In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  AFTERMATH

  1

  In the hours after Aberdeen, the details of what had happened began to travel along telephone lines that branched throughout the world. James Gardiner telephoned my grandfather in Hove, one of many calls he made that night. He described the details of what had happened in the AiryLea bungalow, the showdown, the fact that the Aberdeen assembly had withdrawn from JT Junior, and that most other Scottish assemblies were expected to follow suit.

  My grandfather, carrying the news like a grenade clutched to his heart, telephoned my father and summoned him. I imagine the two of them together in my grandfather’s sitting room, under the framed text about Jehovah always watching you, my grandfather struggling to find the words for what Gardiner had told him. Though they would have been shocked and disgusted by what JT Junior had done, they would hardly have dared to think about the scale of the trouble that was about to begin.

  My father and grandfather were by now high-ranking Brethren. My grandfather was a Stow Hill Depot trustee. My father had taken Meetings across Europe and North America. Whatever Stott father and son did now, whatever position they took, other Brethren – at least in the south of England – would follow. They prayed. They sought the Lord’s will. And they decided that they would have to get the truth to as many Brethren across the world as they could, before any counter stories from New York set like concrete around them all, before the Hales supporters got hold of the Depot. The clock was ticking.

  Two days later, on the afternoon of Tuesday, 28 July 1970, as hundreds of holidaymakers dozed in deckchairs on the Brighton seafront, 450 shocked Brethren brothers and sisters dressed in their best clothes, polished their shoes, put on their hats and headed for the Meeting Room on Vale Avenue, a large new purpose-built hall with high walls and two high, narrow slit windows on the northern edge of Brighton. There was only one item on the agenda for this particular Meeting: Aberdeen.

  After all the phone calls and the secret meetings at our house or round the corner at my grandparents’ house, after the praying, the late-night, lights-out conversations with their wives, this Care Meeting would determine how the Brighton assembly would act.

  In our house, my mother must have put supper on the table as usual. She and I would have run the bath, spread out the towels on the radiators, heated the milk, sterilised the bottles, bathed and fed the babies, my brother bundled on my lap, my sister on my mother’s, and tucked them into their cots as we always did. My brothers kicked their ball around in the garden in the twilight. Blackbirds sang in the lilac tree. It was just like any other night.

  I asked my father, and later William, to describe the final Vale Avenue showdown. Forty-five years later, they still remembered every detail.

  Brethren men filed into the lower front seats of the amphitheatre-shaped room. These front rows had been fitted with hand-held microphones every few feet. The women took up their positions in the upper, outer circles, where there were no microphones. William found a seat a few rows away from my father. His wife had stayed at home, too terrified to watch the inevitable confrontation.

  When everyone had settled, John Railton, the self-appointed leader of the Brighton Brethren, and a JT Junior hardliner, reached for his microphone and stood to denounce the rumours from Scotland. It was a conspiracy, he declared. Satan was behind it. Stanley McCallum was behind it. How could anyone dare to say such things about the Man of God? It was an aberration.

  William described how my father – still, I remember, only thirty-two years old – rose slowly to his feet. At six foot four, he towered above everyone else. Just as he’d agreed with my grandfather, he began to tell the Aberdeen story as he’d been told it, carefully, without drama, a simple relation of the facts.

  John Railton shouted him down after he’d only spoken a few sentences. Declaring him ‘not fit for the fellowship of God’s son’, he withdrew from him. When my father picked up his Bible, coat and hat and walked towards the door, no one followed.

  ‘I drove home,’ he told me, ‘feeling as if I was going to be hit by a mighty bolt from the sky at any moment. It was a genuine physical dread.’

  William was sure he was going to be sick. He was paralysed, glued to his chair, unable to stand. He watched as a man on the other side of the room stood to object to my father’s expulsion. Railton withdrew from him too.

  As William watched that man pick his way through the crowd towards the door, another man – my father’s cousin-in-law this time – stood to protest, and was withdrawn from.

  Now William found his feet, and gestured for the nearest microphone to be passed to him. He wanted, he said, to ask a simple question about the Man of God. He wanted some clarification.

  ‘Can the Man of God,’ he asked, ‘do anything?’

  Railton roared back: ‘The Man of God is pure. The Man of God is pure.’

  Now he declared William withdrawn from too.

  William remembers a group of men sitting a few seats away, including two of his brothers-in-law, turning towards him. One of them said, ‘Get out, you bastard,’ and the chant spread slowly around the room. Soon everyone was chanting:

  Get – Out – You – Bastard. Get – Out – You – Bastard.

  William began the long walk to the door. He told me that he looked at the contorted faces of the chanting old men, one by one, as he passed them, reminding himself that the mortgage on his house belonged to one of them.

  I remembered the story he had told me about how he asked his father where his uncle had disappeared to, and his father replying, ‘Outside the door, son, there is only darkness.’

  ‘I have grown afraid of the dark,’ William had said.

  Now here he was, all those years later, walking directly to the Vale Avenue Meeting Room door. There was no one outside among the parked cars waiting for him. My father and the others had gone, and no one had followed him out. He was entirely alone under that huge black sky. He told me he stood there, in the car park, for a long time.

  He remembered, he said, every detail of the drive home through Brighton’s streets that night. His head spun with panicked questions. Would he ever see his parents or siblings again? Where were he and his wife going to live when their Brethren mortgage had been withdrawn and they had to sell the house? Where would they go when his Brethren employers sacked him? What if his wife didn’t want to come with him?

  When he reached home, he told his wife he’d been withdrawn from. To his relief, she put her arms around him and said that if he had not walked out, she would have left him.

  My grandfather, who was still in the Vale Avenue Meeting Room as the chants subsided, told my father the rest of the story.

  John Railton, his blood high now that he’d expelled so many, now that he’d got the chanting started, took the microphone again. If Mr Taylor wanted to take his wife Eunice to bed, he said, he’d feel honoured.

  He’d miscalculated. This was the straw that broke the assembly’s back. My grandfather now rose to his feet. He could not, he said into his microphone, condone what had transpired in Aberdeen. If anyone in the room agreed with him, they should join him in walking out now. Half of the people in the Meeting Room stood up and headed for the door. Two hundred of them.

  I wish I’d seen it.

  2

  My father parked his car on the drive, climbed the steps, opened the front door, and told my waiting mother that he’d been withdrawn from. She showed him the bags she’d packed, and told him, just as William’s wife had done, that if he hadn’t been withdrawn from she would have left on her own, and taken the children with her. My parents must have sat in the tidy sitting room together looking nervously at each other. Perhaps he poured himself a whisky. Perhaps they prayed.

  Twenty minutes or so would have passed before they heard the sound of cars, voices coming up the front steps: my grandfather, my cousins, old people, young people in family groups or alone, William and his wife among them. I think of my mother opening the door, wondering where she’d find ch
airs for everyone, boiling the kettle, opening boxes of chocolate marshmallows, pouring tea, hoping the voices wouldn’t wake the five children she’d spent so long trying to get to sleep. I sat at the top of the stairs out of sight, holding my stuffed rabbit, listening. My younger brother came to sit next to me, rubbing his eyes. Eventually we crept back to bed, falling asleep to the murmur of those voices downstairs.

  They must have had to do headcounts. Who had walked out? Who was still in there? What were they going to do now? They’d have given thanks for their release; they’d have prayed for the Lord’s guidance. They agreed that to start with they’d use the smallest Brethren Meeting Room at Edward Avenue, just a few streets away from our house. My grandfather still had the keys. The Lord would show them the way.

  My father and my grandfather took the lead. The first thing they had to do, they said, was to get the truth about JT Junior out to as many people still ‘inside’ as they could reach. They’d use the printing presses at the Depot. Two of the four Depot trustees, it seemed, were now ‘out’, and my grandfather had the keys to the offices. Unless someone had already intercepted it, the audio recording of JT Junior’s Aberdeen address would already be on its way to the Depot in the post. Someone needed to get there to pick it up. Once they had the tape, they’d transcribe it, gather all the witness statements, and print a pamphlet. They’d post it out to Brethren around the world, using the Depot’s networks, before anyone in New York knew what was going on.

  My father and grandfather couldn’t have slept much over the next few weeks. Phone calls to and from Brethren around the world continued long into the night, every night. My father typed out the copies of the Aberdeen witness letters that James Gardiner sent from Scotland, and transcribed the bizarre, expletive-ridden and sexualised ramblings of JT Junior’s Aberdeen address from the tape recording when it arrived at the Depot. That tape was important. JT Junior was claiming he had said nothing controversial in the Aberdeen address. The tape would be proof that he was lying.

  No one at home was sleeping much either. My mother was feeding and minding, washing and dressing five young children, including three-month-old twins. She was keeping up appearances. Praying, cooking meals, sterilising bottles, and, when necessary, providing beds and food for the many sleep-deprived Brethren who came to our house to consult my father. She would have listened to him relaying the news as it unfolded, keeping a close eye on the way things were going. She’d been praying for years, she told me later, that we might all be released from a system that she knew was wicked. Now it had finally happened. The Lord had taken our family through the Brethren door and out into the world. My mother seemed different to me then, excited and bright-eyed. She didn’t show her happiness and relief to visitors, but she couldn’t hide it from me. I was always by her side, watching.

  ‘For most of us,’ my father wrote in the introduction to the pamphlet they’d decided to call If We Walk in the Light, ‘it was like waking up from a prolonged bad dream. If we were honest we had to admit that, like Agur [Proverbs 30:2], we had been “more stupid than anyone”.’

  After Aberdeen, it was not disgust, or anger, or outrage that my father felt most acutely, but stupidity. But it’s not my father and his wounded pride that haunts me. It’s Elsie and Winnie Rhodes walking into that pond; fourteen-year-old Ruth pulling her father off her half-dead mother; it’s Eva turning on the gas oven in the empty house, knowing she’d never see her sister again. How many decent people had been betrayed, tortured and tormented by this madman and his cronies, and this inhuman system they’d made?

  The Exclusive Brethren had turned into a cult, and had played out their torments in plain sight, in the suburbs of provincial towns all around the world. How many non-Brethren teachers, doctors, coroners, psychiatrists, lawyers and judges must have seen glimpses of what was going on, and looked away for fear of causing offence? A doctor had once listened to me describe Satan as he appeared in my bedroom at night. Instead of asking me or my parents questions, he’d ordered a urine sample to be taken. A nurse at the hospital that cared for Rhina must surely have seen Eva’s distress when she realised that the Brethren would not let her see her sister again. An administrator at the Egg Marketing Board had opened and read Elsie and Winnie Rhodes’ letter in which the sisters had quoted the scriptures as explanation for cancelling their membership. He might have smiled at how batty religious people could be before he filed it away. Despite the strenuous efforts the modern Brethren make to seal off their people from any contact with the outside world, how many teachers, doctors, psychiatrists and judges are still turning a blind eye?

  3

  Eight thousand Exclusive Brethren members, including the two or three hundred defectors in Brighton, walked out of their suburban Meeting Rooms across the world – or were withdrawn from – in July 1970 or soon after. They formed a new schism, a group with no name. Later, people would call us the Non-Taylorite Exclusive Brethren. My parents and all the other adults must have been in a state of extreme shock. They would have felt lost, rudderless. They sought guidance from the Lord, as they’d always done. They’d been delivered from wrongdoing, but now they had to find their way back to the light and to the right road. After the agonies of the screw-turning years, all these families had to learn to live in a world they knew almost nothing about, and had been taught to fear. They would have to take stock, repent, pray, and start again. Within two years they’d split several more times.

  Though my father was soon preaching regularly in Britain and Europe to small assemblies of Non-Taylorite Exclusive Brethren, he couldn’t shake off that feeling of stupidity. It frustrated him that people weren’t facing up to what had happened; a year after Aberdeen he gave an address about how some Brethren were already slipping back into the old ways, into the old sectarianism.

  ‘What made us so weak and ignorant that we allowed these things to be imposed on us,’ he wrote in a Brethren address published in late 1971, ‘and then in many cases joined in the imposing ourselves? Even now, when our folly is manifest to all, we have still retained an unconscious tendency to condescend to other believers.’1 He was still using the Brethren language; he was still preaching, but his certainties had begun to unravel.

  In December 1971 he gave an address on Hayling Island, along the coast to the west of Brighton, near Portsmouth. After the preaching, William told me, he and my father drove back across the South Downs. A few miles from Brighton, my father took a detour and parked the car by the side of a road that looked out over the great gulf of Devil’s Dyke, a dramatic notch in the Downs a few miles north of Brighton, said by local legend to have been carved by the Devil when he tried to let the sea in and flood the country. He had something he wanted to say, he told William. After he had switched off the headlights, and the darkness had closed around the car, he said, ‘I don’t think I believe anything to do with Christianity.’

  When William described my father’s strange confession, I felt once again as if I was looking through a keyhole, seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. What did those words mean? My father hadn’t said, ‘I don’t believe in God’; he’d said he didn’t believe ‘anything to do with Christianity’. I wasn’t sure what ‘anything to do with Christianity’ actually meant. Perhaps he didn’t know either.

  ‘He’d just been preaching,’ William said, ‘preaching to hundreds of Brethren at Hayling Island. He was good. People trusted him, looked to him to take a lead. But he hadn’t believed a word of what he was saying.’

  The fact that my father had preached without believing the words he spoke made William angry. Of course it did. Perhaps he was thinking that if my father had done this once, he might have done it several times. How hollow was he? I considered telling William that my father had not always meant the things he said, that he’d once given a preaching in which he’d broken an important promise he’d made to me, when he told people that I had asked if the Holy Spirit was the Lord Jesus’s mother. But I didn’t say anything. I wanted to defe
nd my father. ‘Sometimes it takes people a while to see things,’ I said.

  After all, hadn’t this dreadful system forced so many Brethren to dissemble in order to survive? I wondered how many hundreds of Brethren children had feigned absolute belief in Brethren doctrine, rather than shame their parents. After a while it was impossible to tell what was authentic and what was performed, what you believed and what you merely said you believed. You began to wonder which parts of you were true any more.

  I could picture those two still-young men, both afraid of the dark, looking out over the void, that violent slash in the landscape, trying to work out what to do and where to go, trying to be honest with each other. They must both have known what my father’s words meant. They were, it seemed, going to have to go in different directions. My father’s Christian beliefs – if they had ever been beliefs – were fracturing.

  A few weeks later, in January 1972, William told me, he and my father both withdrew from the Edward Avenue assembly. They’d both lost their faith in the Brethren, but William was still a devout Christian, and my father wasn’t. William and his wife had decided to join a new church. At that very last Meeting, the two men stood to read out the letters they’d written explaining their decisions.

  I wish that my mother and William’s wife had stood up to have their say too, for the very first and last time. I’d like to have heard that. But they’d spent their entire lives in a fellowship in which women never spoke, so by then it must have been psychologically impossible for them to speak in a Brethren Meeting. I like to think they had already cut their ties with the fellowship, that they were eager to go, but I imagine they were frightened. They did not know what the world was going to be like out there.