Not My Idea of Heaven. Lindsey Rosa

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ