My father was already drafting the letter he’d give to my mother a few weeks after we returned to England. Wouldn’t they both be happier living apart? Hadn’t the holiday proved that? After all that trouble they’d had in the Jims, he wrote, their marriage didn’t stand much of a chance. He’d start looking for a flat as soon as he could.
12
Our mother sat us all down around the kitchen table before school and told us that our father wouldn’t be living with us any more. He would live nearby, and he’d visit and take us out for the day. She was very matter-of-fact about it. Everything would go on much the same, she said, although we would probably have to move out of the big house into a smaller one sometime soon.
I would have liked to denounce my father, but I wouldn’t have known where to start. He’d left my mother to manage everything; he’d gone to live somewhere else; he had another family no one knew about; there were all those broken promises, all those secrets and lies. Instead, I excommunicated him. I withdrew from him. I told my brothers to tell him, when he called to take us all out for the day over the coming weeks, that I was doing my homework. I disappeared to my room and closed the door, or I went to Helen’s house and stayed as long as I could. It was more than a year before I spoke to him again.
By the time the estate agents came to put a For Sale sign outside the big house a few months later, my mother had found us a three-storey terraced house near the seafront in Hove, with five bedrooms, where she could take in language students as lodgers to help pay our school fees. We kids all shared two rooms up in the attic; my mother took the bedroom with the dangerous, about-to-crack-open ceiling on the middle floor. That left two respectable rooms for ‘paying guests’, as my mother called them. These guests began to arrive as soon as my mother was sure the paint on their bedroom walls was dry.
The floorboards were rickety, and my mother did not have enough money to buy new carpets or to pay a man to cut and lay the rolls of carpet she’d brought from the big house. She set up the sewing machine on the kitchen table at night to cut smaller curtains from the larger ones. A couple of our first guests, a middle-aged Swedish builder and his wife, alarmed by the forking ravines my mother had shown them in her bedroom ceiling, found a local plasterer to fix it.
The sea was so close we could hear the waves breaking on the shingle beach at night. Seagulls screeched like ghosts on the roof above our beds. On stormy nights the wind howled in the chimneys and rattled the windows.
When I wasn’t needed at home, or staying at the Marsdens’ house, I walked miles along the promenade, to the lagoon with the little boats, through the derelict buildings and rusting metal of the harbour at Shoreham, down across the mass of grey mudflats that the sea left behind when the tide was out. From deep under the mud, wormlike creatures had cast up sand coils, as if they’d sloughed off their skins. In the rock pools that the sea had gouged out around the edges of the concrete groynes there were crabs and tiny red sea anemones and seaweeds with beautiful names like bladderwrack and mermaid’s purse. I brought home shiny streamers of it and hung them on the wall of our attic bedroom.
In 1976, the first year we lived in the new house, a heatwave turned everything to sweat and seemed to bring the hot sky down around us. Plagues of ladybirds covered the white hotel façades along the seafront. The buildings undulated and flickered with their moving bodies. They looked as if they were bleeding. When I walked across the garden to bring in the washing, ladybirds crunched under my heavy school shoes. They’d fly out of drawers, heavy, beautiful, lumbering things. I found them in my clothes and in my shoes. We had to keep the doors and windows shut to keep them out.
I read the Narnia books through that long summer holiday, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and The Long Winter. I wrote stories for the twins in which they built boats when floodwaters engulfed their town, or built log cabins to live out a long winter, or found ingenious ways of escaping monsters made of ice or seaweed. We watched episodes of Robinson Crusoe together on the television every morning. My fantasies of flight to a mysterious island opened up again. Now in my daydreams Jack and I would be weaving cabins and treehouses from young branches and twigs on a desert island. When Crusoe fixed his eyes on the horizon and blew into his conch shell in the hope that someone would reply, it was my mouth he blew through. I still imagined that a voice might reply from somewhere Out There.
That autumn, someone told my grandfather that my father had gone on holiday with ‘another woman’ only months after leaving my mother. My grandfather summoned my father and challenged him – ‘What on airth were you thinking?’
Perhaps he expected my father to repent. Perhaps he even thought he could force his giant son to his knees and into prayer as he’d done years before; but my father didn’t back down. Instead, now six foot four and twenty stone, educated and articulate, he shouted back, thumped his fists, raised his voice louder. He told my grandfather that he was going to live his life exactly as he chose, that my grandfather had no right, no right, to admonish him. He could go to hell.
Between them that day my father and grandfather whipped up a tempest that drove my grandmother running from the house. While my poor grandfather was in mid-invective, mid-sentence, mid-competition with his wayward son for the loudest, most outraged denunciation, he ruptured a plaque in his heart and fell to the ground clutching his chest. The paramedics who arrived half an hour later failed to revive him.
That was the autumn my father killed my grandfather.
That’s not what anyone actually said, of course, but it’s what my father believed, and what he thought other people were thinking. He’d never been able to forgive himself, he told me a few weeks before he died.
Kez had been right to get me to use the word ‘Aftermath’ for the third box file of my father’s papers. These were violent aftershocks, earth shudders and rifts, occurring not along a natural geological faultline, but along a human-made one. I think of the paramedics trying to resuscitate my grandfather, my grandmother weeping and praying, my father looking on, ashen, the words he’d used to denounce his father circling round and round in his brain.
No one told us children until much later about the row that killed our grandfather. How could they? He had had a heart attack, they said. He’d gone to be with the Lord, our grandmother said. Coming so soon after my father’s disappearance and in the muddied wake of Aberdeen, my grandfather’s death left me winded and afraid. Where had he gone? Was he with the Lord Jesus? Why were they putting his body into the ground? What would happen to it when the Rapture came? Why was my father crying? I’d never seen him cry before. Brethren hadn’t cried about death. It was supposed to be something to be glad about, because it meant the dead person was with the Lord.
At the Marsdens’ dinner table in the weeks following my grandfather’s death, something – a thought, an image, a question – would set me off into shuddering, gasping sobs, and I’d run for the refuge of the caravan. Eventually Helen’s mother told me enough was enough. My grandfather had gone to a better place, she said. He was with Jesus. He was in heaven with the angels.
‘But how do you know?’ I wailed. Not knowing where my grandfather had gone tormented me. Was he really in heaven? He had believed in the Lord, I knew that, but he hadn’t always been kind or good or right. Had he been good enough to get a place in heaven? Or was he in hell, being burned for ever and ever? If he was in heaven, would my grandmother be able to find him when she went up there in the Rapture? The mansion that the Lord Jesus had made had a thousand rooms. Where would she begin to look?
None of us knew for certain where my grandfather had gone, Mrs Marsden said firmly, and it wasn’t for any of us to know. We’d find out in good time.
No one had ever talked like that in the Brethren. They’d have shot those panicked questions of mine down with the artillery fire of scriptural quotation. It was all right not to know, Mrs Marsden said. This was obvious to her, but it astonished me to hear it said in plain
words like that. If it was true, it meant I didn’t have to try to map the rooms in the heavenly mansion any more, or figure out who went where, or understand the degree of transparency of the Holy Ghost. There were things I would never figure out, Mrs Marsden said, no matter how hard I read my Bible. I was suddenly exhausted. I slept for twelve hours that night.
Would it have helped my father to confess to someone? Would it have eased his mind if he’d been shut up by Brethren priests until he’d come right with the Lord? Although his new acting friends would have told him his father’s death was not his fault, he had to live with the guilt, muddle his way through it, or distract himself. He found consolation in the roulette table.
My brothers knew about the casino before I did, though they didn’t know what it was, or what my father did there. After my grandfather’s death, after I’d seen my father cry, I sometimes agreed to come out with him when he took my siblings out for the day, but my brothers were still seeing much more of him than I was. He’d bought season tickets for Brighton and Hove Albion, so on many Saturdays during the football season he’d pick them up and they’d be gone for a few hours. Sometimes he’d take all five of us to a park or a carnival. Occasionally on the way back he’d park the car on a certain street, and leave us there for an hour or so while he went off to what he would call ‘a business meeting’. My younger brother whispered that he was ‘getting money’ somewhere called ‘Sergeant York’s’. It was a secret, he said. He was going to get enough money to take us all to America. My father had new secrets, and I was curious. But the windows at Sergeant York’s were too high to see anything through.
Years later, my younger brother told me that my father had promised him a day of treats for his twelfth birthday. This would have been March 1978. My brother had put on his favourite shirt and trousers, and washed and brushed his hair carefully. My father arrived two hours late. Once they were in the car he told my brother that first he had to make a trip to Sergeant York’s, but as it was his birthday, he was going to give him all the money he won. They shook hands. He wouldn’t be long, he said after he’d parked the car in the usual spot; just a few turns of the wheel, then they’d get going.
Two hours later he returned to the car, deflated and stony-faced.
‘I guess it just isn’t your lucky day, son,’ he told my brother, slamming the door hard, and jamming the car into gear before taking him home.
‘Poor fella,’ my brother said when he told me this story years later. Of course he meant our father, not himself.
We continued to be baffled by our father’s many derelictions right up till his End Days, but they fascinated us too. His behaviour was often so outrageous that we’d struggle to get people to believe us when we told them about it, or they’d look so shocked and upset that most of the time we just passed those stories between ourselves. Perhaps we thought that if we told them enough times, one of us might finally understand him.
13
I started at a new school just a few months after my grandfather died. I’d done well enough at the Eleven-plus to have won a full scholarship to a selective independent girls’ school, housed in a grand building on a hill with a library on the very top floor that looked out over the sea. My school fees, uniform and books would all be paid for until I finished my A-Levels. My mother was both proud and relieved. My father had fallen behind with my brothers’ school fees, so she’d had to take on more accountancy work and more language students as paying guests to try to keep up with the payments.
Helen telephoned to tell me she was going to the private Catholic girls’ school over on the other side of Brighton. We’d be separated. At least she’d get to wear that lovely blue uniform, I told her, trying not to cry. My new uniform was a horrible bottle-green. We’d still see each other just as much, wouldn’t we? I asked. And though she told me we’d be best friends forever, we both knew that those different-coloured uniforms would change everything. Brighton and Hove High School girls didn’t mix with the girls from St Mary’s. There wasn’t any particular animosity between the schools, it was just that they were worlds apart.
My mother took me to have my hair cut for the first time the day we went to buy my new uniform. The hairdresser put me in the chair and cranked it up. She examined the two thick ropes of plaits I’d worn down my back since I was a very small child. Was I sure? I nodded. My mother nodded. The hairdresser still hung back.
‘I can do it myself,’ I said, as my mother flashed me a look that said, Mind your manners. I showed the hairdresser where I wanted the plaits cut, a few inches below my shoulders, but it was my mother she looked at when she made the first scissor-sawing assault on my hair. But the scissors wouldn’t cut – the plait was too thick. That made my mother laugh, and then we were all laughing. The hairdresser went to fetch a bigger pair of scissors from the high shelf. And then it was done; the plaits unravelled, and my curls were trimmed into a shoulder-length bob. It looked good, I thought, and for weeks I was running my fingers through it, stealing glances in shop windows, wondering why I hadn’t just done it myself years before.
I had grown tired of the foggy, upside-down, vertigo-ed dream world I’d lived in since Aberdeen. I’d begun to crave facts, certainties and meanings, walls that didn’t crumble and give way when I pressed against them. Brighton and Hove High School for Girls was a gift for a child with a head full of difficult questions. It had been set up by two suffragist sisters in the latter part of the nineteenth century to teach girls the full range of academic subjects, including those – such as Greek and Latin and rhetoric – that had traditionally been taught only to boys. Most of my new teachers were sceptical of orthodoxies; many of them had travelled widely and read several languages; some of them were mavericks and misfits.
My history teacher, for instance, would write out difficult questions about the Corn Laws or the First Reform Bill on the blackboard and then answer them, sometimes giving the answers a right-wing spin, sometimes a left-wing spin. She’d take up a position, argue it, and then provoke us to disagree with her and put together an alternative case. I was a shy and awkward teenager, but in these classes, mesmerised, I’d forget myself, ignore the blood rising to my cheeks, and speak. Sometimes she praised me, no matter how much I blushed and stuttered out my answer.
‘Put that in your essay,’ she’d say. ‘Then argue the opposite position. Make me think you believe both sides are true. Then show me why you think one side is more credible than the other.’ Credible. Plausible. Non-orthodox. Empirical. The new words I was learning in these lessons brought my questions into sharper focus.
‘Take nothing on trust,’ she would tell the class. ‘You have to make up your own minds as you go along, make them up as best you can. To do that you must be able to see several sides at once.’
‘Questions,’ she’d write out in looping letters on the blackboard, ‘are sometimes more important than answers.’
She didn’t know I’d spent the first years of my life among fundamentalist Christians, of course. I was just one of the scores of young women she taught. We all had histories.
‘The Bible is an old book written by human beings,’ she said once, and I began to sweat, the heat rising up through my body to my face. ‘It’s been translated from one language to another to another. I’m not saying it isn’t important, just that it was written in a particular time and place by particular people. Never trust anyone who tells you that they know exactly what it means.’
I remembered listening to my father talking about the current truth, the ‘new light’, the truth that was being unfolded to the Brethren alone by the Lord at that particular moment. If JT Junior told them that the Lord had sent him ‘new light’, they believed him. He had so much power. Someone like JT Junior could wipe out all previous truths with a ‘new light’ truth.
It wasn’t just Mrs Marsden and my teachers who gave me answers – inadvertently perhaps – to some of the questions that vexed me. Over the next few years I gravitated towards a succession o
f outliers: musicians, poets, and people my mother would have called hippies. They didn’t lecture me or tell me what I should be thinking. They asked me questions, exciting ones. They taught me to formulate more interesting questions than the theological ones that had always bothered me. They helped me find my way back to my beyond-the-pale father, and then I began to ask him some of those questions too. They taught me how to argue back when I didn’t agree with something.
When our Renton Brethren aunt and uncle invited me to spend a week of the summer holidays with my three girl cousins, one still very young and the other two close to my own age, I accepted. I was fourteen. I liked my cousins. The Rentons, I knew, were not like the Jims. My cousins had explained all that to me once, when I’d seen them at our grandparents’. They believed lots of the same things as the Jims, but they weren’t so strict. They weren’t supposed to eat at the same table with people outside their fellowship, I knew, but because I was family and not grown-up yet, they probably wouldn’t worry about that. They were Christians, I told myself, trying to quell a sense of dread. They were good people, my blood; they couldn’t do me any harm. My mother packed my Bible into my suitcase. When she dropped me off at the station, she told me that if my aunt and uncle asked me to go with them to the Meeting, I should probably go.
Life in the Rentons, it turned out, was much more permissive than in the Taylorite Exclusive Brethren, but it was still austere. My aunt and uncle and cousins attended Meeting several times a week; they had no radio, television or pop music; my uncle and aunt Gave Thanks just as we had done, and their talk always looped back, as I expected, to the Lord and the scriptures. When we were alone my two older cousins asked about the music I liked and the television programmes I watched and the boys I knew. I was, they told me, so very lucky not to be any kind of Brethren any more.
In the Days of Rain Page 25