In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult

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Her family dropped out too after this event, but because the cult had been so suffocating the family so much, they all struggled to re-connect with the normal world. The messages and culture that the cult had delivered had permeated her entire being. They began to rebuild their lives in their own way, she rebelled a little, had a child, dabbled in drugs and even managed to go to university, shoplifted and was afraid of the dark, but couldn’t even begin to tell people why this was.

This is the average number of seconds between one wave and the next, 1-2 miles out to sea. A long wave Beautiful, dizzying, terrifying, Stott's memoir maps the unnerving hinterland where faith becomes cruelty and devotion turns into disaster. A brave, frightening and strangely hopeful book' Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City These grim days only came to an end when, in true pantomime fashion, Jim Taylor Junior was outed as an alcoholic sex-fiend, much given to groping Members’ wives. More schisms ensued. In the process, Roger Stott lost his faith, and transferred his energy towards amateur dramatics and roulette. In 1981, he was sent to prison for a year for fiddling the books to finance his gambling addiction. For the rest of his life, he attempted to work out a foolproof system of roulette, a substitute, perhaps, for a religion that had once offered him a foolproof system of the world. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” - 1 Corinthians 13:12 At university when I made new friends and confidantes, I couldn’t explain how I’d become a teenage mother, or shoplifted books for years, or why I was afraid of the dark and had a compulsion to rescue people, without explaining about the Brethren or the God they made for us, and the Rapture they told us was coming. But then I couldn’t really begin to talk about the Brethren without explaining about my father...’

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Later on though we get an account of how the Brethren evolve and get dragged into scandal through the behaviour of their leadership. At the center of the story is the decade of the 1960s, which Stott’s father dramatically refers to as the “Nazi decade.” During this time, the leader of the Brethren became more and more eccentric and exclusive, essentially creating a cult rather than a religious sect. Many of their practices reminded me of Scientology, based on memoirs like Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology and Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape.

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When Stott was in her early teens her parents made the momentous decision to leave the Brethren. After being told all her life that the outside world was full of sinners and evil suddenly she had to learn to live amongst it. I'm A Celeb's Sam Thompson 'fanboys' over Tony Bellows and shares a hug with the boxer leaving viewers in HYSTERICS: 'This is so cute!' Shia LaBeouf's daughter Isabel, one, flashes a sweet smile as he pushes her in a stroller through Pasadena I'm A Celeb's Tony Bellew and Nigel Farage leave viewers 'heaving' as they are forced to drink blended penises during gruesome trial: 'This is vile!'

I'm A Celeb's viewers SLAM 'insensitive' Nella Rose after she tells ADHD sufferer Sam Thompson to 'calm down': 'Educate yourself!' We hear of Rebecca's young childhood in the last half of the 1960s when her family was still in the church. She was in a constant state of 'high alert' as they were warned that the rapture was close and that church members in good standing would be taken first. She spent much of her early years worrying that she’s be left behind and her whole family would be taken. Once at school she was not allowed to take part in many things as the church did not allow it. The list grew yearly and wasn’t just things like school assemblies but included classes about poetry or fiction, science about the creation story, gym, music, sports and many other things. So she often found herself in the long central corridor doing worksheets while seeing her brothers also in that corridor on their own. After a she got to go to the school library where she started devouring normal books but had to keep this a secret from her family as it wasn't allowed. The frightening thing is that this was happening in the 1960s and 1970s, not the 1860s and 1870s. We will not see this in schools nowadays as the group have their own schools so there is less chance of rescuing these abused children. Rebecca Stott’s account of life in a fundamentalist sect in the UK known as the Exclusive Brethren opens with the weeks she spent caring for her terminally ill father. Following his death, Stott, to fulfil her promise to him, has set out to trace four generations of her Exclusive Brethren family, from prestigious Australian forebears on her mother’s side, to an apprentice Scottish sail-maker on her father’s. Rebecca, like her father (whose memories she relays), endured harsh discipline as a child of Brethren parents, as well as hours of boredom in congregation meetings. She also inherited his literary leanings: her father was one of the last Brethren permitted to attend university, where he experienced what could be argued was his true conversion, courtesy of reading CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity, following which he assumed a leading role within the sect.The weekend will stay dull with periods of rain which turn heavy at times, while a blast of northerly winds on Monday will bring sunshine and showers. Wales No one ever leaves a religion and says, well it was a good life growing up with them. The women are equal and there is plenty of joy, I just felt I could no longer go along with it's core beliefs. No one says that because there is no book. So with these books, how much is a genuine expose of ritual repression and how much is it really about this or any other author's family and their expectation of her obedience and conformity to their religious and cultural code and how they handle her rebellion? Why had these decent young Brethren men turned into bullies? Because closed, rule-bound, discipline-focused totalist systems like the one we lived through made dissent virtually impossible. It paralysed people.” The weather will then turn "widely unsettled" over the weekend with outbreaks of rain accompanied by stronger winds.

Rebecca’s father, Robert, is dying of cancer as the book starts but wants his story to be known by the whole world as a warning not to get 'caught up in' groups like the Exclusive Brethren. Robert doesn't finish dictating his memoirs to Rebecca as they are both too lengthy and too painful for him to go over. He extols her to finish the book for him from the archives which he's left. A few years after his death she finally finds the strength to author this extraordinary book.

Rebecca Stott grew up in in Brighton, England, as a fourth-generation member of the Exclusive Brethren, a cult that believed the world is ruled by Satan. In this closed community, books that didn't conform to the sect's rules were banned, women were subservient to men and were made to dress modestly and cover their heads, and those who disobeyed the rules were punished and shamed. Yet Rebecca's father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking Brethren minister, was a man of contradictions: he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and hid copies of Yeats and Shakespeare behind the Brethren ministries. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult's leader, Roger became an actor, filmmaker, and compulsive gambler who left the family penniless and ended up in jail. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. The arrow shows the average direction of the waves 1-2 miles out to sea. It indicates how sheltered the