‘Gub-bey,’ my brothers would call. ‘Gub-bey, what are you doing up there? Did you get lost?’
‘I’m reading,’ I’d call back, holding myself very still. ‘I’m just reading.’
I was certain that one day the police would come to our house because they’d heard that there was a child there who kept records. I must have confused the police with the Brethren priests, because in my imagination the men who came to the house always wore coats and black hats, not helmets. They would ask my parents if they could speak to me. I would climb the staircase solemnly to my room, slip the notebook out from under my mattress, and carry it down to the sitting room where my parents would be chatting with the two ‘police officers’, exchanging surprised and admiring looks. They’d find their murderer in my notebook, and they’d shake my hand and thank me.
The grown-ups told us that inside our house and our Meeting Room we were safe, because we were the chosen ones. We’d be protected from all the terrible things that were soon to rise up and engulf all the people outside our fellowship. But I was also frightened inside the house – by my father, by the certainty that I’d be caught looking at things I shouldn’t be looking at, or going into rooms I was not supposed to go into. I was frightened by the things I glimpsed in the shadows. More than anything, I was afraid of the increasing certainty I felt that all the horrifying things that were about to happen to all the bad people outside our house and Meeting Room would also engulf my brothers and me – that we’d drown, burn, be hunted down. Because we were not good. We had not separated from iniquity. We didn’t seem able to.
I felt like a cuckoo in the nest, an interloper, the child who didn’t fit. But then, I was also often certain that none of us fitted. Apart from my mother, we all cheated on Brethren rules. I can’t recall a single instance when I’d actually seen my mother transgress, though I can remember times when she failed to denounce my father for his many transgressions, as Brethren rules required her to do. There were many times when I’d heard her – or thought I’d heard her – make a quiet tutting noise, but she’d never say anything. I’d seen the radio my father kept hidden in the tyre compartment in the boot of the car. I knew my brothers hid comics under their mattresses, and talked with worldly boys in the park. They knew I told lies. There were secrets and transgressions everywhere in our house, a great webwork of them. Was I supposed to tell on my father, on my brothers? Would I be punished for not telling? Was the Lord keeping a notebook about me?
Cinemas were worldly, part of Satan’s system, but in the sixties Brethren were allowed to film home movies and project them onto portable screens or their sitting-room walls. Because my brothers and I had grown up with no television or radio, and very few children’s books, these flickering, oversized Technicolor versions of ourselves were especially magical. My father bought a movie camera and filmed us playing in the garden, dressing up at our grandparents’ house or picnicking with other Brethren families in public parks.
Fascinated by these moving images of myself, I began to run imaginary film sequences in my head. One of my favourites involved a car screeching to a stop in the street where I was walking with my parents and brothers. A man and a woman would jump out, hardly stopping to close the car doors, and run across the road towards me. The woman would take me in her arms, kneeling on the hard tarmac as if in prayer.
‘It’s her,’ she would sob to her companion. ‘I knew we’d find her. Didn’t I say, if we just kept looking we’d find her? And here she is.’
There was another version in which a couple would snatch me from under the eyes of my parents as we walked down the street in broad daylight. Before my parents had time to protest, they’d have bundled me into their car. They’d heard of my remarkable abilities, they’d tell me. They wanted me to come and live with them.
Was I scripting meritocratic secular versions of the Rapture? In these car-screeching dramas I’d be chosen, plucked out of grey suburban obscurity, not because I had taken the Lord into my heart, but because I read well, or because I kept scrupulously detailed records of suspected criminals. In these scenarios my parents would lament my disappearance, and chastise themselves for having overlooked me.
Sometimes I found clues that fuelled these cuckoo-in-the-nest fantasies. As well as the key to the guest room, my mother kept blankets inside the copper tea urn that stood on the stair landing. I’d pull over a stool, stand on it, then slip off the lid so I could look down past the strata of coloured blankets into the dark depths of the urn. My mother, I had come to realise, sometimes hid food there, probably to keep it out of sight of my father or my brothers and me, to save it for a special occasion. One day I saw a box of sweets; another time a box of cakes. One Lord’s Day I spotted five shiny red apples nested like eggs in a grey blanket. I left them alone, but found myself coming back to lift that lid every time it was safe to do so.
One day when my parents were busy entertaining Brethren visitors in the sitting room and my brothers were playing football in the garden, I thought I saw the edges of what looked like a white box down in the darkness. I stood on the stool and quietly lifted out the blankets one by one, then reached down, listening for the warning sound of doors opening downstairs. Once the box was safely on the landing carpet, I slipped off its cardboard lid, hardly daring to breathe. The box was full of tightly typed documents, but among them were also three letters written in a fine italic hand, one addressed to me and one for each of my two older brothers. I replaced the box under the blankets and slipped the lid back on the urn.
I sat for a long time examining the sealed envelopes, turning them over in my hand. This discovery would reveal the secret of all secrets, I told myself; it would change my brothers’ and my lives forever. But I knew I could not take the next dangerous step alone. I could hear my heart thumping in my chest as I walked down the staircase. I found my brothers playing in the garden and brought them, protesting but obedient, up to the landing, where I’d hidden the precious envelopes under the carpet. The three of us sat in a circle around them. The envelopes, I told them, contained letters from our real parents. They’d sent us instructions on how to escape and where they’d meet us. We had to open them. There wasn’t much time left.
My brothers, mesmerised, nodded assent. I ripped open the envelopes, tearing across the beautiful italic handwriting. But there was nothing inside. The envelopes were empty. I could not understand why. I wept with fury and disappointment. Why, I asked my brothers, would our parents have taken the trouble to write to us but not have put anything inside the envelopes? I stuffed the torn paper back among the other papers in the box, slipped the lid on, placed it carefully back at the bottom of the urn, and replaced the folded blankets in the order I had found them. I told my brothers never to speak of the box or the letters again.
Years later my father told me that when my mother had found the torn envelopes in the box some months later, she’d been mystified. The envelopes had been a present from a stamp-collecting Brethren brother. He’d bought us all first-day covers to mark the days on which we’d been born. The stamps I had torn through were collectors’ items, intended to be given to us when they had accrued value with time. My mother didn’t care for stamps, and the torn envelopes did not much trouble her.
Sigmund Freud, I discovered later, had written about this fantasy of mine. Some children of a particularly neurotic or imaginative sensibility, he wrote, convince themselves that they will be rescued by the ‘real’ parents from whom they have been stolen or kidnapped. Almost always the fantasy family is of a higher social standing, so the ‘rescue’ reveals the bastardised nature of the siblings as well as the hollow status of the ‘adoptive’ parents. The details of the fantasy, Freud wrote, depended on the particular imaginative materials available to the child: a nearby manor house, local aristocracy, books, fables and stories. Mine were made up of the strange experiences life in the Brethren had given me. My rescuers were ‘worldly’ people.
My fantasy played itself out again
and again, not because I did not love my parents, or felt they did not love me, or because I was any more unhappy or lonely or disorientated than most other children my age, but because I was certain my parents were keeping secrets from me. I was probably daydreaming the fantasies of my parents, too. Each of them, I am certain, must have longed to be plucked out of this strange world we’d washed up in.
14
Between Meetings, Brethren children played noisily in the manicured shrubberies of large detached houses while their parents talked inside with other Brethren grown-ups. The Brethren children who hosted us in the short breaks between Meetings in neighbouring towns on the Lord’s Day – teenagers who seemed impossibly, throat-tighteningly glamorous – played hide-and-seek with us or took our hands and led us down through fruit trees and orchards and kitchen gardens to a musty summerhouse where they had stashed forbidden comics under the floorboards.
One long summer afternoon two or three Brethren teenagers put on a shadow theatre for us in a barn, making characters with their hands behind a screen they’d stitched together from an old sheet. We were not allowed to tell.
Children kept secrets from the grown-ups. Grown-ups kept secrets from the children. We passed around Beano comics and looked out for approaching grown-ups, and made up stories that didn’t have any Bible people in them. We watched each other’s backs. We never talked about the Meetings, or about whether what the grown-ups preached was right or wrong.
Grown-ups, we knew, sometimes broke promises. They were not always to be trusted. When I was five, I came to understand that my father was not to be trusted.
Although large sections of the Bible were a puzzle to me, I was convinced that if I concentrated hard enough I’d be able to figure it out, and that my father’s approval would surely follow. I could not work out, for instance, whether the Holy Spirit – then such an important part of our Meetings – was a dove or a ghost, or the ghost of a dead dove. I turned my mind to the problem in Meeting or when I was trying to fall asleep at night.
One day I had an epiphany: if there was an earthly tripartite family made up of Jesus, Mary and Joseph down here, there had to be a heavenly tripartite equivalent. This meant that if the son was Jesus up there, and God was the father, then the Holy Spirit had to be the mother up there. It made a blinding kind of sense to me, given the silent, birdlike, ghostly, self-effacing nature of the Brethren mothers I knew. I felt the exhilaration of intellectual discovery for the first time: the Holy Spirit, I was now certain, was Jesus’s heavenly mother. It was the early hours of the morning. I heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike two. My brother was snoring in the bunk above me. I was too excited to sleep.
I waited until after the morning Bible reading before I knocked on my father’s study door. He was sitting behind his desk in his smart work suit and tie, with his Bible open in front of him. I had a question about the Holy Spirit to ask him, I said. I carefully explained the logic of the pattern I’d uncovered, drawing the diagram on a piece of Stott and Sons headed paper. But when I told him I had been wondering if the Holy Spirit was Jesus’s spiritual mother, he laughed. I was being too literal, he said. I was using the wrong part of my mind.
When I found the courage to ask the question that was keeping me awake – who or what, then, was the Holy Spirit? – he read me verses from 1 Corinthians 2. In this letter, he said, Paul explains to the Corinthians that certain mysteries can only be apprehended with the spiritual mind, and not with the natural mind. I was using my natural mind to think about the Holy Spirit. That wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
Embarrassed and disappointed beyond measure, I dared not tell him that he had evaded my question. Instead I asked him to promise not to tell anyone about our conversation. He promised. We prayed. I did not sleep that second night either. I lay in bed looking at the underside of the bunk above me, with its links of interconnected chains, rehearsing follow-up conversations with my father and with God. I could make no sense of it, but I knew I was not stupid.
The next morning, the Lord’s Day, my mother bundled all five of her scrubbed children into the car as usual, to go to the Morning Meeting. This austere, high-walled, windowless red-brick Meeting Room on the outskirts of Brighton held five hundred Brethren brothers and sisters. We sat on wooden chairs arranged in a circle, the women and children in the uppermost, outermost circles, the men on the inside. My father, then in his early thirties, had by this time perfected a declamatory, slightly mannered preaching style, and was making a stir as a young ministering brother. People travelled some distance to hear him.
On this particular day he preached to an assembly of two or three hundred south-coast Brethren for twenty minutes on the importance of educating Brethren children about the dangers of the natural mind. His daughter, he told them, had asked a question about the Holy Spirit, and he had explained to her about 1 Corinthians 2. We should not leave our children, he intoned, to languish in spiritual ignorance. We must be vigilant. My face burned red, not with embarrassment but with outrage. People turned to smile at me. I bit my lip hard, and tasted blood. I swore I would never forget that act of betrayal.
15
My mother taught me to read when I was three years old. I remember the black shapes, dark against the white flashcards she used, the intense pleasure I took in deciphering the word on it before my older brother did. Though I took to reading early, he didn’t. I’d snatch the cards when he looked away, and hide them among my toys.
He must have hated me then. I was a little show-off. A little girl show-off. I didn’t care. I had something to prove. There was a begat system to violate in my house; it was enshrined in the Stott and Sons logo that it sometimes seemed had been stamped onto every surface in our home – on the boxes, on the paperwork, on the key-ring my father carried, on the files my mother stacked on the shelves. Boys inherited. Boys spoke. Boys had power. Girls didn’t. I countered that system with will and subterfuge. Eve stole the forbidden fruit. If God knew everything, then he must have known she was going to do that. He could have stopped her. But he didn’t. And he didn’t seem to be stopping me either.
We got our reading practice from the Bible. There were hardly any other books in the house, just the coloured rows of ministry in the sitting room and the volumes of the Children’s Encyclopaedia arranged underneath.
Every morning my brothers and I gathered around the great iron bed in my parents’ bedroom to read the Bible. Each of us would read a chapter. We worked our way through the books, tipping from one story to the next, from Noah’s ark to Moses in the bulrushes to Joseph and Potiphar’s wife to Ezekiel with the dry bones, the staccato of Leviticus giving way to the swells of Song of Solomon. Sometimes there would be pockets of iambic beauty that I couldn’t get out of my head for days.
And-God-re-mem-bered-No-ah.
Job was a particular favourite of mine. Though the story made me furious with the Lord for making Job suffer such terrible things just to prove a point to Satan, the language seemed especially beautiful, especially the bits about the whale.
‘His sneezings flash light,’ I read from my Bible when my turn came round, ‘and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go forth flames; sparks of fire leap out: Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a boiling pot and cauldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.’
I itched to correct my brothers when they hesitated over a word or got the rhythms wrong, but I was not allowed to speak after I finished my chapter. The great victory of those mornings was getting to the end of my chapter without stumbling or showing the slightest sign of self-satisfaction. Although I could sometimes see my father’s joyful approval, I did not acknowledge it or meet his eye. I was not praised. Praise encouraged spiritual pride. I didn’t really understand what my parents meant when they talked about spiritual pride, but I knew it was one of the worst sins of all, one I was especially prone to, it seemed. It was one of the many things I was supposed to be vigilant about.
Despite the fact that only Brethren brothers preached, and sisters were silent and obedient, I imagined a dazzling Brethren future for myself. By the time I’d beaten my elder brother at reading and at the times table, I’d decided that I’d be one of the first Brethren girls to be allowed to preach in the Meeting Room and in three-day Meetings. I was going to be the first of the female preachers. It was my calling.
There were plenty of glorious sons in the Bible, of every shape and size. Sons who inherited. Sons who were rewarded. Sons who were nurtured and recognised. Sons forgiven. Prodigals. And there were all those son sequences: Jacob begat Esau and Esau begat … Most, if not all, of the daughters in the scriptures, it seemed, by contrast, were traded by their fathers or brothers, or raped or offered as wives or as compensation prizes. There didn’t seem to be much to look forward to about being a daughter in the Bible. There were no chains of begats for daughters.
So it made sense to turn myself into the son who overtook all his siblings. I’d be Joseph. And Jacob. The canny, overlooked, improbable sons. The ones who beat everyone while no one was looking. Joseph had been the youngest, the puniest, the least likely, and he still got to be king of Egypt. But I’d have to know the Bible better than my brothers if I was going to get anywhere. I began to memorise whole chapters, and to write lists of all the books of the Bible in the right order, just as my father had done as a child.
When my brothers and I got confused about questions of theology or doctrine, we couldn’t untangle them because asking questions was risky. My mother, usually busy preparing food or making curtains or feeding a baby, would say, ‘Ask your father.’ When we did – if he was home, which he usually wasn’t – he would launch into a long lecture that was impossible to follow. So the misunderstandings we made privately from listening to preachings in Meeting turned into muddles.
In the Days of Rain Page 17