‘Soon I had a small library of pieces in my head,’ he wrote. ‘I could go there at any time, even when I was in a Meeting. I had a secret, non-Brethren compartment inside my head.’
I thought of the salty ark I’d made for myself, the secret, non-Brethren room inside my own head. I wondered where all the other Brethren children went to in those long hours of Meeting. Did they have private rooms too? Had the women daydreamed? What about William? Had anyone – other than a small group of the men – really been listening to all that angels-on-a-pinhead exegesis?
14
My father was ten when doctors found an abscess in his mother’s womb and rushed her to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. They did not expect her to survive. My father and his brother were sent to stay with their Auntie Bessie and her husband on their farm in Kent. The prayers for his mother at the Kent Meeting Room were urgent and serious, my father remembered. Her father and grandfather were ‘famous’ ministering brothers in Australia, so my grandmother’s illness was much discussed, much whispered about. Weeks passed. The news was not good. The Kent Brethren redoubled their prayers; my father and his brother fended off the sympathetic embraces of the elderly Brethren sisters.
And then, just as the doctors and my grandfather had given up hope, the abscess had suddenly burst. ‘A wave of relief and gratitude swept through the Brethren Meeting Rooms in Kenilworth and Kent,’ my father wrote. ‘In Brethren terms, my mother’s recovery was a high-profile event. A miracle. To me,’ he added, ‘it was proof that God existed.’
When my grandmother returned home from the hospital she told my father about a recurring vision she’d had through the last ten days of her illness. Sometimes, she said, she’d surface from her dreams to find doctors or nurses bending over her, or my grandfather sitting holding her hand, but most of the time in her mind she was walking across a winter landscape, looking up at a network of bare branches silhouetted against a red and gold sky while a heavy bell tolled somewhere close.
She’d been in a prolonged struggle with the Lord, she told my ten-year-old father. She couldn’t die, she told God. How would Robert manage? And the children needed her. In answer to her pleas a simple phrase repeated itself, remotely, impersonally, against the steady tolling of the bell: ‘One will in the universe,’ the voice said. ‘One will in the universe.’
My grandmother lived like this, slipping between the physical world and the metaphysical sunset, for more than a week. And then one day she capitulated, she told my father. She gave herself up to God’s will. ‘Thy will be done,’ she’d said finally. ‘Thy will be done … Not what I will but what Thou wilt.’ Within twelve hours the poisonous abscess inside her broke and dissipated. My grandmother had told my father this story, I guess, because she wanted him to give up his will too. Give up everything, let the Lord direct your ways. That was the Brethren way.
For months after she returned home, my grandmother would walk to the back door of their Kenilworth house at sunset to gaze at the pattern of winter trees against the sky. ‘Sometimes,’ she said to my father years later, ‘I could hardly breathe when I looked up at them.’ He must have felt the same way when he looked at her.
15
In the year that my grandmother nearly died, 1948, James Taylor, the Brethren world leader, the man we called JT, a Sligo-born New York linen merchant, received ‘new light’ from the Lord about worshipping the Holy Spirit.
‘New light’ was important. You could tell the Rapture was close because the Lord would start to send lots of it. New light meant new instructions, new truths, revealed only to the Brethren’s leader, the ‘Man of God’. But this particular new light about the Spirit upset people. John Nelson Darby had always taught that Brethren should worship the Lord and the Father, not the Spirit by itself. Now JT was telling them that the Lord wanted them to worship the Spirit equally with God and the Lord. Was he right?
Some senior ministering brothers expressed their concern privately. There was too much stress, they said, being placed on the ministry of Brethren leaders – from Darby to James Taylor. People were putting more emphasis on ministries than on the scriptures. Surely that was wrong. Many of the doubters, however, were wary of saying such things publicly for fear of being withdrawn from. Most did as Brethren usually did – they decided to wait, keep their counsel and see how things played out.
‘The Morning Meeting now had to be changed,’ my father wrote. ‘Everything had to be rearranged. We worshipped the Lord at the beginning, then after the passing round of the bread and wine and the moneybox, everything was about Christ and The Assembly. Then we worshipped the Spirit, then the Father, then the Trinity. There had to be a revision of the Brethren hymnbook so that there were hymns addressed to the Spirit. All the Brethren that fancied themselves as hymn writers got busy writing new hymns.’
JT’s teaching in the late forties and early fifties was complex and increasingly esoteric. ‘We were the children of Israel fleeing from Egypt through the wilderness to the promised land,’ my father wrote, remembering the sense of adventure and risk that those stories excited in them all. ‘We thought of ourselves as a community of refugees, travelling across the Jordanian desert, exposed to danger from all directions.
‘Egypt,’ he wrote, ‘was supposed to be the World System we’d left behind, where we’d been in bondage. We’d escaped all the way to the Red Sea. The Red Sea was supposed to be the Gospel, Salvation through the death of Christ, God parting the waters and letting the Brethren through on dry land. That took us into the Wilderness. We were following the Ark of the Covenant which was Christ through the Wilderness and we were being fed by the manna which was also Christ.’
When my father talked or wrote about the manna – the mysterious food that God provided for the Israelites in the desert – he’d always quote the lines from the Bible: and it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like cake with honey. I thought of the boy in the Meeting Room thinking about honey cake and coriander seed, just as I had pressed the bread between my four-year-old fingers to see if it tasted or smelled better squashed, relishing the smell of yeast that lingered on my fingers.
‘At the other end of the wilderness,’ my father wrote, ‘was the river Jordan. The Ark of the Covenant went ahead of you down into the river bed and we were supposed to follow it. This was Christ’s death in you, a painful experience. Then you came up on the other side and began your life in the new land. On the other side we’d still have to fight encroaching tribes and get things built and established. But this landscape was heavenly – we were now on God’s territory, not man’s.’
Just to make things more complicated, JT told them that all these things were happening at the same time. ‘Spiritually,’ my father wrote, ‘you’d be leaving Egypt through the Red Sea, learning the lessons of the wilderness, going down into the Jordan and living your life in the land on the other side, simultaneously.’
It was a lot to keep in mind, particularly if you were ten years old. My father seems to have struggled not just with the metaphysics of the flight from Jordan story but also with the geography. He was vexed by the fact that the children of Israel were supposed to have taken forty years to travel a distance that should have taken a few weeks. He’d asked his primary school teacher about the exact distance during a scripture lesson. When he’d quoted the answer at home, his mother wrote to the school and had him ‘excused’ from scripture lessons. Enraged, he’d waited for his mother to go shopping, then taken down his father’s atlas and used the scale and a ruler to confirm the distance his teacher had given him. Sixty-five miles. Had it really taken them forty years to walk sixty-five miles? This meant that the children of Israel’s average speed through the wilderness had been about eight yards a day, he told me years later. ‘And they were supposed to be travelling day and night. It made no sense. How could people walk that slowly?’
16
The miracle of his mother’s recovery in 1948 had made my father resolve to be a better
Brethren boy. He’d been deeply affected by the story she’d told him about giving up her will to God. But there was another event in his life in the same year that changed everything.
That summer the Stott clan travelled down together to the great international gathering of Brethren clans that took place annually at Central Hall, Westminster. They called it the ‘universal gathering’. Although women, children and non-ministering Brethren men were not allowed into the Meetings during the day, they could attend the evening addresses. Admission was by numbered ticket, checked at the door.
For these Meetings the Brethren rented Central Hall from the Methodists. It was the only non-conformist religious hall in London big enough to seat all the thousands of Brethren who congregated from around the world. That it was just a few yards from the House of Commons must have added to the sense of occasion and of dissenting power. Compared to the usual Brethren Meeting Rooms the décor – polished wood and red damask – must have seemed both disturbingly ornate and very impressive.
Central Hall, Westminster
At the age of ten, my father had never seen so many people all in one place, nor seated in such a way that made the Brethren hierarchy so immediately visible. On a raised dais just below the huge organ about a hundred men were seated around JT.
‘I could see that if you made it into that section of a hundred men,’ my father wrote, ‘you were getting somewhere. JT was in the front row. In the middle. It was a little bit like those May Day Parades in Moscow, when the Soviet leaders stood in a particular order around Stalin and you could see at a glance who was in and who was out of favour that year. In the JT era these placements only changed slowly. Later, it would be different. At this stage, in 1948, my father was still in the body of the hall, but he was in the part from which you took off into the top hundred. My grandfather sat in the second row just behind JT. I looked on him with a new respect.’
I’m looking for excuses for him now. How could the ten-year-old Brethren boy, already nearly as tall as his own short and stocky father, indoctrinated by the patriarchal begats of the Bible and the family business, not have been moved by this visual display of male power? In that noisy red hall he discovered that his father, the dictator of his domestic world, had little status and was seated only in the stalls. But his grandfather was up there on the raised dais, seated just behind JT, the Brethren leader.
My father was impressed. Of course he was. I would have been impressed too, if I’d been there. All that red carpet and polished wood. The great organ, a hundred feet high. All that noise; all those choruses of Amen. Maybe it was all the red in my father’s memory that made him think of the Soviet May Day parades when he tried to describe it. It was making me think of the Nuremberg rallies – Hitler with all his henchmen behind him on the stage. Did my father decide that day that someday he’d be up there on that platform too? That he’d get even closer to the Brethren leader than his grandfather?
‘After the Meeting,’ he wrote, ‘I was with my mother in the crowds outside the hall when JT came past. My mother knew him a little (he was very fond of her father) and she introduced me to him and I shook his hand. I was embarrassed but my mother said that in future years it might mean a lot to me that I had met JT. And she seemed to feel that some of his spirituality might rub off on me at the same time. JT spoke to me gravely and seriously as if I was a grown-up.’
I’d watched my father preach when I was growing up. Not just in our little Meeting Room in Edward Avenue but in the much bigger one in Vale Avenue, with the steeply raked circular seating around the central platform. I’d sit up at the back with my mother and siblings, looking down through the hats and bodies, studying the way he paced the floor when he preached, how he gestured with his hands, how he’d make his sentences curl, rise and fall.
I particularly admired the length of his silences. All Brethren men knew how to pause and hold a silence – it showed that they were waiting for the Lord to guide them – but my father would pause right in the middle of a sentence, and stretch out that silence so much longer than everyone else. I’d press my fingers into the soft leather of my Bible in suspense as I counted out the seconds.
There was one particular line I’d listen out for in my father’s preaching, a line that had especially beautiful rhythms. An important Brethren sister from the early Ireland days had once said, ‘Let us put away our playthings for the world is in flames’ – and that line, dark and poetic, had been passed down among Brethren over the years. My father loved it. He wouldn’t just use it once; he’d repeat it for effect. When I was six years old I watched him repeat it five times. I whispered each of the words along with him under my breath, anticipating where he was going to put the next stress, or the next long pause, keeping a close eye on my grandfather down in the front row opposite me to see, from his expression, if my father would get away with it.
A few years ago I found myself absentmindedly mouthing that sentence, with my father’s inflections, as I approached the podium of a vast hall in Heidelberg where I was about to give a lecture on Aristotle and early ideas about evolution. My words must have been picked up by the powerful microphone pinned to my lapel, but thankfully they were drowned out by the audience’s applause. After I had pulled up the first slide – a striking photograph of the lagoon on Lesbos where Aristotle had once studied fishes and birds – I held the silence for as long as I dared, until I could see people leaning forward in their seats. I am my father’s daughter, I thought as I began to speak, unable to suppress a smile. Had I, I wondered, worked all those years to become a writer and scholar so I could take the microphone, like my father and grandfather, and claim my place up on the platform too?
17
Nineteen forty-eight, the year of my grandmother’s near-death vision, the year that JT changed the rules about the Holy Spirit, the year that my father shook hands with JT, was also the year that my great-grandmother Ada-Louise was finally released from the Ballarat asylum. Now that new drugs were controlling her epileptic fits, Brethren relatives told my great-grandfather Hugh Wasson, it was un-Christian to keep her there. Ada-Louise, sixty-nine years old, finally came out of the asylum to live in her husband’s house in Adelaide. His nomadic, studious, independent missionary life came to an end. After forty years in an asylum, Ada-Louise was difficult; she talked incessantly, and sang hymns at the top of her voice. It was impossible for my great-grandfather to read the Bible quietly as he had been used to doing. His health began to suffer.
His married daughters Kathleen and Betty, now living in England, read his many airmailed letters and decided it was time they ‘shared the burden’ of their mother. They persuaded their father to move to England and buy a large house in Brighton, where he could live with Robert and Kathleen and their three children. It would be big enough for him and Ada-Louise to have their own wing, but connected enough for Kathleen to help look after her mother.
When the unhappy couple arrived at Tilbury Docks in mid-July 1953, having been cooped up for weeks reading their Bibles on the SS Orcades, their two daughters and their families were on the quay to meet them. Ada-Louise had not seen Kathleen or Betty for nearly forty years, nor had she met her grandchildren, though she’d memorised their names and life histories. My father, then fourteen years old, was fascinated and embarrassed by his grandmother’s emotional intemperance. They all were.
‘She seemed to be in a kind of ecstasy,’ he wrote. ‘She kept murmuring and sighing and stroking our faces.’ Then, grandly, she introduced them all to her husband, forgetting that he’d been to stay in England many times.
‘Rather you than us,’ my father’s cousin hissed at my father from behind her gloved hand.
Ada-Louise and Hugh Wasson in the 1950s
In my mind’s eye my bespectacled, snow-white-haired great-grandmother, wearing a black dress and matching jacket with silver embroidery, stands on the quay in a new country, surrounded by strangers, like a Russian dowager in exile. She is sixty-nine but looks ten years older. H
er face, strikingly beautiful in pre-asylum photographs, is now deeply lined, but she still appears wilful. Her face is still a little like mine.
What had she been doing all those years? What had she been allowed to read or see in that grand asylum? I like to think there might have been a garden, or at least a pretty view from her window, and a piano, and someone to listen to her sing hymns sometimes without mocking her. I try not to think of her in that padded cell my grandmother remembered. I like to think that, had I been standing on the quay that day, I might have stroked her face or kissed her hand. But I’d probably just have been embarrassed too.
Hugh bought Ada-Louise a second-hand pedal organ that they assembled in the rear drawing room of the huge Brighton house that they and my grandparents had bought with joint funds. For four hours or more every day she played and sang the hymns she’d been taught as a child – most often ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ and ‘Almost Persuaded’. She’d sing slowly and with deep feeling, my father remembered, her voice wavering and breaking from time to time as the words and music overwhelmed her. Tipping her head back like a wolf, she would aim the hymn towards the ceiling. She insisted on having the door open so the rest of the house could hear her perform. My father and his siblings would try to shut it without her hearing, but she’d always open it again.
Sometimes she’d be so overcome by her own playing that she’d trot out of the room and grab any passing child, or my grandmother, or the cleaning lady. ‘Just come and listen to this,’ she’d say, forcing her prey into the chair next to the organ. With an audience present she’d weep through the hymn, and then, on finishing, stand, bow and wave royally. ‘Then,’ my father wrote, ‘you had to say the right things and escape as quickly as possible before she started the next one.’ When visitors began to prepare to leave she’d run to the piano and sing ‘God be with you till we meet again.’
In the Days of Rain Page 9