In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  The Meeting Room was a dark wooden building with blacked-out windows. It stood in a sea of tarmac built on fenced-off land adjacent to the railway station car park. Once we’d parked, we peered through the chain-link fence between our car park and theirs. Their car park was full. We were too late. The Salhouse Brethren were already breaking bread. They must have started at 5.30, I told Kez, half an hour earlier than the time we broke bread when I was growing up.

  While we waited for them to come out, Kez pulled up the previous evening’s episode of The Archers on her phone and played it through the car speakers. Helen Archer was in prison, awaiting trial for having stabbed her abusive husband. She’d just had her baby. We both wanted to know if she was all right. Kez passed me the binoculars.

  Eventually the Meeting Room doors swung open. Twenty or thirty men and boys came out first, each of them dressed in a dazzlingly white shirt and black trousers. The effect of all those white shirts against the dark building was startling, like the foam on the top of a wave that was moving in our direction. Behind them, women with brightly coloured headscarves tied at the backs of their necks ushered small children towards cars. One of the women, spotting our car, walked straight towards us and peered through the metal fence.

  I gasped, and reached for the button to lock the doors. Kez laughed.

  ‘She can’t see us through the glass, remember,’ she said. ‘It’s tinted.’

  The woman glared at our darkened windows. We looked at her. After a few seconds she turned and climbed into her car. Kez grabbed my hand. ‘I won’t let them get you,’ she said. We both laughed.

  We waited for the last of the cars to leave, and then drove slowly through the village in the fog. Clusters of Brethren men and boys carrying Bibles came into view and then were gone. Soon the big cars and the men in white shirts had disappeared completely. We were alone in the dawn on the outskirts of Salhouse.

  ‘Now it’s time for the bitterns,’ Kez said, pouring coffee from a flask and unwrapping the sandwiches we were supposed to save till lunch.

  As we walked the path around Salhouse Broad, passing the binoculars between us, scanning the reeds for reed buntings and listening out for the elusive bitterns, the little girl in the red cardigan kept appearing in my mind’s eye. I wondered if there were girls like her in the Meeting Rooms now, sitting in the back row among the women, trying to work out how transparent the Spirit was; and if those girls sometimes wondered, as I had done, why the women didn’t just stand up and stamp their feet and shout.

  The morning sun felt warm on my skin. Birdwatchers and walkers were gathering. All around us giant oaks and elms puffed up their colossal greens into blue sky. Cuckoos called from distant fields. We saw a kingfisher flash past and a pair of herons take to the air together, but still we didn’t hear the bitterns.

  My children have grown up very differently from me. My son Jacob, born during my second year at university, was raised in a commune of intellectuals and writers; my daughters Hannah and Kez are not afraid to ask questions, or speak up, or take to the streets together to demonstrate about the refugee crisis. The gyre is not inexorable. They’ve been raised to love this world of ours. They do not believe in absolute Good or absolute Evil. They’ll fight to protect this fleeting life and each other, and to make the world more just and kind.

  My aftermath has been slow, which is why, I think, I have spent so much time reading in libraries and talking about literature in university seminar rooms, writing books about Charles Darwin and teaching classes on feminism. The iron room of my father’s world swung open to the skies when, at the age of ten, he was allowed to keep Arthur Mee’s Book of Everlasting Things. Since that first burst of joy and terror I felt when I reached for the turquoise spine of the school library copy of The Secret Island, or tracked down Darwin in the school encyclopaedia, I have spent much of my life in libraries: Cambridge University Library, the English Faculty Library, Cambridge Zoology Library, and now the British Library. I read erratically sometimes, veering from poetry to science to history to fiction until I find myself caught up in something. It might be seventeenth-century glassmaking, or Darwin’s barnacles, or what happened to Londinium after the Romans left it derelict, or the hunting patterns of peregrines.

  I haven’t had that dream about The Committee for a while, but I’m certain they’ll be back. Next time I’ll have a few things to say. For fifty years they’ve summoned me back to their iron room to hector me with questions about why I’ve failed to do what I was sent here to do … Have I forgotten again?

  Next time, I’ll take a few paces across the room and grasp the iron handles of that heavy interrogating light of theirs with both hands. The beam will sweep across the room, shadows contracting and stretching until I have them all pinioned in its glare.

  ‘I don’t have to remember what I was sent here to do,’ I’ll say, ‘because I wasn’t sent here to do anything.’

  I’ll borrow some phrases from V.S. Ramachandran’s book on consciousness.

  ‘My brain is made up of atoms forged billions of years ago in the heart of countless far-flung stars,’ I’ll say. ‘Those particles drifted for eons and light years out there in the universe, until gravity and change brought them together in my skull to form the tangle of atoms that make up my brain. Now I can wonder about the gods, or life after death, or consciousness and where we’ve all come from and where we might be going to, and I can sit outside under the stars talking with my children and their friends and wonder about my ability to wonder. You’ll never build an iron room strong enough or big enough or dark enough to stop that. There’ll always be a crack where the light gets in.’

  I had gone to fetch my children – Kezia who was then twelve, Hannah fourteen, and Jacob twenty-three – so they could say their goodbyes to their grandfather. He hadn’t spoken for days, I told them. He hadn’t opened his eyes or moved. Even when I’d read him the whole of Four Quartets, his favourite poem, his face had not flickered. His breathing was shallow. ‘He’s our tribal leader,’ Jacob said. ‘I can’t imagine him not being there.’

  Up on the fens, the snow was falling again; the setting sun had cast a red glow across the white fields. We drove slowly up the lane, following the line of the river until the pink tower of the Mill came into view over the brow of an incline. My brother and stepmother were cooking dinner in honour of our visit, an elaborate cassoulet from one of my father’s recipes. The sitting room in the Mill tower where my father lay was warm and fragrant, the table laid out with candles and open bottles of wine.

  But when the children took their positions around the chair, and Jacob called his name – ‘Dodge,’ he said, softly – his voice cracking with tears, my father’s eyes opened. I took Kez’s hand.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t talk now,’ he whispered, struggling to catch his breath, ‘but in a little while I’ll unfurl my wings and then fly a little, you’ll see.’ Then he disappeared back under the morphine.

  It was the last thing he said.

  Four days later the owl began its slow, ghostly flight down the riverbank towards him.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people have helped me to write this book. Ex-Brethren have checked facts, tracked down source material, provided photographs, notes and diaries, explained obscure Brethren doctrine or told me their family stories. Most of these people, several of whom appear with substitute names in the book, have chosen to stay anonymous. For many of my informants remembering was difficult. Their determination to answer my questions despite that difficulty kept me going when the task of finishing this book occasionally seemed impossible. I particularly thank ‘Frank’, ‘Ruth’ and ‘William’. They became a chorus in my head as I wrote, just as they had been for my father.

  I am grateful to Ian McKay for his friendship, encouragement, patience and the speed with which he checked my account against his records, archives and his books of ministry during the two years of the book’s evolution. Thank you also to Graham Johnson of the Christian Bret
hren collection at Manchester University Library who provided archive material.

  The trustees of Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat gave me a month-long fellowship to finish the book and turned a blind eye to my occasional excursions to remote graveyards and fishing villages. Thank you to Hamish Robinson for an early-morning drive to the local GP’s surgery after the wasps attacked.

  Thank you to my friends Tiffany Atkinson and Petra Rau, who were also my readers and who, like so many of my colleagues at UEA, take risks with form and breach disciplinary boundaries in endlessly inventive ways. Tiffany helped me to understand embarrassment and even, occasionally, to find pleasure in it.

  I thank Alex Stein for her twelve-week course on the Social Psychology of Cults and Totalitarianism, taught at the Mary Ward Centre in London, and to the group of people in the class that summer. Most had children in cults or had lived in cult communities. I am grateful for their stories and for the reading Alex gave us – books and essays from Hannah Arendt to Peter Lipton and extracts from Alex’s own work on brainwashing all helped me to understand the Brethren as a cult and to see how cults work.

  Don Paterson convinced me it was time to begin, showed me both how to start and, after a duration, how to end.

  I thank Rebecca Carter, my agent at Janklow & Nesbit, for seeing what I couldn’t yet see and for her unique insights and instincts along the way. I am grateful to my very brilliant editors – Helen Garnons-Williams of Fourth Estate and Cindy Spiegel of Spiegel & Grau – for understanding what the book might be, and for challenging me through every draft to go further and to find answers to questions I did not yet know how to formulate. Thank you too to Robert Lacey of Fourth Estate and Kelly Chian of Spiegel & Grau for putting the book through such scrupulous and eagle-eyed copyediting and into production.

  My thanks finally go to my grown-up children Hannah, Kezia and Jacob for reminding me why this book mattered. Kezia chivvied and challenged as I wrote and was often ahead of me with the torch finding the way. Jacob and Hannah read and improved drafts. I could not have written this memoir without my brother Benjamin, who is one of the kindest and wisest men I’ve ever known. And finally my thanks go to my father for leaving me such a complex and rich inheritance, and to my mother for keeping the family ship afloat in the often mighty turbulence he left in his wake.

  Rebecca Stott

  March 2017

  NOTES

  Reckoning

  1. See Michael Bachelard, Behind the Exclusive Brethren (Scribe, 2009).

  2. Philip Cooney, ‘Brethren Still a Cult in Rudd’s Book’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 August 2007.

  3. Bachelard, Behind the Exclusive Brethren, p.3.

  4. Billy Kember and Alexi Mostrous, ‘Extreme Sect Secures Tax Breaks’, The Times, 17 March 2015.

  Before

  1. Carl E. Olson, ‘Five Myths About the Rapture’, Crisis (Morley Publishing Group, 2003), pp.28–33. Although it is understood that about 50 per cent of contemporary Americans believe in the idea of the Rapture, there was no common notion of a pre-Tribulation Rapture before the eighteenth century. Olson writes: ‘Vague notions had been considered by the Puritan preachers Increase (1639–1723) and Cotton Mather (1663–1728), and the late-eighteenth-century Baptist minister Morgan Edwards, but it was John Nelson Darby who solidified the belief in the 1830s and placed it into a larger theological framework.’

  2. Cited in Norman Adams, Goodbye, Beloved Brethren (Aberdeen, 1972), pp.31–2.

  3. James Grant, ‘The Religious Tendencies of the Times’, Sword and Trowel, June 1869.

  4. See Ian Smith, Tin Tabernacles: Corrugated Iron Mission Halls, Churches and Chapels of Britain (Salisbury: Camrose Organisation, 2004), and Alasdair Ogilvie, Tin Tabernacles and Others (PhotoStroud, 2009).

  5. John Nelson Darby, Collected Writings, Vol. 41; cited in Bachelard, Behind the Exclusive Brethren, p.21.

  6. See Brian P. Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion (Routledge, 2007); for all my information on Eyemouth I have relied on Peter Aitchison and John Hume Robertson, Children of the Sea: The Story of the Eyemouth Disaster (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2001).

  7. ‘Scotch Bankrupts’, Herald (Glasgow), 26 August 1885.

  8. See T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700 to 2007 (Penguin, revised edition 2012), and Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell, The Lowland Clearances: Scotland’s Silent Revolution 1760–1830 (Birlinn Ltd, 2016).

  9. Callum Brown, ‘Protest in the Pews: Interpreting Presbyterianism and Society in Fracture During the Scottish Economic Revolution’, in T.M. Devine (ed.), Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society, 1700–1850 (Edinburgh, 1990).

  10. For Brethren accounts of the Glanton division see two pamphlets in particular: D.L. Higgins, The Glanton Crisis Explained (London: G. Morrish, c.1915), sets out the London position; W.T.P. Wolston, ‘Hear the Right’: Plain Facts Regarding Alnwick and Glanton, Edinburgh and London (privately printed, 1908), sets out a defence of the Alnwick Brethren. Both can be found on the website of archive materials, brethrenarchive.org.

  11. Napoleon Noel, The History of the Brethren (W.F. Knapp, 1936), pp.40ff.

  12. See Peter Bladin, A Century of Prejudice and Progress: A Paradigm of Epilepsy in a Developing Society – Medical and Social Aspects, Victoria, Australia, 1835–1950 (Epilepsy Australia, 2001), and M.J. Eadie and Peter Bladin, A Disease Once Sacred: A History of the Medical Understanding of Epilepsy (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2001).

  13. Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control (OUP, 2004), p.126.

  During

  1. See Bachelard, Behind the Exclusive Brethren, pp.272–85.

  2. ‘Doctrine that Divides’, Anno Domini, BBC Everyman, dir. Peter France, 1976.

  3. J. Taylor Junior, Letters, Vol. 2, p.324.

  4. Roger Shuff, Searching for the True Church: Brethren and Evangelicals in Mid-Twentieth-Century England (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2005).

  5. Quoted from a letter in the author’s possession.

  6. Stephen Bates, ‘Secretive Sect Softens Ban on Outside Contact’, Guardian, 15 March 2003.

  7. J. Taylor Junior, Readings at Nostrand Avenue and Other Ministry, Vol. 1 (1970), p.2.

  8. Email in the author’s possession.

  9. Email in the author’s possession.

  10. Gerard Kemp, ‘Brethren Drove Them to Suicide’, Daily Mail, 24 July 1962.

  11. Stanley Milgram, ‘Behavioural Study of Obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 4 (1963), pp.371–8.

  12. Robert Stott (ed.), The Way Everlasting (Kingston: Stow Hill Bible and Tract Depot, 1958).

  13. ‘Notes of a Meeting in Connection with Stow Hill Depot, 1962, held at Alexandra Palace, London, 12th July, 1962’. A copy can be found at www.brethrenarchive.org.archive/later-exclusivism/raven-section/taylorite/notes-of-a-meeting-in-connection-with-stow-hill-depot.

  14. Manuscript in the author’s possession.

  15. J. Taylor Junior, ‘The Service of Song and Other Ministry: Notes from Meetings at Haywards Heath and Croydon, 1963’, in The Ministry of J. Taylor Junior, Vol. 25, p.91.

  16. Unpublished manuscript of ‘Notes Taken from Meetings 1957–1970’. Document in the author’s possession.

  17. Alan Clarke, ‘The Compliance Officer’ (unpublished manuscript in the author’s possession), p.138.

  18. Ibid.

  19. See Michael Bachelard, ‘Schooling’, in Behind the Exclusive Brethren, pp.215–45.

  20. http://www.discourses.org.uk/History/TheAberdeenIncident.pdf.

  21. The account that follows is assembled from two documents: witness statements assembled in Robert Stott, If We Walk in the Light (Stow Hill, 1970); letter from Ted Steedman, http://wikipeebia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Steedman_letter.pdf.

  22. Letter from Ted Steedman, http://wikipeebia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Steedman_letter.pdf, p.2.

  23. Ibid., p.3.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid.r />
  26. Robert Stott, If We Walk in the Light, p.3.

  27. Ibid. Nicodemus was a Pharisee who helped prepare Jesus’s body for burial. I have no idea why JT Junior is invoking him here, or why he refers to ‘Eric’ as Nicodemus.

  28. In 1987 the Brethren brought a lawsuit against the author and publishers of a book published in The Hague in which the Kers testified to the good character of JT Junior. Their testimony is online at wikipeebia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Kertestimony.pdf.

  Aftermath

  1. Roger Stott, ministry in possession of the author.

  2. See Martin McGregor, The Town that God Forgot (lulu.com, 2011); ‘Father Ostracised by Sect Axed Family to Death’, Daily Telegraph, 21 March 1974.

  3. Ministry of J.H. Symington, Vol. 95 (Minneapolis, 26 August 1981), pp.134–5.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Archives of Brethren Materials

  Christian Brethren Archive, John Rylands University Library of Manchester University

  www.mybrethren.org

  Archive of materials on the Plymouth Brethren: http://www.brethrenarchive.org/archive/

  Books About the Brethren

  Adams, Norman, Goodbye, Beloved Brethren. Aberdeen: Impulse Publications Ltd (1972)

  Bachelard, Michael, Behind the Exclusive Brethren. Carlton North, Victoria: Scribe Publications (2008)

  Bailey, Michael and Redden, Guy (eds), Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio-Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century. Farnham: Ashgate (2011)

  Baylis, Robert H., My People: The History of Those Christians Sometimes Called Plymouth Brethren. Wheaton, Ill.: H. Shaw (1997)

  The Brethren Movement Worldwide: Key Information 2011. Lockerbie: OPAL Trust for International Brethren Conference on Mission (2011)