In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  11

  When I was four, my parents, alarmed at my sleeplessness and loss of weight, took me to see a doctor. Although we were not supposed to have contact with non-Brethren, doctors were an exception. Later, when the separation rules stepped up again, I’d be taken to see my Brethren doctor uncle, my father’s sister’s husband. Mostly we were not sick and we did not see doctors. But on this occasion my parents must have been alarmed. The doctor insisted that I see a specialist.

  I claimed to see things at night, my parents told him. I rarely fell asleep before midnight. When my parents had been banished to the waiting room and the doctor pressed me to confide in him, I told him I saw Satan, and that when I concentrated very hard I could make the angels appear. He seemed to think the angels were good, but I explained that even among the angels you had to work out the good ones from the bad, and that some of them had both wings and hooves. The bad ones said terrible things, I told him; they talked just like Satan. It was very hard to tell the difference. He asked the nurse to collect a urine sample; he took notes; he ordered more tests. He did not ask my parents where I might have got such strange ideas from.

  Whether these visions were hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, or a form of sleep paralysis, I like to think I was dreaming the whole household’s tormented dreams, that I was the lightning rod through which all my family’s imaginary voices and nightmares passed.

  And now I think about my mother, stuck at home with tiny children, not allowed to work, having to cook for all those Brethren visitors and to get her own brood up at dawn on the Lord’s Day and get us washed and changed, ready for breaking bread, then come home and vacuum – again. She had a double burden: she was expected to keep both dirt and Satan out of her home. What was happening in her dream world?

  William, my father’s closest Brethren friend, remembers my mother as both a great beauty and as the woman who hoovered. In the early days of my parents’ marriage, Brethren men would stay late to discuss assembly matters over several glasses of whisky.

  ‘Your mother,’ he told me, ‘would get rid of us by getting the Hoover out.’ Of course she did. She wasn’t allowed to express opinions, complain, pray aloud, or preach. She’d never win an argument against my father. She’d just set him off. With the Hoover on its highest setting, it could do her roaring for her.

  My mother was houseproud by nature, but she was also expected to be. There was a daily routine of vacuuming, laundering, dusting, scouring and polishing. Different rooms and cupboards in our house smelled of different cleaning and polishing products: Pledge, Brasso, Dettol, coal-tar soap and Vim. As a Brethren girl I was expected to be my mother’s helper. I’d shake out wet sheets with her, fold dry sheets, sweep down the staircase, scour the bath with Vim, tip the powdered Smash and the measured water into the food mixer and stare down into the grey-white gloop until all the lumps had mixed in. But though I was happy to do all this because I loved my mother, I resented the fact that my brothers did not help, and that my mother did not ask them to. Brethren boys did not do housework. That was women’s work.

  Why would only my brothers inherit the family business? Why was it Stott and Sons, and not Stott and Daughters? Why didn’t the Spirit speak through women? Why didn’t my brothers have to sweep the stairs? Why did Brethren preachers have to be men? Where in the Bible did it say that the Lord only spoke through men? It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair. I studied the Brethren women around me to see if any of them were angry too, but it was impossible to tell.

  I’d heard my adored grandmother talking about her mother’s wilfulness, heard her talk to other women about wilful wives, or about how so-and-so should remember to be proud to be flesh of her husband’s flesh, proud to subdue her will to his. I knew the women would never back me if I spoke out. They’d be shamed by any insurrection of mine. It would be the work of Satan in me. If the Lord wanted me to be silent and obedient like that for the rest of my life, just because I was a girl, then I wasn’t sure I liked the Lord.

  I’d have howled with fury if I could, but I knew there was no persuading anyone or making any difference. Years later, a male cousin who’d been raised in the Brethren but run away at the age of twenty-four asked me why I supposed that out of all his ten siblings he was the only one who’d refused to believe in the Taylor system. Like me, he’d had to nurse his outrage silently and secretly. Speaking out never brought change, he told me, only trouble. ‘You’re just a girl,’ my brothers would say. Just a girl. But it wasn’t easy for the boys either.

  Brethren women and girls were not supposed to have their hair cut, because women’s hair, JT Junior had decreed, was their ‘glory’. My brothers had short hair, and little combs in their back pockets to keep it tidy. My hair had never been cut, so by the time I was three or four, it stretched down to my waist when it was wet. Thick, heavy and curly, it had to be combed and plaited constantly. My mother would tug the comb through the endless knots.

  Friday nights were hair-washing and nail-cutting nights, a family grooming that prepared us for the five or six weekend Brethren Meetings, including the compulsory 6 a.m. Meeting on the Lord’s Day. My brothers and I would sit on the landing outside the bathroom, waiting to be called in to have our hair washed over the sink. While I was waiting for my turn I’d untangle my long plaits and run my fingers through the knots. My brothers would be in and out of the bathroom and back playing in the garden in a few minutes. It took ten times as long to wash and rinse my hair.

  It was too long and thick for the sink, so I’d kneel over the edge of the bath with my hair coiling down onto the white enamel. My mother used a watering can to rinse the soap out. My hair was like her own: both a glory and a burden. Hers was pinned up, mine perpetually pulled back into tight plaits. Later, when JT Junior decided that Brethren women should display their ‘glory’, she’d have to take her hair out from the braided coil she wore on the top of her head, brush it out, and wear it down her back under a headscarf.

  I was surprised not to find any pictures of me from this period wearing a headscarf or a hat, but there are very few family photographs at all taken during the Taylor years. ‘Cameras were considered as worldly, and a distraction from the Lord’s work,’ a cousin explained. ‘None of us have many pictures from that time.’

  When I took the kitchen scissors to my three dolls, cut off their hair and painted their lips with red felt pen, I like to think I did it for all of the put-upon, subjected Brethren women I saw around me. My parents sent me to my room as punishment. My grandparents questioned me closely about it. I was ‘such a sweet and good child’, I heard my grandmother say. ‘What could have got into her?’

  Exhausted by having to get us up and dressed for dawn Meetings, my mother would take afternoon naps, particularly when an elderly Brethren baker and his wife took my younger brother out in their shiny grey Morris Minor to give her a break. They’d return him a few hours later with cake tins full of still-warm fairy cakes and scones. Before taking her nap, my mother would check that the front and back doors were locked, get out some bricks or other favourite toys of ours, and draw the curtains. She would then sit in an armchair and close her eyes. Just for a few minutes, she’d say. I’m just going to close my eyes for a few minutes. My older brother and I would play quietly in the same room until she woke up.

  In the cine films my father made in the sixties and seventies, we children are always dashing about in that strange, slightly-speeded-up way: running, climbing, kicking balls, riding tricycles in rich, flickering Technicolor. We are never more than a few inches away from each other. But while my brothers are usually intent on each other or the football they’re chasing, and my mother is doing her best to avoid the camera, I’m gazing up at my very tall father behind the camera. My eyes glitter with pleasure at whatever he is saying. Gub-bey, over here, he calls to me, using my nickname, always with the emphasis on the second syllable. I turn and smile up at him. I cover my face and uncover it. My father himself is never visible, but the sun
casts him as a long shadow here and there on a lawn or carpet, and from time to time I can see him reflected back in my own eyes.

  12

  I remember my childhood as a sequence of dimly-lit Meetings interspersed with short bursts of noise and light when we rode tricycles or scrambled over climbing frames with other children in the bright green of Brethren gardens. But how much time did my brothers and I actually spend in Meeting? I examine my father’s documents and the list of JT Junior edicts that he’d collected. In the mid-1960s, JT Junior, apparently ever more certain that the Rapture was only weeks or months away, had decreed that Brethren babies should be baptised at eight days old, attend Meeting immediately, and be offered the bread and wine as soon as they were weaned. If they reached out for the bread dangled in front of them as they sat on their mother’s knee, this was proof that they were ready to join.

  It’s not just the nonsense and the trickery that alarms me now – after all, how can a six-month-old baby reaching for bread be choosing anything but food? – but the number of hours we Brethren children spent listening to the men talk. My brothers and I – and thousands of other small Brethren children of our age around the world – attended nine one-hour Meetings a week before 1968, and eleven a week between 1968 and 1970. That makes a total of just over 3,000 hours I spent sitting absolutely still, listening to a small group of men, including my father and grandfather, preaching obscure Biblical exegesis and prophecy, in voices that rose and fell and paused in strange incantatory cadences, before I was six years old. No wonder I heard voices. No wonder they never stopped.

  Brethren children were expected to be quiet and well-mannered in Meeting. We’d sit in the back row with our mothers, clothes pressed, faces scrubbed, shoes polished, hair tightly plaited or pinned back with clips, Bibles on laps.

  While the Brethren ministering brothers talked of the nature of grace, the coming of the Lord, wells and springs, Lot and his salty wife, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Corinthians, the Pharisees and the Laodiceans, I daydreamed as I had taught myself to do in the warehouse, imagined scenarios, turned the men and women in the room into my puppets, made them do remarkable, astonishing things. I’d have the Brethren brothers and sisters fly – headscarved, suited or hatted – across the room; sometimes I’d have the flying bodies crash into each other. I’d have them all taken up into that mansion of a thousand rooms, set them off up there together like a human cannon, and then snatch them straight back down again.

  The metaphysical questions and imaginings that vexed me, just as they had vexed my father at the same age, came from my attempts to apply a child’s sense to what I heard in Meeting. I produced tangled things. I’d pick up a few sentences of the men’s ministries and Biblical exegeses here and there, recognising sections of the Bible being quoted, and try to translate a meaning for myself. I’d get a foothold for a few seconds, and then slip and slide off again.

  Was it the endlessly riddling and incomprehensible nature of Brethren ministry that made me yearn to open doors I was not supposed to open? Or was it all those hours I’d spent running and climbing unsupervised in the dusty and dark warren of the warehouse, all the secret back rooms I’d found there, up staircases that seemed to appear from nowhere?

  Between my parents’ bedroom and the bathroom in our house in Goldstone Crescent there was a locked door. Sometimes I’d get a glimpse of the dark, gloriously coloured interior of the room when my mother slipped in to fetch something. The curtains were always drawn shut, so the room was dark, but I could make out two beds fitted with rich purple covers, matching heavily-lined floor-to-ceiling curtains, and a kidney-shaped dressing table that stood in the bay window. Whenever my mother went in there, she’d make me wait for her on the landing. After coming out again, she’d check that the handle was firmly closed, then she’d lock the door and slip the key into the large polished copper tea urn that stood on the landing.

  When my mother disappeared into hospital for observation in the last month of her fourth pregnancy, taking with her several bundles of sea-green wool so she could knit my dolls new coats, my grandparents, or some other Brethren couple, must have moved in to care for me and my two brothers, to cook and run the house. I remember only the certainty that now I might finally find something interesting. I looked in cupboards, under beds and loose floorboards, not only for the many things I knew my mother hid from us – cakes, marshmallows, fruit, dolls, suitcases of baby clothes – but for darker things too, things I could not imagine or name or know I was looking for.

  The first time I slipped the key from the urn, eased it into the keyhole, and nudged the door of the guest room open, a long crack of light slid across the floor like the path the moon made on the sea. I could just make out the shape of an enormous pram with two blue hoods at the far end of the room. Smocked baby clothes gleamed white against the floral purples of the bedcovers. I stood on the threshold, paralysed by the mystery of what I was seeing and by the miracle that I’d not been caught. I didn’t dare enter the room, but pulled the door slowly shut, locked it, and replaced the key in the urn.

  Soon I was slipping into the darkened room more and more often, closing the door behind me, treading quietly to avoid noisy floorboards, opening drawers in the half light, trying out the handles of the magnificent royal-blue pram hoods to see if the mechanism worked the same as the one on my dolls’ pram, or lying on the floor between the beds to watch the inverted pictures of the garden flickering across the ceiling.

  One day, when I was finally brave enough to lift the latch on the wardrobe doors built into the far alcove, I thought I saw eyes looking back down at me from a tissue-paper bundle on the top shelf. Something – or somebody – needed rescuing. I knew I’d have to stand on a chair to reach the bundle, but I feared that someone downstairs might hear me. Still, there was no other way. I dragged the chair as quietly as I could across the pink carpet and wedged it between the bed and the cupboard, climbed up onto it, and stretched as high as I could towards the bundle that I was now convinced was an abandoned child. I tugged at the nearest corner, hoping to catch the bundle as it fell. But as I wobbled up there on the chair, the tissue-paper parcel fell past my outstretched fingers and hit the floor with a terrible shattering sound.

  I waited, pinned to the spot, for the inevitable running feet on the stairs or stern voice calling my name, but nothing happened. I ducked down out of sight between the bed and the cupboard to unwrap the bundle, dreading what I would find. Inside the white tissue paper I discovered the broken fragments of a porcelain doll’s head, her skin as white as eggshells, and with the most delicate pink paint flushed across her cheekbones. A single blue eye rocked inside its broken socket. I rolled the tissue paper back around the lacy body and stuffed the bundle behind the heavy curtains. I was certain that I’d heard it whimper.

  When my mother returned home from the hospital a few days later, still heavily pregnant, I lay awake, waiting for the bundle of broken pieces to be found, all through the long night that she howled in labour while my brothers and I lay in our beds, our pillows pulled tight over our heads, all through the sirens and blue lights of the ambulance that came for her. Though I was allowed to touch the fuzzy walnut-brown head of my new baby brother as the paramedics carried my mother down the stairs strapped into a wheelchair, I was in agony. I told myself that that tired and tight smile she’d given me was because she knew about the shattered doll, and was waiting for me to confess and tell her I was sorry and that, yes, I had taken the Lord into my heart.

  ‘I did it!’ I wanted to scream at her. ‘I did it! I broke the doll. And I stole the key. I’m the one. It was me!’

  I knew the bundle of tissue paper wrapping the broken doll must have been found, but no one ever spoke to me about it. The whole terrible saga disappeared into the miraculous homecoming of my tiny new twin siblings.

  13

  My brothers and I understood that outside was dangerous. And all the outside people were dangerous. I’d look through my bedroom window acr
oss the road into the darkening park beyond the thick fringe of trees and imagine Satan and his people over there, scuttling about, doing wicked things.

  The streets outside our Meeting Rooms and Brethren homes were owned by Satan and thronged with Satan’s traps and snares: shop windows full of television sets with moving pictures that you tried not to look at but couldn’t take your eyes off. Hoardings on newspaper stands; cinemas with giant illuminated letters; adverts for perfume and make-up; women in mini-skirts. There were snatches of music too, from open windows or café doors, rapid drumbeats and seductive melodies. The grown-ups would say all these things were ‘worldly’, and in the Meeting Room they preached that Satan, the enemy, used them in his battle for our souls.

  Someone gave me a notebook and a pencil sharpened to a dusky point. But instead of practising my letters, I took to sitting on the wide bedroom windowsill with my eyes fixed on the bus stop below. I was curious about the worldly people down there, what they were doing, what sins they’d committed, how dangerous they were, what they were going to do with their sin-packed worldly days. With my new pencil and notebook I began to keep detailed records of every person I saw waiting there, noting down times and dates, the buses they took, their hair colour, their height, clothing, even shoe colour. As I became quicker and more accurate at chronicling Satan’s people, my spelling improved. Why did my father and I both keep these obsessive records, mine descriptive and his numerical?