An accidental weirdo: my childhood in a cult, part 1
Back in the day, in the 1980s, I had quite an ordinary childhood in the east end of London, with two parents who liked each other and me, and a small sister who liked our parents but wasn’t that keen on me (it was mutual at that point). My small-sister jealousy aside, I have good memories of it. I had a red and yellow tricycle and we went to the park a lot. My dad played vinyl records – the Beatles, the Doors, Simon and Garfunkel – and chocolate biscuits were in regular supply. My mother’s parents lived within an easy walk and we spent a lot of time there, children scuttling up and down the 4 storeys of their house while adults chatted and smoked in the garden (it was the 1980s). It was all very ordinary.
Everything changed when I was four. My parents began to argue more, for one thing. They did not seem entirely in accord in their ideals and ideas. For another thing my mother suddenly acquired a batch of new friends, who seemed fun and interesting, but they brought with them a lot of strange foods and a lot of strange words and habits. When we visited them my father didn’t always come with us, and after a while every visit to them was characterised at some point by a session of hymn-singing and prayer. I was not familiar with hymns, or with prayers. I had not been exposed to religion before. I didn’t know what to think of it, except that it was really fucking boring to kneel for ages listening to people enumerate the blessings they hoped to receive and agonising over the sins they regretted committing. It felt like a really pointless use of time, particularly when climbing frames and rope swings existed. I was baffled by all of it.
After a few prayer-y visits to the new friends, it was decided. My tiny, fierce-looking Cockney mother explained to the rest of us that she was going to devote her life to the service of a new religion, one which was so freshly minted it didn’t even have a name yet. “The Message” was the vague title that everyone gave it in those days. (It’s called the Sabbath Rest Advent Church now. Google it. You probably won’t want to join). The leader was based in Australia, but there were some German elements too, and it was all quite international. Many pamphlets appeared from Australia and Germany. My father thought it sounded a crock of shit, and didn’t want to get involved. (I think he thought that it was a phase my mother was going through, like when she got really obsessed with lentils and then the pressure cooker blew up on a Thursday afternoon and coated the whole kitchen with lentils and they never got mentioned again).
It was not a phase. This was now my mother’s actual life. She stopped smoking, and credited God (via the Message) with her willpower. She stopped eating meat, because God doesn’t like it. Soon afterwards, we all stopped eating meat, because she did the cooking. She stopped drinking any alcohol, because the Bible says no. She stopped swearing, even when I stood in dog mess for the hundredth time on Upton Lane. Chocolate biscuits got binned permanently, like the Satanic poison they are. My mother started singing all the time, and summoning my tiny sister and me to regular prayer sessions. Because the Message was so new, and there were only five other “believers” in the whole of the country, there was no church, no meetings. Just lots of phone calls and Bible reading and the introduction of a fuck of a lot of new rules to a life I really hadn’t minded in the first place.
In the following September, I should have started school, but the Message didn’t really like the way mainstream schools tended to encourage broad analytical thought, so after a chat to the Message elders, my mother explained to my father that she thought she’d home school me. He didn’t protest, although she had no formal qualifications (cheers, Dad). Also, she didn’t actually home school me, she just kept me at home for more prayer. But I could read really well and people kept being impressed with my vocabulary, so it was all fine. And I was only four.
Life went on. Prayers happened with increasing and alarming regularity. Hymns became earworms, and my mum quietly disposed of most of my dad’s records, because they had sinful lyrics. The TV broke, and was not replaced, because the World is sinful, and the TV is a window into the World. That Christmas, my mother was visibly uncomfortable with the bin bag full of presents which arrived as usual from my grandparents. She tried to bin them, but I caught her, so we were allowed to open them after all. We did not have a Christmas dinner. I was too young to realise that this was a break from the way things had previously been, and much too young to understand that we would never have a Christmas again, but that is how it panned out. I’d dressed the last Christmas tree of my childhood, and for some reason, coloured fairy lights would now always make me sad.
The next year, my great-grandmother died, and with his inheritance my father decided to move us all out of London. He’s a hippy at heart, his job could be done anywhere, and he had dreams of self-sufficiency and creating Kew Gardens in miniature on his own land. The prospect of isolation, miles from civilisation, was music to my mother’s ears. It would be so easy to be godly when surrounded only by fields! No temptation exists in nature! Consider the lilies, ffs! They were in rare harmony on this decision and with terrifying speed, my sister and I were whisked a 3-hour drive away from London and everything we’d always known. I was mollified NOT ONE IOTA by the fact that the new house was big. It had concrete floors, no central heating, and a driveway made up of bits of crushed chalk. It was a dump.
But it had acres of fields around it, and this made it heaven for my parents. They wasted no time extending it and adding an Aga and then they had another baby, because why not? There was plenty of room. We got another sister. So then there were five of us, and apart from the postman, we could go for weeks at a time without seeing another human being.
You could not imagine a better location in which to lovingly but completely brainwash your three daughters into believing that the world would definitely end before they grew up and that – unlucky! – their dad wouldn’t be in the new world, because he continued stubbornly to refuse a Message membership.
About The Author
