Not My Idea of Heaven

One of the neighbours, Kathy, had rung my mum to say that her daughter was causing trouble.

Game over.

Legitimate revenge was never far away, though. For most people Sunday is a day of rest. But for Jim. Poor old Jim! That was the day that the Fellowship descended on Albion Avenue. Cars casually pulled up onto the kerb outside his bungalow and helplessly he looked on while a procession of men, accompanied by their long-skirted wives, ambled across the road and into our house, from where I watched Jim with a warm glow of satisfaction. Even he could not defend himself against us.

A new rule had come in that said all Fellowship families should, if possible, move to a house that was not joined to any other. But Mum and Dad could not afford to move, so we stayed where we were. Sometimes I thanked my lucky stars that I lived in a semi-detached house.

One evening a sound snaked its way through the walls of our neighbour Kathy’s house and into our front room, where I was sitting with Mum and Dad.

Thump-thump-thump-chukka-chukka.

My ears pricked up, excitedly. Mum carried on with her knitting, but Dad looked up from his paper towards the wall and tutted.

Thump-thump-thump-chukka-chukka.

I quickly got up and went into the kitchen. I knew what to do. I took a glass from the cupboard and crept into the dining room, where no one could see what I was doing, then pressed the container up against the wall. There it was again, but clearer now.

Thump-thump-thump-chukka-chukka.

For a brief moment I let the forbidden music pass through the crude amplifier into my ear and felt good. Then I pulled away.

Returning to the front room to do what I thought was right. I took down the horn that hung from a corner of a shelf.

Thooooooot! Thooooooot!

I blew as hard as I could.

Thooooooot! Thooooooot!

I had let the Devil into my soul and now I had to drown him out. After a minute or two, Mum and Dad expressed their objection to my awful racket.

But I had done it. I had resisted the temptation of evil and felt proud.

Satan was not coming into our house.

Perhaps the Fellowship was right to be cautious about living at such close proximity to the Devil.

Chapter Nine

Bound by the Rules

We all took it in turns to have Fellowship members to our homes on Sundays for a meal. Sometimes we had to have them after the morning meetings for the ‘Break’. I really liked the ‘Breaks’. Sausage rolls, crisps and sandwiches would come out on trays, like a kind of buffet. The other kids and I would run around stuffing food in our mouths as we played. I especially liked the evening meal. If it was Mum’s turn we would arrive home from the last meeting of the day and open the front door to the smell of meat and potatoes roasting in the oven that Mum had left on using the timer. Then it was a rush to get the table laid for ten or twelve visitors.

Mum used the best cutlery. It lived in a wooden canteen that Mum and Dad had received as a wedding present in the 1960s. I loved to open the lid and look at the dull shine of the stainless steel. I hoped that one day Mum would give it to me so that I could feel proud when I entertained the Fellowship.

My place would be set at a little trolley on wheels. If I was lucky, the visitors would have kids, and we would mess around the whole evening while the adults talked endlessly. More often than not, I ended up lying across Mum’s knee, exhausted. I’d drift off to sleep in that position, feeling secure with the drone of voices washing over me.

Mum and Dad groaned when we were told it was our turn to go to the Walkers’ house for dinner and we went with a feeling of dread. Once, a Fellowship member visiting the Walkers for lunch had found a hair in his cup of tea. This news had spread like wildfire through the Fellowship and now no one wanted to go to their house. It did not help that all the family had greasy-looking black hair – it wasn’t even as if the hair in the cup of tea would be clean!

So when I heard that Colin Walker was coming to live with us I was mortified.

This was my first experience of Fellowship members being ‘shut up’.

I had heard that it was a terrible thing, but I couldn’t see why. If it meant that Fellowship members came to stay at our house, well that was exciting to me. Victor’s bed was replaced with bunk beds, which were squeezed into his tiny room. Our house was buzzing with anticipation. We’d never had anyone to stay before. Colin arrived with one suitcase and was grinning madly. To me, a four-year-old, he looked like a huge gangly stick insect, with the Walker mop of black greasy hair on top. I soon grew to love having Colin around and forgot to check for greasy black hairs in our tea cups. From then on, my games became even more adventurous. I had two brothers to tease.

Colin had an obsession with lawn mowers and would bring them home to dismantle in the back garden. Mum was furious about it. The garden was her territory, and here he was, spilling oil and leaving rusty engines all over the lawn. He’d work away out there for hours, but we never really knew what he was doing. The lawn mowers never seemed to work.

The strange thing was that Colin’s mum, dad and sister never came to visit. And they lived only a few streets away. When I asked Mum why no one came to see Colin she explained the big secret. She told me that his sister, Lois, had ‘given in to temptation’. I was too young to be told what she’d done, but I could tell it was a serious matter.

Colin’s family stopped coming to the meetings and no one in the Fellowship saw them. Colin was old enough to leave home, and free of sin, so he was encouraged to go to a Fellowship household that hadn’t been touched by the Devil.

Then, after a few months, as suddenly as he had arrived, Colin moved out and everything returned to normal. Apparently, Lois had left home, taking her sins with her.

I never thought anything like this would happen to us.

After Colin left, we went back to visiting the Walkers every so often for dinner, but Lois was never mentioned again.

I was just glad that my own sisters were still around.

Being so much older, Alice was almost motherly towards me and treated me like a baby doll. One day she said she was going shopping in the town and asked if I wanted anything. I said, immediately, ‘The star-shaped transforming figure.’ I had seen it on the toy pages of the Argos catalogue. It was a solid plastic device in light lilac and I thought it would change my life. I waited impatiently for her to come home and almost wet myself with excitement. At last she appeared and, with a flourish, produced a package for me. My heart sank. Where was the cardboard box? What she handed to me was a soft tissue-wrapped parcel, which I opened. Out fell a pair of suede, fake-fur-lined mittens. Oh, the disappointment!

Shortly after the mitten incident Alice married her childhood sweetheart, Mike Edmonds. She left the house crying her eyes out. What was all the fuss? I wondered. She was only moving round the corner! She drove off with her new husband in his car, dragging the tin cans behind it that had been tied on by my brother and his friends. White clouds of shaving foam drifted into the air, ruining the carefully sprayed message ‘Good Luck!’ It was a time of great celebration and joy in our house.

Such joy.

It’s hard to remember when I first noticed a change in our house. Certainly for the first few weeks after Alice left I was still reeling with excitement. Now I had to share a room with only one sister and had a new house to visit. Alice seemed a little reluctant to let me come and mess up her nice new house, but it was arranged that I would have breakfast with her, one Sunday morning, after the Supper. I couldn’t wait!

Well I was in for a shock. At home we ate our cereal first, then hot stuff, such as baked beans on toast, or fishcakes. I sat down at Alice’s table and waited for my breakfast to arrive. She wasted time asking me how everyone was at home and if I was missing her. I just wished she’d hurry up; I was starving. Finally she brought it out and I grabbed my spoon in readiness.

What!

Where was my cereal? In front of me was a plate. Not a bowl, but a plate! I looked at the crisp slice of toast dripping with butter and honey.

It wasn’t right at all, but I was so tempted. Pushing my confusion aside I stuffed the warm food in my mouth. Mmmm. Crisp on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside. Just how I liked it.

Alice may not do things the same way as Mum, but she knew how to make good toast!

I wish I hadn’t cared so much about that toast and had told her that I missed her. But I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see her again for a very long time.

As a six-year-old, I wasn’t told what was going on. I just had a sense that things were not quite right in our house. What happened was discussed by a committee of male priests behind closed doors. But what I can say is this.

Radio and recorded music, which might expose us to worldly influences, were banned, so the first job my dad did when he bought a car was take out the radio-cassette player and store it away in a drawer, to put back in if he ever sold the vehicle. My brother was not like my dad. He bought a Fiat Strada when he was eighteen and didn’t remove the radio. He just wanted to do what other teenagers did. Someone in the Fellowship noticed and accusations of sinful behaviour were made. Mum looked under Victor’s bed, found some music cassettes and threw them out.

If only that had been the end of it, but it wasn’t. There were further accusations, including something about a deliberate car crash outside a meeting room, and a trip to the cinema. I don’t know what was true and what was not, but it didn’t really matter. Mum and Dad thought that the priests were just looking for a reason to punish them, and Victor was the scapegoat. Mum and Dad were considered troublemakers themselves, speaking up about things they thought were corrupt. It didn’t pay to question those in charge.

At the last meeting I ever went to, I stood outside in the car park with my friend Stelly – two little girls in their best dresses and matching headscarves among the hundred or so cars. We did not rush about as we usually did. I looked at her. She was perfect: a good Fellowship girl.

‘It’s going to happen, isn’t it?’ I asked.