Call Me Evil, Let Me Go: A mother’s struggle to save her children from a brutal religious cult

Call Me Evil, Let Me Go: A mother’s struggle to save her children from a brutal religious cult
Sarah Jones

Sarah had lived in fear for over a decade. Humiliated, ostracised and brainwashed, her spirit had been crushed. But as the realisation of what she was subjecting her children to began to sink in, she found new strength and determination – the strength to try to escape the world that had consumed her for so long.Sarah was never a troublesome child. She smoked and drank a bit when she was underage, and shoplifted once, but she was generally well-behaved and didn’t mean to upset her mum and dad. But Sarah’s parents had seen first hand what could happen when a teenager went off the rails. Scared the same would happen to Sarah, they sent her away, many miles from home, to a church school that would put a stop to her bad behaviour.They had no idea they were sending Sarah to a place where she would be forced into obedience – a place that sanctioned force-feeding and beating in order to smash a child’s will. They had no idea she would end up marrying a boy from the cult, and cutting the rest of her family out of her life. Or that she would begin to treat her own children in the same way – believing there was no other option, and that everyone in the outside world was evil.But she did. And the day they sent Sarah away to the little church school miles from home was the last time they saw their real daughter for over a decade. Until one day when Sarah found the courage to fight back, the strength to protect her children and bravely venture into the world she believed was full of evil.This is Sarah’s story – the shocking but ultimately inspiring true story of her struggle to save her children from the suffering she was forced to endure.

Call Me Evil, Let Me Go

A Mother’s Struggle to Save Her Children from a Brutal Religious Cult

Sarah Jones

To all my beautiful children and to all the broken

lives that cults have left in their wake

Contents

Chapter 1

Shocking Revelations

Chapter 2

My Family and I

Chapter 3

My Life Is Turned Upside Down

Chapter 4

Handed Over to Tadford

Chapter 5

All Work and No Play

Chapter 6

Teenage Marriage

Chapter 7

Traumas of a Young Mother

Chapter 8

The Church Demands

Chapter 9

My Eyes Are Opened

Chapter 10

Escape

Chapter 11

Starting Again

Chapter 12

A Roller-coaster Ride

Chapter 13

On Trial

Chapter 14

A Family Reunited

Chapter 15

Looking Back

Afterword

Useful Contacts

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Shocking Revelations

The phone rang just as I started cooking spaghetti bolognese for the children’s tea. It was the junior-school head. Even though she knew me well her voice sounded harsh, cold, and formal and my heart immediately started pounding. I could sense that I was in for a telling-off. Again. Without any preamble she said that my son Paul had been very naughty at school that afternoon. He had been messing around with some other boys after football, throwing the caked mud that had collected on their boots everywhere and, worst of all, he had even thrown a piece into another boy’s face, cutting him slightly and making him cry. She told me I had to ‘deal with him’ at home.

I thought her formality was a bit over the top and asked if there had been any teachers in the changing room while this was going on. She admitted there hadn’t been, and I thought to myself that it wasn’t too much to worry about and that boys will be boys. Even so, I was gripped with tension. I knew only too well that being told to ‘deal with him’ was an unspoken order to smack Paul. He, along with his sister Rebecca and his brothers Luke and Daniel, went to Tadford School, a small establishment that belonged to Tadford Charismatic Church in the south of England.

The Charismatic movement is not a church in itself, but includes many different churches. Its members believe that faith must be deeply felt rather than just experienced through ritual. Tadford was under the overall control of its founder and pastor, Ian Black, and was unlike any other church. He was a controversial, powerful, supremely confident man who regularly preached that it was important to break a child’s will early and believed in corporal punishment.

I had grown used to being told what to do by the Church leaders, and especially Ian Black, ever since my parents had placed me in their care years earlier, when I was in my mid-teens. I’d been desperate not to be uprooted from my family home in a small market town in the Pennines, to board at Tadford, as it was far too far away from family and friends, but my well-meaning parents, particularly my mother Pamela, were worried that what they saw as my increasingly rebellious teenage behaviour meant I was on a slippery downward path. They believed that a school with strict religious guidelines, firm discipline and an inflexible routine would do me good.

Although my feisty spirit had largely been squashed over the years, it had never quite been extinguished and I had a reputation for not always toeing the line. But the phone call on that cold November evening shook me to the core and I was anxious to get away. ‘OK, I’ll deal with it’, I said, then put down the phone.