In the Days of Rain Read online

  ‘Unless you were “in the Spirit”,’ my father wrote, ‘the afternoon Bible reading was usually not very interesting.’ At the age of seven he’d worked out a game to make the time pass more quickly. He’d choose a letter of the alphabet and start counting all the times it appeared in the chapter of the Bible they were reading that day. Soon he discovered that there were more E’s than any other letter. So he’d give E a less popular partner, like K or U, to slow it down. The total score of these two paired letters had to beat a combination of two other letters, usually S and N.

  ‘When I’d completed the chapter,’ my father wrote, ‘I’d move on to neighbouring chapters, noting the scores down in the back of my Bible. The results were often quite close. A word like “possessions” at the end of the chapter could tip the balance just in time. For some reason the SN team seemed to do better in the Old Testament. My mother,’ he added, ‘never worked out what I was doing, but as long as I was quiet and apparently reading my Bible she was content.’

  Was this game an early sign of his gambling? Did my father learn to gamble to stave off his boredom in Scripture Meetings? Even as a seven-year-old, he was racing letters and keeping scores. He would still be keeping tallies on his deathbed – of calories, fruit flies, gambling winnings, and diabetes counts.

  My father was smart. When his teachers tested his IQ at grammar school several years later, his score was the highest they’d ever seen by a pupil. I heard people describe him as having a photographic memory. He could memorise whole poems in a few minutes.

  His obsession with numbers plagued me and my siblings. He was a compulsive keeper of scores. Later, when we had families of our own and he came to visit, the first thing he’d do – every time – would be to explain to everyone gathered at the dinner table how he had shaved three or four minutes off his previous record for the distance he had just driven. He’d produce tattered pieces of paper covered with dates and times and distances, his face flushed with pride.

  ‘The Preaching came at half past six on the Lord’s Day,’ my father remembered. ‘It was always a familiar mixture of the tough and the mawkish: threats of Judgement and Hell on the one hand and sentimental appeals on the other. The general idea was that all humans were hopelessly bad: “The heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked” and that unless we repented and believed in Jesus and the saving power of His blood we’d be judged at The Great White Throne and put into The Lake of Fire. There were variations but the basic theme was always the same. To be fair,’ he added, ‘the Brethren didn’t go on about Hell as much as some people. They talked about the Day of Judgement more.’

  ‘Apart from the Lake of Fire,’ he wrote, ‘there was the certainty of being Eaten by Worms. There was also going to be a lot of Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth.’ He’d tried gnashing his teeth, he wrote, and it hurt. The image of Hell that impressed him most was the Bottomless Pit. The idea of falling down a hole forever frightened him more than any of the other descriptions: ‘I used to imagine that endless lonely falling as I lay in bed at night. It made me feel dizzy.’

  Edmund Gosse, when he put together his notes for Father and Son, remembered something similar happening in his dreams as a boy – an intense sense of vertigo, of being spun through time and space, his heart racing. I didn’t have falling dreams. Mine had rain and floods, earthquakes and tidal waves in them. It was, I suppose, just a different kind of vertigo.

  ‘If a visiting ministering brother was preaching,’ my father remembered, ‘he’d corner you after the Meeting to ask if you loved the Lord or if you’d put your faith in the Blood of the Lamb. I never knew what to say. I didn’t blame the preachers, though,’ he added. ‘They were expected to do that. It was their job.’

  His empathy took me by surprise, but then I remembered that later, when he began to preach, my father had to corner children himself, so it was perhaps no wonder he was defensive. I’d watch him rounding on a child after Meeting and asking the same thing: ‘Have you put your faith in the Lord?’, or ‘Have you taken the Lord into your heart?’ I’d get asked those questions too, as I stood in my Best Dress clasping my stuffed rabbit. But come to think of it, I don’t remember my father asking me about the Lord being in my heart. It was always the Brethren sisters who asked about that.

  I worried a lot about that taking-the-Lord-into-your-heart question when I was a very small child. Sometimes I’d be sure he was in there. I’d welcomed him in. I could relax my efforts. I’d be glad he was there. Joyous even. But mostly just relieved. Then a day or so later he’d be gone again. Sometimes his disappearance would coincide with me doing something naughty, sometimes not. I’d have to do the taking-in ritual – praying, confessing, making myself subject – all over again. But the questions that vexed me – was the Lord supposed to wander off like that? Was that normal? – were not the kinds of questions I’d dare to ask. I was supposed to take the Lord Jesus in, and he was supposed to take me up when the Rapture came. I wasn’t sure how all of that worked either. You had to make sense of it in whatever way you could, without help from the grown-ups.

  My father’s closest friend in the Brethren – I’ll call him William to protect his identity – now in his seventies, told me that it was often the little things that kept you obedient, that kept you from running away. He’d had an uncle who’d been withdrawn from for some misdemeanour or other. When, at the age of eight, my father’s friend asked his father what had happened to the uncle he’d adored – why he’d disappeared, whether they’d ever see him again – his father had simply said, ‘Outside those doors, son, there is darkness.’ He’d developed an idea in his head, he said, of his beloved uncle groping about in some ‘murky, dark horror’. ‘I grew up terrified of the dark,’ he added.

  Now I began to wonder if my fear of the dark came from the same place that William’s had. We’d both grown up believing that the darkness beyond our small circle of light was full of scuttling monsters waiting to snatch us. Most children, I guess, feel a dread of what they can’t see. Few children are told that they are right to be terrified, that their imaginary monsters are real devils sent by Satan, or that they might even be Satan himself.

  12

  In the 1940s my travelling salesman grandfather became one of the most important ministering brothers at the Iron Room in Kenilworth. At home he was strict, my father wrote. He’d make his children drop to their knees to pray at the slightest transgression. He was often angry or getting angry. His rages would come from nowhere.

  His father had had a quick temper, my grandfather would tell people by way of apology or explanation, when he caught himself. David Fairbairn Stott had been a disciplinarian. He’d bullied his children. With Brethren women and children expected to show unconditional compliance and subjection, Brethren men had absolute power in their homes. Their anger must often have gone unchecked. Bullying of women and children must have been common even among otherwise good men.

  When my father wrote about my grandfather he described him as a monster who raged and ranted: ‘I was afraid of my father,’ he wrote. ‘He was prone to terrible rages. They came suddenly, like thunderstorms. “Why on airth did you do that?” he’d say. “What on airth were you thinking about?”

  ‘Sometimes he’d lose control of himself for ten minutes or so, roaring at the top of his voice and beating his fists on the table. He wasn’t roaring at anyone, he was just roaring. Once he roared on the lower part of the Kenilworth staircase, beating his fists against one of the steps. Afterwards he was exhausted and tearful. It was as if he had been taken ill.

  ‘He was never violent towards my mother. That was something outside his range. He punished us, sometimes with a ruler across the palm of the hand, or if we’d been especially bad he’d use a belt. Sometimes he’d just slap us hard on the side of the head. “By,” he would say heavily when he was angry, “By.” Not “by” anything, just “By”, and he’d draw a deep breath. His anger was always much worse than the physical blows.

  ‘My
father’s rage hung in the air as a dreadful possibility. “You’ll set me off,” he’d say when we tried to justify or explain. If one of us misbehaved when he was preaching in The Iron Room he’d stop speaking and frown at us. Other Brethren would turn and look at us. “I’ll stop the Meeting,” he’d say to us at home. “If I see you doing that again, I’ll stop the Meeting.”’

  My father described my grandfather as having a nervous tic when he was on edge, a kind of winking with his left eye that took the left-hand side of his mouth up with it. ‘When this started,’ my father wrote, ‘it was better to apologise and propitiate, even if the matter under investigation had been an accident. Even then you couldn’t always stop the rage; sometimes there was no stopping it whatever one said. Justice did not come into it. If something had been broken or spilt, someone must be to blame. Anger hung in the air, waiting to discharge itself. It was like living on a fault line or the slopes of a volcano. When I read Shakespeare years later, I understood the final roarings and the stricken, exhausted peace at the end of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear. The only durable calm, I already knew, was the one that came after cataclysmic events. You braced yourself and braced yourself and then the terror came and you lived through it and then it blew itself out and you were exhausted and shaking but everything was all right again.’

  I thought of my grandmother, raised in a big house by her kindly aunt, or playing out in the Australian backwoods with her sister and cousin, now living out a life of constant appeasement in rainy suburban Britain, stepping between her husband and her children, making peace or trying to keep it, praying for it, smoothing feathers.

  The rage wasn’t just in the men, or only in the Stott branch of the family: my grandmother’s mother, the hauntingly mournful-looking Ada-Louise, my great-grandmother, had been a legendary fury. She’d once thrown one of her daughters across the room and broken her arm. I found that hard to believe when I looked at the picture my father had given me.

  Ada-Louise had a strong Huguenot jaw, the long family face. She looked like my two dark-haired brothers. She looked like me. She looked like my son. There are a few black-and-white photographs of Ada-Louise in her twenties – striking, mournful and laced up to the neck – and then photographs of her in her sixties, white-haired, blank-eyed, smiling, propped up by others. In the forty or so in-between years she’d lived in an asylum where they didn’t take photographs.

  My great-grandfather Hugh Wasson, the boy who’d run away from his home in Northern Ireland to take a boat to Australia at the age of thirteen, sent his beautiful, troublesome wife Ada-Louise, away to an asylum soon after his two daughters had started school. She wasn’t mad – she had epilepsy. Grand mal seizures. And she was wilful. Medical experts thought an institution was the best place for her. Epileptics were considered loose, untrustworthy and maniacal in Australia at that time. In 1901 the country’s most eminent epileptic specialist had decided to gather all of Australia’s epileptic women together in an asylum at Ballarat, where they could look after each other and not breed or infect others. One third of those women died in the first seventeen years of the experiment.12

  Ada-Louise at around twenty

  When my grandmother talked about her mother, she usually described her as dressed in white. She remembered her having a seizure at the school gates wearing a white dress. A male stranger had lifted her unconscious body up in his arms and carried her home, daughters in tow, clutching schoolbooks. My grandmother remembered her mother disappearing to Ballarat, then brief visits to the grand asylum building. She remembered the upset and shame, the fear and grief of it all. She remembered seeing her mother in a white straitjacket in a padded cell.

  ‘My mother was wilful,’ my grandmother would say when I was ten or so and the two of us were cutting those crosses together into the stalks of Brussels sprouts in her kitchen. Not just ill, but wilful. If there were other Brethren women around the kitchen table they’d nod when my grandmother told that story. Wilful women need locking up. Wilful women have husbands who sign papers, doctors who prescribe lobotomies and ECT. They get sent away and they don’t return for forty years.

  You didn’t want anyone to be using the word wilful about you.

  Rage was in my father’s blood too, but although he wrote about his father’s temper in his memoir, he did not describe his own. We, his children, grew up under its shadow, the marks of it on the walls and doors. My first memories of my father are of the walking-on-eggshells kind. He was big, he was volatile, and though he was often affectionate and funny, his affection sometimes had a sharp edge.

  We learned to avoid him when he was in certain moods. He’d warn my mother not to set him off. He’d warn us. When something did set him off my mother would shepherd us quickly into the sitting room and lock the door behind her. Then the kicking and shouting would begin.

  When I was three or four years old, I’ve been told, my father came home after a grilling from one of the senior ministering brothers to find me sitting in a corner of the kitchen taking great gasping breaths after a long sobbing spell. He shouted at me to be quiet. This made me start crying harder. All of a sudden he lost control, flew across the room and hit me hard around the head and face. Disgusted at himself, he fled the house.

  My face swelled up black and blue. Within hours I couldn’t open my eyes. My face had to be covered in foundation and talcum powder to mask the bruises. I had to be hidden for a week from the eyes of visitors so that other Brethren wouldn’t see what my father had done.

  It was probably one of the reasons he doted on me later, I was told. He’d never forgiven himself. But I don’t have any memory of the blows. And he never talked to me about it.

  When I told my father’s friend William this story, forty-five years after it happened, his eyes welled up with tears, not just for me but for my father, my mother, and for himself.

  ‘We were under terrible pressure,’ he said. ‘Those were the Jim Taylor Junior years. We were all sleepless, anxious, trapped. We were being watched all the time. We were all living on the edge of a volcano.’

  13

  But I’m jumping ahead. All of that shouting and kicking of doors came later, in the 1960s. My father grew up in the 1940s, when the Brethren were strict, fanatical even, but not yet maniacal. It was my grandfather who was doing the shouting back then. My father was still a child, adding up his E scores in his Bible and hoping no one could see what he was doing.

  My father won the school English prize in 1946 and brought home Arthur Mee’s Book of Everlasting Things, an anthology of extracts from great literary works. He was seven. My grandfather must have been proud of the award but wary of the prize. Only certain books were allowed in Brethren homes. He examined the heavy, expensively bound volume, and pronounced it acceptable. ‘This was a serious mistake,’ my father recalled. ‘I knew there was a world outside the Brethren, but I’d seen nothing like this. The Brethren line was that literature, sculpture, painting, and secular music – even human imagination itself – were all mischievous, frivolous, and seductive distractions from the scriptures. When Paul came to Athens and saw all the ancient beauty there he dismissed it as “idolatrous … the graven forms of man’s art and imagination”. The only important thing to God, we were told, was your reborn self in the Spirit.’

  To my father’s surprise, sin, repentance and being born again weren’t mentioned in the Book of Everlasting Things. ‘A gap began to open up in the wall that had been built between me and “the world”,’ he wrote. ‘I slipped through it.’

  My grandparents, seeing my father’s pleasure in the book, bought him Mee’s companion volumes for subsequent birthdays: One Thousand Famous Things and One Thousand Beautiful Things. They ordered a set of the Children’s Encyclopaedia. When the crate containing the volumes arrived, my grandfather summoned the family to watch as he selected the D volume and with a razor blade cut out the entry for Charles Darwin, then threw the excised pages in the fire. Darwin’s ideas, he told them, were wrong and
wicked and against scripture.

  I have my father’s copies of Mee’s books on my bookshelves. They smell musty and the pages have yellowed. The Book of Everlasting Things, 352 pages long, contains extracts from great literature and art. The American Declaration of Independence sits next to Matthew Arnold, Henry Vaughan next to George Eliot. Later in the book there’s the best part of The Ancient Mariner, twelve pages of In Memoriam, nine pages of Samson Agonistes, Gray’s ‘Elegy’, five pages each of Milton’s Areopagitica and Paradise Lost, Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ and Adonaïs – ‘in which I almost drowned’, my father wrote – a long passage from Robinson Crusoe, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, whole speeches by Demosthenes and Pericles, eight pages from The Odyssey, Cicero’s ‘Essay on Old Age’, Plato’s account of the death of Socrates, Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, eleven of Shakespeare’s sonnets and several passages from his plays.

  What was my Brethren grandfather thinking in allowing such worldly books into the house? My father, seven years old, was enthralled. He memorised the Shakespeare speeches, rehearsing them in his bedroom when his parents were out – Julius Caesar’s ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all’, Twelfth Night’s ‘Make me a willow cabin at your gate’, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ from Macbeth, and ‘Come, let’s away to prison’ from King Lear. He fell in love with Emily Brontë, he told me, his eyes full of tears. He took his magnifying glass to the pictures in the Book of Everlasting Things – paintings by Raphael, Holbein, Giovanni Bellini, Velázquez and Rembrandt, and photographs of ancient sculptures from Egypt, Greece and Rome.

  ‘The words of remarkable men and women,’ he wrote, ‘began to swarm inside my head. Other feelings, other judgements, other passionate beliefs, a different seriousness and an unfamiliar gaiety opened up to me as I read.’ He then quoted the lines from Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, as he would do again many years later to me during our car journeys, often weeping: ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken’.