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

I knew the head was right, in that Paul had been naughty, but I thought it was just the sort of silly thing a boy of his age might do, especially when no teacher was present. I also wondered why I hadn’t been told about it when I collected Paul from school. I glanced at my watch. It was just after 5 p.m. I knew I had better sort Paul out before my husband Peter came home from work as he was likely to be far tougher on Paul than I would be.

I called Paul. ‘Will you come into Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom, please,’ I said, trying not to let my anxiety show in my voice. ‘I want to speak to you.’ I didn’t want to punish him in front of his siblings.

Paul was struggling with his homework in the bedroom he had to share with Rebecca. He had dysgraphia, a writing disorder, and the help the school had given him had, six months earlier, suddenly been withdrawn without warning or explanation, and as a result he was finding schoolwork much harder.

I told him about the phone call, and he admitted that he, along with some of his friends, had been silly. It wasn’t, he insisted, just his fault. I listened carefully to his explanation and told him he had been naughty. I then pulled down his trousers and underpants and gave him two quick smacks with my hand on his bare bottom. After that I cuddled him tightly, pleased that he didn’t cry. I hated smacking him, but I knew that if I didn’t Peter would and it would be far worse.

As all four children ate their supper Paul didn’t seem at all concerned about being smacked. No more was said until a couple of hours later when Peter arrived home from a nearby town, where he was working as a fitness coach. Peter and I were not getting on well. We had married when I was only 18 and very naive. He was several years older than me and, if possible, even more innocent, but the Church encouraged its young members to marry early, so we did what was expected of us. I always felt suspicious that ours was an arranged match, but I had genuinely come to love Peter. I also knew I was lucky to have a husband at all, because you could only marry within the Church and there weren’t always enough young men to go round.

Sadly our marriage had recently become little more than an empty shell. Peter seemed to be permanently in a bad temper and was hardly at home, choosing instead to spend any spare time – when he wasn’t working late at the fitness centre – helping out in the Church. Soon after he got back from work I told him what had happened at school, and made a point of adding that I had dealt with Paul and smacked him. Peter ignored my comments, went straight to find Paul and took him into our bedroom, grabbing as he did so a squash racquet that was lying by the door. He then smacked Paul’s bare bottom several times with it.

I was mortified. Paul was our first child, but still our baby. He needed our protection, not our anger. When it was over he went straight back to the bedroom he shared with Rebecca without saying a word. He stayed there for the rest of the evening, and wouldn’t speak to me when I tucked him up for the night. Paul and I had always been close and his silence was like a dagger in my heart. He might have been brave enough not to cry, but I wasn’t. I wept for him. I thought it was totally wrong to hit him like that, and couldn’t bear the thought of his pain, but I knew from experience it was pointless to say anything to Peter, let alone criticize him. If I protested he was likely to fly into a rage. But I hated myself for being so weak.

I knew if I confronted Peter he’d also tell Ian Black, who ran the Church with a rod of iron, what had happened, and he would certainly haul me into his grand office and go through his usual emotional battering. This included telling me in very strong language that I was rebellious, or worse. Although he was a religious leader he didn’t mind his language, and it seemed to me that he enjoyed trying to undermine me.

Paul was still very subdued the next day, a Friday, but went to school without any fuss. When I collected him in the afternoon he told me, with no apparent emotion, that he had been ‘whacked’ – beaten with a shoe that was kept in the classroom and used to hit children if they disobeyed one of the school’s many rules. I was furious that he had been beaten without my knowledge or agreement. It meant that my poor little boy had been punished not once, not twice, but three times for the same, not very serious, offence.

I was cross that none of the teachers told me what had happened when I was picking Paul up, but shortly after we got home, the phone rang. It was Patricia, one of his teachers, who told me officially that he had been smacked. I was so angry I gave her short shrift. I said that I had been specifically told by the head to deal with Paul’s punishment at home and that, contrary to what was the school’s normal procedure, I hadn’t been told in advance that he would be hit, nor had I given anyone permission to do so. She didn’t say much and the conversation was quickly over.

I felt desperately sorry for Paul. He seemed withdrawn and uncommunicative, so I gave him lots of extra attention. When Peter came home that evening I told him how annoyed I was that the school had disciplined him after clearly saying they would leave it to me. He barely reacted. His uncle and aunt, who had brought him up after his parents had been killed in a boating accident, were founder members of the Church and he believed that anything the Church did was automatically right whereas any opinion I voiced against it was automatically wrong.

Paul went to school as usual on Saturday. He had lessons in the morning, played football in the afternoon, then had a violin lesson and choir practice. On Sunday morning and evening he came with the rest of the family to church. It was an utterly miserable weekend. Paul barely spoke a word the whole time. I felt totally distraught that I had let him down. He had been treated so appallingly that I wanted to take him out of the school immediately. But realistically I knew it wasn’t an option. It was compulsory for all members of the Church to send their children to the Church school. Any other course of action was unthinkable.

But as the days passed, Paul’s unfairly harsh punishment weighed increasingly heavily on me and I began to feel that the Church had taken away not just my control over my child but also my parental rights. In addition, I slowly started to realize that it wasn’t just my children they were in control of, but that my own mind, body and emotions were being run by the Church.

I’d never thought about it with such clarity before, but the incident prompted me to wonder how I had accepted as inevitable something as wrong as hitting children. It made me feel terrible. I was very maternal and adored my children, yet I was unable to protect them or even have the support of their father. I was desperate to talk my anxieties through with someone, but didn’t know where to turn. My life, like those of nearly all the Church members, was centred entirely on Tadford Charismatic Church. I was cut off from my family and former friends and had nowhere to go to express my concern or get help.

Tadford actively discouraged members from associating with anyone who wasn’t part of the community. We were repeatedly told that the world outside the Church was a horrendous place and that there were no true Christians except those who came to Tadford, not even Christians who attended other churches. On the rare occasions the idea of leaving the Church fleetingly crossed my mind, I was instantly enveloped by a paralysing fear and put it right out of my thoughts. Over the years, Black had given his congregation many examples of individuals who had left the Church subsequently being struck down by God and I believed to my core that if I left I too would die. So although it was now clear to me that something was wrong with a Church that believed in corporal punishment, I couldn’t take it any further. Instead I tried to immerse myself in making improvements to our new house. I loved creating a nest for my family and, although it didn’t change anything fundamentally, it worked on one level as a diversion.

Several weeks passed and one Tuesday afternoon I decided to go into a nearby town to buy some curtain material for the twins’ new bedroom. It was market day and I took along my friend Megan, another Church member, who was older than me and had kindly offered to make the curtains. I bought some fabric with thin blue, red and white stripes for the twins’ room and another with a design of leaping dolphins for the bathroom. Neither was expensive and I came home feeling very pleased.

The following day I was called into Black’s office. This usually meant trouble and I assumed it was something to do with my work. All adult Church members had to put in many hours of ‘voluntary’ work for the Church. I’d had various jobs and was now recording and editing the pastor’s sermons and his regular sessions of what he called ‘miracle healing’.

I worked while the children were at school, in the evenings after they went to bed, at weekends and when the Church arranged conferences. Not surprisingly, I felt permanently exhausted. As soon as I arrived at Black’s office he told me off about a faulty recording I had produced. Then, to my astonishment, he turned his attention to my recent shopping trip. Although all my four children were of school age, he asked how dare I go off without permission, leaving ‘others’ to look after them. I explained I went to get curtain material for our new home, but he repeated that I had no right to do so without asking first. It was absurd. I had gone in my free time, while the children were at the school, for which we paid fees, and the ‘others’ he referred to were in fact their teachers.

I was often intimidated by Black, but on this occasion I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman and I’m still being treated like the teenage girl I was when I first arrived. I can’t carry on like this.’ Later I found out that Megan didn’t get into trouble for coming with me.

The trouble was, I couldn’t think of a concrete plan to change my situation. I consoled myself with the thought that, largely thanks to my job recording Black’s sermons, at least my eyes were open now in that I was more aware of how the Church operated. His ‘miracle healing’ events regularly took place on a Sunday, when individuals of different ages who were suffering from a range of illnesses, including arthritis and cancer, would come to the Church in the desperate hope that they would be healed. The routine was that, at various points in the two-hour assembly, Black would choose a few of these invalids to talk to. He would use a hand-held microphone to record what he was saying, then ask what was wrong with them. Regardless of the malady, he would tell them almost immediately that they had been cured.

If, for example, they had a problem walking he would firmly take their hand, pull them from their seat, and then half drag them forward and back in front of the congregation at an ever-faster pace until they were almost running, claiming loudly throughout that Jesus had cured them. The mood of these meetings was highly charged and intensely emotional, and the sick, their loved ones and many members of the congregation would almost always weep.

I noticed that Black was careful not to claim that he did the healing himself, but the way he spoke and behaved made it easy to assume that Jesus was using him as the conduit for the ‘miracle’ to take place.

It was my job to record these traumatic sessions, edit them and add any necessary sound effects, and produce a half-hour CD that the Church could sell to the general public. To make sure I encapsulated the essence of the occasion, I had to spend a lot of time studying how Black worked and what he said. As a result I became acutely aware of his techniques and choice of language. His voice was constantly on my computer’s speakers (I did my editing with some software I had bought) and, almost imperceptibly, he gradually lost his hold on me. As he did so I began increasingly to think for myself. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because for so many years I believed Jesus used Black to talk to us and express His wishes. I felt that God Himself was eternally grateful that Black was alive. This gave Black massive power and inhibited a very ordinary person like me from questioning such a man about any area of his life.

Once I developed some distance I watched and listened to him more objectively and became increasingly cynical about his ‘miracle cures’, particularly as I would also often have to interview these sick people after their sessions with him to get some words of testimony from them. This meant I saw for myself that his claims that they were cured weren’t true. Although some managed to walk or run with Black in the heat of the moment, their problems always returned a couple of days later.

Because I had to edit Black’s sermons I became very familiar with his expressions and speech patterns. I listened as he ruthlessly criticized people who weren’t in the Church, dismissed those who were getting old, peppered some sermons with sexual innuendo and regularly made serious allegations, often of a sexual nature, about individuals, most of which I didn’t believe at all. My job was to make the sermons respectable for public consumption. I made sure I deleted his sexual innuendo and slanderous comments. Ironically, spending my formative years in a strict cult had left its moral mark and I didn’t think it was right for any Christian to talk in such a negative way about any individual and it was certainly not how a religious leader should think, let alone behave.

The finished CDs were meant to enhance Black’s reputation and bring in new members. They were also a useful source of income as they were sold in the Church shop or sent out via mail order from the Church catalogue. Bit by bit, my resentment spread to other areas of my life and once I began to question Black’s behaviour I started to resent and reject the Church’s overall control of what I did, said and felt. For example, I couldn’t watch TV soaps because Black described them as evil. Nor was I allowed to listen to secular music, either modern or classical, as Black said it contained evil spirits. The exception was the music of Bach, whom Black described as being a true Christian. Instead, Church members were encouraged to spend their spare time listening to CDs of him preaching.

Peter and I even had to ask permission to go on holiday. Not that we went very often. We were too busy working for the Church, and besides had no spare money. Like all members, we were expected to hand over tithes, which were at least a tenth of our gross salary, to the Church, give additional amounts for ‘special occasions’ and pay hefty school fees. I couldn’t even freely choose what I or my children wore. Respectable women of the Church weren’t allowed to wear trousers, a skirt above the knee, or show even a hint of cleavage, and the children had to be dressed in tweeds and blazers like little adults.

My birthday was approaching and, as happened every year near that time, it was an opportunity to take stock. I felt that in many ways I had grown and matured, but in others I was still being treated like a child. It annoyed me. I didn’t want to be told what I could and couldn’t do and how I should think any more, but working out how to change this was too big a reality for me to contemplate. I just knew I couldn’t carry on in the same way. The main problem was that I had so little experience of making decisions. Most people learn about decision-making gradually as they grow up. But I had been emotionally pummelled into obedience during my most formative years by Black and other senior members of the Church. I had almost no control over my life or my children.

Not that I dared mention what I felt to a soul. I couldn’t confide in Peter, who, when he wasn’t working long hours at his day job, spent his time at the Church, or in a single friend, as anything I said would have gone straight back to Black, and I was terrified of him and the power he had over me. I badly needed to explore my fledgling thoughts. I wanted to find out if anyone else felt the same as I did and, like me, longed to be comforted or reassured. Instead I bottled up everything deep inside me, kept my inner turmoil completely hidden and somehow dealt with it all myself. It was particularly difficult as I’m naturally gregarious, but for the moment to behave differently seemed as difficult as swimming against a tidal wave. Even if you slightly criticized either an ordinary member of the Church or one of the elders, everyone got to hear about it and you could be ostracized. The prospect was too awful to contemplate and I likened it to solitary confinement. I couldn’t risk that as my whole life revolved around the Church. I had barely seen my parents or my sister during my years away and didn’t feel close to them. I had no other adult contacts outside – everything of my pre-Church life had been severed. I had nowhere to go. Nor, I realized when I thought pragmatically about my situation, did I have any money of my own.

It was a huge struggle but I managed to keep my thoughts to myself until one day, about five months after Paul had been beaten, I was on my way to the recording room after I’d taken the children to school, when I bumped into another Church member, Susan. We started talking and she daringly grumbled that she wasn’t allowed to go on a holiday when she wanted to. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘This place is just like a bloody cult.’

I had never heard the Church described like that, and it had never crossed my mind in all the years I had been at Tadford that what I was trapped in, and controlled by, had the characteristics of a cult. I wasn’t even absolutely sure what a cult was. I didn’t say anything to Susan, because my head went into a complete spin and alarm bells began to ring so loudly in my ears I felt I would explode.

When I calmed down a little I remembered that there was a Christian bookshop in town that we weren’t allowed to go to. Black had told us it was evil because it was run by Christians who weren’t members of Tadford. Perhaps, I thought, the answers to the thousand of questions that were flooding my brain could be there. I rushed into the recording room, which was in a small room in the church.

My friend Kath, who had been at Tadford for just over a year, was helping out that day and was already hard at work editing the recording of the recent spring conference. Instead of saying ‘Hello’, I almost barked at her, ‘Pack up. We’re going out.’ We locked the room and when I whispered our destination in her ear her eyes opened wide, but she saw how intense I was and didn’t say a word.

Bearing in mind that we weren’t allowed to go out without permission and I had no idea if Kath would be on my side, I was taking a big risk. I certainly hadn’t thought it through. It was as if something more powerful than myself was pushing me forward. Part of me was in a complete panic, but there was also a quiet but firm voice in my brain telling me that Kath always seemed to keep her own counsel and I should trust my instinct. We got into my car and I drove into the centre of town as if my life depended on it, which indeed I felt it did. I was convinced that at any second God would strike me dead because I wasn’t doing His will. There could be no greater sin than deliberately disobeying orders and going to a bookshop run by people who would surely go to Hell. Sooner or later that would be my destination too, I thought, even if I were lucky enough to be spared for the next half-hour. My dicing with fate seemed more dangerous than leaping off Mount Everest blindfolded on a dark, freezing night. Utter madness. My choice of destination would also inevitably mean I would lose my children to the secular world – something I’d repeatedly been told was a fate worse than death. It didn’t occur to me to question what type of God could be so capricious as to strike you down for going to a bookshop without permission.

I was shaking like a leaf by the time I arrived in town and parked by the bookshop. I looked around, half expecting to see a celestial firing squad lined up on the pavement waiting for me. There was nothing. I was equally relieved to see no one I knew nearby. As we walked into the bookshop I took a deep breath. My heart was beating incredibly fast. I wanted to get out as soon as possible and try to save my life. I looked desperately along the shelves, at first too scared to focus or read any of the titles. Then suddenly my eyes lighted on a slim white book entitled When a Church Becomes a Cult, by Stephen Wookey. I looked quickly around for Kath, pulled her over, pointed at the book and with shaking hands took two copies off the shelves. I gave her one and we each paid for our own copy. Then I drove back to Tadford as fast as I could, feeling a strange mixture of terror and exhilaration as I quickly prayed for my life to be spared.

I dared not go home in case someone spotted me, reported me to Black and I was hauled into his office and asked why I wasn’t working. So I suggested to Kath that we go back to the recording room. She agreed and as soon as we were safely inside we locked the door. It was something I did when I had a lot to do and didn’t want to be disturbed, so in itself that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. If someone should knock on the door and want to speak to either of us for whatever reason, I decided, I would sit on the book. Kath and I then sat at adjacent desks and began reading our books. I took a green highlighter and marked the sentences that meant something to me. There were so many I nearly ran out of ink. I also began crying so much I could hardly breathe. I have never read anything so fast, but it was vital to dash through it before anyone disturbed us. At the same time I couldn’t skip a single word. The contents mesmerized me and I recognized an enormous amount of similarity between what was being described in the book and my life at Tadford. As I turned each page I realized more and more clearly what sort of place I was in. It felt as if I were being given a powerful electric shock that was reawakening the real me that had been crushed for so many years. My reaction was that everything about my life at Tadford was completely shattered and that I had been part of one big lie. I saw with rare clarity that I had to get out. The only question was: how?

Chapter 2

My Family and I

I was born Sarah Alice Weston, the third child and second daughter of Pamela and John Weston. My father worked as an electrician in the Merchant Navy, my mother was a florist. Home was a spacious three-storey, semi-detached, five-bedroom house with a large garden in a market town in the Pennines.

Apart from me, my family consisted of Kerry, who was 11 when I was born, and Roy, 12. My sister was easy-going and well behaved, but there was something not quite right about my brother. I couldn’t have known then that he was to affect my life profoundly.

Roy was by all accounts an adorable baby and grew into a bright, intelligent little boy much praised for his all-round ability by his teachers at his local school. My doting parents took great pride in his success, and not too much notice when his teachers added that he was a bit of a loner and didn’t mix well. He was, after all, the first child in our family and Mum didn’t know what to expect. She assumed he was taking after her and she was not one to go out with a crowd of girls. She didn’t even worry that he kept himself to himself at home too, putting it down to the fact that he was behaving like any boy with two younger sisters.

Certainly Roy didn’t take much notice of me when I arrived, but Kerry was delighted to have a little sister. Roy’s life and that of my family changed dramatically almost overnight one day when I was just a sweet, bubbly toddler. Many parents worry about their child turning into Kevin, the iconic teenager created by comedian Harry Enfield, when they reach their teens, but Roy’s transformation was far more extreme. He stopped being the loving lad who was good at so many things, and turned into an impossible rebel with an explosive temper who screamed and shouted at the least thing.

He used to be immaculate and tidy, but became extremely scruffy and left his bedroom in a terrible mess. Worst of all he no longer wanted to go to school and began playing truant. It was shortly after his birthday that we had the first clear sign that something was seriously wrong. He was playing rock music so loudly in his bedroom that the house started to reverberate. Dad went in and asked him to turn the volume down. To his horror, instead of replying Roy jumped up and down on his bed with his fingers in his ears, screaming. Now, when most children of that age start screaming in a tantrum they stop pretty quickly afterwards, but Roy scream lasted for over ten minutes. It was then that my parents knew for certain that their son’s behaviour had gone beyond that of even the most difficult teenager.

Mental health was very poorly handled in the sixties and seventies, with little diagnosis and even less support. When my parents took Roy to see our trusted family GP they believed everything he said implicitly and didn’t query his diagnosis that Roy was just a typical adolescent. He said that, of course, it was unusual behaviour, but ‘these things happen and they shouldn’t worry’. They did worry, of course, and felt very guilty about his obvious unhappiness, racking their brains to remember something they might have done that triggered this change in him. But they couldn’t come up with anything.

Roy was particularly awful when my widowed maternal grandma came to live with us that year. He started screaming at her so much her that my parents dared not leave her alone with him and, although we all wanted Grandma to stay with us permanently, after a few months Mum and Dad felt she had to leave for her own safety. Roy also insisted on eating his meals alone in his bedroom, which upset Mum and Dad greatly because we liked to eat together as a family.

Over time, Roy’s behaviour grew even worse and he spent ever longer periods alone in his room. Kerry, who is now an occupational therapist working in Canada, worried that he didn’t have any friends and lived in an imaginary world where he often put himself in charge of military battles. Although some days passed calmly, the unpredictability of his moods and his anti-social behaviour kept me on a knife edge of anxiety. I never knew when he was going to start screaming again and hated the stormy and tense atmosphere at home. It was like living with a time bomb. Kerry sometimes locked herself in her bedroom when she heard him shouting and we all felt increasingly scared.

As well as making life difficult for me and Kerry, Roy was also wearing Mum and Dad down. They nevertheless tried to look for positive things about his behaviour and took heart when he visited Uncle Roger, Dad’s brother, who lived in a nearby village, because it put him in a better mood. Sadly, once he was back home, he’d usually run up to his bedroom, put a record on and start on his screaming all over again.

He also enjoyed coming on our family weekend camping trips to sites in the North York Moors. We had a large tent with a separate section for each of us. Roy seemed happier in the fresh air, and nothing like as disruptive as he was at home.

Although I was too young to have any real concept of what was going on, I could sense the dark cloud that hung over the family. I was so frightened of Roy’s strange behaviour I often shook like a leaf. My parents did their best and took him back to the doctor countless times. They tried a child psychiatrist too, but, as extraordinary as it may seem, his diagnosis remained the same – a bad case of adolescent behaviour – and they were told repeatedly that the best way to deal with their son was to keep reassuring him of their love. Dad even took up kite-flying so that he and Roy could share an activity together, but it failed as Roy would always intentionally get their kites entangled, which was disheartening to Dad, to put it mildly.

One example of his strange behaviour occurred at one of my birthday parties. Dad was in hospital after a fall aboard ship when he’d hit his head on a bulwark, and was expected to stay in for two weeks, but Mum invited twelve little friends round for me and prepared egg, banana and ham sandwiches, jelly and ice cream, and a birthday cake with pink icing. I was very excited but sad too that Dad wasn’t with us. It was hard work for Mum to do on her own, but she organized lots of fun games, like Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs. We were all having a lovely time when, about halfway through the party, Roy came out of his bedroom, walked down the stairs and threw his dinner of meat, potatoes and lots of gravy right across the room. He then started yelling unintelligibly before going back to his room. I was petrified and so upset that my special day was ruined.