Call Me Evil, Let Me Go. Sarah Jones

Paul didn’t seem at all concerned about being smacked. No more was said until a couple of hours later when Peter arrived home from a nearby town, where he was working as a fitness coach. Peter and I were not getting on well. We had married when I was only 18 and very naive. He was several years older than me and, if possible, even more innocent, but the Church encouraged its young members to marry early, so we did what was expected of us. I always felt suspicious that ours was an arranged match, but I had genuinely come to love Peter. I also knew I was lucky to have a husband at all, because you could only marry within the Church and there weren’t always enough young men to go round.

      Sadly our marriage had recently become little more than an empty shell. Peter seemed to be permanently in a bad temper and was hardly at home, choosing instead to spend any spare time – when he wasn’t working late at the fitness centre – helping out in the Church. Soon after he got back from work I told him what had happened at school, and made a point of adding that I had dealt with Paul and smacked him. Peter ignored my comments, went straight to find Paul and took him into our bedroom, grabbing as he did so a squash racquet that was lying by the door. He then smacked Paul’s bare bottom several times with it.

      I was mortified. Paul was our first child, but still our baby. He needed our protection, not our anger. When it was over he went straight back to the bedroom he shared with Rebecca without saying a word. He stayed there for the rest of the evening, and wouldn’t speak to me when I tucked him up for the night. Paul and I had always been close and his silence was like a dagger in my heart. He might have been brave enough not to cry, but I wasn’t. I wept for him. I thought it was totally wrong to hit him like that, and couldn’t bear the thought of his pain, but I knew from experience it was pointless to say anything to Peter, let alone criticize him. If I protested he was likely to fly into a rage. But I hated myself for being so weak.

      I knew if I confronted Peter he’d also tell Ian Black, who ran the Church with a rod of iron, what had happened, and he would certainly haul me into his grand office and go through his usual emotional battering. This included telling me in very strong language that I was rebellious, or worse. Although he was a religious leader he didn’t mind his language, and it seemed to me that he enjoyed trying to undermine me.

      Paul was still very subdued the next day, a Friday, but went to school without any fuss. When I collected him in the afternoon he told me, with no apparent emotion, that he had been ‘whacked’ – beaten with a shoe that was kept in the classroom and used to hit children if they disobeyed one of the school’s many rules. I was furious that he had been beaten without my knowledge or agreement. It meant that my poor little boy had been punished not once, not twice, but three times for the same, not very serious, offence.

      I was cross that none of the teachers told me what had happened when I was picking Paul up, but shortly after we got home, the phone rang. It was Patricia, one of his teachers, who told me officially that he had been smacked. I was so angry I gave her short shrift. I said that I had been specifically told by the head to deal with Paul’s punishment at home and that, contrary to what was the school’s normal procedure, I hadn’t been told in advance that he would be hit, nor had I given anyone permission to do so. She didn’t say much and the conversation was quickly over.

      I felt desperately sorry for Paul. He seemed withdrawn and uncommunicative, so I gave him lots of extra attention. When Peter came home that evening I told him how annoyed I was that the school had disciplined him after clearly saying they would leave it to me. He barely reacted. His uncle and aunt, who had brought him up after his parents had been killed in a boating accident, were founder members of the Church and he believed that anything the Church did was automatically right whereas any opinion I voiced against it was automatically wrong.

      Paul went to school as usual on Saturday. He had lessons in the morning, played football in the afternoon, then had a violin lesson and choir practice. On Sunday morning and evening he came with the rest of the family to church. It was an utterly miserable weekend. Paul barely spoke a word the whole time. I felt totally distraught that I had let him down. He had been treated so appallingly that I wanted to take him out of the school immediately. But realistically I knew it wasn’t an option. It was compulsory for all members of the Church to send their children to the Church school. Any other course of action was unthinkable.

      But as the days passed, Paul’s unfairly harsh punishment weighed increasingly heavily on me and I began to feel that the Church had taken away not just my control over my child but also my parental rights. In addition, I slowly started to realize that it wasn’t just my children they were in control of, but that my own mind, body and emotions were being run by the Church.

      I’d never thought about it with such clarity before, but the incident prompted me to wonder how I had accepted as inevitable something as wrong as hitting children. It made me feel terrible. I was very maternal and adored my children, yet I was unable to protect them or even have the support of their father. I was desperate to talk my anxieties through with someone, but didn’t know where to turn. My life, like those of nearly all the Church members, was centred entirely on Tadford Charismatic Church. I was cut off from my family and former friends and had nowhere to go to express my concern or get help.

      Tadford actively discouraged members from associating with anyone who wasn’t part of the community. We were repeatedly told that the world outside the Church was a horrendous place and that there were no true Christians except those who came to Tadford, not even Christians who attended other churches. On the rare occasions the idea of leaving the Church fleetingly crossed my mind, I was instantly enveloped by a paralysing fear and put it right out of my thoughts. Over the years, Black had given his congregation many examples of individuals who had left the Church subsequently being struck down by God and I believed to my core that if I left I too would die. So although it was now clear to me that something was wrong with a Church that believed in corporal punishment, I couldn’t take it any further. Instead I tried to immerse myself in making improvements to our new house. I loved creating a nest for my family and, although it didn’t change anything fundamentally, it worked on one level as a diversion.

      Several weeks passed and one Tuesday afternoon I decided to go into a nearby town to buy some curtain material for the twins’ new bedroom. It was market day and I took along my friend Megan, another Church member, who was older than me and had kindly offered to make the curtains. I bought some fabric with thin blue, red and white stripes for the twins’ room and another with a design of leaping dolphins for the bathroom. Neither was expensive and I came home feeling very pleased.

      The following day I was called into Black’s office. This usually meant trouble and I assumed it was something to do with my work. All adult Church members had to put in many hours of ‘voluntary’ work for the Church. I’d had various jobs and was now recording and editing the pastor’s sermons and his regular sessions of what he called ‘miracle healing’.

      I worked while the children were at school, in the evenings after they went to bed, at weekends and when the Church arranged conferences. Not surprisingly, I felt permanently exhausted. As soon as I arrived at Black’s office he told me off about a faulty recording I had produced. Then, to my astonishment, he turned his attention to my recent shopping trip. Although all my four children were of school age, he asked how dare I go off without permission, leaving ‘others’ to look after them. I explained I went to get curtain material for our new home, but he repeated that I had no right to do so without asking first. It was absurd. I had gone in my free time, while the children were at the school, for which we paid fees, and the ‘others’ he referred to were in fact their teachers.

      I was often intimidated by Black, but on this occasion I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman and I’m still being treated like the teenage girl I was when I first arrived. I can’t carry on like this.’ Later I found out that Megan didn’t get into trouble for coming with me.

      The trouble was, I couldn’t think of a concrete plan to change my situation. I consoled myself with the thought that, largely thanks to my job recording Black’s sermons, at least my eyes were open now in that I was more aware of how the Church operated. His ‘miracle healing’ events regularly took place on a Sunday, when individuals of different ages who were suffering from a range of illnesses, including arthritis