If anyone turned on the radio and heard one of my dad’s Music with Meaning shows the message would seem idyllic: love was the answer to all of the world’s problems – sharing love, living in love and making love. Mo instructed Dad not to use the word ‘Jesus’ on the show. This strategy was an important one, because many listeners had no idea what they were tuning in to, or that the show had any religious affiliation, let alone a notorious one. But some of the songs on the show were hardly subtle. Jeremy Spencer sang a song entitled ‘Too Young for Love’, based on the Mo Letter ‘Child Brides’, where Mo set out his belief that children as young as eleven and twelve were ready for marriage, sex and children.
Part of Mo’s plan was to produce a second generation of children, like me, who were born into the Family of Love and who had never known the outside Systemite world. They would be untarnished by the sins of a former life. To show what faith he was putting into this earthly paradise he called ‘Loveville’, Berg sent members of his own family to live with us.
There was Faithy of course, his youngest and most loyal daughter, who was such a zealot her blue eyes shone fiercely. Mo also sent his granddaughter, nine-year-old Mene, who became a star of the show. When I first saw her I thought she looked like an angel, with her bright blue eyes, milky white skin and blonde, wispy hair. She had a soft, sweet voice and a dreamy look in her eyes. She behaved like the perfect Family child, always obedient and smiling, reading and quoting the Word.
We rarely spent time together anywhere except in the recording studio or at practice rehearsals. I never played outside with Mene in a normal childish way – I don’t think she was ever allowed to play.
Everyone had something to contribute to the Music with Meaning radio and video shows. It was fun and, like any child, I loved to show off my talents. There were musicians, artists, technicians, seamstresses and secretaries. Some of the more famous characters were Peter Pioneer and Rachel, a married couple and singing duo from Denmark, and Joan and Windy, a singer/songwriter team who were openly bisexual. Zack Lightman, from Norway, was the lighting man and cameraman, and his wife Lydia designed the costumes and backdrops. Sue, a softly spoken American with brown eyes and a charming smile, was the ‘club secretary’. Jeremy Spencer’s wife Fiona was the ‘Queen Mother’ of the camp, and the chef was a fiery Italian named Antonio. They lived as a threesome and Fiona had seven children by these two men.
In the centre of the camp a large canvas army tent was used as a gathering place for meetings and a dining hall in the winter months, when nights were cold. Two big gas fires heated the arena and we used kerosene lamps for light. To feed so many people, there was a whole team of people whose job was to ‘provision’ free food from the markets and local companies.
When the weather was warm, we ate on rows of benches and tables under the trees. Our food was fresh and, on the whole, delicious. Our breakfast consisted of semolina, sweetened with brown sugar, honey or molasses. Antonio tended to cook Italian food, the kind that could be quickly prepared for some two hundred hungry people. Big bowls of pasta with rich tomato sauce, or stews with beef chucks, potatoes and carrots.
Children were regimented and expected to behave. Even the very youngest had to sit still on the hard wooden benches lined up in the big tent and listen during the long meetings we had in the evenings. These sessions were incredibly boring and I would end up retreating into my thoughts and a make-believe world as a way of escape. I also found it incredibly difficult to keep my eyes closed during the long prayers, and I would cover my eyes with my hands and peek through my fingers so no one would catch me.
Once Faithy had established the running of the camp, she turned over the leadership of Loveville to a married couple, Paul Peloquin – a French Canadian from Quebec – and his wife Marianne, and departed on her next mission, to set up a Spanish version of the show, Musica Con Vida, in Puerto Rico.
Paul and Marianne took their task seriously – too seriously. They were a childless couple and had been desperately praying for a son for many years. Paul had jet-black hair and brown eyes and spoke English with a heavy French accent. He was a real charmer, but also had a fierce temper that could flare up unexpectedly. Marianne was French – a well-built woman, big boned, nearly six feet tall with deep-set eyes and a pronounced nose. Part of their responsibility was to draw up the daily schedule and assign everyone their jobs for the following day.
Reveille was at 7.30 a.m., and after breakfast, I’d go to a nearby house which we named the Blue House because it was a pretty shade of faded blue – the same colour as many of the fishermen’s boats. This was our communal school, where we had Word Time and Scholastics, taught by our regular teachers, Johnny Appleseed, Fiona – Jeremy Spencer’s wife – and Patience, Nicki’s mother. We were shown flannelgraphs and read True Komix—illustrated Mo Letters for kids. An endless river of these Letters and books from Mo and Maria would come in the post, usually once every two weeks. Every Home had to open a mail box and the leader in each Home was the only one who knew that address and had the key. It was run like a military espionage service, with secrecy the code word.
On sunny days Word Time would take place under the shady umbrella pines in the campsite. Sunday-school teachers in the outside world would have swooned if they’d opened up a True Komix. Many of them showed scenes of explicit sex, nudity, or gruesome demons and bizarre dreams that Mo believed always had some meaning – they were God’s messages. ‘Mo is God’s prophet for today, His mouthpiece to give us His new Word,’ our teachers would tell us. ‘System Christians don’t have the Spirit; they are “old bottles” who can’t receive the new wine.’
God, Jesus, the angels and the Devil were real and part of our everyday lives. Jesus would reward us when we were good, or the Devil would punish us when were bad. Our indoctrination was constant, and questioning anything opened our minds up to the Devil’s doubts. A picture from one of the True Komix sticks in my mind. There’s a little table with a tea set, and the Devil is depicted as a little elf with horns and a pitchfork. A little girl is sitting in the chair next to him and four little ‘doubtlets’, and the Devil is pouring her a cup of tea. The next scene shows her trapped in quicksand, sinking back into the System, because the Devil and his doubtlets had got to her. ‘It’s dangerous to have a tea party with the Devil and his doubts,’ the comic said.
Some of the True Komix stories we read were based on the Royal Family’s children, Davidito, Davida and Techi. We already knew them from the ‘Davidito Letters’ as examples of how to raise ‘revolutionary’ children in God’s way. Mo’s secretary and second ‘wife’, Maria, had two children, Davidito and Techi. Davidito was born in 1975 from a Flirty Fishing encounter with a hotel waiter in Tenerife. He was only three days older than me, and I was very proud of that fact. Maria’s lover and Mo’s right-hand man, Timothy, was Techi’s father. Mo wrote that Timothy was ‘just hired for his seed’ and that Techi was his. He claimed that he’d received Techi’s unusual name in a vision, when a spirit of a little girl had come to him when he was sick (and just before she was born, in 1979). He decided that Techi was a reincarnation and tried to fit this Buddhist doctrine in alongside Christian doctrines.
Davida was the daughter of Sarah Kelley, Davidito’s full-time nanny. She called herself Sarah Davidito. All three children were part of the Royal Family and lived in seclusion in Mo’s Home. The Royal Family children were to have a lot of influence in my life. They were our idols we looked up to, and we followed their lives in the Mo letters we read with great interest and curiosity.
After siesta, we would be allowed out to play. My regular playmates were two sisters, Renee and Daniella. I liked their mother, Endureth, and took to her as my second mother. I still did not accept Serena as my stepmother and often ignored her. I suppose my childish mind figured that if I blanked her out, she didn’t exist. Serena also had her hands full caring for her six-month-old daughter, Mariana, and was now heavily pregnant by my father. To ease the situation, I ended up staying indefinitely with Endureth and her husband Silas, My sister Kristina would have been the same age as Daniella, and I would always talk about her as if I knew her, only she was in ‘India with my mother and baby David’. Being with my friends in their family atmosphere