1954 – the Agapemone diary records no entries for the year I learned about my grandfather’s stupendous blasphemy. Was that a coincidence? Back then, had I known, I would have been convinced my reaction to my new-found knowledge had upset those I lived with to such an extent that no one that year even gave a thought to the diary that had recorded the community’s momentous and trivial happenings for half a century. Now, I believe it was indeed merely chance.
It was term time and I had lined up with the rest of the student body for the weekly distribution of sweets: any confectionery brought to school at the start of each term was confiscated and then doled out every Saturday morning, when it could be supplemented by sweets bought by the school and resold to us. How we looked forward to Saturdays.
I remember so well the way the sun streamed through the huge glass cupola above the grand staircase that morning, adding warmth to the busy hum of 90 schoolgirls. At last, it was my turn and I collected my ration of the Belgian chocolates I had brought for the summer term – a gift from one of the old ladies – adding to them five Liquorice Allsorts and two Bulls Eye mints.
Belgian chocolates were hardly the usual confection brought in by pupils. But then neither was the armful of damask tablecloths or the eight-piece set of solid silver cutlery in its own leather roll that I had been sent to school with in my first term. Most parents just provided the requisite knife, fork and spoon, plus two sheets of bed linen.
I enjoyed the rush of exquisite taste as I left the queue. ‘Kitty!’ I heard someone call out.
‘Yup,’ I shouted over my shoulder. Stuffing the rest of the chocolates in the paper bag they had been distributed in, I waited impatiently for a friend, whose identity I have forgotten, to catch up. I was anxious to get Pinto and ride down to the beach a mile or so away, where we would gallop into the sea and I would feel his muscles rippling beneath me as he began to swim.
‘Did you know,’ my friend said as she fell into step beside me, ‘your grandfather said he was Jesus?’
I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Huh?’
‘Your grandfather, Smyth-Pig . . . pig . . . oh, whatever his name was, said he was Jesus.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m not,’ she persisted. ‘I heard my aunt and Mummy talking about the Aga . . . Agap . . . your home, anyway, when they drove me to school. And they said your grandfather said he was Jesus.’
‘Well, they’re wrong,’ I retorted. I turned away, fished another sweet out of my pocket and began to head downstairs. ‘Nobody goes around saying they’re Jesus!’
‘You ask Miss Burridge,’ she shouted after me.
I made my way out of the main school building and down the drive to the stables, snatched my pony’s halter from its hook in the tack room and strode out to the park to call him. How dare she talk such nonsense? And she calls herself a friend!
But when I got to the park I realised I had come without a carrot – I would have to entice Pinto with my one remaining sweet. As I toiled after my pony under an increasingly hot sun, I began to work myself up into a state of righteous indignation over my friend’s words. But they would not go away, stretching instead like a banner across my mind. I had to get to the bottom of this. To my pony’s surprise, I abandoned trying to catch him and returned to the school, where I tracked down the headmistress, Miss Lilian Burridge, who was chatting with her sister Miss Mary, the school matron, outside the little ones’ dormitory.
‘Is something wrong, Kitty?’ asked Miss Mary, seeing my expression.
Her kindly-put question crystallised my years of unanswered confusion about my family into something close to panic. Suddenly, I couldn’t speak.
Once we were seated in the alcove of her bedroom, I began. ‘Someone told me my grandfather claimed he was Jesus.’
The two sisters’ expressions were far too noncommittal.
‘It’s not true,’ I whispered, ‘is it?’
‘He didn’t exactly say he was Jesus, dear,’ said Miss Lilian.
Relief began to flood through me.
‘It was more that he was the Messiah. The Second Coming,’ she went on, with a glance at her sister, who nodded in confirmation.
I watched their lips move and heard not a word. Surely, it couldn’t be true! And yet . . . they would not lie to me; not as they were so religious, running their little school according to their Christian beliefs. Eventually, Miss Lilian left the room, reappearing several minutes later with the stuttering Reverend Skrine.
His mollifying explanation made no difference. I didn’t even hear what he said, I was so consumed by the thought that my grandfather didn’t even look like Jesus. No long hair. No blue eyes. No robes.
It seemed like hours – but could have been seconds – before the vicar excused himself and Miss Mary asked if I would like to go home for the rest of the weekend.
She smiled. ‘Why would I do that, Kitty? We thought a weekend home would give you a chance to talk the whole thing over with your family. To ask questions.’
And be told answers!
By the time Mummy arrived in a taxi to fetch me – promptly, for once – I was stony-faced. The drive home took place in silence. I wasn’t saying anything in front of strangers; I knew my mother wouldn’t. When we reached home and Waa came out to greet me, I pushed past her, ran up to my room and locked myself in.
Flinging myself onto my bed, I glared up at the ceiling. All those hours in the school chapel. All those Sunday mornings in church. Praying to Jesus. The scripture lessons about Jesus. The little talks from Miss Mary about Jesus. And all the time . . .
‘Kitty?’ Mummy’s voice came from beyond the door. I watched the door handle turn. ‘Come on, Kitty, open this door!’
Perhaps I would refuse to go back to school. But Pinto was at school. Maybe I would become a nun. No, not a nun – fancy praying, ‘Our Grandfather, who art in heaven!’
Then it was Uncle David – Uncle Glory! ‘Kitty, listen to your mother.’
‘Go away!’ I screamed. It had the desired effect. The door handle stopped turning and the footsteps receded. No wonder Ann had been so keen to leave. Her boyfriend had been right, our family truly was ‘peculiar’.
I must have fallen asleep for the next thing I remembered was it being dusk. It took me a few seconds to work out where I was. And why. So, this was no nightmare from which I would awake. I felt my heart sink. Perhaps I was about to have a heart attack and they would find me dead in bed. Then they would be sorry.
My stomach rumbled in the silence. I realised I was starving. How could such a prosaic need as food make itself felt when my life had been devastated? I glanced at my watch – eight o’clock. Everyone would be in bed except Mummy and Uncle David, and they would be at the pub or in Granny’s drawing room at the other end of the house. Another rumble. I would have to creep down to the kitchens and find something – anything – to eat. But before I even made it out of bed, someone knocked on my bedroom door.
‘Kitty!’ It was Waa. ‘I’ve brought you some toast and tea. Shall I leave it out here?’
‘Yes,’ I said shortly. ‘No.’ I padded to the door and unlocked it. Waa was in her dressing gown, her white hair unpinned and straggling down her back. She carried a tray, which she set on my bedside table. Tea, a whole mound of hot buttered toast and an egg under its own little cosy.
‘Oh, Waa,’ I cried, my tears beginning to flow.
‘I know.’ She pulled me to her.
‘Why wasn’t I told?’
‘Mummy so hates to see any of you upset. She loves you all very much.’
‘Do Ann and Margaret know?’
‘Yes, they know. I think we all thought they might tell you. Sometimes things are easier coming from people your own age.’
Anger, this time at my sisters, rose like bile. ‘Well, they didn’t.’ My voice began to rise. ‘Why didn’t they, Waa?’
‘They probably didn’t want to think about it either.’
‘Do you believe my grandfather was Jesus?’
She didn’t answer immediately and, feeling betrayed, I started to pull free from her encircling arms. ‘But it wasn’t how it was, Kitty,’ she went on. ‘Your dear grandfather never said he was Jesus – Jesus died on the cross – he said he was the Son of Man, come again to help the world. And, Kitty, if the world had listened, maybe those terrible wars would never have happened and my brothers would never have been killed.’
She poured the tea and pointed to the egg and pile of toast. ‘Eat up, Kitty. It’ll help,’ she encouraged. ‘Your grandfather was a wonderful man, who acted according to his lights.’
‘He was a blasphemer! He was a false prophet!’ I shouted, cracking the egg so violently, the yolk streamed down the side of the shell. I scooped it up with my finger.
She looked at me as I sat in bed, hugging my knees, with a tearstreaked face and fingers covered in egg yolk. ‘The world called him that. But he made us all feel special and he so wanted the world to be a better place. And he entrusted me, Kitty – young Margaret Davis from Wiltshire – with his children. And now you and your sisters are my family, too, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Not for all the tea in China.’
I should have tossed and turned that night and awoken the next morning with rings of exhaustion under my eyes, but I hardly remembered my head hitting the pillow after Waa left. It was in the daylight that the nightmare returned. One moment I convinced myself none of it was true; the next, I worried about what was I going to say to people; and the next, who else knew? Did the Ledermans know? No wonder the village children laughed at me. Waves of embarrassment flooded through me at the thought of everyone knowing but me. Would my friends shun me, like in the Bible? I shouldn’t have had to discover the truth about my grandfather from a school friend. But, most of all, I was angry with this grandfather I had never known but who had coloured my entire life. Who had spoiled everything – from beyond the grave!
Eventually, I washed and dressed and made my way along the passage, through the baize door to Granny’s End and down the dark stairs to her drawing room. People are right when they say they see things in a different light: nothing had actually changed – around me old ladies moved like old snails, nodding and smiling as I squeezed past; the same bucket sat under the same leak, on the bottom step of the stairs leading to Jericho; the same gloomy Victorian engravings hung on the wall, including one which had always terrified me, of a wolf about to attack a small child in her four-poster bed – yet it didn’t look the same.
Halfway down Granny’s stairs, I stopped to stare up into my grandfather’s penetrating, sad eyes gazing down from his portrait. I longed to throw something at it. ‘What are you doing, Kitty?’ Mummy was watching me from the drawing-room doorway.
‘Staring at Jesus,’ I replied.
She sighed. ‘This isn’t worthy of you.’ She opened the door wider. ‘Ethel has made some coffee. Real coffee, not instant,’ she enticed.
‘I don’t like coffee,’ I lied. ‘I’m going to see Granny.’
‘Granny isn’t here. Uncle David has taken her out for the day.’
‘So I won’t ask her questions?’
‘Yes,’ replied my mother. ‘She’s an old lady, Kitty. She’s blind and she has cancer.’ She pushed the door wide for me. ‘Come in here.’
The morning sun streamed in, setting the Crown Derby in the glass-fronted sideboard a-sparkle and making patterns of light on the oval dining table. Mummy sat opposite me. ‘I can’t really tell you much, Kitty, because it all happened before I was born.’
‘All what happened?’
‘He announced he was the Second Coming.’
‘And people believed him.’ My tone dripped with all the sarcasm I could muster.
‘Many did,’ my mother admitted. ‘But many more didn’t.’
After breakfast, I wandered outside and gazed longingly at the neat little house where my friends, the Ledermans, lived. I could see Trudel Lederman inside dusting. She looked up and, seeing me, waved. I waved back and forced a smile. No, I couldn’t face explaining why I was home in the middle of term. I turned away.
At lunch, I tried to imagine the old ladies praying to, rather than with, my grandfather. Did they genuflect when they saw him, as my mother and uncle did when they went to Roman Catholic Mass? As soon as we’d finished eating, I hurried to the laundry.
Cissy peered up at me from the door of the little low cottage. ‘Oh, it’s you, Kitty. I thought you were at school,’ she said. ‘Never mind, I had hoped it might be the doctor. Lettit has had a fainting spell. Probably doing too much as usual. We’re all getting old, I’m afraid, Kitty.’ She thrust a coin into my jodhpur pocket. ‘It’s all we have on us at the moment, but perhaps it will buy you a little something. Everything’s getting so expensive these days.’
I sought out Emily.
‘Go about your business, young lady,’ she raged, when I raised the subject. ‘Or I’ll take my stick to your back. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I went back to Waa.
‘He acted according to his lights,’ she said. ‘It’s all I can say, dear. It’s all in the past and best forgotten.’
‘But nobody does forget. They’re always talking about him and how wonderful he was, yet you’re all cross with me when I ask questions!’ I wailed, close to tears.
She reached for me and, tall as I was – a good head and shoulders taller than her bent old figure – she clutched me to her. ‘I know, Kit, I know. But you have to put it behind you. You’re making everyone unhappy.’
My uncle and grandmother returned from their outing in the late afternoon. I had promised my mother not to talk to my grandmother, so I turned my burning anger and confusion on my uncle.
‘Now perhaps you know what it was like for your mother, Uncle Pat and me,’ he replied angrily to my questioning.
‘I don’t care what it was like for you; it’s terrible for me!’ I shouted. ‘I hate my home. And I hate my family.’
Uncle David spat out his answer. ‘You ungrateful wretch!’ he cried. ‘Try being in our shoes; then you’d know!’
Mummy had been sitting quietly in a corner chair. ‘Perhaps now, Kitty,’ she interrupted, ‘you can understand why I sent you to boarding school. So you could have a life beyond this place.’
‘I wish I could stay there and never come home,’ I yelled as I ran from the room.
Over the next 24 hours, I nursed my confusion into a cold determination to find out all I could. I chose my time and victim carefully. Waa had returned to her ever-growing pile of my mending. Mummy and Uncle David were at the pub. The KP were at lunch.
‘Did someone knock?’ Toto called from her room.
‘It’s me. Kitty.’
She opened her door. ‘What a lovely surprise! Come in, come in.’ She took my arm and guided me to a chair, as if it was me who was going blind.
‘I want to know about my grandfather,’ I burst out.
‘He left us a long time ago.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘We never dreamed he would leave us. Oh, it was such a terrible time. Especially for our Holy Family.’
I blinked. ‘Holy Family?’
‘Yes, dear, your grandfather, your grandmother, and your mother and uncles.’
What did that make me? And my sisters? It was becoming so bizarre, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But it was Toto who began to cry. A tear magnified into a huge bubble from behind her bottle-end glasses and then started down her cheek. She wiped at it with her lace hanky.
‘It was all such a long time ago, Kitty. So much has happened since then, so much confusion and sadness.’
Watching her, I grew scared. Suddenly, I hadn’t the heart to badger her. ‘Please don’t cry, Toto.’
I went back to my mother, who said again how it had all happened long before she was born. ‘You can’t imagine how hard I tried to leave this all behind me,’ she said, as she sipped her third whisky of the evening. ‘But remember, Kit, he was my father and I loved him very much.’
Eventually, Uncle David, in his quick-tempered way, told me to stop pestering the old people and my mother. ‘You’re becoming a spoilt brat,’ he said. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was being so self-indulgent. I led a normal life, went to boarding school –at great financial cost to my mother, he went on, as he departed for sea again – to my great relief. What more did I want? I wanted the truth about my grandfather’s astounding declaration on Sunday evening, 7 September 1902.
* * *
As I watched the taxi, which had brought me back to school, wend its way down the drive, the waves of confusion which had surged through me when I had first learned of my grandfather’s stupendous claims continued to ebb and flow, a bit like seasickness. I continued to struggle with my new knowledge for the rest of the term. The first thing to go was my embryo faith. I no longer even tried to pay attention to Reverend Skrine’s sermons or the Misses Burridge’s teachings about ‘the Lord’, and how one must never ‘take His name in vain’. Well, my family had blown that, hadn’t they?
Little did I know then that the kindly Burridges routinely shielded me and my younger cousins, who also attended St Hilda’s, from the frequent newspaper stories about the Agapemone and its once-scandalous goings-on – yet another example of the kindness and loving atmosphere within that small and unfashionable school.
If my grandfather had said he was the Son of God come again – and been so obviously wrong – then perhaps Jesus hadn’t been the Son of God either? I was perfectly ready to agree that the hero of the New Testament was a good man, but the Son of God? What God? I didn’t doubt there was once a good man named Jesus, who righted wrongs and was crucified because he represented a threat to the state, but was he perhaps just one among many, including Muhammad and Buddha? Perhaps there was no God, just a force for good and a force for evil.
Much of my initial anger about my ignorance was directed towards my sisters, who had both now left home. But I reserved my deepest anger for my mother, my uncles and those I lived with. Surely, I should not have been left to find out from a school friend. As the term wound on, I promised myself that as my family hadn’t been honest with me, I would have nothing to say to them.
When at last I returned home for the holidays, to my shame I was rude to Waa, curt with my mother and uncles, and merely polite to the old ladies. But I did shrink from behaving badly in my grandmother’s presence, just as I shrank from confronting her about my grandfather’s outrageous claim.
But I had to talk to someone.
One afternoon just before teatime, my curiosity got the better of me and despite my resolve not to speak to my family – and Toto was family as far as I was concerned – I plucked up my courage and tiptoed to her room on the top floor of the mansion. I knocked on her door. What if she started crying again? That thought almost sent me scuttling back down the steep stairs. But I was too late. ‘Who’s there?’ The old lady peered out from behind her thick spectacles.
‘It’s me. Kitty.’
She greeted me warmly and drawing me in, invited me to sit. She fetched a second cup and saucer from her cupboard, moving around the small crowded room as if her eyesight was perfect. We chatted about school, about the weather and her health for several minutes. And then, in the pause that followed, I plunged in. ‘Did you believe my grandfather was Jesus?’
She looked shocked. ‘Oh, my dear, it wasn’t like that at all.’
‘What was it like then?’ I asked.
‘It was . . . it was . . . wonderful,’ she stuttered, before feeling for the embroidered handkerchief she always kept in her pocket. ‘But it was all too long ago.’
* * *
It was tough returning to school after the holidays.
‘Did your grandfather really say he was Jesus?’ asked one girl.
‘It’s none of your business,’ I replied.
It was even worse attending school chapel the first evening, which, unlike Eden, was plain and the very essence of Presbyterianism. Two girls sneaked giggling glances in my direction whenever Jesus’s name came up. My face reddened and my discomfort increased when Miss Burridge saw them and, in front of everyone, ordered them to her study after prayers, where they received a lecture and lost valuable house points for behaviour – at St Hilda’s, one pupil sinned and the whole house suffered.
My fellow students had been asked not to talk to me about my grandfather but still whispered questions to me whenever they thought the teachers were out of earshot. ‘Did he really?’ one asked through a foam of toothpaste as we brushed our teeth in adjacent sinks. ‘But he’s dead, isn’t he? So how could he be Jesus?’ another whispered, under cover of flapping sheets as we changed our bed linen. ‘Was he put in prison for blaspheming?’ a third girl hissed, as desk lids slammed and chairs scraped across the classroom floor at the end of our weekly Latin lesson.
But soon they found more important things to talk about. Who would make the relay team? Would the strawberries ripen in time for sports day? Outwardly, I too threw myself into a constant round of athletics and debating societies – plus illicit activities, such as sleeping on the roof without permission and leaving the school grounds after dark. But inside I vowed to uncover the facts about my grandfather. Just what he did and, even more importantly, why. What I didn’t realise then was how small a piece of the puzzle his astounding declaration represented; how many other reasons there were for my family to be thought ‘peculiar’.