Later he said that he could remember very little about the hotels they stayed in, or the interior of the St Ives Meeting Room. But he remembered the beach – the golden colour of the sand and the sound of the cricket ball hitting the bat, the texture of browned and bare skin, and the white of a particular swimming costume gleaming in the dark.
My father, now very tall and athletic, not exactly handsome but more than usually eloquent for a seventeen-year-old, stood out from the crowd of Brethren young men. He’d fallen in love – not with my mother, but with the girl of the white swimming costume. She had slipped her hand into his during one of the evening walks. She was three years older than he was, twenty to his seventeen, and the assistant matron at a boys’ public school. They had four days together before she’d had to leave. She walked with her toes turned out a little, the way dancers sometimes do, so he’d called her ‘Penguin’. They swam out to the anchored raft off Porthminster Beach after dark one night and lay kissing on the fibre matting under the moon and stars.
She left St Ives by train the following day, the same day that my mother arrived with her sister and parents. She and my father were introduced on the beach, but he’d been too heartbroken to talk much. He exchanged letters with the Penguin every day for months. Her letters arrived with a small penguin drawn on the back of the envelope. After Christmas she wrote to say that as they lived so far apart and their ages did not match, she thought they should ‘discontinue’ their ‘friendship’ – and, she added, ‘My parents wish it.’ The penguin on the back of this particular envelope lay flat on its back and had an arrow in its stomach.
When my father expressed interest in my mother, the girl he’d met fleetingly at St Ives, another Brethren girl invited them both to her birthday party. He was seventeen, my mother twenty-one. They met again at a Brethren wedding. My father invited my mother to watch the University Boat Race from Putney in March. He’d won a place at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, he told her. He’d be starting in September, and was going to try for the rowing team.
He remembers walking along the Thames. He remembers swans and weeping willows and my mother’s coat, which had a fine herringbone pattern and a large, soft collar that she turned up behind her head. When she laughed and turned towards him, he told me, the darkness of her hair, thickly plaited and pinned up around her head, took his breath away. They talked about Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Yeats, he said – but I know he would have done almost all of the talking. Cambridge won the Boat Race. It rained. On the train afterwards they ordered tea and toast and talked, my father said, as if they were already engaged to be married.
He arranged to go to Salisbury for a weekend to stay with her and her parents. It was a disaster. Head in a book, he missed the train and turned up very late. She had to cancel the restaurant booking she’d made. The following day he borrowed her father’s car, a Rover that was polished every week, and took a turn too tightly, scraping and denting the car all along the left-hand side. It was a sign, my mother told me decades later, that she should have taken notice of. He was going to go on crashing cars for the rest of his life.
22
My father’s first letters home from Cambridge were all about rowing and the problems he’d had getting his rowing kit washed and dried in time for the next outing. His college crew were out on the river at dawn every day, training in the early-morning mist.
He was going to lectures, writing essays, talking to the other undergraduates on his corridor and on his crew. In comparison to life at home, he must have felt very much in the world, and he clearly relished it; but he also knew, as all Brethren undergraduates did, that the local Brethren were keeping a close eye on him, and would be writing to his parents with regular reports. He was expected to attend Cambridge Meeting most days of the week, and several times on the Lord’s Day.
My father messed up his first year at university, his cousin told me. Reports from the Cambridge Brethren arrived claiming that he’d gone off the rails, that he was backsliding morally. ‘Backsliding’ was a word I’d often heard used about Brethren young men. It seemed to cover a multitude of sins. I suspect my father’s worst crimes were that he missed some Meetings and had been seen going to the cinema and socialising with non-Brethren. It probably also meant he’d begun to ask questions about doctrinal matters.
Everyone back home was holding their breath. The family honour and reputation were at stake. My great-grandfather Hugh Wasson now decreed that no other young Stotts were to go to university, or into any other form of higher education. My father had been corrupted and muddled, he declared. He wasn’t going to risk that happening to any of his other grandchildren.
In his second year of university my father began to attend lectures by C.S. Lewis. He read his way through all Lewis’s books, but it was the final page of Mere Christianity that brought him to his knees one night, both metaphorically and literally, in his small rooms in Willis Road. The conversion was so violent that, years later, the details of the room, the wallpaper, the light through the window, the scattered pattern of the papers on his desk, had seared themselves like a scorchmark onto his memory.
‘Submit to death,’ Lewis wrote, ‘… submit with every fibre of your being, and you will have eternal life. Keep back nothing … Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.’
‘The words,’ my father wrote, ‘leapt off the page. Here was the most powerful of my new literary apostles reinforcing all the old Brethren arguments.’ His defences collapsed suddenly, ‘like the walls of a sandcastle swept by an incoming tide’. There was that sea metaphor he so often used. He’d been engulfed again. He knelt and prayed. It was, he wrote, a ‘halting, painful prayer’.
‘I look back on that young man and his capitulation,’ he continued – confirming in that one word, ‘capitulation’, the degree of exhaustion I’d sensed in him – ‘I look back on that young man in that small lonely bedroom with affection and sympathy. I didn’t have a chance.’
It’s the empathy that surprises me. The empathy he has for his remembered, capitulating self. And mine for him.
‘I didn’t have a chance.’
A chance to do what, though? To get away? To not believe? But he had made a choice. He had chosen to follow Lewis’s kindly, pleasure-taking God instead of his father’s punitive one.
‘I’d been brought up to believe in a transcendent God. Now, with Lewis and Donne, I began to think about an immanent one.’ He quoted lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins: the world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil. This new God loved the world rather than shunned it.
Under Lewis’s spell he went to see Look Back in Anger and Waiting for Godot at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. He watched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries at the Arts Cinema.
‘Cinema stopped being furtive entertainment,’ he wrote; ‘it contained both moral instruction and metaphysical power.’ In Brighton during a vacation he saw Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer. He had ‘chosen’ a complicated, spine-contorting middle way: he’d stay in the Brethren, and bring this other world into it.
23
My parents look happy in the black-and-white photographs I have of them from the 1950s. Among those packs of young Brethren at St Ives in the apparently halcyon summers before 1959, I can see them moving gradually closer together. In the early ones they stand far apart, two figures among a big group, he leaning against a seaside railing, she with her stylish collar turned up against the wind; then there’s a picture of them closer together, in a group of four or five cousins. The women are conservatively dressed; some wear headscarves. They wear no make-up. The men look a bit geeky, but otherwise, if you’d been on the promenade in St Ives that day, you wouldn’t have known they were any different from anyone else.
St Ives, 1956. My father is on the right
Ma
ny ex-Brethren I’ve talked to describe the fifties as a golden age in Brethren life. It was only when Jim Taylor Junior took over as Man of God in 1959 that things went wrong. He ruined it all, they imply. He was an aberration, a monster. He made good people do unspeakable things. But even in the fifties, I can see, there were already serious prohibitions in place:
No cinemas, theatres, circuses, music halls.
No sports halls.
No radios or television sets.
Friendships with non-Brethren – tolerated but not encouraged.
No trade unions.
No sex before marriage.
No trousers for women or short skirts.
No fashionable clothes.
No tabloid newspapers.
No thrillers or modern novels.
No short hair.
Within five years the prohibition list would have grown to four or five times this length. Within ten years it would be at least twenty times as long.
Around this time, in the late fifties, my father remembered, he and my mother, now engaged, discussed whether or not they should stay in the Brethren. With the rules getting stricter, many young people were leaving. My mother suggested they put the decision to the Lord. What she meant by this was that they should look for an answer in the scriptural verse on the Day Dawn calendar for that particular day. It’s what many Brethren did. If you were going to let the Lord direct your ways, you had to be confident that you could read the signs he sent. The Day Dawn calendar was one of the ways the Lord directed the Brethren. You might as well have rolled dice, I wanted to protest, or read tea leaves, or spun the roulette wheel.
My father couldn’t remember the exact scriptural text on the Day Dawn calendar that day, he told me, though he thought it had been about walking in the light. He and my mother decided it meant they should stay in the Brethren.
But I’m pretty certain they’d have stayed even without consulting the Day Dawn calendar. They were optimistic and happy. They didn’t know what was ahead. And anyway, how could they have left? If they had left the Brethren in 1959 they would never have seen their parents, siblings, uncles, aunts or friends again. They would have orphaned themselves.
24
‘We’re in 1959,’ I said, looking back over my notes. I’d just seen that sense of urgency creep up on him again. He wanted to watch the cricket; he wanted to sleep. But he knew he was running out of time. He was an eyewitness to this strange piece of history. Very few people had seen what he had seen. He had to make a record before he died.
I went to fetch the tape recorder.
‘Why didn’t we see it coming?’ he asked.
‘It’s easy to see it with hindsight,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I would have guessed what was going on either. Maybe even JT Junior didn’t know.’
I adjusted his chair so he could sit up a little. My brothers had gone for a walk; my stepmother was taking a nap.
‘Just half an hour,’ I said. ‘You need to conserve your energy.’ I closed the door. Something had made me want to draw the curtains. There’d been more snow flurries outside overnight.
‘You should see the soil,’ I said. ‘The snow’s dusting it like icing sugar. It’s very pretty. I can see twenty or thirty lapwings from here, too. Twice as many as this time last year. They’ll be nesting in a month or so.’
But he wasn’t to be distracted. He was already back in 1959.
‘That was the year that JT Junior seized power,’ he said after I’d pressed the record button. ‘It was a seismic shift in Brethren history. Seismic.’
All ex-Brethren describe 1959 with similarly dramatic metaphors. Sometimes they call it a coup. Whatever comparisons they use, geological or military, they mean that nothing would be the same again. There was no going back.
‘It took JT Junior ten years,’ my father said, ‘to completely transform the Brethren into a cult. It didn’t happen all at once. But when he seized power it was violent and sudden. The rest was a kind of ten-year lava flow.’
My parents were out of the country when the coup happened. They’d married quickly so my mother could accompany my father to South Africa. He’d been offered a three-month summer internship with Wall’s ice cream in Johannesburg; they’d be staying with Brethren families, and he’d be preaching. In June 1959 they flew into a South Africa deeply scarred by a decade of apartheid. The Brethren coup took place in Central Hall, London, a month later.
Brethren photographed at Central Hall in 1959. Gerald Cowell is at the podium, JT Junior immediately to his right
Ever since James Taylor died in 1953, the 100,000 Brethren around the world had been waiting for the new ‘Man of God’ to emerge. For six years the leadership rotated between four men, one of whom was the rather erratic JT Junior, James Taylor’s son. Each July, people half expected one of the four to take the upper hand at the annual three-day Central Hall conference, but summer after summer things had gone on much the same. Until 1959, that is. My grandfather was at the gathering, but he wasn’t amongst the top brass up on the stage in the photo that one of the ex-Brethren sent me. He’d only been a trustee of the Brethren publishing house they called the Depot for five years, so perhaps he wasn’t important enough yet; or perhaps they’d had to ration the seats. Had he minded not being up there?
It was the usual vast gathering. Senior ministering brothers from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, America, South America, even Iran, had flown to London. My grandfather described the events to my grandmother. She wrote about them to my father in Johannesburg.
‘The question of professional associations came up again,’ my father said.
I was struggling to keep up. I couldn’t see how any of this was important. Yet remembering the details of that 1959 gathering seemed to be agitating my father more than anything else in the story he was trying to tell me.
‘Professional associations?’ I said. ‘Why did that matter?’
‘James Taylor had banned union membership ten years before,’ he explained, with obvious impatience. ‘Now Brethren were saying that if blue-collar workers weren’t allowed to belong to unions, then white-collar workers – Brethren doctors, architects, chemists and lawyers – should leave their professional associations too. But that was going to be a problem, because many of them would lose their jobs.’
‘Someone had to decide,’ I said, feeling my way.
‘Yes, exactly. One of the four leaders, Gerald Cowell, took the microphone and began to make the case for a slow, staggered withdrawal from the associations. He even suggested that someone might write to the government and get some kind of special dispensation.’
He asked me to adjust his pillows so he could sit upright.
‘Now at this point,’ he continued, his eyes brighter than I’d seen them for days, ‘at this point, JT Junior intervened in a way that was very un-Brethrenlike indeed. He came in very abruptly and said, “Are you saying we shouldn’t get out immediately?” Cowell was slightly taken aback, but he repeated his proposal.
‘Taylor quoted the New Testament at him: “Come out from among them and be separate,” he said. “That’s what it says. It doesn’t say go slowly. Come out from among them and be separate. That’s what it says.”
‘JT Junior just kept hammering on about this. There were awkward pauses and a very un-Brethrenlike contretemps went on, and JT Junior made this sort of howl of Come out, come out.’
‘Howl ?’ I said. ‘What kind of howl? Was that normal?’
‘Taylor was unpredictable,’ he said. ‘He could be aggressive. It wasn’t the Brethren way, but suddenly here he was, openly defying Cowell, goading him, then howling: Come out, come out. Once he’d shouted down Cowell like that, everyone knew JT Junior was the new leader.’
Had JT Junior planned to take over the leadership? Several ex-Brethren who lived through that period, some of whom were at Central Hall in July 1959, have told me since my father died that they think Bruce Hales, an Australian accountant and JT Junior’s right-hand man, had
been behind the coup in some way. He was the uncle of the most recent Brethren leader, who was also called Bruce Hales. The older Bruce had married JT Junior’s daughter Consuela only a year before the coup. Had he begun to work on JT Junior over family suppers? Had he stoked up JT Junior’s impatience with the pace of Brethren decision-making processes? The timing certainly looks right. When my parents flew back from South Africa that August, JT Junior was already putting draconian new rules in place. Neither of them knew the scale of the storm they were about to enter.
DURING
1
Three weeks before my father died there’d been a lunar eclipse. A blood-red moon had hung low in the sky above the Mill, silvering the fields and the river. He’d staggered outside to the riverbank, leaning on my younger brother, and they had stood there watching the moon turn black. Two tall men, father and youngest son, their arms around each other, gazing at the sky.
Now, the following day, laid out in the middle of the room under a moth-eaten gold velvet throw, he was fighting the effects of the morphine, and though he was impatient to get on with our interview, he was easily distracted. He wanted the door closed before we began. He seemed to think there might be someone out there listening. ‘Is that noise coming from in here?’ he whispered when the whirr of the tape recorder started up.
In the Days of Rain Page 11