. For a group of post-war fundamentalists living in the British suburbs two thousand years later, this injunction of Paul’s proved difficult to follow. One of the early Brethren leaders had made a rule that if men were supposed to have their heads uncovered in the temple, they should have their heads covered on their way to it. So the brothers wore hats to the Meeting, and hung them on the rows of hooks at the back of the Iron Room.

  When my father was a child, the lack of symmetry in this hat rule had vexed him. He’d asked my grandfather why the sisters weren’t carrying their hats to the Meeting and putting them on when they went in. His grandfather laughed, but didn’t answer the question. My father wasn’t sure he knew the answer. He’d begun to wonder if there were other things his father did not know.

  ‘The Morning Meeting in The Iron Room,’ my father remembered, ‘lasted for just over an hour. Brethren boys had to make sure that all the sisters had any cushions they wanted before the Meeting started, and a hassock, or footstool. Hassocks were piled at the back of the Room, fat and thick and stuffed with some kind of coarse material, some patterned, some plain. All the sisters had to have one to put their feet on. The chairs were arranged in a circle around a table covered in a white cloth. On the table there was a goblet, a loaf of freshly baked bread in a basket, and a collection box.’

  First, a brother ‘gave out the notices’. These included the times of the following week’s Meetings, who was giving the address in the Iron Room that night, and what Fellowship Meetings were scheduled for the following Saturday. Next, the same brother would read out any Letters of Commendation for Brethren visitors present that week. Then the Morning Meeting would start. There was no script or written plan, but there was ‘a general understanding’, my father wrote, ‘that things moved in a particular order. Brothers gave out hymns or got to their feet to pray a
s they were moved by the Spirit to do so. Brethren sisters were not permitted to speak though they could join in the hymns.’

  After the first hymn, a brother walked to the table, broke the bread into pieces and passed it round, just as we did twenty years or so later. Everyone took a piece and ate it slowly. When the basket of bread was back on the table, the brother prayed a second time before passing the goblet of wine around. Then the collection box was circulated, a small wicker basket with a green baize lining and a hole in the top for the money.

  In the forties, Brethren children were expected to ask to start breaking bread at the age of around twelve. As soon as senior ministering brothers had interviewed the child and confirmed that a conversion had taken place, the child would be declared to be ‘in the Spirit’. Teenage children who weren’t ‘in the Spirit’ were considered to be a disgrace to their parents. If you hadn’t been converted, my father wrote, or if you doubted any of the doctrine, it was better to pretend to be ‘in the Spirit’ rather than shame your family or risk getting withdrawn from. Eventually you forgot how to put up any resistance. Or you were just too fearful.

  Better to pretend. So my father had muddled through then, just as I had done. He’d been baffled too, and he’d found ways to keep quiet and pretend he wasn’t. If he and I had been Brethren kids sitting on a fence together outside the Iron Room, could we have found a way of saying how strange it all was? I doubt it. I would still have been ‘just a girl’ to him. He wouldn’t have told me about the secret games he played during the scripture readings. I wouldn’t have told him about the hold of the ark that I walked through inside my head when I was supposed to be praying.