In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  Then it was claimed that Mrs. Ker had been found in bed with him when other members of the sect walked in.

  It led to a furious row among members of the sect, and today Big Jim was busy sending off up to 8,000 letters ‘explaining’ the events in Scotland.

  Mrs. K and her husband Alan, a research chemist are staying with Big Jim and his wife Irene (60).

  Today Mr. Ker was not at the house, and Mr. Taylor and Mrs. Ker explained that [he] had gone to Washington on business and would be back later.

  Mr. Taylor, who claims that his hold on the leadership of the Brethren is still unchallenged, said: ‘Absolutely nothing happened in that bedroom that Mrs. Ker and I are ashamed about.

  ‘It is true she was laying under the sheet on the same bed as myself. But I was on one side of the bed, and she was on the other.’

  Whose clothes were on the floor?

  Said he: ‘Some of the clothes were mine. I don’t know who the other clothes belonged to.’ ‘I didn’t ask her to lie under the sheet. Mrs. K chose to lie under it of her own free will. Certainly nothing improper happened, and it is wrong to say that she was naked.’20

  It read like the Janet and John books. Where is John? John is in the tree. Where is Janet? Janet is in the bedroom. Her clothes are on the floor. Whose clothes were on the floor? Mrs Ker’s clothes were on the floor.

  None of it rang true to me. The underpants. The photograph. The stupid, lecherous preacher. By then I was taking drugs, going to concerts, reading E.M. Forster and memorising soliloquies from Shakespeare so I could impress my father. But I still distrusted newspapers. I regarded them as worldly and corrupting, full of lies, Satan’s way of brainwashing people. And Philip Finn wasn’t helping. JT Junior’s ‘bedroom dealings’, as Finn had called them, were grubby and embarrassing, but he had no idea how much damage they were going to inflict on so many Brethren families like mine.

  20

  It was another thirty years or so before I discovered the full story of Aberdeen, the distressing details that lay behind the version Philip Finn had written for the Daily Express.

  Kez found a pamphlet among my father’s papers called If We Walk in the Light. My father and grandfather had written it to help Brethren assemblies decide how to act after the scandal broke. It included scores of witness statements, and a transcript made by my father of JT Junior’s last, foul-mouthed, rambling preachings, given in between climbing in and out of bed with Mrs Ker. We found other witness letters archived online. There were no sly sexual innuendos and winks here. This was deadly serious.21

  In July 1970, JT Junior, seventy-one years old, Brethren Man of God, had flown to Britain from New York for the annual summer three-day Meeting and to do his usual round of preachings up and down the country. On the morning of 23 July he arrived in Aberdeen by plane, and was driven from the airport to a large blue-and-white-painted bungalow called AiryLea, in Nigg, a southern suburb of the city next to a golf course. A local senior ministering brother called James Gardiner had been given the honour of hosting him. There were several other guests, according to the witness statements: ‘Dr. and Mrs. Robert Gardiner of Perth, Mr. and Mrs. Jim Gray of Edinburgh, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Steedman of Falkirk and Miss Anne Gibb of Falkirk.’

  One of them, Ted Steedman, recorded some of the events of that first day:

  We arrived at James Gardiner’s house on Thursday evening. Mr. Taylor was in bed resting and joined us about 7 p.m. He very soon paid a great deal of attention to the sisters, spoke in a crude way of their having had relations with men and constantly asked different ones when the results would be ‘… when is the delivery?’ He made reference to women’s bras and seemed obsessed with the sisters’ breasts. He made one sister after another sit on his knee, with one especially he kissed her for minutes at a time, putting his mouth over hers and sucking her in a most peculiar way, all the time fondling and caressing her body, making her husband look out the window while doing so. His tactics with other sisters he wanted was to say that they didn’t like his ministry, were not with him, and so on, until they came to him. This went on till the Kers came about 9 p.m. They should not have been there, but Jim insisted they stay, so that James Gardiner and his wife had to sleep in most difficult circumstances. When he had gone off to bed we found the first sister he had handled was very upset. We found in the morning she was nearly hysterical through the night.22

  The Kers, a young Brethren couple with four children, were from London. They’d flown to Aberdeen to hear JT Junior, and were due to stay with other Brethren a few miles away, but had been invited to break their journey at Nigg. There’s no mention of the Ker children. Presumably they’d been left at home with family in London.

  By 9 p.m. JT Junior appears to have been drunk, aroused, and frustrated by an evening of groping those poor women. And then in walked pretty Mrs Ker. Something had been going on between them for a while, some people told me. ‘William’ had seen JT Junior groping Mrs Ker’s breasts in a car park outside a Meeting a few weeks earlier when he’d first arrived in Britain.

  JT Junior insisted that the Kers stay in the Gardiners’ bungalow rather than in the accommodation that had been arranged for them nearby. The Gardiners had to give up their bedroom and make up a bed for themselves on the floor.

  According to James Gardiner, later that evening Alan Ker ‘led his wife’, barefooted and in her dressing gown, through the kitchen, dining room and living room, to the room in which JT Junior was staying at the back of the house. He returned to his bedroom alone. The following morning, Mrs Gardiner saw Mrs Ker leaving JT Junior’s bedroom. All through the day, Mrs Ker went back to the bedroom between Meetings. JT Junior was almost an hour late for the afternoon session. James Gardiner knocked on the door of his room, but got no response. Twenty minutes later Mrs Ker came out, saying she had had to wait until she was ‘released’.23 Her husband led her to JT Junior’s bedroom again that night, again returning to his own room alone.

  So far Mrs Ker had been described as compliant. While the other female guests had become upset by all the groping, some even ‘hysterical’, Madeline Ker in her dressing gown and bare feet had allowed herself to be calmly led back and forth to JT Junior’s bedroom by her husband. She was behaving in a completely subject way, as Brethren women were supposed to do. But, one of the witnesses said, when she’d been prevented from going to JT Junior, she’d become ‘impudent’. When James Gardiner reminded her that he was the head of the house, and responsible for what happened in it, she’d said to him, ‘I don’t accept you as head of this house.’

  I was surprised how much Mrs Ker’s behaviour shocked me. It was so un-Brethrenlike. Here was a Brethren woman standing up to the Brethren men, but just so she could go back to that lecher’s bed. I’d give my right arm, I thought, to be given an hour to ask Mrs Ker what was going on, why she’d let herself be led like that. But no one was asking Madeline Ker anything. They were just calling her names.

  The following day, Saturday, Mr Gardiner barricaded the route to JT Junior’s bedroom, to stop the Kers from getting through. Mr and Mrs Ker tried to break down the door, cracking a glass panel. Later in the day, Mrs Ker managed to slip into the room, staying there alone with JT Junior for some time, so that they were again late for the afternoon Meetings. When she came out of the room she told her host that JT Junior wanted him to know that he was a ‘son of a bitch and a bastard’.

  ‘It is hard,’ Ted Steedman wrote, ‘to put on paper the atmosphere of madness.’24 When JT Junior woke the next day, Steedman wrote, he was calm, and presumably sober. He gave a good address in the morning Meeting. But he started drinking again at lunchtime, and Steedman recorded: ‘his demeanour changed, as though something came over his mind. He became nasty, almost animal like and his conversation unclean.’25

  What kind of monster was this, sitting at his hosts’ dinner table and making the women sit on his lap in turn so he could grope their breasts and suck at their mouths in front of their husbands? These were peo
ple my parents knew. People who had been to stay in our house, slept in our spare room. Good people. Eminent Brethren men. What would my father have done if he’d been there and JT Junior had tried to touch my mother like that?

  21

  JT Junior wasn’t just climbing into bed with Mrs Ker. He was also preaching. In the Aberdeen Meeting Room, where hundreds of Brethren men and women had gathered to hear him, the Jekyll and Hyde of the AiryLea bungalow had turned into the spitting mouth of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. You can take almost any page of the forty-page transcript of his Aberdeen preaching at random and JT Junior’s words and obsessions are pretty much the same, only arranged in a different order. What he says is shocking enough – the words of a man suffering from alcoholic dementia – but so too is the mood of collective hysteria in the Meeting Room. Could the Brethren gathered there that day really have thought that the Holy Spirit was speaking through this man? And what was my father thinking as he transcribed this madness, which would eventually appear in the whistle-blowing pamphlet he and my grandfather put together?

  [Loud laughter and stamping.]

  JT Junior: Now we must get on with this meeting here and the next address: Now we have Mr. George Terries. The next address. You never had it so good. You big boob, you. And then, the next is what? Because we’re still producing [not clear]. We had the hell of a time in our house just a few minutes ago – ’ell of a life. That so-and-so. But it’s No. 2 now. We got No 1. That’s No. 1, that’s George Terries. Anybody know him? Anybody know George Terries? We’re going to have the ’ell of a time here. I want to tell you my purpose that he’s a very good factory. I’m still looking for that. George is No. 1 … No. 2 is coming but it comes slow. She’s in terrific pain. You bastard! You bastard! We need a doctor here. Go to sleep Stanley, go to sleep. We have plenty of hymns, to hell with you. We’re having a very good time. You bum, you. You big bum. Scott! Bum! Scott! Bum! Scott! Bum! Scott! Bum! Scott! Bum! Now you have it. You never have it. You never had it so good. You never had it like this, you nut, you.

  [40 seconds pause with bursts of laughter] [Shouting]

  JT Jnr: You stinking bum! You stink! Why didn’t you bring some toilet paper with you. Very fine meetings.

  MBT [identity unknown]: Yes, first class.

  [Pause with indistinct remarks and laughter then shouts of laughter with cheering, whistling, and stamping.]

  MBT: What I would like to know, Mr. Taylor – is this to be the pattern for all meetings?

  JT Jnr: Look at that son of a bitch there.

  [Pause culminating again in laughter, stamping and whistling.]

  JT Jnr: You never had it like this before. You bastard, you.

  [Loud laughter, stamping, and whistling.]26

  I wanted to hear what the ‘loud laughter’ sounded like. When I found the audio recording of the Meeting that someone from PEEB had put online, that laughter didn’t sound anxious or hysterical, as I had expected. People were guffawing. JT Junior must have been miming and gesturing and playing the clown, because the audience sometimes laughed in the long pauses when no one was saying anything. Sometimes the laughter and whistling went on for half a minute or more.

  Had they all gone mad? Was this a kind of collective hysteria, like what had happened at the Salem witch trials? Did they think that God actually sounded like this?

  JT Junior goaded the older men in the Meeting with jokes about faeces, constipation and purging. His preoccupation with spiritual cleanliness – a lifetime of using words like ‘spewing’ and ‘purging’ – had turned into a sequence of grubby jokes about bums.

  JT Jnr: David, where the hell you been? Thank God for you. I thank God for you every time. You been stinking somewhere. What you been doing at?

  DJD [identity unknown]: In Hell.

  JT Jnr: You haven’t had any privilege to do that. You feeling better? Thank God for that. You feeling better, David? Thank God for that. You feeling better, David? Thank God for that. Are you feeling better, David? Thank God for that. The whole thing, too. What about your intestines? Was that the trouble? To hell with them! ’ell with them. ’ell with them. You hear that George? George! You st … George! Did you hear? Yes. You st … ’ell with the other one! ’ell with the other one! Stay awake, you boob! What do you think, we’re going to get on with all these songs from Detroit? To hell with them, ’ell with them, I said. ’ell with them! You big bum you. You never had it so good. And don’t you think, don’t you think you’re going to go away with this stuff. You here, what’s your name? Son of a bitch.

  JG: John Gaskin.

  JT Jnr: Get up. You look like nothing. Sit down! You never had it like this before. Eric! Awake? You awake there? Well, get up and perform Eric, get up. Get up, Eric. Get up! Eric, get up. Sit down. You never had it like this before. You stupid people here, what do you think I am? I’m a professor. Here you, I’m not finished with you yet. You nut! Get up. I’m not finished with you yet. Well, I’ll tell you this. Don’t you mention any cars any more, remember? So what the hell are you? Skunk. You never had it like this before. That son of a bitch. I was very careful using the word son-of-a-bitch because I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know you have to be careful about it. Is everything alright with your bowels? You never had it so good. Stand up, Mr. Gardiner. I would like to introduce you to Nicodemus. And will you answer the question that I ask you Nicodemus? You couldn’t. Who are you? Who are you?27

  22

  According to the witness reports, after this extraordinary afternoon Meeting, JT Junior and Mrs Ker disappeared off into the bedroom again. Stanley McCallum arrived for dinner. He was one of the Brethren top brass, one of JT Junior’s right-hand men. No one dared tell him what was going on. Someone asked Mr Ker where his wife was. He told them she was resting. An hour or two passed. Someone asked when Mrs Ker and JT Junior were going to appear. They carried on waiting. Eventually McCallum said, ‘There is something wrong in this house,’ and the older men said, ‘Yes, there is.’

  James Gardiner went through to JT Junior’s bedroom and opened the door. He found Mrs Ker undressed and in bed with JT Junior, who was wearing his pyjama top, which was open at the front. Gardiner called Mr Ker and told him to get his wife out, and summoned McCallum to the bedroom to witness the scene. When McCallum reprimanded JT Junior, JT Junior brazened it out: ‘The devil is in you,’ he roared, ‘and I have to get him out. You’ve been wrong all your life.’

  Gardiner pointed at Mrs Ker’s clothes lying on the floor, but JT Junior said, ‘You can’t prove they are her clothes.’ When Gardiner demanded that the Kers leave his house, JT Junior roared, ‘She’s my woman.’ He tried to leave with the Kers, but was prevented. Though it was long past midnight, Gardiner called a doctor who had been attending JT Junior for several weeks. He gave JT Junior a sedative injection which sent him to sleep. The following morning, JT Junior’s son, James the Third, flew his father back to New York, heavily sedated.

  By the time Stanley McCallum got back to the USA himself, JT Junior’s spin doctors had told his local assembly that he’d plotted JT Junior’s overthrow, and that he was a homosexual, a sodomite, and had a criminal record.

  In Aberdeen, Gardiner and the other shell-shocked bungalow witnesses put together their witness accounts and sent them to the New York assembly.

  In New York, JT Junior’s supporters, concerned about the press attention the story was getting, rang Philip Finn and offered him an interview in JT Junior’s house, with the Kers present. It did not go well, what with the underpants and the whisky and all. JT Junior had not done himself any favours. If he wanted sex, he told Finn, would he have spent a thousand dollars and gone all the way to Aberdeen? ‘Brooklyn,’ he joked, ‘would have been cheaper.’

  JT Junior, backed by his supporters and the Hales brothers, now spun a new defence. Over the following weeks, the story of a plot gave way to a more sophisticated and nuanced narrative: Aberdeen, Brethren were told, had been a deliberate test of loyalty, devised, designed and orchestrated by
the Lord himself to identify and expel interlopers as the Rapture approached. Even the Kers were repeating this story. They’d keep doing so for decades.28

  In a few weeks Brethren spin doctors had turned JT Junior from a lecherous alcoholic bully to a martyr, prepared to jeopardise his personal honour for the Lord’s Truth and to ensure a final necessary purge before the Rapture began. But then, just three months after Aberdeen, JT Junior died of an alcohol-related disease.

  When I made my promise to my father on his deathbed that I would try to finish his book, complete the part of the story he had not been able to face, chronicle the Nazi decade he’d talked about, I started off thinking of myself as a detective solving a crime. Now that I could finally see the full, abject picture of those ten years, I wasn’t gathering the details just for my father any more. I wanted to explain all of this to the child in the red cardigan I’d once been, the girl who’d done her best to understand the deranged world she was born into, but who just ended up furious and confused. I wanted to tell her that someone would put the pieces of the puzzle together. I’d done that, I realised – for her, for me.

  But once I assembled the facts into order, there seemed to be no easy explanation I could offer either my father or my younger self. There was no culprit to be caught, no handcuffs to be placed on the wrists of a single murderer or thief. The questions the story raised were like the heads of the hydra of Greek myth: cut off the head of one question, and several others grew in its place. How had JT Junior managed to remain in power for so long? How had so many clever, good people been led into such a cruel system? How had men like my father allowed themselves to become exactors and interrogators, bullying people into confessing to imaginary sins? And once they’d finally seen the system for what it was – the projection of an alcoholic’s paranoia, delusion and hunger for power – what did they do about it?