Not My Idea of Heaven

Chapter 39 - My Brother and Tom

Chapter 40 - Testing Times

Chapter 41 - Sister and Brother

Chapter 42 - Off the Peg

Chapter 43 - Don’t Turn Your Back on Me

Chapter 44 - Full Circle

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

The world, as we understand it, exists in our minds. The problem is, we all think differently. To some people, the world I grew up in is perfectly normal. To them, it is right, and the way the rest of the people in the world live is wrong.

How you see it depends on which side of the fence you are standing.

I was born on the wrong side of the fence. This book is about my journey from one side to the other, and how I had to leave my family behind.

Although this is a true account of my life, I have changed the names of those involved to respect their privacy as much as possible.

Chapter One

How Ever Did it Come to This?

My weight halved in a matter of months. The winter dragged by while I crouched against the radiator. I pressed my back into its heat until my skin burned. I sipped continuously from a mug of black coffee, willing the inky liquid to warm my bony body. Mum knelt in front of me, pleading, ‘Please eat.’ At last, desperate, she pushed crumbs of food into my mouth. I sealed my lips and turned my head away. Then the hunger came. I ate until I could eat no more. My belly, full of food, stretched and swelled, and I became consumed by rage. I used my fists to thump my face and jaw bone. So I sat on my hands while Mum fed me.

I became the prisoner of my mind. I listened carefully to its wild rants and became obedient to its command of weight loss. I purged my body of the pollutant, picking at my teeth to remove every last trace of food. But I wanted to be well, to be normal. How ever did it come to this?

Chapter Two

Welcome to My World

I sat in the Welfare office on the hard plastic chair behind the door. The windowless room was hot and I felt my sweaty legs sticking to the seat. The Asian boys messed around in the corner, scuffling with each other. I kept my head down and pretended to read my book. I didn’t want anyone talking to me. It was embarrassing having to be there.

Through the open door I could hear the sound of my friends singing hymns in assembly. They were Christian hymns but I didn’t recognize any of the tunes or the words. I just wanted to be with the other children, but neither their prayers nor their songs were approved by God. In my head I sang the words to a hymn that I knew would be.

Jesus bids us shine,With a pure, clear light,Like a little candle,Burning in the nightIn this world of darkness,

So let us shine –

You in your small corner,And I in mine.

It comforted me. On rare occasions Mum would sit at the piano and ask me what songs I wanted her to play. I’d always pick ‘Jesus Bids Us Shine’ and ‘Away in a Manger’. I stood by her elbow while she banged away at the keys and we sang together.

When the assembly was over, the Welfare lady sent us back to our classrooms to join in with the lessons. I could forget that I was different for a while, until the time for lunch came around. It was wrong to eat or drink with sinners. So I ate mine at home.

When I was old enough to read I was given a Bible. Not just any old bible: this one had my initials on the front, embossed in gold lettering. ‘L.R.M.’ The leather cover smelled expensive, not like the books Mum picked up from charity shops. This one was special.

I’d seen bibles at school, but I knew this one was different. On the first page was the name J. N. Darby. ‘What does “Translated by …” mean?’ I asked Mum.

She explained that Mr Darby was a very important man, because he had discovered the true meaning hidden in the Bible. ‘The recovery of the truth,’ she called it.

His picture stood on a shelf in our house, and had pride of place in every other home belonging to members of the Fellowship. People like us. There were other pictures too, which were also black-and-white shots of sober-looking men. These were the ‘Elect Vessels’, the men of God, chosen by Him to lead us.

We were the disciples. Those who had not discovered our truth were the ‘worldly people’.

I knew it was wrong to mix with these people, who believed in devilish things and had Satan in their hearts, but they were all around us. We lived among them, but not with them. As my Bible said, ‘Be in the world, but not of the world.’

We were special.

Special or not, I lived in a normal suburban street called Albion Avenue, lined by trees with rows of similar-looking semi-detached houses on either side. These were not Fellowship homes, they were full of worldly people, but my family somehow slotted in among them.

We were friendly enough to our neighbours. Mr and Mrs Harvey, the old couple next door, gave me and my sister Samantha chocolate treats and Mum chatted to them in the street, but our friendship ended on the doorstep.

The front garden of our house, number thirty-seven, was perhaps was a little more orderly than some of the others on the street. Mum loved gardening and took time creating neat rows of roses and irises. Other than a particularly tidy front garden there was not much to differentiate my house from any other. It all looked perfectly normal. But there was one small thing.

‘My dad says your house hasn’t got a TV aerial, so that means you haven’t got a telly,’ a boy living in my street blurted out one day.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘we don’t.’ I felt proud, he looked shocked.

‘Why not?’

I was blunt. ‘Because it’s my religion.’

‘What do you do, if you don’t watch telly?’

‘Oh, we play games,’ I said, and began the long list of exciting adventures that I got up to behind the door that was closed to all except the Fellowship.

‘I play shops and offices and …’ I could see by his face that he was becoming envious of my tremendous life. I breathed a sigh of relief; he didn’t think I was weird.

What I really did was play a lot on my own, creating an imaginary world from whatever was around me. I loved sneaking into the garage, pushing my way past the bikes and all the clutter, to find the door into the old coal cupboard where Mum kept her jam-making equipment. The shelves were stacked with jars, which I filled with potpourri and perfume, created using sticks to mash the flower petals I’d pinched from my mum’s rose garden.

My dad’s office was a wooden shed in the garden in which he designed aeroplane gearboxes for Rolls-Royce. His drawing board stood against the back wall, opposite the door. He’d roll out a huge sheet of drafting paper, tearing off lengths of masking tape to secure its corners, and begin to align his array of pencils on the parallel rule. I was fascinated with the meticulous detail in his drawings and loved watching them grow as I stood by his side, fiddling with the stationery in his desk drawer.

When Dad was out at work, I turned his office into a shop, opening the window to serve the customers. Tucked under a desk was a box of my sister’s Cindy dolls, which I’d pull out and play with on the floor. As long as I didn’t touch Dad’s drawings, I was welcome to play in there any time I liked.

Being a design engineer, Dad could turn his hand to most practical tasks. A lot of the time he spent fixing the car, but he still managed to build a go-kart for me. If he was too busy, he was more than happy to provide us with some scraps of timber from the garage, and let us make our own entertainment. Armed with some of Dad’s wood and a length of rope, my best friend Natalie and I made a crude swing, hung from a puny branch of a tree on our street. All we could do was swing one way and then the other. It was great, until the rope wore thin and snapped, and I landed on my bum.

Mum was always busy, too. She grew most of her own fruit and vegetables at the bottom of the back garden, freezing beans, and other crops, to feed us over winter. Every summer, the jam-making equipment would get dragged out of my favourite cupboard and Mum would set to work, preparing jar after jar of strawberry conserve, using the fruit we brought home from the pick-your-own farm.