Dad would try all these new rules, trying to organise us all. We’d sit down and have this big family meeting at night. I used to hate it and be dramatic about it – I just wanted things the way they used to be. TENDY
Towards the middle of 1996, everyone rejoiced at the happy news that Bev was pregnant. Tendy felt special when Bev told her before she told the other kids.
In 1997 Phil’s business was doing well enough for him to buy a property in the country where he built a shed to use as a base. He took on six employees, but with his usual generosity in helping others, he would give a job to the neediest person rather than to the best one.
The move to the country didn’t help the family dynamics, and chaos sometimes reigned unchecked when the children were alone. Phil tried to impose order, with family meetings in the evenings to introduce schemes that involved lists of chores and rewards of stickers. Tendy who was 11 when they moved to the country hated it all. She looks back now and can laugh at memories of getting all dramatic at the meetings, when she would keep repeating, ‘I just want it to be like it used to be.’
Phil wasn’t around enough to enforce any new system. The children were on their own after school and for long periods in the holidays. They suffered their father’s unreliability and accepted it as normal, knowing that they would be the last ones to be picked up from sports practices, or that any arrangements they made would be broken if something came up at work.
To Phil, being able to provide for his family was essential; it was what a good father did. It was important to him that he could buy things they needed, give them holidays, and surprise them with treats; it was how he showed them he loved them. He would shower them with expensive treats whenever he came back from long periods away. Interestingly, Neville had done the same thing when Phil was a child. He’d be away on his tent campaigns or speaking tours and come back laden with gifts for the children.
Although Phil was a loving and generous father, he wasn’t able to see that what they needed most was his time and presence. They’d been through so much, but he couldn’t help them overcome the issues arising out of their past because he hadn’t dealt with them himself. He just kept going, staying positive for them and doing what he was good at, which was making money for them. His absenteeism made Bev’s life just about impossible as she struggled with trying to be a stepmother to his strong-willed bunch who were so used to having their own way.
Jessica was born in February 1997, another little blond-haired Cooper.
Bev had a new baby, her own son Mitchell who was not quite four years old, and Phil’s five children to parent, often single-handedly.
Bev and Phil married once Phil’s divorce from Sandy came through in October. Crystal was pleased. It felt like she had a real mother at last, although the wedding brought questions for the nine-year-old from her friends about where her real mother was. She opted for simplicity, saying her mum lived in New Zealand and they didn’t see much of her. It was easier than saying she lived in a cult, then having to explain what a cult was.
By the end of 1997, the good relationship between Bev and Tendy foundered as Tendy and Justine became more and more rebellious. Justine was 12, a year older then Tendy, and where she led, Tendy followed. They were either the best of friends or fighting to the death, with Bev having to cope with the fallout. Justine was headstrong and now she was doing exactly as she pleased. She’d bring cigarettes home for her and Tendy to smoke. Phil tried to stop them by using the psychological approach. He bought a packet of cigarettes, sat the girls down, and lectured them on the evils of tobacco use. When he figured the message had hit home he left the room, leaving the smokes behind as an awful warning. The lecture had no effect and the girls grabbed the cigarettes, thrilled with their windfall of free smokes.
Israel’s difficulties weren’t behavioural but were just as serious. His academic achievement by the end of his second year of high school was abysmal. Phil, already guilty about him missing out on his childhood, didn’t want him to grow up without an education as well, and suggested that he go to boarding school. It also meant he’d be out from under Bev’s feet at home.
Israel agreed to go, although he hated leaving the children he regarded as his own. They’d been such a close family it was hard for him to settle in a new situation but school was another community and turned out to be a bit like living with a whole lot of brothers. It was a Catholic school with strange rituals and, weirdly for him, he saw similarities between the community and the Catholicism Neville abhorred.
Boarding school felt initially like the worst thing that had ever happened to Israel, but turned out to be one of the best. He caught up on the schooling he’d lost and excelled academically, but perhaps more importantly for a 15-year-old, it helped him to accept his history and to feel more a part of the world he now lived in. When he first arrived, he repeated his fictional stories about his family, but his classmates picked up on discrepancies and kept questioning him until he told the truth. It was a relief to stop hiding.
For the whole of his first year, he kept pretty much to himself, immersing himself in study because there was nothing else to do. He was used to getting up early at home and continued to do so at school, using the two or three hours before breakfast to study. During this year he taught himself how to study by reading everything he could: text books that weren’t part of the class requirement; re-reading work done during class; reading around each subject in every reference he could find. His grades improved as he filled in the gaps in his previous schooling.
It wasn’t until the second year that he began to make friends and, as he did, he reduced the intensity of his study regime, although he still maintained a rigorous schedule to ensure he didn’t fall behind again. By his final year, the school and his peers had come to recognise his capacity for taking on responsibility, making him a prefect and a house sports captain. Israel relished the responsibilities which included the care and welfare of the younger boys. He was happy to return to the nurturing, caring roles that had so long been part of his life at home.
At home Phil’s business continued to grow. It was the challenge he loved, the feeling of being in the midst of chaos and controlling six different things at once. It absorbed and fascinated him. However it absorbed his time as well and Bev was left to deal with Justine and Tendy who were increasingly out of control, getting into trouble and always fighting. On the home front, the family struggled with issues that Phil could ignore as long as he buried himself in work.
At Christmas 1998 Phil took all of them to New Zealand for the holidays. It was good for them to be with the wider family again and the whole clan attended church on Christmas Day.
One day they decided on the spur of the moment to go to the West Coast and visit their mother and sisters in the community. Phil drove the children over but he knew they wouldn’t be let in if the community saw he was with them, so he and Jess got out of the van at the gate while Bev drove the others into the grounds. They were driving around looking for the right building when they caught a glimpse of Dawn among a group of people. She looked shocked to see them, like a deer in the headlights, and vanished when the group scattered at the sight of a strange vehicle. Later Israel realised she would have been indoctrinated in the belief that outsiders were evil and that her own siblings weren’t good Christians. She would also have been swept up by the group around her whose instinct was to run when an unknown vehicle approached. The community was very sensitive to the possibility of further abductions.
Bev started the engine again and they finally found where they were meant to go. The moment they pulled up, Neville/Hopeful and his second-in-command came out of the building and strode over to the van where Hopeful demanded to know why they were there. Bev told him she’d brought the children to see their mother. He asked who Bev was. Phil’s wife? He already had a wife thus Bev was an adulteress, a whore. He fired an entire repertoire of abusive names at her while the younger children cowered, crying, in the back of the van. Bev didn’t want to leave until they had seen their mother, but Israel knew it was never going to happen and told her to just go. The younger ones cried most of the way back to Christchurch. The visit strengthened Israel’s belief that his dad had been right to take them out of the community. It gave Justine, Tendy and Crystal first-hand insight into his reasons for doing so, but for seven-year-old Andreas it was simply upsetting.