Things got even more confusing when we went to school. My two older brothers and I were sent to Connaught Road Junior School, a state primary in Hove. There were no Brethren schools in the sixties, though today Brethren children are bussed long distances to expensively equipped ‘faith’ schools where they are closely supervised, girls are segregated from boys, ‘science’ is carefully censored, and students are taught that evolution is a false theory.19 But although we were schooled alongside worldly children, we were supposed to have no contact with them. We came home for lunch to comply with the Brethren eating rule. In fact, there was no danger of our making friends with any worldly children, because we had no idea how to talk to them. We spoke a quaint kind of Brethren-ese – we talked about ‘the Lord’s Day’, ‘walking in the light’, ‘in the arms of the Lord’ – and I noticed the effect those phrases had on the other children.
The things that preoccupied and excited me and kept me from sleeping – the precise layout of the great mansion in heaven; where the angels lived in the great city; how transparent the Holy Spirit was; whether a murderer could ever be repentant enough to get taken up in the Rapture – were clearly not things the other children thought about at all. The things we heard them talk about were fascinating, but incomprehensible. None of them thought they needed to explain that The Banana Splits and The Monkees and Tom and Jerry were television programmes, or that ‘the Seagulls’ were the Brighton and Hove Albion football team. I stood in the playground with my brothers, our backs pressed up against the brick wall, trying to be invisible, watching and listening.
In 1969 all the children were talking about Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing, but I had no idea what it meant. Brethren families like ours, who were forbidden to have newspapers or television sets, would not have seen the pictures of the blue cloud-laced earth from far away, or watched Armstrong take those strange underwater steps on the dusty moon. We were, of course, living on a kind of satellite planet of our own.
16
The teachers at Connaught Road were used to Brethren families. They didn’t put up a fight when Brethren parents stipulated what their children were permitted to read or study. They probably weren’t allowed to – they were expected to respect and accommodate religious differences. And in any case, why would they object? Brethren children were well-behaved, obedient, hard-working, never any trouble. You’d hardly notice they were there, except for the strange clothes they wore.
The teachers banished us from the classroom whenever the lessons strayed into areas that conflicted with Brethren teaching. They took no chances. And in the 1960s and seventies, when the Exclusive Brethren took their totalitarian turn, that meant we spent many of our school hours in the long corridor that ran the length of the Victorian building.
No assembly. No prayers. No classes about poetry or fiction. No science that conflicted with the creation story. No gym. No ballet. No music classes. No sports. No discussion of ethics or philosophy. The teachers handed us worksheets. We had comprehension practice, quizzes, handwriting sheets, maths sheets. We’d be given a stack of them and a high desk and chair out in the hallway.
It was always a relief for me to be in the corridor – it was quiet after the hubbub of the classroom. I’d hear the rest of the school as if through water: fragments of teachers’ voices, children singing in choir, or flute music, or the thud of feet in the gym. The air was full of the smell of poster paint and glue.
Sometimes I’d glimpse one or both of my brothers somewhere further up that hallway, their heads bent over their pile of worksheets. I wasn’t allowed to call out to them, but if I waited long enough, one of them would sometimes sit up, look around, see me, grin and wave. I’d wave back. The only other people we saw out there were the worldly boys who’d been sent out of class for misbehaving. They’d sit on chairs outside the head teacher’s room, fidgeting, waiting to be called in and reprimanded. Sometimes a teacher would come out to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, but eventually they felt confident that I was entirely obedient, and were content to leave me be.
One day my teacher told me that when I got to the end of a particular worksheet, I could go to the library for independent reading if there was time left before the bell rang. I still don’t know if she realised what she was saying. I nearly told her I wasn’t allowed in the library, but I swallowed the words. When my classmates had library time, I would sit on a faded red plastic chair in the corridor outside the door. I’d peered in from time to time, and been astonished that there were so many books in the world, that someone had thought to put them all in one room, and that they came in so many shiny colours.
‘At home we only have ministries,’ I told my teacher once.
Her eyebrow rose just a flicker. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, and turned to another child.
There had been other books in the house once, I discovered later – my mother’s adored and beautifully leather-bound Jane Austens, my father’s collection of Shakespeare and poetry. But in 1962, when JT Junior ordered all Brethren households to cleanse themselves properly, my father had boxed up all the books and packed them into the boot of the car. Many of them reappeared in the years after we left the Brethren – he must have stashed them somewhere for safekeeping, just as the Romans buried their treasure when they evacuated Britain in the fourth century, or the Catholics hid their relics under floorboards during the Reformation. But though his books came back, my mother’s Jane Austens did not.
God had not exactly said it was all right for me to go into the school library, but he hadn’t exactly said it wasn’t, either. Usually he sent a sign. I was good at looking for signs – a bird flying one way or another, the wind blowing towards me or away from me, even car numberplates could be signs. He hadn’t sent a sign this time. The library door was open. That, I persuaded myself, probably meant it was all right. The Lord must be showing me the way.
I headed for the far corner, where the fiction shelves were. The old floorboards creaked noisily beneath my feet. The bell might ring at any moment. A teacher might usher me out. My brother might glimpse me through the door and tell our parents. But I was already in, and the bell had not yet sounded. I reached up and pulled out a book.
On the cover of The Secret Island, a group of four children a few years older than me crouched on a clifftop looking down on a sandy beach where some suspicious-looking grown-ups were unloading a rowing boat. The children looked as if they were in danger, but they also seemed to know what they were doing. Mike, Peggy and Nora were sitting in the fields, talking together, I read. They were very unhappy. Nora was crying, and would not stop. As they sat there, they heard a low call. ‘Coo’ee!’
I read as if turned to stone, breathing in the musty smell of the book, my bare knees marked by the edges of the floorboards. Before this I had only read the Janet and John books with my mother: John is in the tree. Janet is in the kitchen. And the Bible, of course. I had read most of it by now, aloud, kneeling on the floor of my parents’ bedroom. But there were very few stories about children in the Bible, other than Jesus, and he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, or go to school, or play in the fields, or cry. He preferred to talk about the Bible to grown-ups in the temple.
Why was Nora crying in the field?
As Peggy and Mike comforted Nora, a scruffy boy called Jack appeared, and asked what was wrong. The children explained that they were being treated as no more than farm slaves by their aunt and uncle, that their real parents had gone missing, that they were very unhappy.
When the bell rang ten minutes later, I stuffed the book underneath a dusty red beanbag in the corner. Brethren children were not allowed to borrow library books. I would have to hide it so no one else could borrow it before I came back.
Where had the children’s parents disappeared to?
Could Jack be trusted?
17
Over the next few weeks I read the whole of The Secret Island without discovery, punishment or consequence. When the
bell rang I’d go to my next lesson, complete my worksheet, and head back to the library, checking over my shoulder to ensure that I hadn’t been seen. Would they escape to the secret island after all? Would the leaky boat they’d stolen stay afloat? Where would they sleep? How would they open the tins they’d taken from the larder? What would happen when the food ran out?
Jack now occupied the place in my head where only God and my parents had been before. He was on the right, and they were on the left. It was easier to keep them in separate rooms. I negotiated with God, but sought advice and good sense from Jack. I agreed with Jack when he told the others that sometimes grown-ups could be cruel, unfair, and plain wrong. He was right when he said that under certain circumstances it was all right to steal food. After all, as Jack said, the bad aunt and uncle wouldn’t have to provide for the children any more once they’d escaped to the secret island, so stealing a few provisions in the night couldn’t exactly be wrong.
Although I read all the books in Enid Blyton’s Secret Series, it was The Secret Island that I kept coming back to. It made my heart beat faster. I was in love with Jack. He always knew what to do. He’d know how to plan for when the Tribulation came. He’d found the island in the lake that no one knew about. He knew where a boat was hidden. He told the other children that they could all live there together, build a cabin out of willows, and live off the land while they waited for their real parents to come and find them. And their real parents did come and find them.
Years later, when my father recited Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ again and again – I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made … – I’d be back in the wood on the island with Jack, tying the willow branches together. Nine bean-rows will I have there, my father would declaim, lost in his own imagined refuge, and a hive for the honey-bee – and I’d be lighting the candles in the wood with Jack as night fell.
At home I became stealthy. I wrote out a list of the things Jack had told the children they should take on the night they ran away:
Empty tins for storing things in
Saucepan
Axe
A fine sharp knife
Sugar
Knives and forks
Books and papers for reading quietly
Ludo and dominos
A sewing workbasket
Matches
Mixed nails and a hammer
A small magnifying glass for making fire
‘On the night before they left,’ Blyton wrote, ‘they broke into the larder and took: Some tea? Yes! A tin of cocoa from the top shelf. A packet of currants and a tin of rice from the store shelf, too. A big load, a few cakes from the cake-tin!’
By the time my mother gave birth to my twin brother and sister, I had gathered a stash of stolen objects. I’d known for some time that when my parents and all the other Brethren grown-ups disappeared in the Rapture, and we children got left behind, Satan’s people would come looking for us. There was nothing in the Bible about what to do when that happened. We wouldn’t be able to stay in the house – I’d read about Sodom and Gomorrah and the terrible things that happened there, and guessed that was what would be unleashed when Armageddon started. We’d have to escape to caves in the mountains, or find a boat somewhere and cook over fires we had to start ourselves.
There was a copse with thick woodland and hiding places just behind our house. That’s where I planned to spend our first night. But now that there were two new babies in the house, things would be more difficult. I was glad that my father and one of the other Brethren priests had baptised them in the bath when they were a few days old. But I didn’t know enough about baby souls to be able to say one way or the other whether my parents would be allowed to take the babies with them in the Rapture. So I’d have to be ready in case they got left behind too: powdered milk, sterilising equipment, bottles. I made my mother show me the whole routine, and how to check the temperature of the milk by squeezing a few drops onto the back of my hand.
18
Something really bad had happened. My parents were talking in hushed voices again. I listened from the back of the car. I set up my dolls in the hallway near the phone so that I could eavesdrop on the long calls my father kept making and receiving. It was the end of July 1970. I was nearly six. We had two tiny wailing babies in the house whose cots had been put in my bedroom, and I wasn’t sleeping – not because of the noise they made, but because I couldn’t stop looking at them. They were so beautiful and strange. They made my heart ache.
There were five of us now, and the baby routine on top of the usual domestic routines filled up every minute of the day. I bottle-fed my baby brother while my mother fed my sister. The house was thick with the smell of baby sick, sterilising tablets and Dettol. My mother had always used a lot of Dettol, but now my father was bringing home industrial-sized bottles of it from the warehouse. Even through all that noise and smell and excitement I could tell that something important was happening outside the house, because the phone never stopped ringing.
My mother was usually changing one baby or feeding the other or washing nappies, so my brothers and I would answer the front door when my grandfather and the other men arrived to consult with my father that summer. They disappeared into the sitting room. My mother took them biscuits and bottles of whisky or pots of coffee, and when they left, my father would summon her. She would leave me to mind the babies, and would close the door behind her.
Through the hushed talk on the phone, the raised voices behind closed doors and the whispered conversations between my parents, I heard the words Aberdeen and Mrs Ker repeated again and again. I worked hard to piece together the clues, but when my father glimpsed me trying to listen in while he was on the phone, he kicked the sitting-room door shut. Although I failed at the time to work out what Aberdeen meant, or what Mrs Ker had done, or why everyone was so upset, I did know that it was because of Aberdeen that our lives changed forever. Aberdeen was the reason we left the Brethren and went to live in the outside world. Aberdeen turned everything upside down.
19
What had actually happened at Aberdeen only took shape for me years later. I was sixteen. We’d been out of the Brethren for eight years by then, and the circumstances of our leaving had been overlaid by all the dramas that had happened since. It was 1981, the day after my father had been taken to prison for embezzlement and fraud. His landlady had told my mother that if his effects were not removed from his flat by the end of the week she’d be taking them to the dump. So my mother and I had let ourselves in to my father’s impossibly messy post-divorce flat, taking Dettol and rubber gloves, and started opening the drawers and looking in the boxes. My mother wanted to find the deeds to the house we lived in. She had to save it from the lawyers and creditors, or we’d all be homeless.
On the table I found an open file filled with yellowing newspaper clippings. The first one I pulled out was from the Daily Express. It was dated August 1970. There was something about the photograph under the headline that looked creepy: a very old man was sitting on a sofa with his arm around a pretty young woman. His hand seemed to be very close to her breast. She was smiling in a rather pinched, uncomfortable way. The headline read, ‘“We are not ashamed,” says Big Jim.’
Big Jim, I remembered, was what journalists called JT Junior, the Brethren Man of God. And here – finally – was a picture of the mysterious Mrs Ker. Philip Finn, the New York correspondent for the Express, had interviewed JT Junior in his house in New York about a scandal that had just taken place in Aberdeen.
I did not want my mother to see the clipping, or the file I’d opened. Everything was bad enough already. I was upset for her to be seeing my father’s dirty and disordered flat. She hadn’t found the house deeds, and she was putting everything she could find into the black bin bags and boxes we’d brought with us. I was trying not to inhale the strange smell of off milk, cheap hair oil and the newspapers that had been piled high in every corn
er. I stuffed the pile of newspaper clippings into my school satchel, and went to look through the boxes my mother had left for me to search through.
Later, after we’d gone home and my mother had gone out to work, I closed my bedroom door and nudged the chest of drawers in front of it. I tipped all the cuttings from my satchel onto the floor, found the Daily Express piece, and read it through slowly.
Philip Finn had turned this scandal into an episode from Benny Hill, all nudges, winks and smirks. He was making it seem silly – but it wasn’t silly, it was terrible and epic. This was Aberdeen. This was what my parents had been talking about eleven years earlier. This was what they’d been trying to make sense of. This was why we left. Finn wrote:
Big Jim Taylor put his arm round dark haired Mrs. Madeline Ker at his Brooklyn, New York, home tonight, kissed her lightly on the cheek and said: ‘I don’t care what people say. She is a very, very pure person.’
Then the balding, silver haired leader of the Close Brethren said: ‘We have never at any time done anything improper.’
Resting on his lap was a large leather-bound Bible, and in his right hand he held a tumbler half full of Scotch.
As we talked in the upstairs sitting room of his large detached house 32-year-old Mrs. Ker, mother of four, from Harrow, Middlesex, smiled up at him.
When I arrived at his home, Big Jim was sitting in an armchair wearing only underpants.
He said: ‘I suppose I had better put my pants on. But, quite honestly, I find it more comfortable just sitting in my underpants.’
Big Jim seemed quite at ease, and quite oblivious of the sensation surrounding him and Mrs. Ker and her husband during their recent visit to Nigg, Aberdeenshire.
In the Days of Rain Page 18