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I was born fourth-generation Brethren. Hanging up there on all the branches of the family tree are generations of Brethren on both my mother’s and father’s sides, and before that several generations of French Huguenots, Calvinist émigrés who fled waves of Catholic persecution. If you’ve been born into a group like the Brethren, and everyone you know – parents, friends, work colleagues, siblings, grandparents, great-grandparents, cousins – is living by Brethren rules, you assume it’s completely normal. It’s the people outside your assembly who seem strange.

That long Brethren inheritance was a badge of honour in our household. It was held in place by the stories we were told and the objects and keepsakes in our home. An enormous oil painting of my eminent great-great-grandfather, Grandpa Mallalieu, my grandmother’s grandfather, hung over the fireplace in our sitting room. It would have reminded the Brethren guests who came for tea between Meetings of our distinguished bloodline. Arthur Lee Mallalieu had ‘taken the ministry’ across Australia, set up tent meetings and tin tabernacles and helped to establish the first Brethren assemblies in Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. When my mother toasted crumpets on the fire for us on cold winter days I’d look up and he’d be looking straight back down at me.

It was not an especially stern portrait. Grandpa Mallalieu was tall and handsome. In the painting he seemed to have just looked up from reading his Bible; his head rested thoughtfully on his hand. But you could never escape Grandpa Mallalieu’s eyes. Growing up I tried standing in every corner of our sitting room to find a spot where I might avoid them. There wasn’t one.

There was always someone watching: God from above and Grandpa Mallalieu from the sitting-room wall.

‘Grandpa Mallalieu’

The portrait had been painted over another painting, my mother said, but she could not remember what it was. As a small child I imagined there was a ship under Grandpa Mallalieu, battling high waves, riding the wind.

In the kitchen my mother had hung a large framed print of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. She loved the cobalt blue of the young woman’s apron, she said. It was her favourite colour.

The milkmaid stood at a window, pouring milk at a table piled high with freshly baked bread. She didn’t watch me like Grandpa Mallalieu did. Her eyes were down; she was rapt in her own daydreams, just as my mother often was. I watched the milkmaid from the kitchen table when my father was giving thanks before dinner, when my siblings and I were supposed to be praying with our eyes closed. Her milk poured from the mouth of her jug into that terracotta bowl below, without end. With her head covered like that and her table full of freshly made bread, I always assumed she was a Brethren sister, just like my mother and aunts, busy preparing the bread for the Lord’s Day Meeting. While the men were discussing ministries or disciplinary decisions in the adjoining room as they did in our house, she was snatching a private moment, secret and off in her dreams.

But there was a wooden box in the lower right corner of the picture that filled me with dread. Recently I read that it was probably a seventeenth-century foot warmer, but back then I imagined it was a trap or an instrument of torture. It meant that this dreaming, fleshy, cobalt-blue-wrapped girl was going to get caught.

Brethren were proud of their roots. My father would defend the radical puritanism of the very first Brethren, sometimes passionately, long after he’d left the Brethren and given up his belief in God.

‘It started out right-minded,’ he’d say. ‘But it went wrong. They weren’t intending to start their own Church. They were just good men walking in the Lord together, trying to find a way of living according to Paul’s gospel.’

If I had any chance of understanding what my father had called the Nazi decade and its aftermath – the turbulence we lived through as a family in the 1960s, seventies and eighties, the separations, the suicides, the scandal, the schisms, the gambling, my father’s addictions, embezzlement and prison sentence – I was going to have to understand how the Brethren crossed the line from being right-minded, as my father had put it, to being wrong-minded. I needed to find out how they turned into a cult.

The handful of Brethren history books I consulted all confirmed my father’s story. In the late 1820s a few young men, repelled by the corruption, decadence and in-fighting they saw in the Anglican and Catholic Churches, had come together to break bread in sitting rooms and hired halls in Dublin. Certain that the world was fast approaching its end, they decided to return to the principles of the early Christian Church as laid out by Paul’s gospel – adapted, as they thought fit, for nineteenth-century believers:

No priests.

No ritual.

No intermediaries.

No incense.

No hierarchy.

No sacred ground.

No altars or pulpits.

They were not a denomination, they insisted. They were simply following The Spirit, and preparing for the End Times.

A charismatic ex-barrister and ex-curate, John Nelson Darby, had eventually taken a lead. None of them would be saved, he told his followers, unless they separated completely from the rest of the world. They had to prepare a clean house for the Lord’s coming.

When I was growing up there were framed photographs of Darby on the walls of most Brethren sitting rooms. Two elderly Brethren sisters called the Miss Ellimans used to give us sweets on the Lord’s Day from a drawer under a glass-fronted cabinet in which they kept their framed photograph of Darby. Though Brethren talked about him as a kind of saint, he always looked to me, as he glowered out from behind the glass door of the cabinet, like the kind of man who’d shout at you if he opened his mouth.

John Nelson Darby.

Darby is famous for having ‘invented’ the idea of the Rapture. He’d had a vision, he told his followers, that there would be two Second Comings, not just one. First, Christ would arrive and take the Brethren off the planet, in a sudden, secret exodus to heaven. It was all there in the scriptures; hadn’t the Apostle Paul told the Thessalonians that the Lord’s people would be ‘caught up’ into the air? As soon as the Rapture had taken place, all the people left behind, the worldly people, would suffer the Great Tribulation. The Bible didn’t specify what this was exactly, but we all understood there’d be terrible storms, earthquakes, plagues and famines.1

Christ would return a second time, Darby wrote, for the Judgement Day reckonings. There would be people saved at that point, but they’d be in the second ranking. The most privileged of the residents of heaven would be the Rapture people, the ones who’d gone in the first exodus: the elite, the first-class travellers, the emigrants.

That was us, my people, the Brethren.

They told us children that all we had to do was take the Lord Jesus into our hearts and ‘withdraw from iniquity’ to be certain of a place in the much-longed-for upward rush of the Rapture. But despite my most strenuous efforts, I never managed to withdraw from iniquity for very long – and that meant, of course, that I knew I’d be left behind.

The Brethren visitors who came to our house for tea between Meetings were from all over the world. Once people like Grandpa Mallalieu had started the missionary work back in the nineteenth century, Brethrenism had gone everywhere. By 1845 there were 1,200 Brethren breaking bread together in a hall in Plymouth. By the end of the nineteenth century there were assemblies right across Europe, in Australia, New Zealand, America, Jamaica and Canada, Brethren breaking bread in tents, or assembling in corrugated-iron churches built from kits, in fields and jungles and in the outback.

There were quarrels and schisms right from the start. When Darby returned from preaching in Europe in 1845 and found that the Brethren at Plymouth had reintroduced priests, he first denounced them, and then withdrew from them. This was the first withdrawal of many. The religious-tract war that followed, with Darby accusing his adversaries’ leader, Benjamin Newton, of being ‘a blind instrument of Satan’, led to new rifts. When the Brethren of the Bethesda assembly in Bristol broke bread with some of Newton’s followers, Darby withdrew from all of them. He wrote to all the rest of the Brethren assemblies around the world, telling them that ‘to receive anyone from Bethesda is opening the door now to the infection of the abominable evil from which at so much painful cost we have been delivered’.2

Abominable evil. Infection. That was the way they talked. When we left the Brethren I was surprised to discover the rest of the world didn’t talk like we did. Darby’s way of seeing the world was absolute. He was certain he was right. Evil was real, he told his followers. It was everywhere.

The Brethren tract wars attracted newspaper attention from the start. In 1869 James Grant, editor of the Morning Advertiser, described Brethren as living in ‘a state of constant antagonism’ with each other and with the world. He reported the violent behaviour he’d seen at Brethren conferences; but it was, he wrote, ‘the effect of Darbyism on family life’ that was ‘perhaps its most awful feature’.3 He reported numerous cases of families broken up by Brethren rules.

Brethrenism has always devastated families. It’s a measure of the Brethren’s faith, they say, that they are prepared to put the Lord before ‘natural ties’. When they say ‘natural ties’ they mean family bonds, those complex threads of affection and loyalty that weave between siblings and parents and children. Those threads are good, they believe, but not if they lead to Brethren rules being broken. That’s when you have to take a knife to them.

My father always had a bit of a thing for Darby’s black-and-white, brooking-no-compromise asceticism. I was impressed by it too in my teens; it reminds me of the excitement I felt when I later read Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau on civil disobedience. There was something brave and bold, I thought, about these people refusing to kowtow to the Church authorities, rejecting the incense, the idolatry, the angels-on-a-pinhead High Church nonsense of it all. They’d gone their own way; they’d done their own thing. I liked that.

But the trouble is that if you persuade people that this world is a mere waiting room for the next, they’ll come to despise it; if you teach people to believe that Satan is using all of the people outside your Meeting Room to try to stop you from going up in the Rapture, they’ll come to think that all those people are tricksters and devils, or infected with evil; and if the promised Rapture doesn’t come, pretty soon they’ll become paranoid, impatient and obsessive, and they’ll be looking for ways to separate harder.