Kitabı oku: «Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed by Those They Trusted»

CHAPTER ONE Daddy’s Little Girl

I was playing alone in the front garden of a white house near the small fishing village of Rafina, in Greece. Our garden had three olive trees, as well as an apricot, fig and peach, all ripe with fruit. I sat under a large, old pine tree that cast deep pools of shade. The ground was bleached and bone dry from the sun, and I amused myself by drawing pictures on the parched earth with a white rock. I was five years old.

I had little recollection of my mother, only a brief memory of her playing guitar and singing, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so’, as I played with my little sister Kristina on a bunk bed in a small room in another land. But I was fiercely loyal to Mum and talked about her every day, even though I had not seen her for two years. I still missed her and my sister, and barely remembered my baby brother David. I clung desperately to the hope that Mum would come back. Like a record that never stopped spinning, I’d repeatedly ask my dad, ‘Why did she leave us?’

Dad would hug me and explain. ‘Mum decided to be with someone else, and I couldn’t let you go. You were the oldest, and we’ve always been close, haven’t we?’

I nodded. I loved Dad just as much as my mum, but I thought it was unfair to have to make a choice between them.

‘What about Kristina and David?’ I asked.

‘They were too young. They still needed to be with their mother.’

Dad worked long hours in a makeshift recording studio set up in the basement of our house, producing and acting as DJ on a radio show, Music with Meaning. Because of this I had a nanny, Serena, a young German woman. I resented her, and made life as difficult as I could for her by not cooperating or even acknowledging her. Serena had long, straight dark hair and brown eyes magnified by a pair of thick glasses. Poor Serena. Whatever she did to try to win me round, I was determined not to like her. I thought her German accent sounded funny, and she was constantly trying to give me wheatgerm with unsweetened yoghurt and spoonfuls of cod liver oil, which I hated the smell and taste of.

We belonged to the Children of God, a deeply secretive and religious organization with tentacles that spread across the world. The leader and prophet was named David Berg. We knew him as Moses David; my Dad called him Mo, and I knew him as our ‘Grandpa’. He ordained everything we said, did, thought and even dreamed. Everything in our lives, even the smallest and most insignificant detail – including the food we ate – was regulated by Mo. He had said that our diet should consist of healthy food and no white sugar, and Serena enthusiastically embraced Mo’s healthy eating policy. ‘It will give you strong bones and teeth,’ she would tell me – but it didn’t make it taste any better. She was never cruel, but she was strict, and I saw her as an unwelcome intrusion into my life. Originally, Dad had told me she would be staying for three months, and I had been counting the days until she left.

That sunny day as I played under the pine tree, I glanced up to see Dad and Serena walk out on to the front veranda. They were standing very close together and, instantly, I sensed a kind of electricity between them.

‘Honey, I have something exciting to tell you,’ my father called to me. As he spoke, my tall, handsome Dad, whom I adored more than anybody in the world, turned and embraced Serena.

As I walked towards them, I noticed their faces were lit up with beaming smiles. Oh no, I groaned. This did not look good.

‘We’ve decided to get together, sweetheart,’ Dad pronounced, in a far too happy tone of voice for my liking. ‘Serena is going to be your new mother.’

‘Not her!’ I shouted. ‘I hate her!’ I could not even bear to speak her name. ‘I want my mother. Why can’t she come back to live with us? It’s not fair!’ I sobbed. I turned and ran off to a corner of the garden and stood with my back to them.

Dad followed me and bent towards me, concerned. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sweetie, you know your mother has gone for good. She’s not coming back.’

‘But I want my sister and brother here. It’s not fair.’ I stuck out my bottom lip in a pout.

‘But you have so many brothers and sisters here you can play with,’ Dad said.

‘It’s not the same,’ I complained.

‘Honey, we’re all one family. Now watch that lower lip…or you’ll trip over it if you’re not careful.’

I half smiled, if only to make Dad feel better.

Mo said that we weren’t supposed to have individual families. Our brothers and sisters in the Children of God were our true family. We even referred to ourselves as the ‘Family’. But I refused to forget my mother or Kristina and baby David, though I was scared I was beginning to forget what they looked like.

The only photograph Dad had of Mum was of her standing behind a double buggy, with me sitting in one side and my baby sister next to me. I studied the photograph carefully. Mum had long, sandy blonde hair down to her waist, blue eyes and a wide smile.

‘She’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘And that’s my sister?’ I couldn’t see her face clearly because of the picture’s poor quality. Kristina was just a toddler, aged about a year old, with two little pigtails. I was eighteen months older and very like her. We were both dressed in pretty cotton frocks and had sun hats on. As hard as I stared, I couldn’t summon up the slightest memory of them and mourned, feeling a gaping hole in my being.

Dad described how he and Mum used to take us with them when they went out witnessing in the streets. ‘I’d manoeuvre the pushchair in the way of someone walking the opposite direction and then hand them a leaflet and witness to them, telling them about Jesus and how they could be saved. Indian people love children and you were so cute and pretty. They’d pinch your cheeks and chat to you. They felt they couldn’t be rude with you two sitting there gazing up at them like two little angels.’

‘Do you have a picture of David?’ I asked.

‘This is when he was just three months old,’ Dad replied, producing a small black and white photograph.

‘He’s so cute. Look at those cheeks!’ I said proudly. He was lying on his tummy lifting up his head with his chubby arms, and had a big grin on his face.

My own early memories were brief, seen in a series of quick little snapshots, like windows opening in my mind’s eye. Much of what I gleaned, Dad told me in our rare quiet times alone. I’d cuddle up on his lap and he’d tell me selective vignettes that gradually built into a bigger picture. But it was always half a picture; he never told me much about Mum.

Perhaps as a way of keeping her alive, and forlornly holding on to the remnants of a family life, I often asked Dad to tell me the story of how he and Mum had first met and then married, and my birth. He didn’t tell me a lot about it; it wasn’t until I had grown up that I heard the full story.

‘Your mum was young and beautiful – just seventeen years old when we married. I was twenty-two.’

I was always full of questions. ‘And what about your dad?’

Dad told me his father was a lawyer and military judge in the British army. He had no recollection of his mother, as she had died when he was four and his father had remarried soon after. He and his half-brother were sent to a boarding school in Cheltenham.

‘I was a rebel at school. I was even expelled after I led a protest where a group of us locked ourselves in the main hall.’

‘Why – what did you protest about?’ I asked.

‘The school prefects used to beat us for almost anything, no matter what. They’d come in at night with their flashlights and shine them in our faces to wake us up. We got fed up with the injustice and stood up against it.’

Thrown out, he enrolled at a drama school in London and in his holidays travelled throughout Europe. ‘I was searching for the meaning to life,’ he explained.

I listened earnestly as he described how, in pursuit of life’s meaning, he read many spiritual books and dabbled in the occult and meditation.

I shivered. It had been relentlessly drummed into us by Mo that drugs and Ouija boards were dangerous, because they could open the door of your mind to the Devil.

When he was telling me about those years, Dad said, ‘I ended up deeply depressed and disillusioned with life.’

‘Wasn’t drama school what you wanted?’

‘It was empty. Without the Lord, it’s meaningless. Just husks, sweetie.’

It was at this low point that one day he received a call from one of his mates who had just returned from Istanbul. This friend had planned to walk on foot to India, but instead had been converted by the Children of God en route, and had returned to England to spread the word.

Dad was taken aback by the dramatic change in his previously disturbed and doped-up friend. He now seemed confident, with purpose and direction. ‘He told me it was all thanks to the Children of God. I was curious.’

In the hippie era of peace and love, the message proclaimed by the Children of God seemed exciting: find a new life in Christ, drop out, live communally, forsake materialism and share all things, just like the early disciples. But this was not just another zealous evangelical group from America – it was God’s Endtime Army, the elite, who would lead a lost world in need of salvation during its darkest hour.

The Children of God believed that with the end of the world looming near, pursuing anything else in life seemed pointless. Dad was convinced. He gave away most of his possessions and turned up at the doorstep of a commune in Hollingbourne in Kent with just a small suitcase, ready for his new life as a disciple.

His eyes lighting up at the memory, Dad told me, ‘It was amazing. Everyone lived under the same roof and shared all things just like the Early Christians in the Book of Acts. It was the family I had been searching for.’

New members were told to choose a Bible name to reflect their new life. Dad chose Simon Peter. His full-time job was now to go out on to the streets and witness – the name they used for trying to win converts. Handing out literature for a donation was called ‘litnessing’.

Always full of new ideas, Dad came up with a novel way to litness. He laughed as he described it. ‘I dressed up as a clown, with a bright red nose and a funny hat that had a bouncing little plastic birdie on top.’

He wiggled his fingers on top of his head and made a face. I giggled. ‘I bet you looked silly!’

‘Oh, I did – but I was a clown. Clowns are allowed to look silly. I’d jump in front of passers-by and make them laugh before handing them a tract and asking for a donation. I became a star litnesser and fundraiser – I made hundreds of pounds a week for the Family.’

I laughed as I tried to imagine my dad clowning it up in London, a city I didn’t remember, although I’d been born there. Street solicitation was against the law, however, and Dad had run-ins with the police. Of course, he didn’t see anything wrong in what he was doing. He was obeying God.

Dad told me he met my mum in Hollingbourne, as they both joined the same commune as new disciples on the same day. She was just sixteen and had been recruited straight from school. Young and idealistic, she thought the Children of God was a bona fide missionary society. My parents were ‘married’ by the group, before being legally married in church. After a three-day honeymoon in the Lake District, they squatted in a large house in Hampstead that the Children of God had taken over.

Dad used his training as an actor to do stage performances, dramatically reciting whole portions of the Mo Letters – missives from the prophet that were mailed regularly to every commune as a guide for us disciples to follow and live by. He loved the thrill of acting, and his talent soon set him apart as a sort of celebrity within the group. Spurred on by his success, he recorded more of these Mo Letters in a series of cassette tapes called Wild Wind, which were distributed across the communes for disciples to listen to. While Dad was busy and fulfilled, Mum, who was pregnant, was terribly ill, and it must have been a great relief when, on 29 January 1975, after three days of difficult labour, I was born in the small attic room on the third floor of the Hampstead Home.

Becoming new parents did not stop Mum and Dad from pursuing their new-found mission to save the world. Missionary teams were being set out and my parents received a ‘prophecy’ to go to India. A disciple was not supposed to have a will of his own, but had to follow God’s will by praying and hearing from Him in a prophecy. These prophecies gave the stamp of Divine approval on any plans or decisions that needed to be made.

In reality, the British authorities had begun to investigate the Family’s activities, especially their aggressive proselytizing and soliciting of donations, and Mo told everyone to move from the UK and go on to greener pastures, such as India, South America and the Far East – places where the authorities would be far less likely to care about what a group of Western dropouts did.

When our little family first arrived in India we went to an apartment in a block in Bombay designed for the middle classes, although it was about the size of an English council flat. It had three bedrooms, which we shared with two other couples and two single brothers. After a few weeks my parents found a two-bedroom ground floor flat in Khar, a subdivision of Bombay. There were so many people staying there, disciples coming and going from other parts of India, it was always crowded. They had very little furniture except two single beds and a table and chairs in the living room.