I didn’t find my father’s ‘resignation’ letter in any of the boxes. Perhaps he hadn’t kept it. But, going by the preoccupations of the preachings he made around this time, it’s likely that he talked about how Non-Taylorite Exclusive Brethren were gradually returning to their splitting and shunning ways, and how he didn’t want to be part of that, because the Lord had shown him it was wrong. He would have known this was to be the last time he had the floor, so he would have taken his time over writing and delivering his last words. This was his Brethren swansong.
When he finished reading his letter, he would have walked out, taking my mother and all of us with him. I have no memory of the occasion, but I can still see the Meeting Room clearly in my mind’s eye. We would have been sitting in the back row as usual, in our Lord’s Day clothes, my mother at the end, next to the twins in their two pushchairs. When my father finished his speech, the Brethren probably launched uncomfortably into another tuneless hymn to cover the sound of our clatter and the bang of the door as we filed out after him with our hats, Bibles, coats and toys.
It couldn’t have been easy for him. Non-Taylorite Exclusive Brethren were not as strict about separatism, so he knew we’d still be able to see all the family we were leaving behind – his parents, siblings, nieces and nephews – but we would not be Brethren any more. He knew the Brethren would say that he and my mother were turning their backs on the light, and consigning their children to the darkness. They would be praying for us all the time, for our return and our salvation.
William told me he saw my father on only four occasions after we left the Brethren. He and his wife met us in a park for tea in 1972, a few months after that last Meeting, and they came to see my father playing Richard the Lionheart in a production of The Lion in Winter a year after that. My father was very good, he told me. He had a strong stage presence. Seeing what a good actor he was, he added, had made him wonder whether he had been acting all through his Brethren life. I was thinking that too.
After that, he said, he and my father had lost contact for many years. He and his wife went to live in another country, and when they finally came back to England, William had tracked my father down to the Tunbridge Wells bedsit where he was living after he’d been sacked from the BBC. He’d been shocked by the state my father was in, how unkempt he was, but they’d talked for hours just the same, played classical CDs together, had lunch in the local theatre café. Then, decades later, he’d visited my father in the hospital in Bury St Edmunds six weeks before he died.
The remaining Non-Taylorite Brethren, including my aunt, my grandparents, and a few of my father’s first cousins and their families, splintered into new groups as new leaders stressed slightly different ways of separating from the world. Each new faction came to be known by the name of its leader – the Rentons, the Frosts, the Walkers, the Strangs. They found new, ever-smaller Meeting Rooms, and broke bread together in their own particular ways. Each of them believed they’d found the right new path, and that they had returned to the light.
My grandfather, grandmother and uncle went with the Frosts. My aunt and her husband and small children went with the Rentons. For the rest of their lives they would disagree about doctrine and practice, and about the correct ways to ‘withdraw from iniquity’. We still saw these aunts, uncles and cousins for dinners and occasional birthday parties, but it was often awkward. I always felt they were watching me, trying to judge how worldly I was becoming. I seemed to be always saying the wrong things, giving the wrong answers to their questions.
Eventually the Brethren Frosts subdivided yet again, into what they now refer to as ‘Hard Frosts’ and ‘Soft Frosts’. They still shun each other. They are not allowed to attend each other’s funerals or weddings. Sometimes I hear stories about trouble in the Renton ranks: a small group has risen up to defend someone who has been withdrawn from. Others take up the hardline separatist stance again. So they split. More people get withdrawn from. It’s that shameful Red-Tiler and Blue-Tiler story all over again.
4
Perhaps in 1972 our parents thought we were too young to understand why we’d left. My brothers were eight and five; I was seven, the twins one. Perhaps they thought we hadn’t been listening when they told us that televisions and radios were wicked; that Satan was in cinemas, newspapers, pop music, theatres; that the world outside our Meeting Room was evil to the core, and would corrupt us if we went anywhere near it. Perhaps they thought we’d be delighted when they installed a television set and a radio in our house, and took us to the cinema.
Perhaps they’d forgotten that they’d been telling us since we were born that the Rapture was about to come, and that if we had not given up our wills and desires and natural minds to the Lord, we’d be left behind when everyone we knew disappeared off the planet, and the bad people would be drowned, burned, buried alive.
But we children did not cast off our Brethren teachings so easily or quickly. I became, in this post-Aberdeen confusion, preoccupied with sin and salvation, particularly after my parents had left the Edward Avenue Meeting Room and began to take us to a succession of local churches.
In the spring of 1972, just months after we’d walked out of Edward Avenue for the last time, my parents started to take us to church services on Sundays. I was still expected to put on my Best Dress, but the neat pile of triangular headscarves that my mother had made for me, that I’d kept in my top drawer, disappeared altogether. We didn’t have to get up in the dark any more. We were allowed to sleep until nine o’clock on the Lord’s Day. We’d go to a new church for a few weeks, shake hands, smile, and then my parents would try another: the Baptists on Holland Road; the Methodists on Portland Road; even, eventually, the Anglicans on Nevill Avenue.
Once we were inside, we recited the Lord’s Prayer alongside everyone else. The other people knew the words by heart, but we had to read them from the sheet we were given. We were supposed to memorise it, my mother said. My father didn’t appear to like any of these new churches. He didn’t seem to think the preachers were any good – I heard him complaining about the sermons to my mother. Within a few weeks he stopped going altogether, but my mother carried on taking us to the Anglican church on Nevill Avenue. My headscarves still hadn’t turned up.
The way these other people worshipped bore no relation to the way we’d done things in the Brethren. But even if I’d felt able to ask questions, I wouldn’t have known where to begin, and I was pretty certain my mother wouldn’t have known the answers anyway. She looked just as bewildered as I was. These people were Christians, my mother said, just like us, but everything they did was different – the words they used for things, the places they put things, even the way they arranged their chairs. In this new world:
Churches had pulpits and altars.
The people were called congregations.
They sat in rows rather than in circles.
The women and children were allowed to sit with the men.
Some of the women wore trousers.
The men in the rows didn’t preach.
Only the men in the pulpits preached, and they wore robes.
Only the very old women wore hats.
Someone invisible played organ music when we sang hymns.
People knelt to pray.
There were no headscarves.
There was a sheet of words we were supposed to follow.
Sometimes we were supposed to join in and say things all together.
They talked about ‘Jesus’, rather than ‘The Lord Jesus’.
They read passages from the Bible that I didn’t recognise.
They talked about ‘Sunday’, not ‘The Lord’s Day’.
They didn’t talk about Satan, or the Rapture, or about Clean Houses.
No one was doing any ‘withdrawing from iniquity’.
I was pretty sure they must have a completely different God up there. I couldn’t see how our Lord would be happy to come in here, with all those pictures, crucifixes and statues.
/> At home, things were upside-down too. My father announced one Saturday afternoon, when my mother and I were polishing the brass, that he was taking my mother and us three older children to the cinema, to see Gone with the Wind. I glanced at my mother, alarmed, but she did not protest. It seems astonishing now, but I remember almost nothing of the film, apart from some shots of alarmed horses and the great fire that engulfed Tara, but I do remember reaching out for my mother’s hand at the moment we stepped across the threshold into the richly coloured entrance hall; and later watching her face in profile, flickering in the light from the screen, rapt and terrified by turns, happier I think than I’d ever seen her.
It wasn’t that I believed we were now Satan’s people, or that we’d been plunged into some dark new world, or that the worldly people we were now allowed to talk to would trick and corrupt us – rather that someone had changed all the rules. It was like being lost in a town where all the signs had been changed into a language I didn’t know. I remember sometimes reaching out to touch hard surfaces to see if I was awake.
There were other vertigo-inducing changes. Our meals and domestic routines and bedtimes had always been arranged around the times of the Meeting, especially on weekends. Without Meetings, our days were shaped differently. The twins were walking now, usually in different directions. My mother was grateful to have me mind them when she was busy. I’d carry them back into safe range when they strayed into the flowerbeds under the lilac tree, or would feed them when she’d carried their high chairs out into the garden. My two older brothers seemed delighted by all the new things they were allowed to do: the football stickers they collected and stuck into albums, the comics my father brought home for them, and the children’s programmes on the television set. But they must also have been struggling to make sense of what was happening.
I found a picture of my brother and me in 1972. We are launching a hot-air balloon I’d made, with a basket fashioned from matchboxes. My Tribulation-survivalist fantasies had become more elaborate. Since I’d seen a full-size hot-air balloon drift across the sky above our house, I’d begun to wonder if I could engineer ways to escape flooding by using flight. When this balloon model got snagged on our television aerial I decided it was a sign of the Lord’s disapproval of our new television set.
My father began to show a taste for art films. In September 1972, for my eighth birthday present, he brought home four reels of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Swordfights, chickens, medieval Verona, velvet and satin costumes crackled and flickered through the projector and up onto the wall of our darkened sitting room. The words rose and fell, or fizzed like sparklers. But despite my father’s careful explanation of the story – the star-crossed lovers and the feuding families – I couldn’t follow what was happening. My brothers soon found excuses to leave the room. My mother left to put the twins to bed. Before I eventually fell asleep on the sofa, I watched my father’s face caught in the light from the screen. He was transfixed, his eyes wide, just as my mother’s had been in the cinema – but he was also mouthing the actors’ lines to himself. Did he know the words to the whole play? How did he know them?
When I started a new middle school that year, I was allowed to attend school assembly for the first time. Assembly was worse than church. It wasn’t that I disapproved, rather that I didn’t understand the language of mild sentimental Anglicanism that my teachers used. There was a lot of talk about sharing, and loving your neighbour; we were expected to do a lot of clapping.
‘I love God’s tiny creatures,’ we sang, ‘That wander wild and free. The coral-coated ladybird, The velvet humming bee.’ None of the Brethren hymns that I remembered had any animals or birds in them.
When I walked the school grounds – from the gym where we did PE, to the outdoor pool where we had swimming lessons, to the classroom where we practised Eleven-plus exam papers sitting at desks arranged in neat rows – I sometimes felt as if I was walking on the moon. I failed to find a way to explain to my teachers or the other children why I didn’t know the rules of rounders or netball, or how to climb a rope. After years of being asked to leave the classroom for so many lessons, I still found myself waiting for a teacher to send me out. But now they didn’t. Sometimes, when the classroom was very noisy, I wished they would. My teachers praised my abilities, particularly in reading and writing, in the school reports they wrote during these years, but they complained that I seemed to have a problem concentrating.
Many people assume that leaving a cult like the Brethren must be exhilarating. ‘You had no TV or pop music or cinema,’ they say, ‘and then you did? It must have been amazing!’
But when you see interviews with people who have recently left cults, they describe feeling bewildered and frightened; their eyes dart around, searching for points of reference, metaphors that would get somewhere close to describing the feeling of being lost, not-at-home, without walls.
No one, of course, shrugs off years of indoctrination in one go. Many escapees went back to the Brethren after a few weeks, not only because they missed their families – which would be reason enough – or because they didn’t have the skills to get work, but because the world frightened them. You can’t just refuse to believe that the world belongs to Satan if you’ve heard it repeated over and over since you were born. It’s under your skin. People also describe the difficulty of making choices – moral, financial, domestic, professional and emotional – because inside the Brethren there are virtually no choices to make.
The language that non-Brethren speak seems different, too. At eight years old, I did not know how to talk to the other children at school, or how to bridge the void between their world and mine. I was pretty certain the Rapture was still coming – after all, no one had told me otherwise – but I had no idea who’d be taken, now that my parents had started to watch television and films and go to other churches. I’d stand with my back to the wall in the playground watching the children skipping rope, singing their complicated rhymes, and I’d be conjuring Tribulation scenarios, imagining tidal waves sweeping across the tarmac, storms tearing down the playground walls and trees, the four horsemen galloping across rooftops, lights out and sea levels rising. Icky Wicky Wai Cho, Chai Chickenora, someone would be chanting; or a group of children would be creeping slowly across the playground, calling out, What’s the time, Mr Wolf? They still didn’t know what was coming. But nor did I any more.
I began to steal anxiously from the boxes my mother kept hidden in the house: packets of crisps, Kit Kats, marshmallows in shiny silver and red foil. Concerned about the weight I was gaining, my mother took me to buy tent-like crimplene clothes in bright yellows and pinks from a new shop in Brighton called C&A. My mother was still washing my hair in the bath. It had not yet been cut, and it hung down my back in two tight plaited ropes.
No one teased me much at school – they just avoided me. I was always the last to be chosen for teams, the first to stumble on the gym mat or to fall when we were supposed to leapfrog over the vaulting horse. My brothers didn’t want me in their cricket matches. I was just a girl, and I didn’t run very fast.
I read my way through the piles of library books I brought home from school and from the public library along the road: Russian, Cornish and Irish fairy tales, collections of short stories about Arthur and his knights. The girls fared far better in these stories than the girls in the Bible. Their fathers or brothers still exchanged them or married them off, or their stepmothers put them to work, but these girls often ran away, refused to do what they were told, stole keys, disguised themselves, went where they weren’t supposed to go – into the west wing of the castle, or down into the dungeons; they found out things they were not supposed to know. I began to write stories for my teacher about fairies, swords in stones, and snow girls.
I wasn’t the only one flailing around with metaphysics and theology. My younger brother had become preoccupied with original sin. He and I would often wait for our mother to pick us up from school outside the Booth
Museum of Natural History, a strange Victorian building a few hundred yards up from the school gates. Its steps were covered by a canopy, so we could take shelter there if it was raining. The road was on the edge of a park, and on the brow of one of the highest hills in Brighton, and from the steps we could look down over the whole of the town through the trees, and out to sea. I was sure I could make out the curve of the earth from up there, the water flecked with cargo ships and sailing boats.
One day I noticed that during the walk from school my little brother was flashing me dark looks. When we got to the steps of the museum and I asked him what was wrong, it all came out in a jumbled rage: ‘It’s all your fault. It’s all women’s fault. If Eve hadn’t made Adam eat the apple we’d all live forever.’
‘He didn’t have to take it,’ I said. It was raining, my mother was late, and my shoes were wet. There wasn’t much else to say. I was speechless with rage of my own. I couldn’t counter the logic of the Genesis story. We’d been taught that every word of the Bible was absolutely true, that it was the only truth. He’d trumped me. The Bible had trumped me.
My brother and I didn’t speak for days. I was furious about being blamed for stealing his immortality, and he was furious about having had his immortality stolen. There was no easy way to settle this dispute. We’d never discussed scriptures with our mother; that was our father’s terrain. But he was hardly ever home now, and I wouldn’t have asked him anyway – I’d resolved never to ask him about the scriptures again. I went back to my Brethren Bible to check the exact words in Genesis, but there were no exact words. That was always the trouble. It all depended on what you thought the words meant. Did the Bible actually say that it was women’s fault? Is that what the story of the forbidden fruit and the serpent meant? Was my brother right? Was it all my fault?
5
In the Days of Rain Page 21