Not My Idea of Heaven

Catherine’s mum sounded unsure. ‘I don’t think we can, Lindsey, that’s not … I don’t think we’re allowed to do that.’ But there was no stopping me now.

‘It’s going to be fine,’ I said.

Together all three of us headed up Albion Avenue, right to my front door.

When Mum opened the door her face said it all. The two adults looked each other: Mum in her sensible skirt and blouse, and Catherine’s mum in her bright-pink leg warmers. I don’t know who was more embarrassed. I had done wrong.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mum managed to say to Catherine and her mum … I pushed past her and ran into the front room. Alice was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by acres of material. I looked at all that white satin and in a moment I had forgotten my bad deed. After Mum had dispatched Catherine, she entered the room, picked up the scissors and carried on cutting carefully around the edges of the wedding-dress pattern. She didn’t say a word.

I did not invite my school friends home again.

Halfway through my first day at primary school, I came across a problem. Most of the other children were having packed lunch or cooked dinner at school, whereas I was expected to go home. I really didn’t want to be the odd one out, so I looked for somewhere to hide.

Off to the side of our classroom was a long cloakroom with benches down the middle and our coat pegs on the walls. It seemed like the perfect place, so I ducked behind the door and hoped no one would find me. Samantha somehow knew I’d be there, and took me home straightaway.

I soon found out that going home for lunch wasn’t the problem for me: it was coming back afterwards. By the time I returned, everyone would be playing out in the field and playground. Even worse was when it was raining and all the pupils were inside the hall, sitting at tables laden with various arts, crafts and games. I’d arrive at the hall doors, and look through the panes of glass at everyone busy in their groups, working away at their activities. Taking a breath, I’d push the doors open, and, with a bright smile on my face, walk in.

I always had the fear that everyone would stop what they were doing and look at me, seeing how different I was. In fact, no one really noticed, but every day the fear was the same. In the playground I would try to join the groups and games, kick a ball around, play on the cement blocks or on the climbing frame. The need to blend in was everything to me. I was proud to be part of the Fellowship, but that was of no value with my friends and offered me no protection among them.

I managed to fit in most of the time. I may have had to wear ribbons in my hair, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for a young girl. And our school uniform was a blessing for me. I could wear the requisite grey skirt (keeping it below my knees, of course), without breaking Fellowship rules. Most of the time it was just the school assembly and lunch that caused me problems, but I was disappointed not to be allowed to join after-school clubs. I couldn’t go to Brownies, or swimming, or join a book club. Generally speaking, if it had the word ‘club’ in the title, I wasn’t allowed to attend. Luckily, though, the person who started the after-school netball didn’t call it a club, preferring the word ‘team’. Well done to them, because I was allowed to play as goal attack and competed against other schools. I loved it and was even made captain, but it was a short-lived affair. My parents eventually decided to crack down on teams too, just to be on the safe side.

In my first year at school, a boy in my class handed out party invitations, one of which was addressed to me. I felt no joy, though. Instead, I knew immediately that it was another situation highlighting the fact that I couldn’t be normal and go to a party. I was saved from having to make my excuses by one of the other girls in the class shouting out, ‘Oh, don’t give an invitation to Lindsey. She doesn’t go to parties.’

I certainly didn’t thank her for that, though. It was a bad situation made a billion times worse by her loud mouth.

I made sure I had plenty of friends at school, but I was always looking for ways to prove myself to them. If I had to be different it would be on my terms; I wanted my differences to be envied rather than thought odd. I was very proud of my muscles and started defining myself by how strong I was. I once carried Yvonne Worthington on my back down to the bottom of the playing field and back up again to prove my brawn. Yvonne was extraordinarily tall, towering above everyone else, so she was the obvious target.

Once, I started a fire in the grounds of the school. I was out to impress the kids in the street, and creating a blaze on council property seemed as good a way as any to do that.

We’d somehow managed to lay our hands on a box of matches and soon people were challenging each other to see who would dare to light a fire. Of course, I put my hand up. No one thought I’d have the guts to do it, but I climbed over the gate, as I regularly did for a bit of excitement, and stood on the drive in full view of the road and school caretaker’s office.

I collected up some leaves and twigs, plonked them on the tarmac and shoved a match under the driest-looking twig. To my horror it caught fire. I started stamping on the flames with my rubber-soled shoes. I was really scared at that point – not about burning my foot though: I feared that my parents would notice the charring on my shoe. The fire eventually went out but my shoes were blackened. I scraped them the best I could and hoped for the best. They never found out.

Another time I was in the school grounds again, throwing stones. One of my shots whizzed over the gate and hit a car parked outside on the road. There was a loud bang. I ran to see what I had done, excited and horrified. I saw where my stone had landed and I saw a dent in one of the cars.

I always took it too far – that was the thing. I was always so keen to impress people. I can see now it was just my way of finding an outlet. My life was restricted in so many ways that my antics were inevitable. It seemed to me that the other kids didn’t feel the same need to light fires, throw stones or trespass. They were quite happy watching TV.

I think I got away with a lot more than many other Fellowship children did. I was always allowed to play out in the street with worldly children, as long as I didn’t try to take them home, and, after my experience with Catherine, I wasn’t planning to try that again.

From the day I heard about the school trip I began to dread the time when we were asked if we wanted to go. It was an exciting week-long outing that happened in our last year, and all the children were taken to Wales to stay in a hostel. I’d heard about how they all had wonderful adventures together. I was dreading it – I knew I would have to stay at home and attend school without my friends.

Mum sent me to school clutching the permission request slip, stating that I was not allowed on the trip. I handed it to my teacher, Mrs Renowlden, and sat down at my desk in the middle of the classroom. She leafed through the slips of paper checking each one and then made her way over to see me. Without speaking, she crouched down beside me so that her face was level with mine.

‘Lindsey,’ she said quietly. ‘Your parents won’t let you to go on the school trip, is that right?’

I nodded. I was mortified but I wasn’t going to show it.

‘Is it because of religious reasons, or because of … money?’

I considered what my teacher was asking. My family weren’t rich, but we lived in a nice house and I had all the toys I wanted. In that respect my parents were pretty generous with their money. The money that I was allowed to drop into the collection bowl at the meetings seemed to me to be an enormous amount.

Of course, I knew what the reason was. If I went on the trip I would be exposed to all kinds of evil and would have to eat with worldly people. That was definitely not allowed. Somehow I knew my kindly teacher would find this difficult to understand, and I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the class.

‘Money,’ I lied.

When I was with other Fellowship children I had nothing to hide because we were all alike. From the age of five, I found myself in situations where I had to deal with a school full of people, who knew I was not at all like them. Very early on, I decided to minimize my apparent differences, and do my best to hide them.

My friend Kerry lived a few doors down from me. She was a year younger and much smaller, which had its advantages when we were role-playing mother and baby. She was always doing back flips and handstands and cartwheels on her garden lawn and was the ideal build for a gymnast. To me, she was a show-off, but I didn’t let her know I had such terrible thoughts because then I wouldn’t have access to her fantastic collection of toys!

The only problem was, Kerry wouldn’t let me play with her toys most of the time. I thought she was really selfish. It didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t invited her into my house to play with my toys.

I badgered her to let me ride her plastic tractor, and pleaded to have a play with the old-fashioned sprung pram with huge wheels, which lived in her shed. If I was lucky I could strike a deal with her. She’d let me push her pram if she could pretend to be my baby and sit inside. I’d wheel her up and down the pavement, both of us thinking that we were convincing the passing neighbours that she was my offspring.

I may have had a beautiful piano at home but what I didn’t have was an organ with two keyboards, stops and bass pedals. How I wished Kerry would let me have a go on it. If worse came to worst, and I wasn’t given access to the toys, I’d sit on the organ stool silently banging away at the keys, pretending it was switched on. It was torture for me. They had all this great stuff and no idea how frustrating I felt not be able to play with it.

Kerry had a great garden with a shed at the bottom where all the best toys were kept, together with the pram and the tractor. As soon as I got to her house, I’d make a beeline for that shed.

One day I was at Kerry’s house playing with dolls in the conservatory at the back of the house. This involved a lot of undressing and dressing them in a variety of splendid outfits. It was while we were doing this that we noticed that they didn’t have any privates. How did they wee and poo? we wondered. We needed to do some research on this, so Kerry, her older sister Felicity and I all took off our knickers and started comparing parts.

When Kerry’s mum walked in to offer us some orange squash and biscuits, she found us all sitting there with skirts hitched up, bare-bummed. Bizarrely enough, for the only Fellowship girl in the room, I didn’t feel we had done anything wrong. We were just looking at our bits. But Kerry’s mother was very strict and she sent me home. Her reaction seemed a bit extreme and I didn’t understand why she made a fuss. But the main reason I was upset was that it threatened my friendship with Kerry. If her door was closed to me, that would mean no more playing with her pram, tractor and organ.

After that day I would often see Kerry playing in her garden behind her high, wooden gate, and sometimes I got up the courage to knock on her door.

‘No,’ her mum would tell me, again and again, ‘Kerry can’t play with you today.’

Chapter Eight

Trouble with the Neighbours

I suppose my street was typical of many of the calm suburban roads beyond the chaos of the town centre. The trees that lined the pavements were useful to us children for hiding behind when tracking intruders on our territory, and provided an invaluable supply of sticks we used for whacking each other.

I knew most of the neighbours, but of particular interest to me was Jim, who lived in the house opposite ours and had the largest front garden in the street. Jim was a war veteran and it was widely known that he had spent time in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. This piece of information was passed between the neighbours, with knowing looks from the adults and unsympathetic sniggers from the kids. He was an easy target for us merciless children. With shouts of rage he defended his land and primly painted bungalow against any child or adult who so much as dared to stroll past the white picket fence that controlled the border between friend and foe.

He had almost met his match in me, though. I could also be fiercely defensive. I had good reason to defend my family, I thought. They would not defend themselves as they staunchly avoided confrontation. Having watched Jim reverse his car into Mum’s one day, without so much as a look at the damage, and witnessed him pouring bricks from a wheelbarrow over Mum’s feet, I decided it was time for revenge.

Gathering up as many of my friends as I could find playing out that evening, I laid the plans for the battle. Carefully splitting off the sturdy stems of Jim’s roses, we armed ourselves with rosehips and scuttled back to the protection of the cars parked opposite his house. One by one we ran across the road and flung those hard missiles at his windows. Time and again we watched the lights in his house go on and the curtains pull back. The thrill was superb. And then it was halted abruptly. We had been seen.

‘Lindsey! Come in, now!’ Mum bellowed.

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.

‘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.