In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  Reading JT Junior’s letters in the Mill in the early hours of the morning, I was hearing not just his American intonations, but the voices of all those other ranting men too: my father, my grandfather, thumping the table, their voices rising and falling in a confused cacophony, competing to trump each other with Biblical references. The women, on the other hand, those women who always sat quietly next to me in the back row of the Meeting, their soft hands folded over their Bibles, were still not saying anything.

  By 1964, the year I was born, JT Junior had implemented scores of new rules about homes and family life. Brethren could no longer live in the same house as non-Brethren members. Husbands had to leave non-Brethren wives. Wives had to leave non-Brethren husbands. Small assemblies were to be merged with larger ones to form ‘city positions’ with a designated leader. Brethren could no longer work with anyone who had been ‘put out of fellowship’. Brethren could not live in flats unless they had a separate entrance. No televisions or wirelesses were allowed in Brethren houses. All young children were now expected – ‘encouraged’ – to break bread.

  All around the world Brethren compliance officers held ‘Care Meetings’ to identify and take action against the unclean households in their assemblies. Frank sent me a transcript of a set of notes he’d taken of the disciplinary decisions made in six hundred separate Meetings he attended in the sixties. The notes were concise, but the stories they revealed were chilling.

  Under the heading ‘North Finchley, 1962’, one note read:

  Miss Parks in a house nearly fully divided.

  Miss Paynter has broken communion with her sister.

  Mrs Rook and daughter are still in the same house. All three cases are a great concern. Dr Rook is nearly an invalid. He has the wireless. There is no work of God in him.

  What this meant, I realised, was that poor Miss Parks had been ‘shut up’ and was now receiving ‘Priestly Visits’. She would not be allowed to return to Meeting until the priests had confirmed that she had ‘fully divided’ from the non-Brethren family members she shared her home with – almost certainly one or both of her elderly parents. Even then the priests would not be happy until they moved her out of that unclean house completely.

  Miss Paynter was doing better than Miss Parks. She was no longer in contact with her non-Brethren sister, but was still under close surveillance and ‘under discipline’. She wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  Mrs Rook and her daughter were still living with the invalid and radio-listening Dr Rook. It wasn’t looking good. The two women would almost certainly have to be withdrawn from unless they left that unclean house once and for all.

  So many elderly women carers were being bullied into absolute compliance. And this was just the picture I could see from the notes for a single London ‘Care Meeting’. How many more thousands were there under discipline all around Britain and the world? What was to become of these poor women, tormented as they were by the fear of having to live alone, and unprotected, in Satan’s system?

  According to another of Frank’s notes, on 2 February 1963 – eleven days before my older brother was born – Miss Paynter was in trouble again. Her name comes up under the title ‘Cases of Concern, re unclean accommodation and other – North Finchley’:

  Miss Paynter. She has come to the preachings only. She knows very little and needs teaching. The resistance has gone. She has sat behind separately all the time. She wears the token. The matter has gone on for many months. She loves the brethren in a small way. There is a piece of an ear.16

  That ‘piece of an ear’ is a reference to Amos 3:12: ‘Like as the shepherd rescueth out of the jaw of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear; so shall the children of Israel be rescued that sit in Samaria in the corner of a couch, and upon the damask of a bed.’

  It’s very difficult to grasp exactly what verses like this actually mean, but the senior Brethren ministering brothers always insisted that they knew. In this case ‘a piece of an ear’ was code for ‘We haven’t given up; we’ll get her clean yet.’

  ‘The resistance has gone’ was the sentence that haunted me most of all. It reminded me of the fate of my mournful great-grandmother, the wilful Ada-Louise, and those blank eyes of hers.

  9

  My brother was born on 13 February 1963. My father delivered him and cut his umbilical cord. My parents named him Christopher, after Christopher Tydeman.

  When, in his dying days, I interviewed my father about life in the Brethren, he showed no interest in describing how it had felt to become a father. He’d struggled against the morphine to record the tiniest details of the new edicts that were coming in during the sixties, but he seemed entirely indifferent to what was going on with his wife and children at home.

  ‘February 1963? Wasn’t that the month that Chris was born?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, it was, yes,’ he replied. ‘But the point is that you can’t understand the eating issue unless you understand the direction JT Junior’s ministry was taking in February 1963.’

  How had my brothers and I learned to walk, talk, run and read in this strained, highly scrutinised and discipline-obsessed world?

  I was born twenty months after my brother, on 24 September 1964. After four years of JT Junior’s fierce edicts, Brethren were now almost completely isolated from the world, and knew little about what was going on in it. JT Junior, convinced that the Rapture was now only weeks or months away, was obsessed with getting Brethren houses clean in time. In February 1964 he prohibited meals in restaurants, cafés, canteens and trains. The following month he banned non-Brethren cleaners or mothers’ helpers. Brethren were no longer allowed to sit on juries. Meetings were now expected to be held every day. As part of his campaign for clean houses, he banned all pets. Brethren had to either find alternative homes for their animals, or have them put down. Thousands of parents had to find ways of explaining to their distressed children where their beloved pets had disappeared to.

  In June 1964, JT Junior decreed that Brethren should be employed by fellow Brethren whenever possible. This would reduce their contact with the outside world even further. My father, who had been working as a sales rep for Chivers jams in Cambridge, gave up his job to become a partner in Stott and Sons, my grandfather’s wholesale grocers in Brighton. My parents moved from Cambridge into my grandparents’ house. The move must have put pressure on my already exhausted mother. As a young Brethren wife and mother, she’d also have to attend Meeting every day with her two young children, help my grandmother to keep the peace at home, and to feed the many Brethren visitors who came from all over the world.

  My father and grandfather would have had a good deal to discuss, because in 1964 the Brethren had come under attack. Gresham Cooke, the Conservative MP for Twickenham, appalled by the stories his ex-Brethren constituents were telling him about broken families, suicides and excommunications, had put a Bill to Parliament called the Family Preservation Bill. He wanted to make it illegal for family members to be separated in this way, and told newspaper reporters that he wanted to ban the leader of this destructive cult from entering the country.

  When JT Junior arrived at Meeting Rooms on his usual summer tour of the UK in 1965, he was jeered by large crowds of protesters and cross-questioned by journalists camped outside. At Dorking, he was jostled and forced to stop preaching because he couldn’t make himself heard above the chants of the protesters. He cancelled an arranged meeting with Gresham Cooke and flew back to New York furious and shocked by what he described as press harassment. When the Sunday Times ran an article called ‘Big Jim and his Profits’, he threatened the paper with a libel suit. In September there were rumours that he’d been admitted to hospital.

  With JT Junior in and out of hospital and being hounded by the press, Bruce Hales and his brother John took the reins. A new, business-obsessed era began. Bruce Hales was in his mid-thirties, an engineer and a charismatic management consultant. The brothers stepped up the pace of the money-production machine by organising
invitation-only seminars to groom young Brethren businessmen like my father to train others to set in place methods and procedures for tax avoidance, gift aid and trust funds. Just like JT Junior, the Hales brothers were often rude and sarcastic to the older members of the Brethren. They quickly garnered a large following from young members like my father as a result. Meanwhile they told Brethren that JT Junior was very ill, worn out, and ‘suffering for the testimony’.17

  In JT Junior’s absence, the Hales brothers consolidated Brethren assets, amalgamated small assemblies into larger ones, and ordered a programme of building new Meeting Rooms to their own designs. These windowless buildings looked more like bunkers or bank vaults than places of religious worship. The brothers ordered Brethren who owned rental properties to liquidate these assets to provide money for the new Meeting Rooms or to provide mortgages to young couples like my parents looking to buy their first home. An elderly Brethren woman helped my parents buy a four-bedroomed detached house near the Hove Meeting Room, overlooking Hove Park. The more young Brethren families like ours became financially dependent on other Brethren, of course, the less likely it was that they’d be able to leave.

  My father became one of the Hales brothers’ young acolytes. He enjoyed the status and the attention. He’d been helped to buy a house. Now that he was working alongside his father in the family business, the Hales brothers were treating him, not his father, as the special one. All Brethren businesses had been placed under close supervision. He and his father had to fill in forms detailing profits, budgets, targets and timesheets. He and other young businessmen would be ‘whisked off’, he wrote on PEEBS.net, to business seminars in a private house in London, conducted by the Hales brothers ‘wearing collar mikes’. ‘Then in the evening, we would sweep into Park Street to a Meeting that Bruce Hales was taking and feel like we had inside knowledge because we had been with him all day. We were a sort of embryonic mafia.’

  No wonder he didn’t remember much about what was going on at home. He couldn’t have been there much at all. And there must have been tensions with his father about the direction the business was taking. My grandfather must have hated being overlooked and overruled, but he would have had to hold his tongue.

  There were mutterings against the Hales brothers throughout the winter. Two men who worked at the Depot were interviewed, sacked, and withdrawn from for criticising them. A group of ministering brothers taped one of the business seminars and took it to JT Junior, complaining that the new ‘commercial system’ the brothers were promoting was against scripture.

  Then something extraordinary happened: news reached down to the Brethren networks in October 1965 that JT Junior had withdrawn from the Hales brothers for ‘bringing commerce into the assembly’. This event must have struck terror into Brethren around the world. If, like my father, they’d been acolytes, even lowly ones, they must have expected trouble. But they also knew that if they denounced the brothers, it might be even worse for them. Brethren fathers and sons, like my grandfather and father, would have been set against each other again.

  A spell of expulsions of the Haleses’ supporters began, followed by another wave of confessions. These group confessions had been taking place for several years. Frank described seeing people queuing up to get hold of a microphone to confess in the Park Street Meeting on the night of 1 October 1964 – just one week after I was born. It was a ‘frenzy’ he wrote. They were still queuing at 11 p.m. Now the group confessions largely concerned the Hales brothers.

  Rumours circulated that Bruce and his wife Consuela, JT Junior’s daughter, had retired to a farm in the Australian outback, and that Consuela had had a nervous breakdown. The old guard were back in power. The terrified young bloods steeled themselves for punishment or expulsion.18

  Single elderly women continued to bear the brunt of the power lurchings and disciplinary decisions. John and Bruce Hales had two unmarried aunts called Rhina and Eva. They’d lived together for fourteen years in a suburb of Melbourne. Eva had disagreed with Exclusive Brethren separation rules, and so, despite her devotion to her sister, she’d joined the Open Brethren. When Eva had gone into hospital for an operation, local Exclusive Brethren had taken Rhina to live with them. After Eva was discharged a few months later, Rhina was not allowed to go home to her sister, or to have any contact with her. A few days after Eva returned to her empty house, in November 1965, only a month after Bruce and John had been deposed, relatives broke into the house and found her body on the kitchen floor. She’d gassed herself to death.

  Why had the Hales brothers fallen from power so spectacularly? No one I’ve spoken to knows for sure. There’s no evidence to prove one theory or another, and whichever way you look at it, there was very little ‘of God’ in this struggle for power. And that’s what my Christian ex-Brethren relatives always say when the Taylor decade comes up in conversation. ‘Man is corrupt,’ they say sadly. ‘This was Man’s doing.’

  By the summer of 1966, JT Junior had restored the Hales brothers. Was he satisfied that he’d made his point, clipped their wings, or was this all just part of a plot he’d devised with them? Perhaps it was a way of showing the Brethren, particularly the Hales acolytes, that no one was safe, that even JT Junior’s right-hand men were dispensable. Whatever the explanation, he had secured the terrified allegiance of all the Brethren young men who’d once followed the Haleses. Now he began a campaign to denounce anyone who had spoken against the brothers. A new wave of public confessions followed. Across the world Brethren were forced to admit that they had been guilty of vindictiveness towards the brothers during the period of their expulsion.

  10

  I was, I am told, the baby who cried; the baby who refused to sleep. My mother followed the instructions given to young mothers in the 1960s, which were to leave a baby to cry itself to sleep. Sometimes, she said with admiration, I’d take more than an hour to ‘go off ’, and she interpreted from this, as most mothers certainly did at that time, that my will needed to be broken.

  One of my very first memories is of lying in a bed in a darkened room in our house in Goldstone Crescent in Hove. I am three or four years old. In that memory I can’t see the shape of the room or any of the furniture, but there’s a patch of wallpaper next to the bed that has come loose. I am pulling and tugging at it, curious about the colour of the wall underneath and trying not to think about the voices I am hearing.

  Most nights I heard voices when I was close to falling asleep. They were near to my ear. Some muttered and heckled and harangued; others were sweet as honey. I had no control over them.

  Forty-five years later, in a Cambridge college courtyard under a dark winter sky, Oliver Sacks asked me to describe them. We’d had dinner together at King’s College and had shared stories about the LSD hallucinations we’d had; we’d talked about Darwin and ghosts and about the drug-induced vision of cobalt blue Sacks had once seen. Now, at the end of the evening, I remembered the things I had seen as a child, the voices I’d heard and the monsters I saw. It always happened, I told him, when I was falling asleep or waking up.

  ‘Patterned and repeating shapes?’ he asked. ‘People standing by your bed? Voices with strong patterning – very distinct in sound and texture?’

  ‘They spoke in different languages entirely sometimes,’ I said. ‘I didn’t understand some of them.’

  ‘Hypnagogic and hypnopompic,’ he said, as if he diagnosed the conditions of dinner companions like this all the time. ‘They’re hallucinations that happen when you are falling asleep – hypnagogic – and when you wake up – hypnopompic.’ He’d had them too, he told me. And so had Vladimir Nabokov. He urged me to read Nabokov’s description of them in his memoir, Speak, Memory.

  It’s difficult in truth to separate out the visual from the auditory hallucinations I had as I fell asleep. I saw and heard things that my brothers and parents did not seem to experience. And according to my mother, I saw things during the daytime too. She remembers rushing into the sitting room or the ki
tchen to find me wild-eyed and screaming, pointing at tiny bits of fluff on the floor, as if in fear of my life, as if there were monsters approaching. My howls of alarm and despair were a complete mystery to her. I don’t remember what scared me about the carpet-fluff, but I do remember the voices and the monsters I saw on the curtains in my bedroom. I can still see them very clearly. I still see things. But they don’t frighten me so much now that I know I’m not the only one to have them, and that there is a physiological explanation.

  I remember lying in bed listening to my parents’ muffled conversation in a distant room, their voices rising and falling, and seeing Satan – or my idea of Satan, all horns and scales and a flashing, grinning mouth – projected on the darkened surfaces of the curtains. It was always the same set of six or seven voices I could hear talking to me, not always in a language I recognised. When I was older they’d reappear in my dreams as The Committee.

  By the age of three or four I had developed a perfectly workaday, familial relationship with my God. He was an older-brother God rather than a father God. He could be appealed to and he could concede, but he was unpredictable, and not always to be trusted. If you do this, I’d say, I’ll do that. Sometimes he complied, other times he didn’t.

  I managed the terrors of my small domestic space by negotiating with this God in what I called prayers. I appreciated the company late at night, when my father’s snores grew gradually louder in my parents’ bedroom next door, and I could hear the creaks and groans of the house as the radiators turned themselves off.

  Occasionally, if the voices terrified me more than I could bear, I’d call out to my parents and my father would come in, sometimes on all fours, pretending to be a bear. I dared not tell him what I saw projected there on the curtains – the monsters with wings and claws and hooves, that were both male and female, human and animal. If my father was in a good mood, he’d tell me stories and make me laugh. If he was in a bad mood, he’d shout. My mother gathered talismans to protect me from the dark: she crocheted me a comfort blanket from soft blue and green wool, and gave me a stuffed toy rabbit with long ears. I discovered that if I tucked one of the rabbit’s ears between my little toe and the next toe along of my right foot, the voices would stop. Eventually I’d fall asleep. And the day would begin again.