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‘Were your folk Red-Tilers or Blue-Tilers?’ the Port Seton fishmonger asked me when I asked for directions to the Brethren Meeting Room. He’d looked up from the parcel of crab he was wrapping for me and raised an eyebrow. ‘Brethren Meeting Rooms are ten-a-penny round here. Red-Tilers don’t talk to Blue-Tilers. No one knows what that’s all about. Queer folk.’

He pointed in one direction to a building with a red-tiled roof, and in the other to one with a blue-tiled roof. Despite all the detective work I’d done, I had no idea which one my family had belonged to. Where had Agnes and David Fairbairn Stott broken bread?

It proved easier to figure out than I had feared. The noticeboard outside the red-tiled Meeting Room did not welcome visitors, so I knew it belonged to the Closed Brethren. The blue-tiled Meeting Room did welcome visitors, so it must belong to the Plymouth – or Open – Brethren. My folk, then, had been Red-Tilers.

It must have been difficult to live in Port Seton in the 1880s, I thought, without attending one of these churches and chapels. Agnes and her husband were probably breaking bread with the Red-Tilers before her two orphaned brothers stepped off the boat. The Port Seton Brethren had most likely helped John set up his new sailmaking business. Even if they hadn’t helped out financially, they would have told the family that if they were prepared to give up their will to the Lord, they’d find a better life to come once he had taken them skyward in the Rapture. Agnes would see her mother and grandmother in heaven, and all those siblings and cousins she’d lost.

If Agnes had taken David and four-year-old Joseph along to the red-tiled Meeting Room, the boys would have been treated kindly, helped along, listened to, given a seat in the centre circle. Eventually they’d be asked to break bread, and then to preach. It would have given them a strong sense of belonging, safety and purpose, a conviction that they were the chosen ones and that the Rapture was coming soon.

From the census returns of 1901 I could see that David Fairbairn Stott had married Lizzie Durham, the eldest daughter of a prosperous fishing family. They’d been Brethren too. The census officers recorded that David was running both his own sailmaking shed on the harbourfront and a shop that sold shipping tackle. He’d become well-to-do. When he bought the first car in Port Seton, cousins had told me, Lizzie wouldn’t get into it in front of the house. She was afraid the neighbours would think she was putting on airs, so her husband and children had to pick her up at the edge of the village. It was the Protestant way. Work hard, save money, do well, but don’t flaunt your wealth.

Though David now had security, prosperity, community, wife and family, he still had to watch his back. He knew the Brethren assembly might withdraw from him at any moment if he didn’t comply with the rules. Brethren used the verb ‘to withdraw’ to mean ‘to separate from someone unclean’, but really withdrawal meant expulsion. If you were withdrawn from you couldn’t break bread, you were out of fellowship, you’d lose everyone you trusted, everyone you knew, immediately and for always, and you’d be forced to live among the unclean people, Satan’s footsoldiers. Sometimes a single individual might be withdrawn from; sometimes whole assemblies.

So, in 1905, when Lizzie and David Stott and the other Port Seton Red-Tilers heard about an acrimonious Brethren rift in a small Northumberland market town called Alnwick, just seventy miles south, they’d have talked and prayed about little else. They’d seen it happen before; they knew that rifts like these could get out of hand and spread, engulfing neighbouring assemblies. It never ended well.

The trouble in the Alnwick assembly had, according to Brethren pamphlets I’d found, been caused, as usual, by disagreements about degrees of separation. One group of Brethren believed they should be out in the world saving souls; the other insisted that they withdraw from iniquity and prepare for the Rapture. Thomas Pringle, one of the older ministering brothers, locked the nineteen dissenters out of Green Batt Hall, their Meeting Room, and issued a letter excommunicating them.

The distressed ‘outs’ followed Brethren rules and wrote to the neighbouring Brethren in the tiny village of Glanton, eight miles away, asking for guidance about what to do. The Glantons, also following Brethren rules, urged them to seek reconciliation, but would not break bread with them.

Three years passed. Thomas Pringle refused to retract his excommunication. Most of the remaining Brethren in Alnwick left to join the defectors. Soon Pringle was breaking bread with only one or two other Brethren in Green Batt Hall, but he was still certain he was right.

Although David and Lizzie Stott and the other Port Seton Red-Tilers were sympathetic to the Alnwick ‘outs’, and frustrated by the way Pringle was behaving, Brethren rules stipulated that they were not to get involved. If they did, they might find themselves withdrawn from too.

In 1908 Brethren leaders in London took Alnwick off the list of approved assemblies. With so few Brethren left breaking bread together there, it was no longer viable. The Brethren in Glanton decided they could now break bread with the Alnwick ‘outs’. It proved to be a disastrous decision. Other Brethren in neighbouring assemblies declared that the Glantons had broken Brethren rules; they were now unclean too.

Once Brethren assemblies across the north of England and southern Scotland had started taking sides, the trouble spread south. A Brethren woman who belonged to an Edinburgh assembly that had taken a fierce anti-Glanton stand visited Stoke Newington in north London. The Stoke Newington Brethren appealed to Brethren leaders in the nearby Park Street, Islington, assembly. Was it safe to break bread with her? If they did, would they be excommunicated?

The London Brethren patriarchs consulted, prayed and debated. Thomas Pringle, they finally ruled, had been right to pull up the drawbridge on the Alnwick defectors; the ‘outs’ had been dangerously ‘intercommunional’. The Glantons, in supporting the Alnwick defectors, had broken Brethren rules too.

The London Brethren excommunicated not just the entire Glanton assembly but also all the Brethren up and down the country who’d supported them, including, of course, the Red-Tilers in Port Seton – among them Lizzie and David and their little growing family.

In this new large-scale rift, the Glanton sympathisers in Port Seton, held on to the red-tiled Meeting Room. The smaller number of hardliners, now calling themselves the London Brethren, took over the former Fishermen’s Bethel on South Doors, a six-minute walk to the west. From satellite view on Google Maps it seems that this building had a grey-tiled roof. So there were now three Brethren Meeting Rooms in Port Seton, with blue-, red- and grey-tiled roofs.

All this excommunication was not just chillingly familiar to me – I’d watched the ministering brothers in our assembly suddenly turn on and expel once-respectable members of our fellowship – it was beginning to look like some kind of collective psychosis.10 The fact that there were three Brethren Meeting Rooms in this tiny fishing village was not just absurd, it was shameful.

The crab parcel in my rucksack had leaked in my bag. It had seeped through the pages of my copy of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and stained them brown. It felt appropriate. The intense and small-minded sectarianism of these people turned my stomach like the crab-juice stains on the pages of my book.

The Glanton rift must have affected the whole village in those years before the Great War. There would have been trouble amongst the newly divided fishing crews, daily tensions in the Stott store on the harbourfront, and tight lips on Main Street on the Lord’s Day as three Brethren groups made their separate ways to the Plymouth, Glanton and London Brethren Meeting Rooms: red, blue, and now grey. Didn’t these people have enough on their plates just surviving the winters and feeding their children without having to engage in religious feuds as well?

My family, Lizzie and David and their children, my cousins tell me, were ‘in the Glantons’ for only four years. David and Lizzie Stott, increasingly uncomfortable with the inter-communional ways of the Glanton Brethren, rejoined the hardliners over in South Doors. My great-aunt Greta, their fourth surviving child, born in 1913, would tell people proudly that she was the only one of the family who’d never been ‘in Glanton Brethren’. By this she meant that she’d never breathed the ‘liberal’ Glanton air; she’d been born after the family returned to the hardline Brethren. She was pure Brethren, pure Exclusive Brethren. During the later years of extreme separation that pure blood would matter.11