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I found the Dublin auction house – one of the places where those first Brethren had met together in the 1830s – on Google Street View. It had become a shop. I scrolled in close, but couldn’t get past the door. I would have liked to have gone inside to find the room where the Brethren brothers and sisters had laid out a circle of chairs around a table, shaken out a white cloth, and placed a freshly baked loaf and a cup of wine in the centre, just as we had done. Afterwards, I knew, they’d have stepped out into the noisy street, clutching their Bibles, feeling purged and clean, steeling themselves against Satan’s world out there, the dirt and the devil of it, just as we had done.

My father grew up a hundred or so years later amongst Brethren who broke bread in the Iron Room in Kenilworth, a corrugated-iron shed assembled on wasteland down by the river, one of many Brethren tin tabernacles across the world, either purpose-built or requisitioned from other dissenting groups who’d traded up or shut down. At the centre of all that corrugated iron there was always a table with a white cloth, a freshly baked loaf and a collection box, inside a circle of chairs.

The Iron Room had once stood at the end of a terrace of Victorian houses called The Close, but it was demolished in 1982. When I went to Kenilworth to try to find it, the man who worked the adjoining allotment full of sweet peas and cabbages told me he kept pulling up sections of corrugated iron from his soil, even the occasional window frame. It had mystified him. He had no idea that he had the remains of a church underneath his dahlias. A local historian found a photograph for me.

The corrugated iron of Brethren Meeting Rooms testified to the sect’s indifference to the world and its materialism. Their God didn’t need fan vaulting or gold leaf. He came because of them. Nor did they need to consider longevity when they built these rooms – they didn’t think about rust, mould, leaks, heating, or frozen pipes – because they were certain the Rapture was only weeks or months away. Eventually, of course, the pipes froze, the windows leaked, the iron rusted, paint flaked, mould spread; journalists came and angled their long-distance lenses to peer in through those high windows. To keep them out, the Brethren frosted their glass, fitted curtain rails inside and railings and razor wire outside.4

Satan is abroad, Darby had told Brethren. Satan is stalking the streets of Dublin, Paris, London, New York. He’s got into the churches, he’s in the pubs, the law courts, the pulpits, the theatres. ‘Satan is the god of this world,’ he wrote, ‘the prince of the power of the air, and the manager of this stupendous system.’ And Brethren, he preached, had to separate themselves completely from all this. They had to disconnect from ‘business, politics, education, governments, science, inventions, railroads, telegraphs, social arrangements, charitable institutions, reforms, religion’.5 Telegraphs, invented in the 1830s, were a particular obsession for Darby, certain proof that Satan had got hold of the air.

‘The Iron Room’ in Kenilworth before it was demolished as part of a drive to amalgamate small Brethren assemblies in the 1960s

There were so many things to separate from. Even the air. It all required so much vigilance.

Splitting, withdrawing – sometimes Brethren called it ‘circumcision’ – became the Brethren way. They did it dramatically, defiantly, over and over again. It happened all the time in our Meeting when I was growing up. There were always people my grandparents would be tutting about or praying over, sometimes people I knew, or people in other Meetings I’d heard about. If my grandparents were praying for someone it usually meant they were in big trouble. It almost always meant they’d be withdrawn from, and then we wouldn’t see them again.

After Darby and his followers split from the large Brethren assemblies in Plymouth and Bristol in 1848, people began to call them the Darbyite Brethren, the Exclusive, or the Close, or Closed, Brethren.

When I think of the word ‘close’, I hear Keep close, Come close, Be close, We’re close. There’s a hushed, whispered sanctuary to it, something intimate, protective and secretive, warm, perhaps with a hint of stale air. When I think of the word ‘closed’, I hear doors banging, gates slamming, drawbridges shuddering into place, keys turning. Closed room. Closed shop. Closed is not the same as private or keep out. It means We were open once but now we’re closed. We might once have let you in but now we won’t.

The Exclusive Brethren went from close to closed. They went from drawing close to shutting out. In or around 1848 this strict, close community began to shun.

I’m stepping gingerly here, because I hear Brethren women – cousins, aunts, ancestors – gathering in the wings. They have something to say. They’re whispering that Darby was right; they’re telling me why my educated, sceptical, secular way of seeing things is so impoverished. They want to tell me that God loves me, that he wants to make everything right in the world, that he suffers with us, with me, that he died for my sins. They remind me that everything and everybody in this world, including me, is riddled with sin, and only Jesus can redeem us from that. They tell me to look at the pornography, the internet, the self-harm, the levels of depression and the empty churches. These are all signs of Satan’s dominion, sure signs of his evil working in the world.

These women have my big bones and wild hair; they are serene, gracious, dignified. My grandmother is in the room. I can hear the swish of her silk skirts, can smell her lily-of-the-valley talcum powder, I can hear her talking about the Lord Jesus as I stand on a chair at her kitchen sink blowing bubbles through my tiny fingers. They’d tell a different story if I let them. But I have to tell my father’s story. And mine.