‘Not her!’ I shouted. ‘I hate her!’ I could not even bear to speak her name. ‘I want my mother. Why can’t she come back to live with us? It’s not fair!’ I sobbed. I turned and ran off to a corner of the garden and stood with my back to them.
Dad followed me and bent towards me, concerned. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sweetie, you know your mother has gone for good. She’s not coming back.’
‘But I want my sister and brother here. It’s not fair.’ I stuck out my bottom lip in a pout.
‘But you have so many brothers and sisters here you can play with,’ Dad said.
‘It’s not the same,’ I complained.
‘Honey, we’re all one family. Now watch that lower lip…or you’ll trip over it if you’re not careful.’
I half smiled, if only to make Dad feel better.
Mo said that we weren’t supposed to have individual families. Our brothers and sisters in the Children of God were our true family. We even referred to ourselves as the ‘Family’. But I refused to forget my mother or Kristina and baby David, though I was scared I was beginning to forget what they looked like.
The only photograph Dad had of Mum was of her standing behind a double buggy, with me sitting in one side and my baby sister next to me. I studied the photograph carefully. Mum had long, sandy blonde hair down to her waist, blue eyes and a wide smile.
‘She’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘And that’s my sister?’ I couldn’t see her face clearly because of the picture’s poor quality. Kristina was just a toddler, aged about a year old, with two little pigtails. I was eighteen months older and very like her. We were both dressed in pretty cotton frocks and had sun hats on. As hard as I stared, I couldn’t summon up the slightest memory of them and mourned, feeling a gaping hole in my being.
Dad described how he and Mum used to take us with them when they went out witnessing in the streets. ‘I’d manoeuvre the pushchair in the way of someone walking the opposite direction and then hand them a leaflet and witness to them, telling them about Jesus and how they could be saved. Indian people love children and you were so cute and pretty. They’d pinch your cheeks and chat to you. They felt they couldn’t be rude with you two sitting there gazing up at them like two little angels.’
‘Do you have a picture of David?’ I asked.
‘This is when he was just three months old,’ Dad replied, producing a small black and white photograph.
‘He’s so cute. Look at those cheeks!’ I said proudly. He was lying on his tummy lifting up his head with his chubby arms, and had a big grin on his face.
My own early memories were brief, seen in a series of quick little snapshots, like windows opening in my mind’s eye. Much of what I gleaned, Dad told me in our rare quiet times alone. I’d cuddle up on his lap and he’d tell me selective vignettes that gradually built into a bigger picture. But it was always half a picture; he never told me much about Mum.
Perhaps as a way of keeping her alive, and forlornly holding on to the remnants of a family life, I often asked Dad to tell me the story of how he and Mum had first met and then married, and my birth. He didn’t tell me a lot about it; it wasn’t until I had grown up that I heard the full story.
‘Your mum was young and beautiful – just seventeen years old when we married. I was twenty-two.’
I was always full of questions. ‘And what about your dad?’
Dad told me his father was a lawyer and military judge in the British army. He had no recollection of his mother, as she had died when he was four and his father had remarried soon after. He and his half-brother were sent to a boarding school in Cheltenham.
‘I was a rebel at school. I was even expelled after I led a protest where a group of us locked ourselves in the main hall.’
‘Why – what did you protest about?’ I asked.
‘The school prefects used to beat us for almost anything, no matter what. They’d come in at night with their flashlights and shine them in our faces to wake us up. We got fed up with the injustice and stood up against it.’
Thrown out, he enrolled at a drama school in London and in his holidays travelled throughout Europe. ‘I was searching for the meaning to life,’ he explained.
I listened earnestly as he described how, in pursuit of life’s meaning, he read many spiritual books and dabbled in the occult and meditation.
I shivered. It had been relentlessly drummed into us by Mo that drugs and Ouija boards were dangerous, because they could open the door of your mind to the Devil.
When he was telling me about those years, Dad said, ‘I ended up deeply depressed and disillusioned with life.’
‘Wasn’t drama school what you wanted?’
‘It was empty. Without the Lord, it’s meaningless. Just husks, sweetie.’
It was at this low point that one day he received a call from one of his mates who had just returned from Istanbul. This friend had planned to walk on foot to India, but instead had been converted by the Children of God en route, and had returned to England to spread the word.
Dad was taken aback by the dramatic change in his previously disturbed and doped-up friend. He now seemed confident, with purpose and direction. ‘He told me it was all thanks to the Children of God. I was curious.’
In the hippie era of peace and love, the message proclaimed by the Children of God seemed exciting: find a new life in Christ, drop out, live communally, forsake materialism and share all things, just like the early disciples. But this was not just another zealous evangelical group from America – it was God’s Endtime Army, the elite, who would lead a lost world in need of salvation during its darkest hour.
The Children of God believed that with the end of the world looming near, pursuing anything else in life seemed pointless. Dad was convinced. He gave away most of his possessions and turned up at the doorstep of a commune in Hollingbourne in Kent with just a small suitcase, ready for his new life as a disciple.
His eyes lighting up at the memory, Dad told me, ‘It was amazing. Everyone lived under the same roof and shared all things just like the Early Christians in the Book of Acts. It was the family I had been searching for.’
New members were told to choose a Bible name to reflect their new life. Dad chose Simon Peter. His full-time job was now to go out on to the streets and witness – the name they used for trying to win converts. Handing out literature for a donation was called ‘litnessing’.
Always full of new ideas, Dad came up with a novel way to litness. He laughed as he described it. ‘I dressed up as a clown, with a bright red nose and a funny hat that had a bouncing little plastic birdie on top.’
He wiggled his fingers on top of his head and made a face. I giggled. ‘I bet you looked silly!’
‘Oh, I did – but I was a clown. Clowns are allowed to look silly. I’d jump in front of passers-by and make them laugh before handing them a tract and asking for a donation. I became a star litnesser and fundraiser – I made hundreds of pounds a week for the Family.’
I laughed as I tried to imagine my dad clowning it up in London, a city I didn’t remember, although I’d been born there. Street solicitation was against the law, however, and Dad had run-ins with the police. Of course, he didn’t see anything wrong in what he was doing. He was obeying God.
Dad told me he met my mum in Hollingbourne, as they both joined the same commune as new disciples on the same day. She was just sixteen and had been recruited straight from school. Young and idealistic, she thought the Children of God was a bona fide missionary society. My parents were ‘married’ by the group, before being legally married in church. After a three-day honeymoon in the Lake District, they squatted