LINDSEY ROSA

Not my idea of heaven

The inspiring story of a young woman who

broke free from a strict religious sect

to find to find her own voice

I dedicate this book to my gorgeous children, Nina and Stanley; to Tom whose love has made my life worth living; to my brother who has never wavered in his support of me.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1 - How Ever Did it Come to This?

Chapter 2 - Welcome to My World

Chapter 3 - One Size Fits All

Chapter 4 - The Carpenter, the Dreamer, the Romantic and Me

Chapter 5 - Motherly Love

Chapter 6 - The Ministry

Chapter 7 - School of Thought

Chapter 8 - Trouble with the Neighbours

Chapter 9 - Bound by the Rules

Chapter 10 - After Being Shut Up

Chapter 11 - The Move

Chapter 12 - Secondary Education

Chapter 13 - Coming of Age

Chapter 14 - Feeling the Strain

Chapter 15 - Reading Matters

Chapter 16 - Tailor Me, Dummy

Chapter 17 - Seafood

Chapter 18 - Camping in Gurnsey

Chapter 19 - Changing Appetites

Chapter 20 - Original Thin

Chapter 21 - Jekyll And Hyde

Chapter 22 - I Can’t Do It On My Own

Chapter 23 - So Near And Yet So Far

Chapter 24 - A Clinical Decision

Chapter 25 - Leaving Mum

Chapter 26 - Naming My Change

Chapter 27 - The Truce

Chapter 28 - Another New Life

Chapter 29 - Day Tripping

Chapter 30 - Becoming Worldly

Chapter 31 - Pleased to Meet Me

Chapter 32 - Big Girl in a Short Skirt

Chapter 33 - Living in Sin

Chapter 34 - The Baby Belly

Chapter 35 - Don’t I Want You, Baby?

Chapter 36 - Unfinished Business

Chapter 37 - And Then It Was Gone

Chapter 38 - Playing by the Rules

Chapter 39 - My Brother and Tom

Chapter 40 - Testing Times

Chapter 41 - Sister and Brother

Chapter 42 - Off the Peg

Chapter 43 - Don’t Turn Your Back on Me

Chapter 44 - Full Circle

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

The world, as we understand it, exists in our minds. The problem is, we all think differently. To some people, the world I grew up in is perfectly normal. To them, it is right, and the way the rest of the people in the world live is wrong.

How you see it depends on which side of the fence you are standing.

I was born on the wrong side of the fence. This book is about my journey from one side to the other, and how I had to leave my family behind.

Although this is a true account of my life, I have changed the names of those involved to respect their privacy as much as possible.

Chapter One

How Ever Did it Come to This?

My weight halved in a matter of months. The winter dragged by while I crouched against the radiator. I pressed my back into its heat until my skin burned. I sipped continuously from a mug of black coffee, willing the inky liquid to warm my bony body. Mum knelt in front of me, pleading, ‘Please eat.’ At last, desperate, she pushed crumbs of food into my mouth. I sealed my lips and turned my head away. Then the hunger came. I ate until I could eat no more. My belly, full of food, stretched and swelled, and I became consumed by rage. I used my fists to thump my face and jaw bone. So I sat on my hands while Mum fed me.

I became the prisoner of my mind. I listened carefully to its wild rants and became obedient to its command of weight loss. I purged my body of the pollutant, picking at my teeth to remove every last trace of food. But I wanted to be well, to be normal. How ever did it come to this?

Chapter Two

Welcome to My World

I sat in the Welfare office on the hard plastic chair behind the door. The windowless room was hot and I felt my sweaty legs sticking to the seat. The Asian boys messed around in the corner, scuffling with each other. I kept my head down and pretended to read my book. I didn’t want anyone talking to me. It was embarrassing having to be there.

Through the open door I could hear the sound of my friends singing hymns in assembly. They were Christian hymns but I didn’t recognize any of the tunes or the words. I just wanted to be with the other children, but neither their prayers nor their songs were approved by God. In my head I sang the words to a hymn that I knew would be.

Jesus bids us shine, With a pure, clear light, Like a little candle, Burning in the night In this world of darkness,

So let us shine –

You in your small corner, And I in mine.

It comforted me. On rare occasions Mum would sit at the piano and ask me what songs I wanted her to play. I’d always pick ‘Jesus Bids Us Shine’ and ‘Away in a Manger’. I stood by her elbow while she banged away at the keys and we sang together.

When the assembly was over, the Welfare lady sent us back to our classrooms to join in with the lessons. I could forget that I was different for a while, until the time for lunch came around. It was wrong to eat or drink with sinners. So I ate mine at home.

When I was old enough to read I was given a Bible. Not just any old bible: this one had my initials on the front, embossed in gold lettering. ‘L.R.M.’ The leather cover smelled expensive, not like the books Mum picked up from charity shops. This one was special.

I’d seen bibles at school, but I knew this one was different. On the first page was the name J. N. Darby. ‘What does “Translated by …” mean?’ I asked Mum.

She explained that Mr Darby was a very important man, because he had discovered the true meaning hidden in the Bible. ‘The recovery of the truth,’ she called it.

His picture stood on a shelf in our house, and had pride of place in every other home belonging to members of the Fellowship. People like us. There were other pictures too, which were also black-and-white shots of sober-looking men. These were the ‘Elect Vessels’, the men of God, chosen by Him to lead us.

We were the disciples. Those who had not discovered our truth were the ‘worldly people’.

I knew it was wrong to mix with these people, who believed in devilish things and had Satan in their hearts, but they were all around us. We lived among them, but not with them. As my Bible said, ‘Be in the world, but not of the world.’

We were special.

Special or not, I lived in a normal suburban street called Albion Avenue, lined by trees with rows of similar-looking semi-detached houses on either side. These were not Fellowship homes, they were full of worldly people, but my family somehow slotted in among them.

We were friendly enough to our neighbours. Mr and Mrs Harvey, the old couple next door, gave me and my sister Samantha chocolate treats and Mum chatted to them in the street, but our friendship ended on the doorstep.

The front garden of our house, number thirty-seven, was perhaps was a little more orderly than some of the others on the street. Mum loved gardening and took time creating neat rows of roses and irises. Other than a particularly tidy front garden there was not much to differentiate my house from any other. It all looked perfectly normal. But there was one small thing.

‘My dad says your house hasn’t got a TV aerial, so that means you haven’t got a telly,’ a boy living in my street blurted out one day.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘we don’t.’ I felt proud, he looked shocked.

‘Why not?’

I was blunt. ‘Because it’s my religion.’

‘What do you do, if you don’t watch telly?’

‘Oh, we play games,’ I said, and began the long list of exciting adventures that I got up to behind the door that was closed to all except the Fellowship.

‘I play shops and offices and …’ I could see by his face that he was becoming envious of my tremendous life. I breathed a sigh of relief; he didn’t think I was weird.

What I really did was play a lot on my own, creating an imaginary world from whatever was around me. I loved sneaking into the garage, pushing my way past the bikes and all the clutter, to find the door into the old coal cupboard where Mum kept her jam-making equipment. The shelves were stacked with jars, which I filled with potpourri and perfume, created using sticks to mash the flower petals I’d pinched from my mum’s rose garden.

My dad’s office was a wooden shed in the garden in which he designed aeroplane gearboxes for Rolls-Royce. His drawing board stood against the back wall, opposite the door. He’d roll out a huge sheet of drafting paper, tearing off lengths of masking tape to secure its corners, and begin to align his array of pencils on the parallel rule. I was fascinated with the meticulous detail in his drawings and loved watching them grow as I stood by his side, fiddling with the stationery in his desk drawer.

When Dad was out at work, I turned his office into a shop, opening the window to serve the customers. Tucked under a desk was a box of my sister’s Cindy dolls, which I’d pull out and play with on the floor. As long as I didn’t touch Dad’s drawings, I was welcome to play in there any time I liked.

Being a design engineer, Dad could turn his hand to most practical tasks. A lot of the time he spent fixing the car, but he still managed to build a go-kart for me. If he was too busy, he was more than happy to provide us with some scraps of timber from the garage, and let us make our own entertainment. Armed with some of Dad’s wood and a length of rope, my best friend Natalie and I made a crude swing, hung from a puny branch of a tree on our street. All we could do was swing one way and then the other. It was great, until the rope wore thin and snapped, and I landed on my bum.

Mum was always busy, too. She grew most of her own fruit and vegetables at the bottom of the back garden, freezing beans, and other crops, to feed us over winter. Every summer, the jam-making equipment would get dragged out of my favourite cupboard and Mum would set to work, preparing jar after jar of strawberry conserve, using the fruit we brought home from the pick-your-own farm.

How I loved spending a day there! I’d sit in the middle of the field saying, ‘One for me, one for the basket, one for me, one for the basket.’ On the way out I’d hide my face from the lady at the pay hut and try not to smile in case she saw the red stains on my cheeks and bits stuck between my teeth.

In many ways, my childhood was idyllic, but why wouldn’t it be? My family and I had been chosen by God, so, of course, life was great. I knew that, whatever happened, the six of us would always be together, Mum, Dad, Alice, Victor, Samantha and me.

Chapter Three

One Size Fits All

The Fellowship didn’t have churches with elaborate buttresses and elegant spires, just squat little meeting rooms with plain, windowless brick walls. The only way a worldly person could attend a meeting was by calling the number displayed on the board outside and making an appointment. It was very rare for anyone to do so, though. And, even if they did, they would be regarded with much suspicion. The high barbed-wire-topped fences and imposing padlocked gates were enough to put off most people.

Our meetings happened every weekday evening, once a month on Saturdays and three or four times throughout Sunday. We travelled far and wide to different meeting rooms, attending Gospel Preachings, Bible Readings, and gathering for prayer. Everyone in the Fellowship had to attend, but nobody minded. These were the great social events of our lives – the exciting part, really.

Nevertheless, they made dinnertime stressful. Dad had to make sure he was home from work on time and would usually come hurrying in, complaining about the terrible traffic on the M25. It didn’t matter that Mum had four kids to look after, her job was to ensure the dinner was on the table in good time. Stuffing down the last mouthful of his pudding, Dad would jump up and, with a flurry of goodbyes, he was gone.

I usually went to meetings only on Sundays. The first one of the day was called the Supper, held in a small meeting room just around the corner from our house. I found it strange that something that started at six a.m. could be called that. As far as I understood it, supper was the name given to the meal that people ate in the evening.

We had to wake before dawn to make sure we had enough time to prepare. It took Mum absolutely ages to get ready. Sitting on a stool in front of the big dressing-table mirror, she’d watch herself pull back strands of long brown hair, and fasten it with a clasp. She used clips to tidy up the sides, then blasted the whole lot with hairspray to keep it in place. My sister Samantha and I would watch her, fascinated, waiting for our hair to be brushed and adorned in the same way.

Once at the meeting, thirty or forty of us sat on chairs arranged in a large semicircle, and began what was known as ‘breaking bread’. The ritual involved a jug of wine and a wicker basket of bread, both of which were ceremoniously passed from person to person along the row. I always looked forward to my turn, so that I could gulp down mouthfuls of the beautifully sweet liquid, and feast myself on the doughy bread.

The lady who did the baking, Mrs Turner, had no idea that very few people actually liked her produce – no one in our Fellowship group had the heart to tell her straight. There was a detectable sense of relief in the room when she was ill and unable to bake. Personally, I loved the bread, although that was mainly because I was so hungry. None of us ate breakfast until after the meeting had finished, so, in order to satisfy our grumbling bellies, as soon as the meeting disbanded, and the parents shuffled outside into the little gravel car park to chat, the other children and I would wander through to the little kitchen and catch Mrs Turner before she tossed away her leftovers. It wouldn’t have mattered what her bread tasted like: it felt like a treat to us. With our little hands full of crusts, we would head back out through the hall, stuffing the squashed balls of dough into our mouths.

I was awakened one Sunday morning with a terrible pain ravaging my mouth. The whole of my upper lip was swollen and I was in agony. Mum had to seek permission from the Fellowship before she was allowed stay at home and look after me. It turned out I had an abscess on my tooth, but I still felt as though I had done something very wrong by missing the meeting.

‘God will understand,’ Mum reassured me. She knew more about these things than I did.

Getting to know what God understood or disapproved of was important. Somewhere in the Bible it said that a woman praying with her head uncovered puts her head to shame, and the Fellowship took this message seriously. The solution they came up with was simple. For a start, every female wore a ribbon fastened with a clip. This showed God that we were one of His, and worthy of His protection. There was still the problem of the Devil to deal with, though. As soon as we were outside our homes and meeting rooms, he could reach us. Our protection was a headscarf, and a lot of Fellowship girls were made to wear them at all times outside their homes.

I wore a headscarf to meetings, but I was spared the embarrassment of having to wear it to school or out in the street. My worldly friends may not have been allowed in the house, but I played with them in our road and didn’t want them to see me with that on my head. I told Mum, ‘I’ll wear it when I get older.’ I meant it, too. I thought that, when I reached the age of sixteen or seventeen, I would be a grownup, and when I was grown up it wouldn’t matter if I was laughed at. I suppose I thought that Fellowship adults were immune to the stares and cruel comments made by people in the big bad world. Whenever I left the house, however, I made sure I had my token in my hair. Oh, apart from that one time.

It was a summer morning and I woke up in a wonderful mood. It was just after dawn and the house was still. There were no meetings to attend and not even Mum had stirred from her slumbers. The sun was already shining and I couldn’t wait to go and play in the front garden. I dressed impatiently and brushed my hair straight in preparation for the elasticized hair band I was about to put on. Maybe it was because no one was awake to see me, I don’t know, but for some reason, on that morning, I decided to find out what it felt like to go outside with nothing in my hair.

Standing in the hallway, door open, I stared at our silent street for a moment. Then, taking in a little gasp of air, I stepped outside, beyond the safety of the house. I didn’t know what I expected to happen to me, but nothing did. So I went further, strolling down the concrete driveway, glancing left and right. I secretly wished that someone I knew would see me with my hair down, but it was too early and nobody was around. At the gate I stopped. I’d got only a few yards, but, when the realization of what I had just done hit me, I lost my nerve, dashed back into the house, closed the door, and quickly tied back my hair before anyone awoke.

Although I didn’t like wearing my headscarf in the street, I was proud to do so at the meetings, where I fitted in with all the other girls. Mum had a whole box of square head-scarves decorated with various patterns, and I hoped that one day I would have a full box just like that too. Instead, for the time being, I had to make do with my little plain lilac and pink versions. I often watched Mum carefully picking through hers, holding them up against herself to see if they matched what she was wearing.

Our clothing may have been restricted in style, but we went to town on making it as decorative as was possible within the boundaries we were set. I saw that my mum and sisters cared deeply about their appearance and knew that little details mattered a great deal to them.

Mum and Alice, who was fifteen years my senior, were always making dresses and skirts, and had become highly skilled in the art from their many years’ experience. They had little choice but to make their own, because the clothes in the shops were either too fashionable or were meant for old ladies. We certainly didn’t want to dress like old ladies, if we could help it, and fashionable usually meant too revealing. Skirts had to be respectably long – not necessarily all the way to the ankle, but definitely below the knee. A woman’s knees and shoulders could never be shown. As far as trousers were concerned, they were for men only.

I especially loved trips to the haberdashery shop, where I ran around inspecting every roll of material. The main purpose of our visits was to find some material to make into a skirt, and, if I was lucky, it would be one for me. The material I really liked would typically be colourfully decorated with sprigs of flowers and suchlike, but I usually chickened out of my first choice and went for the one that I thought would make me less conspicuous when I played in my street. Something plain. It was hard to carry off a floral dress when my worldly friends were in their jeans and T-shirts.

Sometimes Mum would ask the shop assistant to cut her a metre length of quilt stuffing, and I soon got to know what she wanted it for. Mum had developed her very own, advanced technique for getting her headscarf to sit perfectly in place. To do this, she would start by cutting the thin layer of stuffing material into the shape of a triangle. Then, laying her scarf on the bed, she’d fold it diagonally and place the stuffing on top.

It was very important that she get it positioned just right so that it wouldn’t show in the final arrangement. When satisfied with her preparations, in one flowing movement Mum would sweep the arrangement up and over in the air and flatten it down on her head, monitoring herself in the mirror as she did it. Sometimes she performed this manoeuvre five or six times before she got it just right. ‘Right’ meant no movement of the untrustworthy headscarf. I watched, impressed by her precision and attention to detail. The quilt stuffing inside stuck like glue to the layers of hairspray and packed out the scarf, making it look beautifully smooth. Next, a set of clips would go in. One last spray from the aerosol can and she was done.

No women in the Fellowship cut their hair. Mum sometimes trimmed my straggly ends and I felt – just for a few seconds – like a worldly girl. But there was no getting away from the fact I looked different. Every other girl I knew had bobbed hair or it was long but styled, whereas mine was very obviously a home job. It wasn’t that it had been done badly, only that the fashions in the eighties were so extreme. Sometimes I sat in front of Mum’s dressing table and held my long hair up so it looked as if it were short, or I pulled the ends over my head to make it look as though I had a fringe. Fringes were forbidden too, of course, as that involved cutting. It wasn’t that I especially wanted short hair or a fringe. I just would have liked the choice to have been mine.

Men had an easier time with the Fellowship’s dress code. They were forbidden from having long hair, moustaches or beards, but that hardly put them out of step with the fashions of the day. If anything, they just all looked middle-aged. On top they wore open-necked shirts, which were usually a sensible light blue or white. These were tucked into a pair of slacks cut in a classic style. It was all fairly standard stuff, but, when everything was added together, it pretty much amounted to a uniform. A worldly person would probably have trouble distinguishing a Fellowship man from a chartered accountant, but I could spot the difference a mile off !

Equality for women wasn’t exactly a priority in the Fellowship. From the top down, everything was run by men, and, as far as the Fellowship was concerned, they were chosen by God. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the meeting rooms used for Bible readings.

We all sat on tiered rows of benches, which surrounded a central stage and a single microphone on a stand. Men were seated at the front, women and children behind. The men took turns speaking into the microphone, reading from the Bible, while the women tried to pay attention. This was difficult for us girls as we rummaged in handbags, hunting for pencils and paper to scribble notes on, chatting together in loud whispers.

Women weren’t permitted to get up and speak during meetings. Their job was to announce the hymn numbers, and any woman was more than welcome to have a go at that. It meant standing up in front of everyone, and sometimes there was a long silence while the women looked at each other, hoping it didn’t have to be them. The singing was started by the men, but, if the choir lead got it wrong, we’d all end up desperately screeching at the tops of our voices.

What I loved better than wine and bread was seeing Ester and her brother Gareth. He was my age, but ‘Stelly’, as I lovingly called her, was a couple of years older. I’d often go to their house to play, while my mum and some other Fellowship women gossiped in the kitchen. One time I was running madly around their house, playing a game of hide and seek. One by one I searched all the rooms, looking in every nook and cranny. I wasn’t having any luck in the bedrooms, so I checked the loo. But when I peeked round the door and saw Gareth, I saw something else, too.

‘Hi, Lindsey,’ Gareth said.

I had never seen a boy with his trousers undone, and I revelled in my good fortune. The real ambition of a Fellowship girl was to get married and have loads of Fellowship children, and Gareth was the boy I’d already decided I’d marry when I was grown up. Now I could be certain.

That night when I said my prayers I thanked God for letting me see Gareth’s willy. He certainly worked in mysterious ways.

Chapter Four

The Carpenter, the Dreamer, the Romantic and Me

When I was little, I shared a room with my sisters, Alice and Samantha. Our beds were lined up side by side, mine being the small one in the middle. There was just enough room to squeeze between them, but I didn’t mind that it was cramped: I felt safe, flanked by my two big sisters. No bogeymen would come and get me in the night.

Our room had a very posh-looking set of fitted wardrobes covering one wall, but in the middle there was a recess to accommodate a little dressing table and its mirror. It was there that Alice sat to prepare herself for bed every night, but Samantha and I were rarely awake to see her. Being older, she attended the evening meetings, and Samantha and I had usually fallen asleep by the time she returned home.

One evening I awoke and saw her, lit by the little pull-string light above the dressing table, peering intently at herself in the mirror. I spied on her from beneath my blankets, hoping she wouldn’t notice me. She was talking to herself gently, slowly plaiting her long hair. I watched her carefully secure two plaits with hair bands. Then came the part I remember most clearly. She opened the dressing table drawer and took out several curlers. These were not the old-fashioned tubes, but plastic clasps, covered in foam. Taking the tassel of hair that hung below her hair bands, she wrapped it around the curlers and fastened them. I shivered with excitement. How daring my big sister was! We were not supposed to try to make ourselves look pretty in any way. I wondered how she managed to sleep with those hard lumps on her pillow, but I guessed it must be worth it.

Alice really wanted to look her best because she was madly in love. She had met the man of her dreams – another Fellowship member. They had eyed each other during meetings, and, despite the seating plan, a Fellowship courtship had ensued. As far as anyone knew, Alice and Mike had never kissed or as much as held hands, but they did speak on the telephone. They spent hours talking each evening.

Young adults in the Fellowship typically met future spouses during a special three-day meeting that could take place in any country where Fellowship disciples were found. The Fellowship made no secret of the purpose of these events, which were a unique opportunity to widen the gene pool. Fellowship women were required to follow their husbands, which meant that as a woman you could end up living almost anywhere in the world. In Alice’s case, she struck it lucky: her beau lived just around the corner!

Alice was so busy with her love affair that she failed to notice that everyone else her age was doing their GCE O-Levels and ended up leaving school with barely any qualifications. As it happens, this wasn’t much of a problem.

Fellowship women were not expected to have careers, just a short stint working in a local office, as Alice did, and then on with the business of marriage. Their job was to reproduce and look after the household. The men were encouraged to gain skills as apprentices at Fellowship firms. University was out of the question, as it was seen as a place where subversive ideas circulated.

The biggest ambition we were expected to have was to get into Heaven. That was the dream.

If Alice was the romantic, Samantha was the dreamer. Actually, she was a romantic too. I can’t say how she got on at school, being six years younger than she was, but academia was never her strong point. Still, if there was a qualification for fantasizing about romance and other lives, she’d probably score even better than I would.

I can only assume that Samantha’s teachers gave her a hard time for doing badly in class, because that is what she gave me when we played teachers and pupils in one of our favourite games. Well, it didn’t remain one of my favourites for very long, but she certainly liked it. It always seemed to revolve around her telling me off, saying I hadn’t done my maths properly. Samantha’s persona took the form of an extremely strict teacher who frequently made me cry. I was an easy target, of course – I hadn’t even started school yet!

When we played shops, we’d take tins out of Mum’s kitchen cupboards, and tubes of toothpaste from the bathroom, balancing all of our stock on top of a wicker linen basket. It lived on the landing at the top of the stairs, where it was ideally placed for receiving reluctant customers on their way to the toilet. On top of the basket we’d place a plastic till, which we were both desperate to operate. Whoever got to the shower cap first could transform themselves into the shopkeeper by pulling it over their head. This shop uniform made us feel very professional!

Samantha and I didn’t play together for as many years as I’d have liked, simply because she was six years older than I, and soon tired of my childish antics. But what really brought the whole thing to a premature end was something I did to her, which I still feel bad about even now. I stole her only worldly friend away from her. Natalie had been a lifeline for Samantha, connecting her to the world outside of the Fellowship. For many of us, those links kept us sane. I think it broke her heart, and I don’t think she ever forgave me for that.

From then on, I felt as if I were the only child in the house. While she became more reserved, I busied myself with my worldly friends. My brother and sisters were growing up fast, but I still had a lot of playing to do.

There’s a lot I don’t know about my brother, Victor. He’d spent twelve years finding his feet in the male-dominated world of the Fellowship even before I was born. He was two years old when the Fellowship split into opposing subgroups, Mum and Dad ending up in the more extreme of the two, and my mum’s parents totally cut off from us in the other. Victor lived through all that, growing up in the 1970s. I know it all affected him greatly, but it didn’t stop him loving and treating me like his baby. And those twelve years that separated us might as well have been twelve minutes for all the difference they made to our relationship.

I really loved my big brother. I followed him everywhere and couldn’t wait for him to wake up in the morning. I listened out for his call for me as soon as his alarm went off and delighted in acting as his slave. On request, I brought him cups of coffee and ferried messages back and forth between him and Mum. She was much too busy to bother about my brother when he was lazing in bed, but that was OK by me.

I loved it when Victor helped me with projects. One time I designed a set of heart-shaped shelves, which he assisted me in making. Whatever I wanted, he’d find a way of incorporating it into his own woodwork projects during his apprenticeship as a carpenter. As was usual practice in the Fellowship, he left school at sixteen, skipping his A-levels and learning a practical trade.

Victor was really handy with a can of paint, and sometimes Dad entrusted him with it to touch up the rusty spots on his Fiat Panorama. Dad didn’t believe in spending money on new cars until he had run his current one into the ground. By the time he had finished with it, the bodywork would be more Polyfilla than metal. The Panorama was an estate car, which carted the six of us around, four in the front and two in the luggage compartment, hanging on for dear life. I was rather glad when the law for wearing seat belts in the backs of cars was enforced a few years later.

Victor may have been handy with a spray can, but he couldn’t really be trusted with one. It always started off all right, then, having finished the job in hand, he looked round for more things to spray. On this particular occasion it was my tricycle that he turned to. I loved that little trike and whizzed around at top speed on it, leaning around the corners with one wheel off the ground. One day I dashed into the garage to grab it and, on seeing it, burst into floods of tears. Across the front of this dear little red trike was a spray mark of blue paint. It wasn’t a big mark, about the size of my four-year-old palm, but to me the blemish was the end of the world. I had no doubt in my mind who was responsible for this horrible stain.

‘Victor,’ I howled, ‘look what you’ve done!’

He popped his head out of the shed, a sheepish look on his face. ‘Sorry, Lindsey,’ he grinned. My anguish drained away at the sight of him, and immediately I forgave him. But I could never ride that tricycle again with quite the same pride. I got used to Victor’s destructiveness, though. I had to. He didn’t think twice about cutting my doll’s hair, and once even found he had crushed some of my toy cars in the vice that lived in the shed. He claimed they had been in a car crash.

When I was about nine, I asked Victor to take me out. What I really wanted was for him to take me fishing with him. He regarded me with a funny look on his face and said he wasn’t sure. I realized then that he was embarrassed by me. I wore clothes that didn’t fit in with the other girls my age and he clearly minded this detail. I was hurt by his embarrassment, and never asked him again. As I grew older, our relationship changed, and for a time we grew apart, but eventually events would bring us closer together again.

Chapter Five

Motherly Love

In one very particular way, I was a normal child. I was inquisitive, and wanted to know ‘why?’ all the time. Unfortunately, most of my questions, which I put to my mum and dad, were met with the same unsatisfying response: ‘Let the Lord into your heart and have faith,’ they would say. In other words, don’t ask questions. They might as well have been saying, ‘Don’t be Lindsey.’

One day I was in the kitchen helping Mum bake, when a question popped into my head.

‘How is God going to win the war against the Devil if there are more worldly people than Fellowship people?’ I mumbled through a mouthful of cake mixture.

‘Trust the Lord, Lindsey, He knows what He’s doing. And it’s very naughty to question Him.’

With no further questions, I carried on licking the spoon.

I wasn’t allowed to do sponsored charity events at school, so another time I asked, ‘Mum, how come we don’t give to money to charities that help people?’

‘That’s not what God has chosen us to do,’ Mum simply said. ‘There are other people to look after the poor.’

Being told that God had all the answers and there was no point trying to work anything out for myself was supposed to stop me asking questions. The problem was that it just gave me a great idea. If God had all the answers, I could ask Him. ‘Dear God, what am I getting for my birthday this year?’ I whispered, so Mum couldn’t hear me. She was standing at the foot of the beds making sure we said our prayers properly.

‘In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.’ I waited for my answer.

As far as Mum was concerned, all my questions about the ways of the world were unimportant. The Bible dealt with those completely and that was all there was to it. As I think she probably saw it, my questioning was just a minor diversion from the really important things in life. These were practical everyday things, such as baking and knitting. In a way, she was right. We had a great time together. Mum loved to buy Family Circle, a magazine for mums, full of arts-and-crafts ideas. She’d keep the best ideas in a folder and, when she’d finished all her jobs, we’d get out the paints, glue, glitter and scissors and get to work.

Mum also kept huge bags containing scraps of material and wool, which we used to make a collage man on one occasion. She drew the outline on a huge piece of paper and I stuck on wool for hair, buttons for eyes and various patches of cloth to make the clothes. She taught me to knit and sew, and we made clothes for my dolls.

When we weren’t doing arts and crafts we were either playing board games or heading out to the shops. It might not sound exciting, but I really enjoyed shopping with Mum, especially if we passed the post office with the cakes in the window. (It’s amazing how hungry you feel after posting a letter.) Bizarrely, it had a sweet counter at one end and a bakery at the other. I wasn’t so interested in the sweets, but Mum and I would make sure that we never went home without my cream bun and her horseshoe-shaped macaroon.

Two shops down from cake heaven was the hardware shop. Mum did a lot of practical jobs around the house, so we would often pop in there for one or two items on the way to the post office. One day, while she scoured the shelves for the things on her list, I waited at the front of the shop, watching as the man behind the counter measured out nails and hooks and weighed them on his scales. I was fascinated by the huge cast-iron weighing scales, which put Mum’s home set to shame. It was then that I noticed that the television fixed on the wall was on. I had seen televisions before but I had never had the chance to see one that was switched on. I looked up curiously.

There were some strange creatures dancing around in front of a row of houses. Popping out of the dustbin next to the steps was a shaggy-looking thing that was clearly neither a human nor an animal. I had no idea what I was seeing. I’d never seen anything like it before, but even so I was far more interested in getting off home with Mum and eating cake. That, not TV, was what was missing from my life at that moment in time.

I had some really nice times with Mum.

If Mum had to go to the doctor’s, or anywhere that involved a lot of waiting around, my grandma would take care of me for a few hours. Gladys was my dad’s mum, and she and my grandpa lived just a couple of minutes away by car. They rented a large Victorian terraced house from Uncle Hubert, who was married to my dad’s sister, Meryl. We’d always have to park in the multi-storey car park built directly behind the terrace, from where we could see Grandma if she was near her kitchen window. If she was looking out, I’d wave, and she’d be waiting at the front door by the time we got there.

I’d head straight out to the shed, which took up most of the tiny back garden and was used as a sewing room. I would sit at the old Singer sewing machine that stood just inside the doorway, thumping my foot on the treadle. I liked to pretend I was making clothes the way I saw Mum and Alice do.

Sometimes I’d see the stray cats that Grandma encouraged to come into her garden by leaving bowls of milk and scraps of food for them. I thought this was pretty daring, because Fellowship members were not allowed to keep pets, just in case they came to love them more than God. Maybe that rule was created just for Grandma, because she certainly loved them. Whenever we exchanged letters, hers would always tell me about the latest cats visiting her garden, and in my letters back to her I’d try to please her by drawing pictures of the ones she described.

I’d always hand my letters directly to Grandma when I saw her at the meetings. After the meeting was over, and everyone had gone outside, I’d run along the rows of benches to where Grandma was usually sitting, waiting for me. I’d tug her long plait of white hair and she’d creak round with a big smile on her face. I was always excited to have another letter for her. I’d ask when I could visit her, hoping to get my foot pumping on that treadle again. If my cousins, Hubert’s boys, were doing something at the house, she’d say, ‘Not this week, Lindsey, I’ve got the boys in.’ She loved her boys, possibly almost as much as she loved her cats.

The same can’t be said for Grandpa, who hated cats. Maybe he was afraid she’d love them more than him. Such was his dislike of them that there was a family legend involving him, a cat and a kitchen door. We all knew the story, but the truth of it was never confirmed. Apparently, he once caught a trespassing cat inside the house, and furiously slammed the door on it as it tried to escape. It was a horrible image and I didn’t want to think of Grandpa doing that.

One of the rooms upstairs in Grandma’s house was Grandpa’s office. He was always up there doing something, so if I was visiting I’d hardly get to see him at all. I’d often go up to a back bedroom to get a book for Grandma to read to me, and would pop my head round the door as I passed Grandpa’s office. He always seemed to be sitting at his desk with his back to the door. He wasn’t one for showing much affection, but if I went in he’d always stop what he was doing and invite me to choose a coloured sticker from the top drawer of his desk. In retrospect, I think they must have been items of office stationery, but I thought they were there just for me.

I particularly liked to be allowed to stay for lunch. Grand-ma’s special was crinkle-cut oven chips with dollops of ketchup. We just had the straight kind of chips at home, so I thought the fancy-shaped ones were wonderful. When it was time for lunch it was my job to run and sound the gong that hung from the ceiling in the hallway. This was Grandpa’s cue to put his stickers away and come downstairs.

After lunch I’d go upstairs to Grandma’s room to have a sleep on her big bouncy bed. It was covered with a large green eiderdown, which was so slippery that I had a job just getting on the bed in the first place. She’d lie down together with me and we’d cuddle up. At some point in the afternoon, Mum would arrive to pick me up. Mum never hung around to chat to Grandma, and I suspect they may not have got on too well, but to me she was special.

Chapter Six

The Ministry

Every month a package would arrive, delivered by a member of the Fellowship. This contained the books that told my parents how to live their lives. These were the Ministry, and we had accumulated hundreds of them. Victor’s carpentry skills were called into action by Dad, who got him to build several enormous sets of shelves and attach them to the walls on either side of the chimney breast in our dining room. They were completely filled with the volumes of the Ministry. Red books, green books, brown books, white books … I loved looking at the colours, but I wasn’t interested in what was in them. Mum and Dad would read every word, process the information and then tell me how a Fellowship girl was expected to behave.

Sometimes I went with Dad, and a few other Fellowship men, to the High Street to do some preaching. Everyone would stand with their back to the glass front of the local Woolworth’s store, while the men took it in turn to step forward to preach. No one ever came out of Woolworth’s to tell us to ‘piss off ’, so we must have had some sort of pitch licence.

When it was Dad’s turn, he would step forward into the bustling crowd with confidence and begin to read from the Bible earnestly. The thing I loved about Dad was that he seemed completely unbothered by the crowd. His confidence gave me confidence to be there; he made it seem like something to be proud of.

Most people just ignored us, but Dad carried on as if he had a captive audience. This happened once a month on a Saturday, when the high street was busy and there were no meetings to go, and it was the only time the Fellowship spoke publicly. I’m not sure if we were supposed to be converting sinners, but, if we were, it was a dismal failure. The only attention I remember getting was from the driver of a speeding white van, who slowed down just enough to shout out a volley of blasphemous abuse at us, before whizzing off in fits of laughter. Well, at least he showed some interest.

Reading all those ministry books and endless chapters from the Bible got tedious, even for Dad, so the reading of the daily broadsheet was a real treat for him in the evenings. Before starting he made sure he had everything he’d need to sustain him throughout the evening. First, he’d carefully snip the corner off a packet of peanuts and lean it against the leg of his favourite chair where he sat, so that they were within arm’s reach. This allowed him to slide his hand down and grab the packet without taking his eyes from the page. Nearby, he’d place a glass of sherry, which could also be located without looking.

Very carefully he aligned the pages of the paper, making sure he had the large cumbersome sheets under strict control. When everything was in order, he’d settle back in the armchair and balance the newspaper on his knees. Between regular munches of peanuts and sips of sherry, he gave sharp twitches of his head and nods of approval. If he got really involved in an article, he’d let out sharp lisping noises: the sound of him muttering under his breath. Victor and I found Dad’s habits hilariously funny. Without a TV, watching Dad was our evening’s entertainment.

Sometimes, he’d let out roars of laughter, calling out, ‘Edith, have you seen this?’ to which Mum would retort sharply, while her knitting needles clattered away, ‘Of course not, Peter, I’ve been far too busy.’

Eventually, Dad’s head would slump onto his chest and he’d begin snoring. This was our chance! Very carefully, one of us would begin to slide the paper from between his fingers. As soon as he felt the precious Telegraph slipping from his grasp, his head would snap up, and he’d shout, ‘I was reading that!’ and our chance was gone. And, of course, there wasn’t a hope in hell of taking away from Dad what was his only window on the world beyond the Fellowship.

Chapter Seven

School of Thought

When I was five I started my first year at the local primary school. At long last I was a big girl. I was particularly proud to be at the very same school my dad had attended when he was a lad. What’s more, I was following in the footsteps of Alice, Victor and Samantha. I couldn’t wait to let everyone in my class know that I had a big sister in the junior school. And I felt so important, putting on my best dress and shoes.

Samantha relished her big sister role, telling me which teachers to watch out for and what I could expect to encounter.

‘You’re lucky you won’t have Mrs Cook,’ she told me, enigmatically.

I wasn’t sure why this was meant to be lucky, but I nodded gravely. I accepted that Mrs Cook was capable of terrible things.

‘Your teacher,’ Samantha revealed, ‘is called Mrs Roland.’ Samantha had heard good things about Mrs Roland. Nothing terrible, anyway.

‘I’m going to call her Roland Rat,’ I announced. I had a sticker of Roland Rat attached to the headboard of my bed, so he meant a lot to me.

‘No, Lindsey, you don’t want to do that,’ she warned.

‘Yes, I do,’ I said defiantly, but I wisely never said it to Mrs Roland’s face.

Pretty soon, though, on the first morning, I was sitting in that Welfare office on the plastic chair, with all the Asian children. No one in the family prepared me for that.

The only preparation for school I was given by my parents was intended to make sure I followed the Fellowship rules while there. How I coped with that in the school environment was left up to me.

It was when I started school that I began to realize how my life really differed from those of the rest of my friends. I didn’t want to stand out, but having to follow the Fellow-ship’s rules made it difficult not to.

One of the first friends I made at primary school was Catherine. I can’t remember much about her now, but I must have thought she was nice, because I invited her back to my house. For some reason I decided that the Fellowship rule of not having worldly people in the house wouldn’t apply on that day. I was living in the moment and it seemed right. I was only five.

Mum was busy helping Alice make her wedding dress that day and had asked Catherine’s mum if she could walk me to the corner of Albion Avenue on the way home, to make sure I arrived safely. But when it came to saying goodbye I found myself asking, ‘Can Catherine come to my house and play?’

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.

We watched two men being ushered into our front room. Through the open door we saw Mum and Victor rise to greet them, then Dad shut the door firmly behind them. There was nothing more to see, so Samantha and I returned to our bedroom. Unusually for me I asked if I could get into her bed. She sounded glad that I’d asked. I got in under her bedcovers and snuggled up against her warm, soft body.

I felt so scared. I had a terrible feeling inside.

Mum knitted cardigans, booties, and bonnets in readiness for the birth of Alice’s first baby. I watched her place them side by side on her bed and I admired the soft white woollen garments. She wrapped them in tissue paper and carefully packed them away in a shoe box. This was a symbol of hope: we would be returning to our rightful place in Fellowship any day now, and the present was ready for that day. We waited for the call to come.

On Monday morning I got up and went to school as usual. I did my school work and played with all my friends. When I got home the house seemed changed in some way. Mum wasn’t rushing around trying to get the dinner on the table. When Dad burst through the door he wasn’t complaining about the terrible traffic on the M25. We ate our dinner calmly. And Dad did not leave the house.

The day after, it was the same. The phone didn’t ring. Again, we ate our dinner calmly. And again Dad did not leave the house.

Days turned into weeks and weeks into months.

‘Why is this happening to us?’ Mum asked no one in particular, over and over again. We were now ‘shut up’, so there was no one to answer her.

Victor left home. He handed me and Samantha £200 each. It seemed as if he was going away for ever. When Lois left her family they were let back into the Fellowship. But this didn’t happen to us.

We didn’t know when Victor was coming back, so Mum said I could have his room. Now I had one all to myself ! Mum stripped off the hideous classic-cars wallpaper and put up something more to my taste – something girly. I painted pictures of flowers on the chest of drawers and hung my ‘Pears Soap’ poster on the wall. It didn’t take me long to settle in!

Alice was still our family and we loved her dearly. But now she was married she had her own household – one that was free from sin.

There was no argument. No fuss. No one made anyone do what they did. Barbed-wire fences and padlocked gates were not put up around our home. And there was always the phone. But that was the end of our relationship with Alice. In fact, it was the end of our relationship with everyone in the Fellowship. No telephone calls, no Sunday dinner with other families. No meetings. It was just the way things were done. These were the rules and the rules were everything. Mum and Dad just accepted them.

And so did I – for a while.

It took me three long years, a third of my life, to work up the courage to make contact with Alice again.

One sunny afternoon, I came home from school to an empty house. Mum worked now. We needed the money and she needed the company of other adults. She had a job at the local hospital, working in medical records, and that was how she’d found out about the birth of Alice’s first baby.

No one told us. It was as if we no longer existed.

The news of the baby started me thinking about what Alice’s life might be like. I fantasized about finding her. She’d give me a big cuddle and say it was all over. God had sorted it out and we were welcomed back.

In the empty house, I picked up the phone. My heart was thumping. I had found her number in the directory a few days before and already had it scribbled down on a scrap of paper, hidden at the back of a drawer. A guilty secret.

I dialled the number.

Brrr-brrr, brrr-brrr, it purred.

I almost put the phone down. What was I doing? I began to feel God’s eyes looking directly at me.

‘Hello?’ a woman’s voice said. It was her, my sister.

‘Hello,’ I replied. ‘It’s me.’

‘Who?’

‘Me, Lindsey.’

There was a moment of silence. ‘Do you want to speak to the priests?’

The police? I thought. Does she want me to speak to the police? I’d made a big mistake. I put the phone down and never told anyone about what I’d done. I’d sinned. That night I prayed for forgiveness.

I’d never knowingly heard the word ‘priests’ before. I had no idea what it meant. When I did hear it again, I froze. All of a sudden I really wanted to know what a priest was.

Victor had also become a distant figure. It was just the four of us now, living in our little bubble, between worlds.

The waiting brought out the nervousness in Dad. He didn’t rush about, but he’d twitch annoyingly, a lot of the time. He’d often pace about, fingers clenched together behind his back. His long legs and straight back took his broad, shiny, bald head somewhere over six feet. From up there, he’d loom over Mum, hoping to grab a rare cuddle.

Mum wasn’t always very affectionate, but her face was built for smiling and that helped her get along with the worldly people she worked with. She could chat away for hours with anyone, given the chance. Dad was friendly, too, but his unrest made it harder for him to let go. He was happier discussing practical matters, like the traffic and work. He was an authority on organization, which suited his clear, strong voice. Mum spoke well, too, but, like both Victor’s and mine, her north London accent became more apparent when she was chatting excitedly.

Samantha was a mixture of the two: soft and cuddly like Mum, but tall like Dad, with a large broad face. When she grinned, it was so complete that her eyes would almost disappear. She’d look at people secretly without turning her head, taking everything in from the corner of her eye.

When it became clear to the Fellowship that Mum and Dad were not going to repent for Victor’s sins they were ‘withdrawn from’. This is the ultimate rejection by the Fellowship, from which there is no return. Mum and Dad had taken Victor’s sins upon themselves by refusing to believe that he had done anything wrong.

The Fellowship may have abandoned us but there was no way that Mum and Dad were going to abandon the values of the Fellowship.

Unlike other members that we knew who were ‘withdrawn from’, we did not rush out to buy a television or a radio. Mum and Samantha did not throw their headscarves away. I still did not eat with the other children at school. In many ways nothing had changed.

Chapter Ten

After Being Shut Up

Suddenly, we found that we had acres of time to fill. The meetings had provided a rigid structure to our lives and now the time we had spent preparing for, travelling to and being at them was empty. Obviously, we had all lost our friends and family members who were still in the Fellowship, but I imagine it hit Mum and Dad the hardest. For Mum it must have seemed like a recurring nightmare first experienced in 1970, when she had bravely made the choice to stay with dad in the Fellowship, while the rest of her family had given up following the Fellowship leader, the ‘Elect Vessel’.

He had taken over leading the Fellowship in the 1950s, and brought in most of the strict rules that forced us to live separately from the rest of the worldly people. I suppose Mum’s family would have reluctantly stayed true to him as well, if he hadn’t made a public spectacle of himself, fraternizing with women, swearing and drinking heavily at meetings and conferences.

Dad’s family supported him, as did most of the local Fellowship, but Mum’s parents had had enough of ‘waiting for the Lord to act’. For Mum it was a choice between family and husband. Once she’d made the choice, that was it. She even referred to her parents and brothers as the Open Fellowship, which was the worst thing she could think of saying about them. They were living a life that was as closed off from the world as Mum and Dad, but saying that they were Open was her way of calling them worldly.

The Lord did act in 1970, and the Elect Leader died, but it was too late. The damage was done, and the family split.

I was just a child of seven when we were ‘shut up’, so they kept their feelings from me. I sensed tension in the house, and heard muffled voices behind closed doors that I pressed my ear to. I wanted to know what was going on, but the words that Mum and Dad kept reiterating were ‘God is punishing us for some reason.’ The ‘reason’ was a mystery, but I was growing up with Mum’s mantra ringing in my ears: ‘Let the Lord into your heart and have faith.’ The punishment was exclusion from the Fellowship, the place they still yearned to be. They questioned each other over and over again: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Then they comforted themselves with the fact that it was God’s will. With prayer, they believed, the answer would show itself to them.

They were so wrapped up in their troubles that they didn’t worry too much about me after that, and I took advantage of this lack of supervision to further my friendships with my worldly mates. I went to their houses, watched television and played computer games.

One day after school I stopped off at my friend Leigh’s house. Leigh lived next door to a boy called Darrell. I went with her hoping for a glimpse of the ginger-haired boy, on whom I had developed a hopeless crush. But, despite my best efforts to linger outside her house for as long as possible, I didn’t see him.

I knew that in her kitchen there was a cupboard full of packets of crisps and I was hoping that she would offer me one. She didn’t. Instead, her mum offered me a pear, which I took. I wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t ripe and I almost spat it out, but, not liking to be rude, I crunched my way through the whole damned thing. I was, however, appeased when we were offered the crisps, which we took upstairs with us. Her bedroom was very different from mine. Whereas mine was tidy and quite bare, except for a toy box and book shelves, hers was messy, with clothes all over the floor. She too had a dressing table, but hers was covered with makeup, music cassettes and a stereo player. On her walls were posters of the boy band Bros. I watched her as she kissed those twin brothers on the lips, declaring that she loved them. We were both rotund little girls, but, rather than wear skirts with elasticized-waistbands and baggy T-shirts as I did, she wore short denim skirts and jeans.

Leigh put a tape in the cassette player and she danced around the room, grabbing a lipstick on the way past her dressing table, which she daubed across her mouth while on the move. You may wonder if I was envious of this girl who seemed to have all the things I didn’t. But I was not. I observed her and her posters, her music and her makeup, and I felt slightly repulsed by her. She looked so gaudy, and I couldn’t think of anything worse than standing out like that. I actually felt a bit sorry for her.

My sister’s worldly friend, Natalie, lived five houses down from us. Samantha hung around in the street with her, while I skirted around them on Samantha’s old shopper bicycle. I knew that it would be passed on to me when Samantha grew out of it, so I practised riding it. It was quite a move up from my little bike with stabilizers that Dad had picked up second-hand. Victor had spray-painted this bike red and blue for me.

I soon found that I could amuse Natalie better than Samantha could, and gradually Natalie spent more time with me than with my big sister. I could see that Samantha was distressed at this turn of events, but she didn’t put up much of a fight. She did try to get her own back just once, though. The three of us were playing out and I was being my usual annoying self, butting in on their games, when Samantha suddenly called me.

‘Lindsey, come over here, would you?’ I felt wary. I could see a huge grin on my sister’s face, which immediately told me something was up. It was common for Samantha to have a faraway, often worried, look on her face, but now she seemed alert and very much in the moment. With Natalie’s persuasion, at last I sauntered over. I was certainly not going to hurry. Samantha grabbed my hand when I reached them and told me to open my mouth. No way, I thought to myself. I’m not that stupid. Then they said they had a chocolate for me. Well, that was quite another matter. I couldn’t possibly pass up on this opportunity. Obediently, I opened my mouth, and waited for the treat.

‘Yuk!’ I spat on the ground with disgust. Far from the smooth, creamy chocolate I had expected, a Polo mint had been placed on my tongue. I hate sweets of any kind, apart from chocolate and fudge, so what might have been a nice surprise for most people was like a kick in the stomach for me. I’m not sure whether Natalie knew of my pet hate and had assumed that this was a nice surprise for me, or whether she was in on Samantha’s despicable plans. Either way, it exposed a side of Samantha that I hadn’t seen before. I was very impressed. She was more like me than I had thought!

I continued to build my friendship with Natalie, and we discovered that we got on really well. We must have looked an odd pair: I with my knee-length skirts and Hi-Tec trainers and she with her trendy jeans and Reeboks. We did have one thing in common, though, and that was our long hair. We both wore it tied back in a ponytail. The only difference was she did it out of choice, and I did it because I had to.

It didn’t take me long to become a well-established part of Natalie’s life. Every day after school I would rush to her house and knock for her to come out and play. She was two years older than I, so sometimes she had homework to do. So then I waited, hanging around in front of her house until she had finished.

I guess it was the natural course of things that I should go into her house. We played in the street. We played in her garden.

‘Are you coming in, Lindsey?’

I didn’t give too much thought to my reply. Not nearly as much as I probably should have done.

‘Yep.’

And that was it. I was in. Surrounded by all the tempting things that I might have had access to before if Kerry’s mum hadn’t walked in on us or if I’d stayed friends with Leigh.

I got into the habit of going to Natalie’s house every day after school. I knew that Mum wouldn’t come until dinnertime to pick me up, so I had hours to kill and it wasn’t long before I asked if I could watch the TV.

At first I couldn’t really grasp what I was seeing. I couldn’t distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. Anything with people in I thought was real life, but I did wonder how I was able to watch them. Did these people not know their lives were on telly. I felt much more at ease with the cartoons. At least I could see that they were drawings, even if they were moving. ThunderCats was my favourite.

One afternoon, I sat down in my usual position from where I could see Mum if she came up the garden path. I was looking forward to watching ThunderCats and Alvin and the Chipmunks, but Natalie had something else in mind.

‘Let’s watch a video,’ she said. That sounded fine to me. I certainly wasn’t going to let on I hadn’t the faintest idea what a video might be.

‘Which film do you want to see?’ Natalie asked.

Oh dear! I thought.

My eyes darted between the two homemade videocassettes she held out to me. I had seen Watership Down and the musical Annie at Kerry’s house, but that experience was not helping me in my decision. Natalie had seen lots of films, and I was afraid that, if I didn’t take matters into my own hands, she would remember that what she really wanted to do was to go outside and play. If that happened my opportunity to watch television would be gone. I had to move quickly.

‘Which do you want to see?’ I enquired.

‘I don’t mind. I’ve already seen both.’ She was beginning to sound bored already.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what’s that one there?’

‘Pinocchio,’ she said, eyeing the cassette in her left hand. ‘It’s about a little boy whose nose grows bigger.’

It didn’t sound particularly promising.

‘What’s the other one?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Dirty Dancing.’

I knew plenty about dancing – I loved my ballet books – but I couldn’t begin to imagine why a dance would be dirty. Whatever it was, it sounded more interesting than a little boy with a big nose.

‘Let’s watch that,’ I said, trying not to let my excitement show.

Natalie put the cassette into the machine, undoubtedly wishing she were playing outside, or doing almost anything else at all.

Well, I’m glad I didn’t choose to go outside and play, because I learned some things that day. As the video images stuttered into life I sat with my eyes glued to the television screen. I didn’t want to miss one single moment.

‘I’m not sure you should be doing this,’ Natalie’s mother said.

‘It’s fine,’ I mumbled. In front of me, men and women gyrated, their bodies grinding against each other.

A women’s voice was singing, ‘And if I had the chance I’d never let you go.’

Natalie’s mother left the room.

For the next two hours, I imagine that I am Baby, and that I am dancing in Johnny’s arms. I am falling in love for the first time. And my lover is a fictional man called Johnny played by a film star. I am nine years old.

I found out later that the actor’s name was Patrick Swayze, when Natalie bought me a full-length poster of him. I carried it home, rolled up tightly under my arm. It felt as if it were burning a hole in my side. Like a guilty criminal, I crept into the house, scurried upstairs and pushed that piece of filth under my bed, far out of sight. Every day for the next week I unrolled the paper and kissed the mouth of the man who looked back at me. I didn’t care if his name was Patrick Swayze or Johnny Castle, the dance instructor he portrayed in the film. I was his Baby.

I couldn’t stand the guilt for longer than a week. With one last kiss of regret, I screwed the poster into a ball and tossed it in a neighbour’s dustbin.

I’m glad I watched Dirty Dancing that day. I felt that I had definitely made the right choice.

I may not have been able to stand the guilt of having the poster in my own house, but that did not stop me wanting to watch the film again. And again … After I’d seen it for the third time, Natalie’s patience snapped. ‘For God’s sake, Lin, let’s go outside and play.’ I was crushed by her bluntness, but I knew when to stop pushing my luck!

Instead, I relived the film over and over again in my head. In the privacy of my bedroom, concealed by my duvet, I held an imaginary man and kissed his lips. This was as close as I could expect to get to a member of the opposite sex for many years to come. I hoped to become a Fellowship girl again very soon, and if that happened I would meet my husband at the age of nineteen or twenty.

I continued to go to Natalie’s house and became a regular fixture on their sofa in front of the TV. It really annoyed me when her dad and brother wanted to watch the motor racing. What a load of rubbish! I thought. It was noisy and as far as I could see no one was testing their own strength. It was cars doing all the work! I liked it better when Roseanne was on. Or The Cosby Show.

One Saturday afternoon Natalie’s mum poked her head round the living room door.

‘Do you want something to eat, Lindsey?’ She understood that I was in no hurry to leave. In the back garden she was preparing a barbecue for friends. It was really time for me to go home, but I had never eaten a barbecue meal before, and I was always tempted by food.

‘Yeah,’ I said happily, ‘I’ll have something.’

‘Lindsey,’ Mum said when I arrived home. ‘Dinner’s on the table.’

I ate two dinners that night. My belly was fit to burst, but I didn’t care. Patrick Swayze put his arms around me and I felt good.

I was becoming good at being two different people. At home I behaved like a Fellowship girl who listened to Dad reading the Bible and said my prayers at night. Outside the house I took part in the worldly things that my friends were doing without feeling guilty.

The Fellowship taught me always to expect that God would punish me for my sins, but it also taught me that anyone under the age of twelve was free of responsibility for their actions. As far as I was concerned, I could do pretty much anything and God would forgive me.

Natalie was older, but often looked to me for what we were going to do. When I was nine and she was eleven I thought it would be a good idea for us to start smoking. We picked half-smoked stubs off the ground, pocketed them and headed towards the school gates.

I did what I had done many times before, and scrambled over the top of the gates, dropping to the ground on the other side with a heavy thud. There was a gap underneath, but I had found out through bitter experience that, while Natalie could slide gracefully underneath, I couldn’t.

We legged it up the school driveway and dashed around the corner, onto the field, and over to a thin row of bushes, carefully avoiding the school caretaker as we went. Once we were well hidden we began. It was more a case of inhaling a mouthful of acrid smoke and trying not to cough our guts up when it hit the back of our throats.

Following that initiation, we smoked on and off for a while, until even we couldn’t overlook the fact that our regular supply of cigarettes came from dirty pavements, and filthy gutters. My habit didn’t last long, and, after that, another nine years passed before I touched another cigarette.

Soon, Patrick Swayze wasn’t the only man in my life. Everywhere I went I thought I saw the boy of my dreams. The boys of my dreams. At school, in the supermarket and in the museums I visited with Dad. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know them, and never would. I created their personalities in my head and thought I knew them. I watched my worldly friends practise kissing with the boys in the playground and, while they were crying over their breakups, I was kissing the back of my hand and hugging my pillow. I was trying to ensure that I would never be rejected; sometimes, though, I let my guard down.

The boy I had a crush on, Darrell, was a friend of Natalie’s and lived just around the corner. One autumn evening, Natalie asked me if I wanted to go to a bonfire party Darrell was having at his house. Mum had warned me never, ever, to go out of the road, but I avoided being disobedient by entering his house through the back garden gate, which opened onto my street.

I watched fireworks shoot into the sky from beside a giant bonfire, which was steadily burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes. I couldn’t count how many sins I was committing, but I knew that Satan must have been in my heart, because that night I went to bed dreaming about Darrell. The trouble was, I think he fancied Natalie, and resented the time I spent with her. I knew she was glad to have me to play with, as she definitely did not fancy him. But, despite this knowledge, I could not stop thinking about Darrell.

One day I was loitering in the street waiting for Natalie to come out and play, when he appeared in our street.

‘All right?’ He half nodded in my direction.

‘Yeah, fine.’ I felt myself blushing.

‘Want a go on my skateboard?’ he asked.

No, I most certainly did not, but I said yes, anyway. He handed me the board and I knelt down on it, trying hard not to let my bum show as my skirt rode up. I pushed off with my trailing leg and that was it: I was whizzing along. This felt good. What have I been worrying about? I asked myself, grinning. I couldn’t help thinking, I bet Darrell thinks I look good.

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