Not My Idea of Heaven

‘Lindsey, you are not going to be “shut up”,’ she replied. ‘You’re just not.’

She sounded so sure.

I never saw her again.

‘Bastards!’ Samantha shouted. We were supposed to be in bed but the pair of us were sitting at the top of the stairs, leaning forward, craning our necks to peek down through the gaps in the banisters and get a good look into the hallway. Her profanity must have been heard, but no one looked up.

We watched two men being ushered into our front room. Through the open door we saw Mum and Victor rise to greet them, then Dad shut the door firmly behind them. There was nothing more to see, so Samantha and I returned to our bedroom. Unusually for me I asked if I could get into her bed. She sounded glad that I’d asked. I got in under her bedcovers and snuggled up against her warm, soft body.

I felt so scared. I had a terrible feeling inside.

Mum knitted cardigans, booties, and bonnets in readiness for the birth of Alice’s first baby. I watched her place them side by side on her bed and I admired the soft white woollen garments. She wrapped them in tissue paper and carefully packed them away in a shoe box. This was a symbol of hope: we would be returning to our rightful place in Fellowship any day now, and the present was ready for that day. We waited for the call to come.

On Monday morning I got up and went to school as usual. I did my school work and played with all my friends. When I got home the house seemed changed in some way. Mum wasn’t rushing around trying to get the dinner on the table. When Dad burst through the door he wasn’t complaining about the terrible traffic on the M25. We ate our dinner calmly. And Dad did not leave the house.

The day after, it was the same. The phone didn’t ring. Again, we ate our dinner calmly. And again Dad did not leave the house.

Days turned into weeks and weeks into months.

‘Why is this happening to us?’ Mum asked no one in particular, over and over again. We were now ‘shut up’, so there was no one to answer her.

Victor left home. He handed me and Samantha £200 each. It seemed as if he was going away for ever. When Lois left her family they were let back into the Fellowship. But this didn’t happen to us.

We didn’t know when Victor was coming back, so Mum said I could have his room. Now I had one all to myself ! Mum stripped off the hideous classic-cars wallpaper and put up something more to my taste – something girly. I painted pictures of flowers on the chest of drawers and hung my ‘Pears Soap’ poster on the wall. It didn’t take me long to settle in!

Alice was still our family and we loved her dearly. But now she was married she had her own household – one that was free from sin.

There was no argument. No fuss. No one made anyone do what they did. Barbed-wire fences and padlocked gates were not put up around our home. And there was always the phone. But that was the end of our relationship with Alice. In fact, it was the end of our relationship with everyone in the Fellowship. No telephone calls, no Sunday dinner with other families. No meetings. It was just the way things were done. These were the rules and the rules were everything. Mum and Dad just accepted them.

And so did I – for a while.

It took me three long years, a third of my life, to work up the courage to make contact with Alice again.

One sunny afternoon, I came home from school to an empty house. Mum worked now. We needed the money and she needed the company of other adults. She had a job at the local hospital, working in medical records, and that was how she’d found out about the birth of Alice’s first baby.

No one told us. It was as if we no longer existed.

The news of the baby started me thinking about what Alice’s life might be like. I fantasized about finding her. She’d give me a big cuddle and say it was all over. God had sorted it out and we were welcomed back.

In the empty house, I picked up the phone. My heart was thumping. I had found her number in the directory a few days before and already had it scribbled down on a scrap of paper, hidden at the back of a drawer. A guilty secret.

I dialled the number.

Brrr-brrr, brrr-brrr, it purred.

I almost put the phone down. What was I doing? I began to feel God’s eyes looking directly at me.

‘Hello?’ a woman’s voice said. It was her, my sister.

‘Hello,’ I replied. ‘It’s me.’

‘Who?’

‘Me, Lindsey.’

There was a moment of silence. ‘Do you want to speak to the priests?’

The police? I thought. Does she want me to speak to the police? I’d made a big mistake. I put the phone down and never told anyone about what I’d done. I’d sinned. That night I prayed for forgiveness.

I’d never knowingly heard the word ‘priests’ before. I had no idea what it meant. When I did hear it again, I froze. All of a sudden I really wanted to know what a priest was.

Victor had also become a distant figure. It was just the four of us now, living in our little bubble, between worlds.

The waiting brought out the nervousness in Dad. He didn’t rush about, but he’d twitch annoyingly, a lot of the time. He’d often pace about, fingers clenched together behind his back. His long legs and straight back took his broad, shiny, bald head somewhere over six feet. From up there, he’d loom over Mum, hoping to grab a rare cuddle.

Mum wasn’t always very affectionate, but her face was built for smiling and that helped her get along with the worldly people she worked with. She could chat away for hours with anyone, given the chance. Dad was friendly, too, but his unrest made it harder for him to let go. He was happier discussing practical matters, like the traffic and work. He was an authority on organization, which suited his clear, strong voice. Mum spoke well, too, but, like both Victor’s and mine, her north London accent became more apparent when she was chatting excitedly.

Samantha was a mixture of the two: soft and cuddly like Mum, but tall like Dad, with a large broad face. When she grinned, it was so complete that her eyes would almost disappear. She’d look at people secretly without turning her head, taking everything in from the corner of her eye.

When it became clear to the Fellowship that Mum and Dad were not going to repent for Victor’s sins they were ‘withdrawn from’. This is the ultimate rejection by the Fellowship, from which there is no return. Mum and Dad had taken Victor’s sins upon themselves by refusing to believe that he had done anything wrong.

The Fellowship may have abandoned us but there was no way that Mum and Dad were going to abandon the values of the Fellowship.

Unlike other members that we knew who were ‘withdrawn from’, we did not rush out to buy a television or a radio. Mum and Samantha did not throw their headscarves away. I still did not eat with the other children at school. In many ways nothing had changed.

Chapter Ten

After Being Shut Up

Suddenly, we found that we had acres of time to fill. The meetings had provided a rigid structure to our lives and now the time we had spent preparing for, travelling to and being at them was empty. Obviously, we had all lost our friends and family members who were still in the Fellowship, but I imagine it hit Mum and Dad the hardest. For Mum it must have seemed like a recurring nightmare first experienced in 1970, when she had bravely made the choice to stay with dad in the Fellowship, while the rest of her family had given up following the Fellowship leader, the ‘Elect Vessel’.

He had taken over leading the Fellowship in the 1950s, and brought in most of the strict rules that forced us to live separately from the rest of the worldly people. I suppose Mum’s family would have reluctantly stayed true to him as well, if he hadn’t made a public spectacle of himself, fraternizing with women, swearing and drinking heavily at meetings and conferences.

Dad’s family supported him, as did most of the local Fellowship, but Mum’s parents had had enough of ‘waiting for the Lord to act’. For Mum it was a choice between family and husband. Once she’d made the choice, that was it. She even referred to her parents and brothers as the Open Fellowship, which was the worst thing she could think of saying about them. They were living a life that was as closed off from the world as Mum and Dad, but saying that they were Open was her way of calling them worldly.

The Lord did act in 1970, and the Elect Leader died, but it was too late. The damage was done, and the family split.

I was just a child of seven when we were ‘shut up’, so they kept their feelings from me. I sensed tension in the house, and heard muffled voices behind closed doors that I pressed my ear to. I wanted to know what was going on, but the words that Mum and Dad kept reiterating were ‘God is punishing us for some reason.’ The ‘reason’ was a mystery, but I was growing up with Mum’s mantra ringing in my ears: ‘Let the Lord into your heart and have faith.’ The punishment was exclusion from the Fellowship, the place they still yearned to be. They questioned each other over and over again: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Then they comforted themselves with the fact that it was God’s will. With prayer, they believed, the answer would show itself to them.

They were so wrapped up in their troubles that they didn’t worry too much about me after that, and I took advantage of this lack of supervision to further my friendships with my worldly mates. I went to their houses, watched television and played computer games.

One day after school I stopped off at my friend Leigh’s house. Leigh lived next door to a boy called Darrell. I went with her hoping for a glimpse of the ginger-haired boy, on whom I had developed a hopeless crush. But, despite my best efforts to linger outside her house for as long as possible, I didn’t see him.

I knew that in her kitchen there was a cupboard full of packets of crisps and I was hoping that she would offer me one. She didn’t. Instead, her mum offered me a pear, which I took. I wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t ripe and I almost spat it out, but, not liking to be rude, I crunched my way through the whole damned thing. I was, however, appeased when we were offered the crisps, which we took upstairs with us. Her bedroom was very different from mine. Whereas mine was tidy and quite bare, except for a toy box and book shelves, hers was messy, with clothes all over the floor. She too had a dressing table, but hers was covered with makeup, music cassettes and a stereo player. On her walls were posters of the boy band Bros. I watched her as she kissed those twin brothers on the lips, declaring that she loved them. We were both rotund little girls, but, rather than wear skirts with elasticized-waistbands and baggy T-shirts as I did, she wore short denim skirts and jeans.

Leigh put a tape in the cassette player and she danced around the room, grabbing a lipstick on the way past her dressing table, which she daubed across her mouth while on the move. You may wonder if I was envious of this girl who seemed to have all the things I didn’t. But I was not. I observed her and her posters, her music and her makeup, and I felt slightly repulsed by her. She looked so gaudy, and I couldn’t think of anything worse than standing out like that. I actually felt a bit sorry for her.

My sister’s worldly friend, Natalie, lived five houses down from us. Samantha hung around in the street with her, while I skirted around them on Samantha’s old shopper bicycle. I knew that it would be passed on to me when Samantha grew out of it, so I practised riding it. It was quite a move up from my little bike with stabilizers that Dad had picked up second-hand. Victor had spray-painted this bike red and blue for me.