Although we could get ready for school and work in no time flat during the week, it was usually chaos on Sunday mornings, even though we had more time than usual. This was in part due to the fact we had to put on our best clothes and all have breakfast together, and because as well as getting all of us ready, Mum had to get herself ready too. She cared what we looked like on Sundays and would make us sit in front of her kitchen chair as she brushed and tugged and plaited hair. Caleb had cowlicks, which drove Mum mad, and she would try to tame them with sugar and water, which often just made them stick up worse in little stiff peaks.
Dad would come out two or three times before Mum would be happy about which tie he was wearing. He had a big tie collection because he had inherited his brother’s ties when he died, and because Mum bought him a silk one every Christmas from money she saved from the housekeeping. She liked his tie to go with her dress. Sometimes it was good fun watching them negotiate about the tie. Dad would come in sort of dancing like a model in his socks and twirl around the table with his chin in the air and his wrists dangling down from the end of his hands and Mum would laugh and laugh and tell him to stop being an idiot, when she really meant she thought he was very funny.
We would leave home at ten thirty in order to be at the Memorial Meeting in Halifax Street by 11 am. After the meeting, which Mum said finished later and later every week because the Exhorting Brothers loved the sound of their own voices, we either stayed for a family lunch, or came home and had fresh white bread sandwiches together before driving back for Sunday school at three o’clock. We bought the bread from an Italian shop on the way home and I loved, loved, loved it. It was often still warm, and sometimes the three of us had a fight in the back seat about who would hold it. Occasionally Caleb hugged it too hard, and it was a bit flat when we got it home, which made the sandwiches squishy, small and out of shape. I sometimes couldn’t help it and dug little holes in the end to eat the soft white heaven, and then tried to pinch it together so Mum wouldn’t notice, but she always did. And that meant I wouldn’t be allowed to have a crust, which every person in my family agreed was definitely the best bit of the whole loaf.
And then Dad would go back to the evening meeting at 7 pm and I would often go with him because Mum said it was too much for the little ones to stay out until after 8 pm. This was true but I think it was also that Mum didn’t enjoy church nearly as much as Dad did and she was glad to have an excuse not to go. I liked Sunday nights because Mum made my favourite tea quite often which was cold roast lamb, baked beans and mashed potato. I think it was her way of saying thank you for going with Dad to church. The other two got to watch Walt Disney’s Disneyland with Mum before they went to bed, and I was a bit disappointed about missing that, but if I had to choose, I’d rather go with Dad into town.
Going to the Sunday night meeting with Dad was great. Sometimes we talked, but sometimes we didn’t, and even if we were quiet, it was a kind of cosy, friendly quiet, and he smiled at me a lot. When we did talk, it was about all sorts of things. Sometimes he asked my views on world events if I’d heard about them. Because of this I tried to remember to look at the Sunday Mail before the Memorial Meeting to see if I could think of something intelligent to say about what was happening. Sometimes he told me about his work, which I always found interesting. And sometimes he told me about how to be a good person, which I paid a lot of attention to and tried to remember. He told me that life was like a game of snakes and ladders and I had to enjoy going up the ladders, but be just as joyful when I slid down a snake because it would teach me how to be a stronger person. He said all experts had to practise and fail many times over, and I had to develop persistence if I was going to be good at anything. He said I should always be reliable, and that he tried hard to be reliable for Mr Bednarski even though it made Mum upset sometimes, but he believed it would work out best for the family in the end.
If I was lucky he would tell me stories about Mum. He told me once that, even though the ecclesia didn’t approve of it, when he and Mum were first married they would go to dances at the local RSL, and that Mum was the most beautiful woman and the best dancer in the whole room. He said that because she didn’t grow up in the Christadelphian Truth, the way we lived was hard for her sometimes, because she loved to go to parties and dances in Scotland, and never went to church. He said he was very lucky she had accepted Jesus as her saviour, but every now and then having a house and children and a routine at church could get her down a bit, and we had to be patient with her because she’d given up so much for us. I asked him if having us children felt like a punishment to her, and Dad said, ‘No, no. Not at all. She loves you dearly. But every now and then she misses her old life too.’
One night I told him I knew Ruthy would be a famous writer one day, but I couldn’t see what I would be famous at. I asked if he knew what it would be. He said it wasn’t important to be famous, just good. I thought about that a lot but decided famous would be better. I hadn’t heard about a lot of famous vets, but I bet there was one, and perhaps I could have a television show and teach people how to look after their animals. That would do the trick.
When we parked in front of the hall for the evening meeting, I was in charge of choosing our seats, and I carried Dad’s Bible and hymn book in with mine and put them on the seat next to me ready for when he joined me. He used to be ‘on the door’, which meant he stood in the foyer in case a stranger came to the meeting, so he could say hello and welcome them and loan them a Bible and hymn book. When the meeting was due to start, Dad would close the big doors that opened onto the street and slip in next to me, which is why I always chose two seats at the end of a row.
I used to worry that perhaps a stranger was just running late, and that Dad had closed the big doors and turned them away by accident. It seemed concerning that you could lose your chance at eternal life if you left home a bit late or caught the wrong bus. I asked Dad about this, but he said if someone was seeking God, they’d find a way, and he had to close the doors because otherwise people slipped in when the service was on and rummaged through people’s coats and bags in the cloakroom and stole things. I said surely it would be okay if they stole one of our loan Bibles – we always had a pile for strangers and members who forgot them for some reason – but Dad said they never stole the Bibles, only the purses.
I used to look up at the board that had the hymns we would be singing that night and put little bits of paper in the right pages to make it easy for Dad, which he always thanked me for. I didn’t often listen to what was being said, but I felt quite happy sitting next to him. I loved his strong, fine singing voice, and he always smelled of Old Spice, which is what we kids gave him for Father’s Day every year, along with nice cards and other things we made for him. Sometimes I would just take in lots of deep breaths to breathe him in. I felt proud sitting with my dad at the meeting. It made me feel I would start the week being the best child he could ever have. Unfortunately, by Monday morning something happened and I always seemed to mess it up.
Not too many other kids my age went to the meeting on Sunday nights. It was mainly old people and a group of over sixteens who were members of the youth group, and who were allowed to go into Rundle Street afterwards to have a milkshake at Mr Randall’s shop, which was open until ten. In my opinion, from watching them closely, they didn’t really come for the service. They spent most of it passing notes, looking at each other and smirking if they thought they would get away with it. I was pretty sure they just came so they could go partying afterwards, because most of the parents wouldn’t let them out on a Sunday night if they didn’t go to the meeting first. I used to like noticing who sat with whom, because this told me the latest on girlfriends and boyfriends, and my best Sunday school friend, Anne King, was mad for this kind of information and quizzed me every week on what the seating arrangements had been the Sunday night before. She said she was pretty sure she was going to marry a boy called Bruce Bacon, who was sixteen and who I thought was out of her league.
In our church, although no one admitted it, there were some families that were more important than others. The Bacons were sort of church royalty and lorded it over other families a bit. Deborah Bacon wore very expensive dresses and had new ones all the time. She was always perfectly clean and tidy – Ruthy said ‘groomed’ – and very sweet to everyone. She was a particular favourite of the old people because she would go and say hello to them before the Memorial Meeting and peck them on the cheek and smile prettily. We Wilsons were almost royalty – sort of like dukes rather than princes – but my family was a poorer branch because Dad wasn’t an Arranging Brother. And because Aunty Maisie said that sometimes Mum lowered the tone.
Bruce Bacon was sitting next to Naomi Stubbs, who was also from a royal family, so Anne would have her work cut out to break them up. But, as she pointed out, she was only twelve and had six years to organise a way to get him to the altar, so she was pretty confident. She said Naomi would look grim in six years’ time, whereas her mother said girls were ‘at the height of their powers’ at eighteen, whatever that meant.
I couldn’t wait to be sixteen and go to the youth group. I didn’t want to go out with boys, but I was mad to go to Mr Randall’s for a milkshake and to go to the car rallies they held on Saturdays and to youth camp without Mum and Dad. Mum said she didn’t know why I was hoping to go because, as far as she was concerned, I could wait until I was baptised before I went anywhere with anyone except the family, and the way I behaved she couldn’t imagine me passing the test for baptism before I was thirty, if ever.
I knew it was a very serious thing to ask to be baptised but I was pretty sure I’d learn how to behave better by the time I went to high school. That would give me plenty of time to prove I was ready for what Anne King called ‘the big dip’ in the huge bath that was under the stage in the rear hall, ready for the next person who asked to be put fully under the water and to be raised new and responsible. My dad was a Baptising Brother, and that meant you could ask him to dip you if you wanted, and I knew it would be my dad who would dunk me. This made it seem a bit less scary, because you had to put on a white robe and walk out in front of everyone and then get into the big bath and the Baptising Brother would say some important words and you had to answer him and then he would lower your head and shoulders in until you were all submerged.
The last baptism I went to was for Graham Walters, who is very tall and skinny, and when the Baptising Brother put his head under, his feet shot up and they struggled a bit to get him right under. Anne and I thought this was very funny but Mum pinched my leg hard and told me I could wait in the car during the next baptism. I had an almighty bruise for ten days. I didn’t mind once it stopped hurting because it was very colourful and I showed quite a few people at school including Maynard, who was fiercely impressed. Anne King said she was in no hurry to be baptised because you couldn’t kiss boys until you were fully married to them and she was keen on kissing quite a few before that. I couldn’t see the interest in this, but Anne was a year older than me and what my Aunty Maisie called ‘a bit forward’.
The Sunday night meeting was meant to be for strangers. It was also called ‘The Public Address’. Strangers were people who hadn’t found the Truth yet, and who might realise the error of their ways if they came to this meeting. We very rarely had strangers, and I wasn’t surprised because I don’t think the meeting would have felt all that friendly if you were an outsider. We all dressed in our Sunday best, just for starters, and that meant anyone who came to the door of the hall in casual clothes would have felt right out of it. Girls in our church were never allowed to wear trousers to meetings, so that would have made a lot of girls feel pretty awkward if they were strangers. And baptised women had to have their heads covered, so seeing a pile of women in dresses and hats would have felt a bit out of the ordinary to most people. And on top of that, Anne always said we probably looked pretty ugly. Women weren’t meant to wear makeup or miniskirts or heels or sheer stockings or much jewellery, and boys had to wear white shirts and suits and ties, even when it was very hot.
So Anne was probably right and even if I’d been a stranger who wanted to learn the Truth, I think I’d have gone somewhere that was a bit cooler. And I meant that literally in the summer, because men were not allowed to remove their jackets until it was over one hundred degrees, and the Presiding Member on the stage invited them to remove their coats. We had a few big fans hanging on the side of the wall in the temple, but every summer at least a few old men and a couple of younger ones passed out with the heat. Girls weren’t allowed to go barelegged or wear sleeveless dresses, but at least we could wear short sleeves and that was a blessing.
I hated, hated, hated wearing stockings, and made Mum cross by asking where it said in the Bible we had to do it. I also pointed out that Mr Driver told me that women couldn’t find or afford stockings during the war and had to go barelegged with a line drawn up the back of their leg to pretend they had a stocking seam on, and as I said to Mum, surely God didn’t stop loving them then because it wasn’t their fault about the nylon situation.
Mum said God wanted us to always do the best we could in the situation we found ourselves in and that meant dressing up for church. Mum didn’t mind dressing up. Aunty Maisie regularly said she ‘went to the edge of what was decent’, but she got lots of admiring looks from people and she looked very fetching in hats, which not that many people can do.
Ruthy looked sweet in hats and liked wearing them, but I seemed to have a small head and they always sat too low over my eyes and bugged me. I tilted them up to get them out of the way, but Mum always tugged them down again and said you should always wear a hat level with your eyes unless it was a pillbox or a beret, neither of which she would buy me. I always seemed to get my straw hats dirty or a bit torn or straggly, which also drove her nuts. She kept hers in lovely hatboxes she covered in flowery wallpaper in the top of her cupboard. Ruthy also put hers away on the top shelf of our wardrobe, but mine always seemed to find their way to the floor of the wardrobe under jumpers and shoes.
Once I found a little fieldmouse in our room and made it a nest in my upside-down summer straw hat. It did lots of little mousey poos and wees in it and the hat smelled quite bad after a while, but Mum just smacked my legs and hung it on the Hills Hoist with a peg to air it. She said I would just have to smell like a rodent and no one would want to sit next to me. I didn’t care too much, and after a while it only smelled bad if you put it up to your nose and took in a deep breath.
Aunty Maisie cornered Mum in the ladies’ toilets after the Memorial Meeting on the Sunday morning after the Caleb-football-jumper fiasco, as Ruthy called it. I was in a cubicle. Mum had just asked me to hurry up because she was insisting I sit next to her for the community lunch in the rear hall as a punishment, partly for making Caleb laugh in the meeting, and partly because of the Gary Johns incident. The Memorial Meeting was the most serious of all the church activities because it was where the grown-ups who had been baptised took the wine and the bread to symbolise the death of Jesus. Ruthy had the right word for it – solemn.
We had to sit in rows in very uncomfortable brown wooden chairs with no arms and no padding. When it was time for the bread and wine, the front row of men in dark suits all stood up at the same time, walked solemnly down the aisles to the back of the room, and then walked to the end of each row in turn to pass along the little dish of bread or the little glasses of wine. I had pinched a bit of bread when I passed it along to Mum, and then rolled it between my fingers and stuck it up my nose. This made Caleb giggle quite loudly, and Mum pinched me so hard I knew I’d have another bruise on my leg.
It wasn’t fair because I wasn’t the only one behaving out of line. When we all stood to sing a hymn, Gary Johns, a thirteen-year-old boy with a reputation for being a bit of a black sheep, had passed me a note saying the Serving Brethren in their dark suits and white shirts and plain ties were really mafia men sent to infiltrate the church and steal the collection money for their Sicilian masters. I didn’t laugh but I made a snorting noise and then pretended I was coughing when Mum’s head snapped to the right to check on me. She wasn’t fooled. I was sentenced to lunch beside her with just a look.
Aunty Maisie was my dad’s sister-in-law. She was really old. Dad had been born twenty years after the brother before him. My grandma, who I didn’t really remember, had some kind of mental breakdown and the doctor suggested to Grandpa that another baby might help. Grandma was very old by the time she had Dad, and I didn’t like to ask if it cured her of being mad, but I hoped it did, because now that I know how you actually have babies, it’s not something you’d do for the fun of it. My source for this knowledge was Venita, who had described both conception and childbirth in such graphic detail, I was a bit surprised there wasn’t a law against both, or at least books in the torture section of every library to warn you to stay away.
When Grandma died, Aunty Maisie sort of took over as a mother to my dad, who was fond of her, but I think, like all of us, quite frightened of her too. She was very tall and very square. Her thick steel-grey hair formed a helmet of frozen waves. She wore waisted floral dresses with skinny belts that were almost entirely lost in the folds between the enormous rolls of her chest and belly. She wore black orthopaedic shoes well shone but always worn down on the outside edges, contributing to the rocking motion of her stride.
On her fingers was a collection of old diamond rings Mum said she bullied Uncle Rob into buying her, even though they didn’t really have the money. Uncle Rob had died fairly young. Dad said it was from asbestos dust from between the floors of a department store in Rundle Street. The gaps between the floors were used as storage, where they kept all the spare racks and the stuff to choose from to dress the floors, and Uncle Rob spent a lot of time in them.
Mum said he died from sheer desperation.
Aunty Maisie was famous amongst the kids in our family for saying ‘Self-praise is no recommendation’, and ‘If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you’.
She had a very scary dark bathroom that had pink and black tiles, and we were all especially scared of the black bath, which Mum said was the height of fashion, but which we thought was like a big coffin. Her toilet seat was very high off the ground too, which meant you had to climb up a bit to get on it. Caleb tended to miss whether he climbed on or stood up, which made Aunty Maisie cross. As a result, he wet his pants quite a few times at her house because that seemed less scary.
Two things were nice about visiting her though. She had a lovely dog called Fudge who was a collie with a beautiful copper and white coat. And Grandpa lived in the sunroom out the back, and although he didn’t talk to us much, we all loved him and used to hang around his door hoping he would invite us in and give us a butterscotch lolly or even let us sit on his knee. Even though I’m not one for people touching me, I liked sitting on Grandpa’s knee. He was a huge old man with a white moustache, an enormous nose, ears full of white hair, and an English accent because he hailed from Bristol. That’s what he used to tell us – he hailed from Bristol. I wanted to tell someone I hailed from Rostrevor, but I always forgot to say that when I had the chance.
When I heard Aunty Maisie come into the ladies’ toilet, I decided it would be better to stay exactly where I was. It was bad enough that Mum had dragged me by the ear into the lane after the service to tell me off. I didn’t need Aunty Maisie having a go at me as well.
Mum had been combing her hair and reapplying lipstick when my aunt stomped in. I could tell without watching that Mum had frozen. Mum had to bear the criticism of many church members because she wore makeup, coloured her hair, wore high heels and because she was a hairdresser, which was a profession all about appearance, and therefore about vanity.
‘Agnes.’
‘Yes, Maisie.’
‘I notice you’ve coloured your hair a rather jaunty shade of orange this week.’
‘Auburn, Maisie. It’s auburn.’
‘I suppose you think it’s rather fetching?’
‘Well, that’s why I chose it,’ said Mum.
‘I was wondering if you noticed a rather relevant verse in the reading of Proverbs this morning?’ asked Aunty Maisie.
‘Which quote was that one, Maisie?’
‘“Charm is deceitful, beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised”,’ chanted my aunt.
Mum didn’t answer at first. I sat very still. I think I was holding my breath.
‘Well, that is very reassuring, isn’t it?’ I heard Mum answer.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A woman who fears the Lord is to be praised … and goodness knows I fear the Lord, Maisie, nearly as much as I fear you.’
‘Agnes, we all know it’s been hard for you. Getting on a boat from Scotland on your own at nineteen was quite an adventure. Leaving all your family behind because there was no work to be had. And then finding the uncle here who’d sponsored you had died while you were on the way. No home to come to, and no way to get home. Well, that’s just awful. And I’m sure it’s one of the reasons you badger Harry to work so hard for a promotion … so you can afford a visit to your family.’
‘Are we going to go through my entire history in this toilet, Maisie? And surely if you thought that was all it would take to get me to leave him, the entire ecclesia would have banded together to sell enough homemade cakes by now to buy me a plane ticket home.’
I knew one of the reasons Mum had said ‘toilet’ was because she knew Aunty Maisie hated that word. My aunt insisted we refer to it as either ‘lavatory’ or ‘water closet’.
‘And there we have it, Agnes. You just referred to Scotland as “home”. I’m just saying, dear, that we all understand what you’ve been through. It must have been so hard. And I’m sure you feel lucky that our darling Harry walked into the hairdresser who’d apprenticed you that day …’
‘And I’m just as sure you all wish he’d never stepped inside that salon,’ said my mum. The tap was still running, but I was sure Mum’s hands couldn’t have been that dirty. I wasn’t breathing because there were things Aunty Maisie was saying that I didn’t know about, and I didn’t want to miss a word. My bottom was getting pretty chilly with my pants around my knees, but sometimes gathering family intelligence takes sacrifice.
‘Well, it must have been God’s will for Harry to find you and bring you to the Truth,’ said Aunt Maisie, who sounded as though she said it through clenched teeth.
‘It must be hard for you to accept that a heathen like me caught his heart when there were rows and rows of mousey girls in brown skirts and brown cardies and brown lace-up shoes just waiting for him to choose them so they could set up their beige households and sit with him, reading their Bibles on their brown cord sofas,’ said Mum.
‘There’s no need to be rude about God-fearing women, Agnes,’ said Aunty Maisie.
I could hear a noise that sounded like my mum swivelling on her heels. I guessed she was looking my aunt in the eye.
‘Are you saying I’m not God-fearing, Maisie? I married him and I accepted the Truth and I was baptised. I’ve tried my best. I am so worried about being considered a poor Christadelphian mother that I am stricter on my children than almost anyone else. I’ve given you nearly all of me. There’s very little of the old Agnes left. The only thing I haven’t done is transform myself into a little brown mouse. For the sake of my marriage and my sanity, I need to keep a part of that girl Harry first met. And if God is the God of anything useful, surely he doesn’t judge women on what they choose to wear. Quote me the psalm that says we have to be dowdy.’
I could hear my aunt breathing now. It was faster and wheezier than usual. And after quite a long minute, I heard my mother say: ‘I Samuel 16:7, Maisie. “For God sees not as man sees: for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”’
I heard my mother’s heels click quickly across the old terrazzo as she escaped.
I must have accidentally said, ‘Yes!’ out loud.
‘Who’s there?’ I heard Aunty Maisie command. ‘Is that you, Dorcas? Come out here now.’
I remained motionless, with my breath held.
‘I know you’re there, you naughty girl. Come out here at once or I’ll tell your father.’
Darn. She had me now. I wouldn’t want Dad to have another lecture from her about me. I slowly pulled up my witches britches and opened the creaky door into the basin area. We stared at each other for a moment, and then without a word, she grabbed me by the ear and yanked me out into the side lane and off to find my father.