A fundamentalist religious sect that frowned on books and banned university
education seems hardly the ideal childhood for a Cambridge professor of
English literature. Yet Rebecca Stott claims that her extraordinary
upbringing in the Exclusive Taylorite Brethren in the 1960s served her well.
After all, not all little girls get to see angels and devils in their
bedrooms, or to spend hours fulminating about male domination.
Stott was raised in a branch of the Plymouth Brethren, the Exclusive Brethren,
which practises separation from the rest of the world: television, radio and
newspapers are banned as “conduits of evil” and women are subservient, wear
long hair and headscarves. It was a radical form of “spirituality”. And,
after her family leftthe Brethren when she was a teenager, Stott reacted:
she became a single parent at 19, an ardent feminist, and wrote a book about
Charles Darwin, a man she had been raised to believe was an instrument of
Satan.
Stott, 42, lectures at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and is an
affiliated scholar at the Cambridge History and Philosophy of Science
Department, with several nonfiction books under her belt. She still looks a
bit puritan, with her black empire-line frock and air of calm, despite her
chatty enthusiasm. She has just published her first novel, Ghostwalk,
a thriller that interweaves 17th-century mysteries surrounding Isaac
Newton’s early career with dark dealings in 21st-century Cambridge. It has a
touch of the Don’t Look Now’s, full of presences glimpsed out
of the corner of the eye, strange coincidences and tricks of time.
On the surface the novel seems far removed from the Brethren, yet it is
steeped in the big questions of Stott’s religious upbringing. It is also
full of hauntings; whether they are real or imagined is left to the reader
to decide. As an academic, Stott is somewhat sceptical about the
supernatural. When she visited a psychic for research purposes she found it
highly implausible. But, as a young child, Stott saw angels and devils in
her bedroom and lived in fear that the world was about to end. She also
believed that because she wasn’t “good enough” she would be left to face
Armageddon while her parents would be saved.
She recalls: “My imagination grew up on the Book of Revelation
and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the great angels in Babylon and
falling stars and floods. Looking back, my more rational side would say I
saw and heard strange things because I had a strong imagination and it was
being fed strange ideas. But, as an adult, I have also had experiences that
make no sense in any rational frame. I have felt presences and sensed
things; coincidences perhaps, but not easily explainable.
“In Cambridge, conversations are so resolutely rational. Yet the city is full
of ghosts and presences and the weight of history. That’s why it was the
perfect setting for my novel, to conjure preoccupations about where the
rational ends and the irrational begins, and where the natural and the
supernatural meet.”
Stott became intrigued by Newton when she discovered that he shared her own
childhood obsession with sin: “Newton kept a list of his sins in a notebook.
That really moved me because I recognised that impulse and his palpable
desire that it could all be wiped clean. As a child I spent a lot of time
thinking about and calculating my sin, just because of the way we were
raised to believe that we were wicked and would be purified by God.”
Surprisingly, Stott describes her early childhood as ordinary, happy and
secure, with a strong family life and endless games. Yet she and her four
siblings weren’t allowed to mix with the other children at their local
school and had to stay out of many English, science and religious education.
So she spent hours working by herself in the well-stocked library. There she
found books that offered a more complex view of the world and she seized the
opportunity to taste forbidden fruit. Enid Blyton and Anne of Green
Gables were a far cry from Brethren-approved tales such as Mary Jones
and her Bible.
Sundays were spent sitting still for hours in prayer meetings while the men
held forth, followed by visits to Brethren families in suburban Sussex.
Stott says: “Even as a young child I thought angry thoughts about how unfair
and wrong it was that God spoke only through men, when the women I knew
seemed to be just as wise. I thought, ‘Have I really got to grow up into
this?’ Sometimes I wonder whether that’s one of the reasons I became a
lecturer.”
Ironically, life got worse when the family left the Open Brethren when Stott
was 12. Five years earlier they had been part of the mass exodus from the
Exclusive Brethren which was triggered by a scandal involving their American
leader. They joined the more relaxed Open Brethren for a few years, until
her father lost his faith. He just gradually lost trust in the whole system
and instead put his faith in Shakespeare and great poetry. He had always
loved literature but had been forced to give it up in the intense Brethren
years.
Until their final departure they lived in a rather grand house in the suburbs
of Brighton, where her father ran the family wholesale grocery business.
Leaving the Brethren meant severing all contact with the sect — including
many relatives — and the family was catapulted into the real world. Suddenly
a huge TV set and radio arrived and they were off to see Gone with the
Wind.
Stott recalls: “There was a sharp intake of breath as we stepped into the
cinema: Satan’s world. Coming out of the Brethren was rocky for us children
because nobody explained that it was now all right to enter this world which
for years and years we’d been taught was full of Satanic teaching. But in
the long term it has given me a healthy scepticism about what is and isn’t
true, and about people in authority.”
Once she got to university, the old ghosts caught up with her: “I had a
delayed reaction to all sorts of things that happened after we left the
Brethren, when so many of the certainties collapsed and my parents’ marriage
broke up. Leaving home was the last straw and I had a bit of a collapse. I
was a lost soul for a while.” She became pregnant in the first year at
university and was taken in by an academic couple who ran their house as a
kind of commune, which enabled her to finish her degree. She later married
and, as well as her son Jake, 22, has two daughters, Hannah, 14, and Kezia,
12. Since her divorce the girls spend two months with each parent.
The Brethren’s legacy has inevitably been hard to shake off, although Stott
insists that her upbringing did no lasting damage. She says: “I don’t think
you ever totally get rid of it, and I’m not sure I want to. There is still a
side of me that wants to ask metaphysical questions about death and God. I
still have apocalyptic dreams. When the sky is particularly black it gives
me that sense of panic I often had as a child. It’s so deep in my
imagination.
“But in lots of ways literature has kicked out of me the paranoid,
black-and-white view of the world I grew up with. Literature has made me
certain that the world is so much more complicated and entangled. My own
novel is about how nobody is either good or evil; they are both in all of
us.”
In the beginning was the word...
Jeanette Winterson, 47, the author of Oranges are not the Only Fruit
(1985) Trained by her Pentecostal mother for missionary work, Winterson
was preaching on street corners at the age of 12. But she was denounced by
her parents when she fell in love with a girl. Winterson says of her mother
that she “would gladly have put Semtex in her boots if she thought it would
bring about the Second Coming”.
Edmund Gosse, 1849-1928, poet, critic and author of an autobiography Father
and Son (1907) A member of the Plymouth Brethren, Gosse was raised
by his strict evangelical father, an oppressive religious fanatic who
believed the biblical account of creation to be literally true. His
childhood memories of religious fervour include his father abominating a
Christmas pudding as “flesh offered to idols”.
James Wood, 41, author of The Book Against God (2003) Raised in
a home where church attendance was compulsory, the atmosphere in Wood’s
family was “scriptural, austere and not worldly”. Exposed to a more relaxed
style of worship at Durham Cathedral, where he was a chorister, he turned
against religion in his teens, eventually leaving the Church.
Ghostwalk (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99) is available for £11.69, p&p
free, from timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy;
0870 1608080
I was brought up PB by English parents. My first break was WWII when I flew with Bomber Command. My father was patriotic only because he thought God supported the 'Empire', --- I wish I had kept the letter from the Brethren gathered together in the name of the Lord, commending me to the bretheren in Britian and elsewhere.
I suddenly realized to my amazment that there were principled and moral people outside of the BP. Finally I returned to Canada---started High School, and 14 yrs later became FRCSC. I look back in anger at the wasted time
when I could have played with neighboring boys, been left to myself to separate the useful from the dross in the intellectual aspects of life.
FGordon Dunn M.D., Ross, California USA 94957