In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  I found several newspaper clippings among my father’s papers in his study a few months later. ‘Father Ostracised by Sect Axed Family to Death’, one headline read.2 I slipped the clippings into my school bag. Once I was safely in my bedroom I closed the door and laid them out on the floor. I tried to figure the mystery out as if it had been one of the comprehension exercises they made us do at school.

  The postman had not been a postman after all. He’d been a telephone operator. A relative had tried to ring the Panes’s house several times but had failed to get through, so they had rung the telephone company to report a fault on the line. Someone had gone to the house, and when no one had answered, he’d knelt down, pushed the flap of the letterbox open, and seen those hanging feet. He’d called the police. The police had gone to the house and knocked the door down.

  Det. Chief Insp. Stanley Atkinson and his officers found a man in blood-spattered pyjamas hanging from an electric cord attached to the banisters in the hall. They found Mrs Panes lying dead in a double bed in an upstairs bedroom. The newspaper said she had ‘severe head injuries’. In my mind the Panes’s house kept turning into one of the cottages in the woods in the fairy tales I was reading. I imagined bowls of hot porridge on the kitchen table; a cage with a child in it; a wolf dressed as an old woman. But this was a real town called Andover. It had policemen and telephone exchanges. It wasn’t a fairy tale at all.

  The policemen found three children with ‘similar injuries’ in other bedrooms, lying in bloodsoaked beds. In another bedroom they found a bloodstained axe with a seven-and-a-half-inch blade. I wondered why the reporter had measured the blade and written the measurements down like that. In that ‘other bedroom’, the paper said, there was a single bed that had been made up but not slept in. Was that important, that it hadn’t been slept in? Was that supposed to mean something?

  They found Bibles by the side of all the beds, and by the telephone in the hall. That didn’t surprise me. This was a Brethren home. You’d always have Bibles by the bed and by the telephone in the hall. You’d have them in other places in the house too.

  Blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the hanging man’s pyjamas and on his bare feet.

  Roger Panes had left a note. He’d written:

  There’s never been such a wicked man. This house will have to be left empty or bulldozed. You go to the Brethren. I trust they will take you in. Cry to God for mercy for you all and the dear children. The Lord is coming very soon.

  When he finished writing those words, he had folded up the piece of paper, put it in the pocket of his trousers, then folded the trousers and placed them on the chair by the bed that had not been slept in. Then he’d gone downstairs for the axe.

  You go to the Brethren, he’d written. I trust they will take you in.

  The police went to the local Brethren Meeting Room and found the name of a Mr Fennell, the Brethren leader in Andover, written on the board outside the door. They went to Mr Fennell’s house to ask him some questions.

  ‘Roger Panes,’ Mr Fennell told them, ‘was shut up during November 1973, because of the way he treated another member of the Brethren over a minor technical offence, and shut up that person wilfully.’

  Roger Panes had been shut up because he’d shut up someone else. That made complete sense to me, but the journalists didn’t seem to understand it. They tried to explain shutting up to their readers, but they didn’t do a very good job. I would have done a better one, I thought. If someone didn’t abide by Brethren rules, I would have told them, they were like lepers. The Bible laid out very clear rules about lepers. They had to stay in their homes, isolated, until one of the priests – like my father – decided they would no longer infect the rest of the assembly. Sometimes it would take days, sometimes weeks, to get such a man clean again. Sometimes the shut-up person got sick.

  ‘What was this minor technical offence that Panes had “committed” according to your statement?’ the judge had asked Mr Fennell at the inquest.

  ‘He shut up that person wrongly,’ Fennell said. ‘That was not right. It was contrary to the accepted code and violations of the Divine Principles involved in the Brethren.’

  Back then – at the age of nine – the story had woven itself into my nightmares. But now, reading it again, I had different questions. Did the judge ask what had driven Panes to murder? Or did he decide it was best not to pry? Did he tell himself that he had a duty to respect religious practice – however extreme – in the name of the freedom of belief that had so long been enshrined in the British way?

  The police, still searching for motives, interviewed the family doctor. Roger Panes had been ill for a while, the GP told them, checking his files. On 21 February 1974, eleven days before the murders, he’d taken an overdose and been rushed to hospital. When a busy doctor in A&E had spoken to Mrs Panes about her husband’s mental health, she said that was ‘between him and God’. Panes had been sent home.

  No one, not the family doctor or the hospital staff, had thought to ask Roger Panes what had been going on. Roger Panes was religious. No one wanted to interfere. It must have been easier to look away.

  Throughout that winter, the ‘shut-up’ Roger Panes would have sat on his bed listening to the sounds of his children playing on the other side of the unlocked door: Graham, seven; Angela, six; and four-year-old Adrian. He would have been able to tell the time by the coming and going of his wife’s car as she took the children to Meeting or to school. He would have heard her telling them to hurry up, straighten their clothes, keep their voices down. He might have heard her crying. Daddy wasn’t well, she might have said, as she placed his food on a tray outside his door yet again. Once a week or so he would have heard different cars on the gravel outside the house as a pair of ministering brothers arrived to interrogate him. Consigned to silence for so long, he must have been startled by the sound of his own voice.

  ‘There’s never been such a wicked man,’ he wrote. They’d never get that house clean again. ‘This house will have to be left empty or bulldozed.’

  At the inquest, a hundred Brethren turned out to fill the gallery in their hats, headscarves and suits, carrying their Bibles. They’d been told to give a show of strength, a testimony of their faith. But someone must also have known that by occupying all those seats, they’d keep most of the journalists out.

  When my father thumped his fist on the steering wheel that day, it was because the Roger Panes story had broken. After the Andover Tragedy we understood that there was no rescuing our family members and others who were still with the Jims. They might as well have been living on the other side of a great wall. They’d have to find their way out by themselves.

  10

  When I think of the life my father lived after Aberdeen, it reminds me of the whirlpool I used to watch in the plughole of the bath as a very small child, that spiralling tunnel I feared would suck me down with it into the darkness. My father had been running from it – whatever the ‘it’ was – all his life; now he was running like the frantic Tristram Shandy, leaping in and out of windows, stacking the chips, staying up all night: faster, faster, before Death catches you. When Death caught you – and he would – there’d be a reckoning. You’d be in trouble.

  ‘If he’d let your mother keep control of the money after Aberdeen,’ one of the cousins told me a year or so ago, ‘things might have been different.’

  Her husband corrected her: ‘Your mother couldn’t have stopped him. No one could have stopped him. After Aberdeen, your father was a different man.’

  ‘He had a kind of excess about him,’ Vincent Joyce said. While most people would come to Wick parties with a single bottle of wine, my father would bring a whole case. When Vincent told him about a new camera that had just come out, and that he knew he’d never be able to afford, my father went and bought it for him. If the whole cast went out for dinner after a performance, my father would foot the entire bill.

  It must have been that hands-in-the-sweet-jar thin
g, I want to say. He must have felt that unless he could cram as many sweets as possible into his mouth all at once, someone was going to take the jar away from him. I knew what that felt like. I often felt the urge to grab everything, eat everything, read everything – Quick now, be quick, they’re coming – before someone came and took the book or the sweets away, and then I’d be in trouble again.

  My father was like that at home, too. Two years after we left the Brethren he decided it was time we moved to a much larger house. Although my mother agreed, she did not think we could afford to buy a house as big and showy as the one he settled on. But he bought it anyway. It had five bedrooms, an acre of land, a carved oak drinks bar as big as anything you might see in a small pub, a sweeping drive, and a double garage. That was important, because my father had started buying cars.

  Vincent told me that the first time he visited us in our new house up on the hill there’d been two Jaguars parked on the front drive, next to the large emerald-green Ford Cortina estate my father had just bought my mother. My father told Vincent he couldn’t decide which Jaguar model to buy, so he’d brought them both home to test-drive. He handed Vincent the keys and asked him to make the decision. One of the cars, Vincent remembered, had dual fuel tanks. He’d never seen a car with dual tanks before.

  One of my father’s cousins told me that my father had several accidents through the 1970s. He parked one of his cars on the drive outside our new house without properly engaging the handbrake, and it rolled down the slope and into a parked car on the road. Another time he drove into the back of a parked lorry as he was returning home from a rehearsal. He must have been drinking, I thought, remembering the empty bottles of Scotch I’d seen in the boot of the car.

  My cousin had lowered her voice to a whisper: ‘Sometimes I wondered if he’d been trying to … you know.’

  She meant, I realised, trying to kill himself. It had never occurred to me before. He’d had so many accidents, so many near-misses; more than most people had in a lifetime.

  He was also visiting another woman, and not telling my mother about it. I discovered this new secret of my father’s by accident when I was eleven. When I wasn’t needed at home, I’d taken to walking. It was an excuse to get out of the noisy new house full of quarrels and television, my mother’s lists of chores, and my father’s irritations. Even in this new world he’d found, he was still losing his temper at home. I would walk through the wood beyond the park, or along the muddy track that began at the end of the cul-de-sac that curled around the back of our house, and find a spot to sit and read.

  The path followed a wooded ridge between suburban gardens and high fences. At one point a solid fence had been replaced with chicken wire, and from a bench near there I could look down onto several back gardens and across a pretty little estate – box-shaped new houses built around a green. I liked watching the people coming and going down there, neighbours talking over garden walls, children kicking balls around, women hanging out washing, men lighting barbecues as dusk fell. I liked knowing they couldn’t see me. Sometimes I’d take my father’s binoculars.

  One Saturday afternoon, when my father was supposed to be away on a business trip and I’d slipped away to the bench on the high path, I looked up from my book to see my father’s Jaguar drive into view and park among the cars around the green. I put my book away, leaned forward to see better through the gap in the fence, pressed the binoculars to my eyes, adjusted the focus. A smiling woman stepped out of the car with two children. My father climbed out of the other side with bags of shopping; neighbours looked up from their hedge-cutting or car-cleaning and waved. He called back, made a joke that I could not hear. They laughed.

  What I had seen was interesting and strange, but it didn’t occur to me to tell anyone, nor did I know how to interpret it. It was just another secret to be added to the others I had kept for my father. There was the radio I knew he kept hidden in the boot of the car in the days when radios were banned, the forbidden newspapers I saw him reading, the cinema tickets I found, the promise he broke. This new mystery wove through our new life in our new house like a red ribbon. I did not know what it meant, but I cherished it. It was my secret. I began to look for reasons to slip out again, to return to my watch post. I kept the binoculars by the back door next to my wellies.

  Our big house, with its huge windows and garden, seemed to be waiting for something. At night, when I lay awake long after my brothers had fallen asleep, it sometimes felt to me as if the walls had become very thin, as if we might all blow away in the slightest wind.

  11

  The tipping point of my parents’ now-struggling marriage was not my mother’s discovery of the woman I’d seen through the binoculars – my mother didn’t know about her yet – or my father’s disappearance into the world of theatre and art, or the vast sums of money he was spending. It was the trip we took across Europe in the summer of 1975.

  It was the year Margaret Thatcher became leader of the opposition, the year the Yorkshire Ripper began his hammer attacks, the year the IRA bombed Green Park tube station. I was ten, nearly eleven, my older brother twelve, my younger brother nine, and the twins five. My father had rented a Dormobile, a shiny brand-new tank of a vehicle. He took us to see it in the showroom, demonstrating to my mother the seats that folded down to make beds, the tent that attached to the side, the roof that tipped up to make bunk beds in the roof, the stove and the fridge and all the clever storage spaces. It was, I thought, beautiful. It had everything. It was perfect.

  It proved to be the chamber in which my parents played out the last scenes of their marriage, up front in the driving compartment, with us children crammed together with the luggage in the back. There were no grand outbursts, only the slow burn of anger: my father slamming doors, the electric crackle of sighs, dark looks, and sharp intakes of breath. We were on the road for three weeks – from Calais down through France and Switzerland to Italy, and back up.

  The day we left, I pulled off a flake of nail that had come loose on my right big toe. By the time we reached Calais my toe had swelled and reddened. By Paris, it was oozing pus. My mother found the pink Germolene antiseptic cream in the first-aid kit she’d brought, but in the heat the cream just melted and ran off.

  My father’s obsession with covering distances in record times overwhelmed him again, just as it had overwhelmed Tristram Shandy. Every day after breakfast we five children took our seats in the back, crushed into the tiny foam sofas that became beds at night, two striped seats that faced each other. My father drove through most of the daylight hours without ever stopping for more than a toilet break.

  In the absence of air conditioning, the temperature rose the further south we went. My bare thighs stuck to the seat; my toe throbbed and pulsed. The windows steamed up. We soon tired of playing I-Spy. My brothers settled into games of cards. We read books for as long as we could before the car sickness took over.

  French fields slid by beyond the edge of the motorway, beyond the net curtains that were tied into bows. Then Italian fields, birds, steeples of churches built high on hills, vineyards. I was ill. My skin crawled and I had to pull a blanket around myself as the thermometer in the back of the Dormobile climbed higher. When we stopped, my mother prepared little bowls of warm water for me, with two capfuls of disinfectant, to soak my foot in.

  I remember very little of the towns we visited – a flash of the twisting streets of Milan; a shop in a Swiss town that sold cuckoo clocks; the bronze horses in St Mark’s Square in Venice, rearing black shapes against a deep-blue sky. My father kept a piece of paper on his sun visor on which he recorded daily tallies of the distances we’d covered and the times he’d clocked up. We covered 350 miles one day, five hundred miles another. We stayed in campsites on the edges of famous cities where we’d arrive just before nightfall. He would have driven for longer each day if he could, but he knew we had to pitch the tent before dark. My mother would cook up a meal from a packet and put us to bed.

  Ea
ch day there were more campsites and more nightfalls and more records broken. My mother, dressed in pretty summer dresses she’d made for the trip, gripped the seat or the car door as we drove, her knuckles white, her face grey. Then I was sick, and the back of the car smelled of vomit and Dettol. My father tried to engage us with stories and history about the cities we drove through, and when he had to battle to make himself heard over the sound of our squabbling he’d yell and shout, and occasionally thump the steering wheel. Then he’d drive faster, and my mother would grip the handle of the door even tighter.

  During the JT Junior years my mother had covered the seats of public toilets with carefully arranged layers of toilet paper before she’d let us use them. It was what her mother had taught her. Generally, it was better not to use them at all, she’d say, unless you were really desperate. In France the campsite toilets were often muddy holes in sheds. You were supposed to put your feet on each side of the hole and squat. She made us wash our hands again and again, but we still got ‘runny tummy’, as she called it, and then my father complained about having to stop all the time to find toilets.

  The swelling in my toe had spread to my entire foot. By the time we reached the Alps I could not walk. On the San Bernardino Pass I put my swollen foot deep into the white compacted snow by the side of the road. I thought it might burn a hole through to the other side of the earth. I was seeing things now; the clouds made faces and animals above me. I stayed there, staring up at the peak of the mountain, my entire leg immersed deep in the snow for a long time, praying for something – and to something – I couldn’t name.