In the Days of Rain Read online

  Family dinners were tense, my father told me. His father sensed disapproval from his father-in-law over domestic and Brethren matters. They’d both been used to absolute authority in their homes. Tensions between them increased when Brethren visitors came to stay. And there was his grandmother’s unpredictability. She’d wait for openings in the conversation and then tell long stories that embarrassed everyone. Her two teenage grandsons enraged and disgusted her. She told them they ate too much and too quickly, and grumbled incessantly about their ‘big feet under the table’. When they asked for second helpings, she’d lean her head to one side and intone:

  ‘To bed, to bed,’ said Sleepy Head,

  ‘Tarry a while,’ said Slow,

  ‘Put on the pot,’ said Greedy Gut,

  ‘We’ll sup before we go.’

  When she was not playing the organ she’d be listening for the bell at the front door or the side door, the one they called ‘the tradesmen’s entrance’. As soon as she heard it, my father recalled, she’d scuttle to answer it. Sometimes she’d get there before anyone could stop her. She’d begin by challenging the caller about the state of their soul. Did they know that they were a sinner in the sight of God? Had they put their faith in the blood of the Lamb? Had they taken the Lord into their heart? Sometimes she’d break out into a hymn.

  One Friday she answered the door to the fishmonger. Ada-Louise loathed fish and the Roman Catholic Church in equal measure. In her long years at the Ballarat asylum they’d always served fish on a Friday, and as she knew this was a Catholic tradition, she’d considered it idolatrous. My grandmother arrived at the door to hear her mother, in a righteous passion, haranguing the stupefied fishmonger about the Virgin Mary, the Pope, and the Whore-of-Babylon Vatican. My grandmother asked him politely to wait while she steered her hyperventilating mother back to her room and to the organ.

  I had a framed portrait of a young Ada-Louise up on my sitting-room wall until a few years ago. Visitors would sometimes say I looked like her, and my daughters would explain that she was Mummy’s great-grandmother and her name was Ada-Louise and she’d been locked up because she had epilepsy. ‘Ask Mummy,’ they’d say when the visitors’ questions multiplied. Then I’d have to find a way of telling them just enough to satisfy their curiosity without going into the entire Brethren story. If I went there I knew we’d be discussing cults for hours.

  But that wasn’t the only reason I’d taken down the portrait.

  ‘She just made me feel sad,’ I told my daughter Hannah when she asked where the picture of her great-great-grandmother had gone.

  In truth, Ada-Louise’s face had come to stand for all those women who’d been shut up or locked up. Not just Brethren women, but all women who’d been bullied or belted by men who’d been allowed too much power in their homes. Her face haunted me. One day when my daughters were a bit older, I told myself, I’d talk to them about that, about patriarchy and how dangerous unchecked male power can be. I’d talk to them about Ada-Louise.

  A decade later, a long-running story on The Archers finally prompted that conversation. Heavily pregnant Helen Archer had stabbed her controlling husband with a kitchen knife after years of isolation and mental abuse. She was arrested. The audience for the show grew by millions. There were chatrooms devoted to the storyline, and money was raised for support groups for victims of abuse. The whole country, including my daughters, then in their early twenties, seemed to be tuning in. But my daughters didn’t need me to do any explaining when the subject came up.

  ‘It’s called coercive control, Mum,’ Kez said. ‘They’ve passed a law about it.’

  ‘Took them decades to listen to the campaigners, though,’ Hannah said, her eyes bright with anger. ‘Did you know that the law didn’t even recognise rape inside marriage until the nineteen-seventies? Un-bel-iev-ab-le.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, trying to be positive. ‘But things are better for women now.’

  ‘Mum, you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale,’ Kez said. ‘You know we can’t ever take feminist progress for granted. They’ll take our freedom away again unless we protect it.’

  ‘Look at what’s happening in Poland over abortion,’ said Hannah. ‘Thousands of women had to take to the streets to make the politicians scrap that Bill.’

  I knew. I’d been teaching feminist theory and writing for years. I’d given my daughters copies of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as birthday presents during their teens. We’d groaned together about sexist adverts on the television, talked about equal pay and equal rights, and agreed about how important it was to stand up and make a noise when you thought something was unfair. Now they were bringing me articles to read and telling me about documentaries to watch by women of their generation. I was learning from them.

  I haven’t put that photo of Ada-Louise back on my wall, though, despite the hope my daughters and their friends give me about a more fair and just future. My great-grandmother’s face still makes me feel sad.

  18

  By the time he turned fifteen in 1953, my father recalled, he was living an entirely divided life. When his closest school friend referred to his father as ‘a religious maniac’, he did not challenge him. He was not an unbeliever, he insisted when I pressed him, but his relationship with God had become a mere insurance policy, just in case it was all true.

  Often the insurance policy did not work.

  My father, at about ten

  One winter day, when he was around ten or eleven, he returned home from school to find the house empty. This was unusual. He had no key of his own, so he climbed over the back fence into the garden of a school friend and the two of them played with the boy’s new cap gun. When he returned to the house half an hour later, his hands and clothes smelling of gunpowder from the caps, there was still no one there. He stood on the front steps wondering what to do.

  ‘As I looked up at the golden scatter of clouds in the sunset,’ he wrote, ‘a horror crept up on me. The Lord had come. The Rapture had happened. I’d been left behind. The whole world seemed to be trembling,’ he recalled, remembering the wind in the garden trees. All the real Christians had gone, and now the Tribulation would start. How soon? How long did he have? Should he warn the neighbours’ boy? Run? Soon there’d be beasts and false prophets everywhere. Where could he hide? He was finding it difficult to breathe.

  When he told me this story years later, he claimed he’d passed out on the steps leading up to the tradesmen’s entrance. I sympathised. I breathed Brethren air for a much shorter time than my father, but I still find myself suppressing a shudder sometimes when I see a particularly lurid sunset, or television footage of flooding, or days of rain forecast on the evening news. A friend once referred to those fear-struck days of mine as my Old Testament Days, but if anything they were fire-and-brimstone days, wormwood days, Book of Revelation days – not Old Testament at all. These were the days of rain Ezekiel had written about when he described strange creatures, with multiple human and animal heads, that he’d seen in the clouds. Even rainbows were supposed to remind us that the Lord had for some reason postponed the wrath that was going to be unleashed on us all. We were always living on borrowed time, waiting, and studying the skies.

  When my father’s mother, grandmother and sister came back from their impromptu shopping expedition, my father wrote, he recovered himself. He said nothing to them about what had happened. They had their tea just as usual, and he did his homework, with Grandma across the hall singing to the ceiling again. It had been a warning from God, he told himself. A warning of what was to come if he continued his secret dissenting and disobedient life.

  19

  ‘When you were a teenager,’ I asked my father in those last weeks of his life, ‘did you rebel? Did you try and run away?’

  ‘It wasn’t as tough back in the forties and fifties,’ he said, trying to find a comfortable position in the reclining chair. ‘Life in the Brethren was a good way of life, provided you were prepared to accept the priv
ations. Very few people came in from outside. We’d all grown up as Brethren. It was the only life we knew. Brethren looked after you and were supportive if people were in trouble. The idea of being out in the world was frightening. You had the feeling that if you went outside the Brethren there’d be no morals at all. People would cheat you and trick you, because the world outside is under the control of Satan. You’d run back into the Brethren to be safe.’

  I remember that terror when I was growing up too. I was constantly watching – or listening – for Satan, hearing the tapping of his hooves on the cobblestones in the streets of Brighton, looking at the children in the primary school playground and imagining the scale of the wickedness in their homes.

  When I took the little path through the wood behind our house to visit my grandparents, I wouldn’t be watching out for suspicious strangers, I’d be listening for Satan. I made deals with the Lord Jesus to get me to the end of the path, to the gate that led back onto the street. Usually I promised to keep looking straight ahead, rather than behind – a token of my faith – in return for protection. When I broke that promise, turning my head at the sound of a snapped twig or a bird or dog rustling through the undergrowth, I’d run, terrified, towards the gate before a slavering, horned Satan stepped out from behind a tree to catch me. He couldn’t get me once I was back across the threshold of a Brethren house. That was the only place you were really safe.

  ‘If you went to a family wedding which was not a Brethren wedding,’ my father continued, ‘– it was discouraged, but it did happen sometimes in the fifties – you’d feel at a loss. You wouldn’t know how to behave, and you’d feel exposed and you’d be grateful to get back amongst Brethren.’

  ‘Didn’t it just seem like everyone at the non-Brethren wedding was having a better time?’ I asked him. I was haunted by the phrase he’d used: at a loss.

  ‘If you talked to a Christian from outside they’d use words that would jar with you,’ he said. ‘Brethren have a vocabulary and a way of talking about things that becomes the truth to you. It’s been worked out over many years. So if somebody else comes in and starts talking about Jesus in a way that’s off-key, it makes you feel ill at ease and out of place, so you’re actually quite grateful to get away from that worldly wedding and back amongst people who speak the same language as you.’

  ‘What kind of off-key?’ I asked, though I knew exactly what he meant. People still seem off-key to me out here in the world, even though I’ve lived among non-Brethren more than five times longer than I lived among Brethren. It often feels as if the words I’ve learned to speak since then don’t stretch far enough, don’t describe the things I feel or imagine well enough. The things that crowd the dark, for instance, or flicker at the edges of my vision, have no name.

  ‘It wasn’t just phrases or ways of speaking,’ my father said. ‘It was ways of dressing and behaving as well. If an interloper got in, say a journalist passing himself off as a Brethren visitor, he’d break subtle rules and codes of conduct so that people would know he wasn’t a proper member of the Brethren immediately. There was a real tribal sensitivity. My father used to say that when he was driving to a Meeting in a strange town, he could spot the Brethren sisters walking along the road. He’d say it was the Spirit telling him, but I always used to think it was their hats.’

  20

  When my father began to study A-Level English he became even more disorientated. He read Hamlet, Coriolanus, Much Ado About Nothing, Wordsworth, Keats, Housman, Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, To the Lighthouse, Howards End and T.S. Eliot. And then one day his teacher gave them Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. My father was utterly bewitched.

  When my father’s teacher told my grandfather in 1957 that my father was uniquely talented and should be studying for Oxbridge, my grandfather, impressed and proud, agreed to let him sit the entrance exams. In the fifties, Brethren young men were still allowed to go to university, though in 1961 it would be banned. More than fifty years later, the Brethren still have a ban on higher education. ‘It takes our people away from the Lord,’ a Brethren priest told a journalist in a rare interview in 2003.

  Now my father’s lies escalated. To study for the Cambridge exams, he had to lie to both his father and his teacher. When his teacher arranged a summer camp at Stratford to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, my father made excuses not to go. When he was offered the lead in the annual school Shakespeare production he had to find a reason to refuse. But he also went to his teacher’s house in the evenings for extra tutorials with other members of his class, despite his parents’ disapproval. He lied to his parents when he made his first visit to the theatre to see Paul Scofield playing Hamlet. Fifty years later, he could still remember the names of the entire cast.

  My father aged around sixteen

  He heard Brethren voices perpetually as he read, he told me in a lowered voice, and then he’d summon them to show me what he heard, what surfaced in his resting mind every day, every minute. ‘There were the father voices,’ he said, ‘they were harsh and judgemental’:

  The mind of the flesh is death … the mind of the flesh is enmity against God … it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be … He that is a friend to the world is constituted an enemy of God.

  But there were also the kinder mother voices, which came on the other side of his head:

  When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and out of Egypt have I called my son …

  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall have rest to your souls …

  How often would I have gathered you, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wing …

  Come, for night is gathering quickly o’er this world’s fast fleeting day, If you linger in the darkness you will surely miss your way.

  Fifty years later he could still quote those lines from scriptures and from hymns. ‘Those voices,’ he told me, ‘never gave up.’

  I heard voices too as a child, sometimes when my head tipped to a particular angle, or when I was falling asleep or had just woken: loud, soft, haranguing, enticing, sometimes in English, sometimes in a language I did not recognise. They were very similar to the voices my father described, though he seems to have heard primarily Brethren mantras and scriptures. Eventually, of course, my father would recite those same words himself when he preached. Repetition of simplified mantras and maxims, social psychologists have proved, is one of the key methods of indoctrination; it affects the physiology of neurological pathways, particularly in teenagers, whose brains are still growing.13 It’s a powerful form of brainwashing. And of course my father’s exceptional IQ and photographic memory made it very hard to silence those voices once they got in his head.

  In the sixth form my father’s Brethren voices were telling him that Yeats and Shakespeare were a frivolous waste of time, that all the apparent vistas that were opening to him were carnal and corrupt, ‘the pleasures of sin for a season’. He veered from one way of seeing to the other. ‘One was graven on stone,’ he wrote, ‘the other rippled like water. One asserted, the other side sang and whispered, beguiled, suggested, asked questions, claimed nothing, resonated.’

  21

  It wasn’t all prohibition and exegesis in the Brethren in the 1950s. Before 1959 Brethren were allowed to take holidays. Brethren families converged on St Ives in Cornwall every summer. It was where many Brethren young men selected their future wives, or had them selected for them. St Ives is where my father met my mother.

  ‘If you looked down on Porthminster Beach from the road above on any day except the Lord’s Day,’ my father wrote, ‘you’d see the holidaying Brethren immediately. There’d be a huge semicircle of perhaps sixty or seventy deckchairs set close together. The chairs kept them closed off from the rest of the beach; the area they made was bounded by the sea on its open side. “Worldly” families were scattered over the rest of the beach, but the Brethren had no contact with them.

  ‘Within the semicircle the
older Brethren men – some of them quite distinguished in Brethren terms – spent their days on the beach discussing “the Truth”. They had their Bibles open on their laps and they’d talk for hours. The sisters talked about their children, and some of them knitted or sewed. Some of the respected spinsters and elder wives took part in the Bible discussions, but they were restrained and tentative; most of what they said was framed as questions. Paul had said: “I do not suffer a woman to teach, nor to exercise authority over a man.” So Brethren women were expected to keep their opinions to themselves. Small children played in the sand within the semicircle. Teenagers swam in the bay and played cricket or rounders. There was also tennis on the hard courts above the beach.

  Brethren women at the beach

  ‘On non-Meeting nights, Brethren teenagers were allowed to gather together after their hotel and boarding house dinners. They met at a coffee bar called “The Picnic Box”. They drank coffee and sometimes ordered the speciality of the house, a very large circular plate of biscuits and exotic cheeses. Afterwards, they walked together along the cliffs. Sometimes they swam at Porthminster Beach after dark. Sometimes during the week Brethren families went to Prah Sands and Perranporth in a convoy of cars to play cricket.

  ‘There was no swimming or beach-going on the Lord’s Day. On the Lord’s Day evenings, after the Gospel in the Meeting Room, some of the Brethren gathered on the quay and several brothers preached to the passers-by. They’d have to compete with other evangelical groups – get themselves heard above the sound of the Salvation Army band. Then the teenagers would walk along the cliffs to Porthmeor beach and sing hymns above the breaking waves at sunset. We’d usually finish with “How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds” to the tune of Crimond,’ he remembered, ‘so that we could practise the descant.’