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My Australian grandmother Kathleen had intonations in her voice that were different from everyone else I’d heard. Her father was Northern Irish. Her mother’s father, the man in the portrait on our sitting-room wall, the man we called Grandpa Mallalieu, had been born in Leeds, and in the 1880s had emigrated to Australia, where he’d established all those Brethren tent assemblies. People sometimes stop me and ask where I’m from: South Africa? they say, Australia? My voice has my grandmother’s mongrel tones too.

She’d show me on the atlas where she’d been born and all the places where she’d lived. She talked to me about the Lord Jesus and about her mother, who’d been taken away to an asylum. She’d lift me onto a chair so I could blow bubbles between my fingers at the kitchen sink. She taught me how to cut crosses into the base of Brussels sprouts. She showed me how to use her hostess trolley, the one she used for entertaining Brethren guests and Brethren visitors from overseas. Her house was always full of guests. She was, other Brethren women told me, an especially spiritual woman.

When she was eighty-eight years old she sent me the transcript of an interview she’d just given to the local oral history group. Now that she was very old, she told me when I visited, her memory was doing strange things. When she sat in her room at the back of my aunts’ house looking out over the garden, watching the birds fly between the feeders, she’d suddenly find that she was looking out over the grounds of one of the houses she’d lived in as a child in Melbourne or Adelaide. Or she’d wake up staring at the patterned wallpaper of her bedroom in the Adelaide house. When she closed her eyes she saw giant redwoods, she told me. She could smell eucalyptus.

My grandmother had told the interviewer that when her mother had been sent almost a hundred miles away from their home in Melbourne to a mental asylum at Ballarat in 1914, she and her sister, then nine and six years old, were sent to live with Aunt Marguerite, their mother’s sister, who ran a school in a tiny timber-mill town called Beech Forest on Cape Otway, two hundred miles south, in a redwood forest right at the tip of one of the southernmost peninsulas in Australia.

I liked the sound of Aunt Marguerite. She’d lost a leg in her childhood – no one knew how – but, my grandmother said, that had never stopped her from doing anything. The two Mallalieu sisters, Ada-Louise and Marguerite, had been raised among the Box Hill Brethren in a suburb of Melbourne. Marguerite had studied hard, become a school teacher and then in her early twenties married a young labourer who wasn’t in the Brethren, and who already had a prison record. She had her first and only child, a daughter, a year later, and when her husband disappeared she’d taken a job in a school as far from her father’s preaching territory as she could. She never remarried.

Brethren relatives called Aunt Marguerite ‘the man hater’, but she seemed like a pirate adventurer to me. I imagined her striding out to school in that remote town along the railway sidings between the tall trees, her wooden leg hidden under her long skirts, her daughter running beside her. The school had fourteen pupils; most of them travelled long distances from outlying farms every day on horseback through the forest to reach it.

My grandmother told the interviewer about the bullock wagon that came to meet her and her sister Betty at the station, and the journey along what she called ‘corduroyed roads’ – muddy tracks with wooden slats laid across them – through giant redwoods and past waterfalls.

Kathleen and Betty spent the summers with their young cousin wandering the forests between the scattered farms on horseback: ‘There were big bushfires sometimes,’ she told the interviewer. ‘At night we saw showers of sparks where branches suddenly broke off in the fires on the hills.’

My grandmother might have remembered those bushfires when, decades later, she and her husband and sons crouched under the kitchen table during the air raids on nearby Coventry, their eyes fixed on the explosions in the sky beyond the window. Robert, her husband, was at home in Kenilworth throughout the Second World War, working as a firewatcher, too old to be drafted into the army or to register as a conscientious objector. When the planes came, she told my father, Robert read from the Psalms by the light of his torch under the kitchen table.

My father made up a prayer for his memoir to illustrate the kind of Brethren prayer his father gave under that kitchen table where the family took shelter during the bombing raids. ‘Our God and Father we cry to Thee,’ he wrote, ‘we cry to Thee that Thy protecting hand may be over us in this house tonight. We pray that Thou wilt use this fear and our sense of danger to make us more dependent on Thee. Help us to realise Thy power as well as Thy love and mercy. We think of all the saints who love Thee and we ask Thee to have them especially in Thy care. And that men and women who do not know Thee may repent and turn to Thee in their hour of need.’

My father must have learned to speak – or mimic – this language long before he could read. He would have heard so much of it, just as I had. All the Brethren men made the same strange sing-song noises when they preached, pausing for long periods of time, tuning in so that the Lord could guide the direction they were taking, then starting up the zig-zag cadences again. Ministry was impromptu. That was the Brethren way, though some of the longer addresses must have been pre-scripted. In the circles of seats, Brethren brothers and sisters said amen or made assenting noises that sounded like half-awake hums, or quiet moans, or almost a kind of singing. You were supposed to make those sounds, my father said, once you were ‘in the Spirit’.

When I read the prayer my father put in his memoir, it’s my father’s voice I hear, with that strange tremor that would appear occasionally when something in the scriptures moved him and he seemed about to cry.