Real lives: ‘I was told that the world outside was evil’Rebecca Stott spent just the first six years of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist and reclusive Christian sect, but its influence has taken a lifetime to escape No one would have guessed that I had been raised in a Christian fundamentalist sect, or that my father and grandfather were ministering brothers in one of the most reclusive and savage Protestant groups in British history. Rebecca, pictured today, was raised in Christian fundamentalist sect the Exclusive Brethren. It was always my fault if the subject came up and, once it did, it would be difficult to make it go away again. People were interested; they asked questions.‘I was raised in a cult,’ I’d say and then recoil, embarrassed by the melodrama of those words. Were the Exclusive Brethren a cult? We wore headscarves and were forbidden from cutting our hair. We weren’t allowed televisions, newspapers, radios, the cinema, holidays, pets or watches.’The list of prohibitions seemed endless. I’d watch people’s eyes widen.

Rebecca Stott spent just the first six years of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist and reclusive Christian sect, but its influence has taken a. Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. Easily share your publications and get.

They’d look at me askance, then compete to ask questions, and I’d think, ‘Oh no, not this again.’‘We weren’t allowed to talk to the other children at school,’ I’d say. We were told that everyone outside the Brethren was part of Satan’s army and they were all out to get us. They called them “worldly” or “worldlies”. If you didn’t do exactly what the Brethren said, they would expel you. Then your family wouldn’t be allowed to speak to you ever again.

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People took their own lives. People went mad. Yes, this was Brighton. In the 1. 96. 0s.

In the suburbs. During the sexual revolution. It’s hard to explain.’Rebecca as a child with the comfort blanket and toy rabbit that her mother had given her. And to explain Brethren women, I’d have to tell the story of how my great- grandmother had been sent to an asylum in Australia for 4. Brethren husband, not just because she had epilepsy, but because she was considered wilful. Wilfulness isn’t allowed in Brethren women, I’d say. But even if the subject didn’t come up, my Brethren childhood would rear up like Banquo’s ghost at the dinner table, refusing to be buried. At university, when I made new friends, I couldn’t tell them how I’d become a teenage mother, or shoplifted books for years, or why I was impatient, afraid of the dark and had a compulsion to rescue people without explaining the Brethren, the God they made for us and the rapture that they told us was coming.

No wonder I heard voices. No wonder they never stopped John Nelson Darby, one of the founders of the movement in the late 1. He had a vision that there would be not just one, but two second comings. First, Christ would take the Brethren off the planet in a sudden, secret exodus to heaven. Watch Mostly Sunny Download more.

All those left behind, the ‘worldly’ people, would suffer terrible storms, earthquakes, plagues and famines. Then Christ would return a second time to save more people, but the most privileged residents in heaven would be the rapture people, the Brethren.

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By the time I was born, in 1. James Taylor (JT) Junior, then the leader of the Brethren, had implemented scores of new rules. Brethren could no longer live in the same house as non- Brethren members.

Husbands had to leave non- Brethren wives. Wives had to leave non- Brethren husbands. Brethren could no longer work with anyone who had been ‘put out of the fellowship’ for breaking the rules.

John Nelson Darby was one of the founders of the the Exclusive Brethren in the late 1. After four years of fierce edicts, Brethren were almost completely isolated from the world. JT Junior, convinced that the rapture was only weeks away, became obsessed with getting Brethren houses clean in time. He prohibited meals in restaurants, cafés and canteens. Meetings were to be held every day and he banned pets. Brethren had to either find alternative homes for their animals or have them put down. Watch Toy Story Online Etonline here. Parents had to find ways of explaining to their distressed children where their beloved pets had gone. I remember lying in bed listening to my parents’ muffled conversations and seeing Satan – or my idea of Satan, all horns and scales and a grinning mouth – projected on to the darkened surface of the curtains.

I managed the terrors of my small domestic space by imagining what God might be like. Occasionally, if the voices I heard terrified me more than I could bear, I’d call out to my parents and my father would come in. I dared not tell him what I saw projected on the curtains. My mother gathered talismans to protect me from the dark: she crocheted me a comfort blanket and gave me a stuffed toy rabbit with long ears. I discovered that if I tucked one of the rabbit’s ears between my little toe and the next toe on my right foot, the voices would stop. By 1. 96. 4, Brethren leader John Taylor Junior had implemented scores of new rules.

Brethren women and girls were not supposed to have their hair cut because hair, JT Junior decreed, was their ‘glory’. By the time I was three or four, my hair stretched down to my waist when wet. Thick, heavy and curly, it had to be combed and plaited constantly. Fridays were hair- washing and nail- cutting nights, a family grooming that prepared us for the five or six Brethren meetings at the weekend, including the compulsory 6am meeting on the Lord’s Day. It’s not just the nonsense and the trickery that alarms me now, but the number of hours we Brethren children spent listening to the men talk. My brothers and I – and thousands of other Brethren children around the world – attended nine one- hour meetings a week before 1. That makes a total of just over 3,0.

I was six years old. No wonder I heard voices.

No wonder they never stopped. The Exclusive Brethren conference in 1. Watch The Dead Pool 4Shared. JT Junior took leadership. Brethren children were expected to be quiet and well- mannered in meetings. We’d sit in the back row with our mothers, clothes pressed, faces scrubbed, shoes polished, hair tightly plaited or pinned back with clips, Bibles on laps. My brothers and I understood that the outside world and the people in it were dangerous.

The streets were owned by Satan and thronged with his traps: shop windows full of television sets with moving pictures that you tried not to look at but couldn’t take your eyes off; hoardings on news stands; adverts for perfume and make- up; women in miniskirts. There were snatches of music, too, from open windows or café doors. The grown- ups would say these things were ‘worldly’ and in the meeting room they preached that Satan, the enemy, used them in his battle for our souls. The teachers at school were used to Brethren children and didn’t put up a fight when parents stipulated what their children were permitted to read or study. The teachers banished us from the classroom whenever they strayed into areas that conflicted with Brethren teachings. That meant we spent many of our school hours in the corridor that ran the length of the Victorian building. Central Hall, London, where the Exclusive Brethren's meetings took place. No assembly. No prayers.

No classes about poetry or fiction. No science that conflicted with the creation story.

No gym. No ballet. No music classes. No discussion of ethics or philosophy. The teachers handed us worksheets – comprehension practice, quizzes and maths sheets. Sometimes I’d glimpse one or both of my brothers further up the hallway.

The only other people we saw there were the ‘worldly’ boys who’d been sent out of the class for misbehaving. They’d sit outside the headteacher’s room, fidgeting, waiting to be called in and reprimanded. If you didn’t do exactly what they said, your family wouldn’t be allowed to speak to you again One day my teacher told me that when I got to the end of a worksheet I could go to the library for independent reading if there was time left before the bell rang.

I still don’t know if she realised what she was saying. I nearly told her but swallowed the words. When my classmates had library time I had to sit on a faded, red plastic chair outside the door.