As I have enjoyed reading everyone else’s biogs here I thought it was about time that I put my own down. I have thought about why I want to do this and whilst I can pretend it is for the better good and it will act as a warning for others thinking of joining the Witnesses, actually I think it is because I think it is just because it makes an interesting story and as will become apparent a good part of my life I had to live a lie and I now find it really liberating just to be really open with everyone.
I also thought about how to write it. Was tempted to write it to the tune of the Fresh Prince but thought that might get a bit tough after about verse 38. Then wondered whether I should do it in the style of one of those biography pieces in the Awake but that would involve reading an Awake to mimic the style and just couldn’t be bothered.
I decided that what I would do is as far as possible just present facts in a chronological(ish) order and then maybe give my take on it all at the end. I will try to keep to this but we will see. In any case, whilst I am not a post-modernist I think that ‘facts’ are often a bit dubious if looking at your own past and are influenced by perspective. Given the only perspective I can honestly take is my own and do not have the full timeline of events in a lot of cases, I appreciate that some people may disagree with what happened and why. I know people have a habit of rewriting their own history successfully in their heads to the point they believe it. As such I have to accept that I may have done this. As a rule of thumb, if I use words that imply ‘this happened’ then these things are as close to facts as I can get. If instead I start saying ‘I remember’, for example, these things are true as far as I am concerned but maybe others will have a different idea.
Anyway, enough preamble. I will start at the beginning with what I know are facts – it says so on my birth certificate.
I was born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire in 1978. Six minutes after my non-identical twin brother. There were two more brothers who preceded me by three and five years respectively. I am told that my mother did not know she was having twins until two weeks before I was born and they managed to get an ultrasound for her. They could only hear one heartbeat apparently but were very concerned about her size.
My mother was a primary school teacher and my father a miner. They were both the same age and had married in their early twenties. I know very little about either of their childhoods really. I know my mum had been a labour party activist before I was born but that is about it.
My grandmother on my mum’s side died a year or so before I was born and I believe she and my mum were very close. My mother had an older brother who had died of a brain haemorrhage about five years before I was born and an older sister (about 15 years older) who had emigrated to Australia in the early 60’s. My maternal grandfather was apparently a complete bastard to his wife and older children and had been in prison for being part of a robbery during the war. When I knew him I really liked him but he died when I was about seven when he was in his mid 70’s. He got knocked off his push bike having been out poaching late at night.
On my fathers’ side my paternal grandfather had fought all the way through the second war until getting put in prison for selling arms to the Greek communists. I don’t know but don’t think he did this for any ideological reasons – he just wanted a few quid. He apparently really loved his children and grandchildren but he popped his clogs when I was two so I never knew him. My paternal grandmother apparently never recovered from his death and whilst there are a couple of interesting stories about her they are not relevant really. She had very little to do with me or more brothers and she died when I was 18.
I have been told that my parents had a volatile relationship with my mum being violent towards my dad. I cannot confirm this one way or another. I have been told my dad had numerous affairs but I can only confirm one. The evidence from admittedly biased people is that he did cheat on my mum a few times and I am inclined to think this is true. To give him his due he denies it but he also denies things having happened that I know to be true so there you go.
Anyway, my first few memories are happy. I imagine it was hard for my parents but it was great being one of a twin. There was always someone your own age to play with. We were very different though. Physically I was much bigger and was cursed with somewhat of a sad face whereas he was blond hair, blue eyes and bubbly. People were always attracted to him. I remember this made me feel sad but never blamed him.
In 1980/81 my mum went out to Australia to see her sister. Since emigrating my aunty (who was diagnosed schizophrenic) and her family had become JWs after my cousin had converted after fatefully answering the door one day. When my mum returned after 6 weeks she had also been converted. I have been told my dad had an affair whilst she was in Australia but in any case when she came home she apparently said to dad that she had found the truth and he had a choice – convert or leave. Clearly he either did not have enough spine or had screwed the relationship up so much that he couldn’t argue and so converted. He has told me that he never believed it to be true but it would have been quite a sacrifice if for no other reason the mine was a pretty masculine place to be converting to some weird religion. They would have both been baptised in about 1984.
I do remember the conversion process vaguely. Having to start going to meetings, not being able to go into assemblies and then my last birthday (I remember mum saying ‘this will be your last birthday so you are not getting much’ and me and my twin brother got a placemat. The following year I remember begging my dad on my birthday just for 20p or something because it was my birthday. This is mentioned not because of ‘poor me’ but rather that my first real memories are of the conversion and I don’t really remember life before.
Life then was pretty normal I suppose. Yes we went to meetings at Carcroft cong and door knocking but mum and dad were financially secure (my dad was a deputy so was not affected financially by the miners’ strike). We were not rich but neither were we poor and each year we would have a ‘present day’ to make up for lost birthdays and Christmas. As an aside, what I do remember looking back is how racist we were. That sort of insidious low level racism – jokes about anybody that was not white and some that were so vile that if my children ever came out with them I would be appalled.
In 1986 my aunty, uncle and cousin came over from Australia to visit. My dad chose this moment to announce that he was having an affair and was leaving. He ran off with another witness who was twenty years younger because as he told me later he wanted out of the religion. I am sure the twenty years younger and big boobs had nothing whatsoever to do with it and cannot think why he both could think of no other way of leaving and why if it was so bad it was alright to leave his kids in it.
Apparently my dad tried to patch things up with her but she would only talk to him in front of the elders and he was having none of it. Whilst the woman he had an affair with was only meant to be a temporary relationship, they married and remained so for ten years.
Mum took his leaving really badly. She used to cry all the time and to this day I neither cry myself in front of other people or can cope with anyone who is crying (save my own children thank goodness but not unfortunately my wife). I started stealing money from my mum’s purse and then because we had the book study at our house and kept the collection box in the kitchen started stealing money from Jehovah. It was only a few quid here and there and I used to pretend I was finding it. I think this (when I was eight) coloured my mum’s view of me for the rest of her life and what my brother’s still think of me. I was of course caught and my mum went ballistic. She still had my dad’s metal tipped pit stick (think thick walking stick with metal at the end used for whacking rock to see if it loose) and beat seven bells out of me with it. She called all my friends and told them I was a thief. She beat me so bad I found out afterwards my brothers thought she was going to kill me. As a teacher, she was scared to send me to school the next day in case anyone saw the bruises. I cannot tell this story now I have my own children without getting furious. I mention it because it is interesting in itself I suppose but also because this event comes back almost 20 years later.
Just before dad left my mum’s sister in law died (wife of brother who died five years before my birth) and my cousins who were orphaned came to live with us. They were older than us and stayed for a couple of years. Mum tried to convert them but I think they were too old already and escaped as soon as they were old enough.
After about 18 months after dad left mum decided that we were going to Australia. My dad says this was just to hurt him. I have no doubt that was a major factor, but also suspect that my mum wanted to be close to the only family she had left. I remember that when she had decided we were emigrating me and all my brothers were in one bedroom playing. She walked in and said ‘I am going to Australia. Who is coming with me?’. When we did not jump up she went into her room crying. My twin brother went in to see her and five minutes later she came back in and said ‘Our Richard is the only one that loves me and he is coming with me’ or words to that effect. We of course all went.
In September 1988 we flew out with the intention of living in Sydney with my Aunty. Unfortunately the stress of being reunited with my mother coupled with my elder uncle’s belief that she should not take her medication meant that she had a schizophrenic episode that peaked a week or so after out arrival with her screaming and attacking her husband (who I believe in this episode was satan the devil and she was Jehovah god. Religion and schizophrenia is not a healthy mix). My mum in her no nonsense way told us that we were moving north to Cessnock in the Hunter Valley to live near our cousins. My mum and my cousins were reasonably close in age due to the big age difference between my mum and her sister.
We started at school and I hated it. I could not make friends easily and it was made worse that my twin brother could. About March 1989 (after we had been in Australia about six months) my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer. I remember her telling me in the car on the way home from school and it was going to be alright – an operation to remove her breast but she would be alright. From what I remember I was not particularly worried. At about the same time she had also just got a job as a headmistress at a school and I remember being really proud of her.
She had a mastectomy and returned home to recuperate but fell ill again within a few weeks. My eldest and twin brother had gone to visit other family in Toowoomba in Queensland at the time, probably to help out after my mum’s operation. I was taken after school to go and see my mum in hospital with my second eldest brother just expecting a visit. Unfortunately she told us that the cancer had spread to her liver and she was going to die. She said though that she was going to fight for every day and she might have several years. It was the last time I cried for about 15 years.
She said she hoped to fight it to see us all get married ‘even if I am blind and cannot walk’. She was dead in three months. It had got to her brain and there was nothing they could do although she never tried chemo. I don’t know how much this had to do with her not wanting to watch her suffer like she had seen her own mother suffer, whether there was just nothing they could do or the fact a that a Watchtower at that time was saying the world would end before the close of the 20 th century (now revised of course)
Her last month or so she was so morphened out of her head that she would be hallucinating every time we saw her, seeing scorpions climbing up her bed or thinking me and my twin brother were still babies. I remember a few days before she died praying that if Jehovah could not save her could he kill her quickly. Her last salient words were apparently to my uncle. She had discovered letters from my brother to friends in the UK that suggested he was gay. Apparently her and my dad had suspected since he was young. She grabbed my uncle and said ‘Roland XXX is a puff’. Nice.
After she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer she stayed at home for a little while during which time my dad flew over. My mother had so effectively brainwashed us that we all said we did not want to live with him and instead wanted to live with our cousins. As it was he said that he wanted to take me and my twin brother back with him but we (or was it my mum and cousins) argued him down. I found out later that he never wanted to take any of us back as his new wife did not want us.
Before she died and whilst she still had some semblance of sanity my mum wrote my brothers and I a letter. It was only brief and it is the only thing I have from her. In it she says how she loved us all, how we were all to stick together and stick with Jehovah and she would see us in the new system. After she died me and my second eldest brother went to live with the eldest cousin and my twin brother and eldest went to live with the other. They both lived in Cessnock only about 500m away from each other but it was quickly made clear that we were separate families now. We would play together as much as we could and went to school together but it is a bit odd to have to start ringing up to see if your twin brother can come and play. I could go on about several parts of my life here and maybe I will elaborate another time but for some form of brevity will cut to the most important points.
My cousin and her husband did the best they could but they had a family of their own – their eldest in the same school year as me – and had their own problems both emotionally, physically and financially. They were not in a position to take us in really but no one else would take us in– including my other ‘elder’ cousin with a million dollar business. His wife thought I and my second eldest brother had an attitude problem. Maybe I did, I don’t know. Could have been something to do with what had happened. I was 10 years old for goodness sake.
It would have been around three or four months after my mum died that someone suggested baptism. I don’t know why or how it came about, but all four of us went through the study and questions. I remember so little of it to be honest. I cannot honestly say whether I believed it I just thought if my brothers were doing it then so should I and it is what mum wanted. So at the age of 11 at a racecourse in Sydney we all got dunked.
Shortly after getting baptised my eldest brother came out and was promptly booted back to England.
When I was at primary school in Australia I got bullied a little, but when I went to high school it turned up about 20 notches. I was a ‘pommie bastard’, tallest kid in the year, smartest kid in the year and a Jehovah’s Witness. They could take their pick really but it was ‘pom’ followed by things being thrown – punches or whatever they could lay their hands on. I remember once they through blue tack in my hair and the only way I could get it out was cutting great clumps of hair out. I went to the headmaster to tell him what was happening after it reaching the point I was petrified all the time and he said ‘But you are a pom. What do you want me to do, patrol all the school so you don’t get beaten up?’ I only have to hear an Australian voice now and I want to hit them, although I never have and never once hit them back then either.
At this time I also started to want to see naked ladies. I had no idea about sex or why I wanted to do this – there was no masturbation or anything like that, I did not even know what it was. My cousins’ husband kept an unusual selection of pornography in his car that he thought was hidden but I found it and looking at it made me ‘feel funny’. I started trying to catch a glimpse of my cousins’ daughter (the same age as me) getting undressed. Being a clumsy clot of course I got caught but not for several months although my cousin’s daughter knew what I was trying to do so her and her friends at school used to call me ‘PT’ (peeping tom). It was wrong I know and thankfully I now have a really good relationship with my cousins’ daughter who now lives in the UK but I do remember when it all came out being given a really stern talk by her father and thinking ‘but what about your magazines in your car?’.
There were good times to – I remember playing cricket a lot with my brothers but also a whole summer where my twin brother went to America for six weeks while we stayed behind. I wasn’t bothered that he had gone abroad (although was beginning to notice how much more he seemed to have then us – hell, I was only eleven and twelve and who wouldn’t have noticed) but just really missed him.
This all went on until December 1991 when I went back on holiday to the UK to see my dad with my brother who lived with me. My mum had left very little money in her will but enough to make sure we could all get back to the UK if we wanted (to. I genuinely thought I was going just for 6 weeks and would come back. I can’t say I thought much about the religion, beyond finding the meetings really boring and thinking that I wouldn’t go when I didn’t have to. So whilst others here rebelled or did deep and profound thinking, I am sorry to say that I left because I found it really boring. Within a day of being back with my dad I had already started thinking about staying. I got on well with his wife (well, I was closer to her age then he was). My cousin sent a letter within a week saying that she was moving her family up to Queensland (10 hours away from my twin brother) and that if we wanted to come back we would have to come with them and also fully integrate into their family. She said that we were materialistic and this had to stop. It really was an awful letter but I am thankful to her in a way because she made my mind up to definitely stay and my dad could hardly send me back. She has apologised for this letter to her credit. My brother did go back though, which I will return to shortly.
I only attended one meeting when I was there and my dad said you don’t have to go if you don’t want to. I hardly needed telling twice. The elders turned up but my dad told them, very politely, to get lost. And that was that.
When my twin brother found out he wrote me the usual rubbish that everyone will be familiar with – “how will I tell mum after Armageddon”. He was also really insulting, calling me an idiot. Unfortunately this putting me down became quite a familiar trait over coming years. (He once accused me of always thinking I was right. I said of course I do, until I am wrong and then change what I am thinking until I think I am right again. I love being wrong, it means that you are wiser then you were before)
My brother returned to Australia but as soon as he got off the plane he was crying to come home. Long and strange story short he did end up coming back about a year later.
During that year things went pretty well, but when my brother came back things took a turn for the worse in my dad’s marriage. It wasn’t my brothers’ fault, although my dad’s wife hated him (he remained a JW which was part of the problem – she had been a JW herself). The age gap was too much, she wanted children and they didn’t really have much in common I suppose. She started making our lives hell. Dad had been out of work since the mines had shut which didn’t help.
About this time – I would have been 14 – I handed my biology homework in late. The teacher there could see something was wrong and I started to talk to her. She seemed very kind – she was about 20 years older than me and had a husband and young family. She said I should go around to her house and meet her family and spend some time away from pressures at home. Before I knew it really she had manipulated the situation so that the relationship became sexual. I later found out my dad suspected something – especially when the police found us in a car and brought us home late at night but she was a good liar and pulled it off. He however did nothing ‘because I was too stubborn and would not listen’.
She waited for full blown sex until my 16 th birthday. Very shrewd. But school was hardly normal after that. No normal relationships or anything. She was highly manipulative and whilst I got offered the chance to go to Cambridge – and got the grades – ended up going to Hull where she lived. I must be the only person to have turned down Oxbridge for Hull. I am amazed looking at what was happening that I got any grades at all. Will return to this later.
My twin brother moved back when he was 16 after falling out with my elder cousin, I think over a girl he fancied. He got engaged shortly after and was married at 18. My dad was not invited as people in the local congregation did not want him there ‘out of memory of mum’ and so they did not speak for about ten years.
My dad and his wife split up when I was about 17 and still at home. They both had affairs. He described the woman he had an affair with as ‘nothing to look at but she is a good cook and can look after me’. His ex wife described her in a phone call to me as the village bike. I told my dad if he could wait one year until I went to university until she moved in I would really appreciate it as I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable and anxious in my own home like I had for the previous three years. He said he understood and it wouldn’t happen. Within a week she had moved in and was making our lives miserable, labelling food as hers’ and dads’, notes around the house about what was to be done and when, leaving property papers on the table to get my brothers out of the house (I was going to Uni so it didn’t matter about me and was in Hull most weekends anyway with teacher woman). It all ended in a big argument where she said she was embarrassed that my brothers were witnesses and she wanted them out of the house. She said if we were any younger she would not have even got together with dad. I sat there and said nothing whilst my twin brother sat on the couch hugging her like the slimeball he was turning into. Despite the hugs, within two months they were both out.
I went off to Uni, made no friends as I was seeing teacher woman who had now turned psychotic, threatening to kill herself every time I tried to break it off. By my last year though I had met my wife to be in a pub we worked in and found the strength to get rid of her. She went mental. I had to sit on her twice to stop her slitting her wrists, she tried to run me over, would come around at night banging on the door, said she was pregnant and left a pee pot to prove it, then she said she had cervical cancer and was going to die if she didn’t have chemo and that would mean losing the children (twins no less) – all this while I had my final exams. After my finals I ran away to America with my future wife for six months.
Anyway, this is not central to the overall story I suppose but does have some context for the end.
Whilst in America I proposed to my wife. Well, I say proposed I heard on the radio there was a wedding dress sale at a local shop and I said if we were going to get married we might as well pick up a bargain. I am from Yorkshire after all and some things are just in the DNA. Once we had bought the dress we thought we better announce our engagement.
When we came back my dad picked me up at the airport. He said that my second eldest brother had decided not to speak to him anymore as the Watchtower said he shouldn’t. I went around to see him and went ballistic. My twin brother then told me that he could come to my wedding but not the reception as my dad was going to be there and as he was DFd he couldn’t come. Since he got married he had turned into a sanctimonious little bastard whose only goal in life was to become an elder. I knew quite a few lads in the congregation through my brothers and they all hated him. I told him to piss off – it was the wedding and reception or not at all. I said the only people I wanted at the wedding were my dad and three brothers and he couldn’t do that for me. He said no he couldn’t and my problem was that I wanted us all to be a happy family and that was never going to happen.
My second eldest brother said the same thing, but I knew he was weak and just lead by my twin brother. As I had lived with him in Australia I was closer to him now then my twin brother anyway and so said fine, just come to the wedding.
Wedding day came, my father was miserable – another story – but my second eldest brother turned up looking miserable as sin and announced that he would not get in any photos with my dad because he was DFd. What an excellent witness that was.
A couple of years passed, I got a Masters from Bristol and started working in Leeds. Out of the blue my twin brother rang up and said that his wife was pregnant and thought we should get back together, so to speak. We met up maybe once every two months after that and I got to know my nephew. My brother did of course not spare the rod and once I nearly belted him for being heavy handed with his son but I thought ‘just leave it’. I put up with him being a prick to me most of the time, could always tell he was judging me but put up with it for my nephew. When he was about one my wife fell (got to love that term) pregnant. When she was six months gone we went around to my twin brothers’ house for tea. My nephew went to bed and we started talking about disciplining children. The time mum beat the crap out of me for stealing was brought up – looking back, we had never talked about mum at all since she had died in any meaningful way. Anyway, my two JW brothers were laughing saying they thought she was going to kill me. I said – not angrily – that I thought she must have been tapped (crazy) to have done that to a child.
I looked over to my twin brother who had gone red and said ‘if you are going to speak about mum like that I am going to have to ask you to leave’. I got up and said fine, I will go then. And by the way everyone thinks you are a self centred shit. I went into the kitchen and could find my shoes. He was running at me saying if I didn’t get out he would call the police. I said that the way he treated his son was awful and when he turned eighteen I would get in touch and tell him what a load of BS his dad had been feeding him all his life. So my brother grabbed hold of my throat. I pushed him off and then my second eldest brother decided he would have a go as well. I firmly pushed him off as well. All this in front of my heavily pregnant wife.
The next day my second eldest brother rang and said ‘sorry for trying to strangle you’. I stayed calm but said is this what the religion has brought you to? Then proceeded to pull down his belief system for him which was a waste of time because deep down he knows it is crap but wants to see mum again. He ended up just shouting down the phone that I am a materialist and hanging up. I don’t drink, smoke or take drugs. I am happily married. My life has not fallen apart because I am no longer a witness. Therefore I am a materialist.
I tried to get in touch with him when my son was two. ‘What do you want!’ I got rather than hello. He said he felt nothing for my son or indeed his other nephew. My twin brother is now an elder.
My cousins’ daughter who now lives over came up a few weeks ago and said that my brothers were bad mouthing me all the time ‘he only care about material things’ etc. She tried to speak to my second eldest brother a few weeks ago about this amongst other things. All she got back was that I was an apostate (I have never been DFd and could not give a flying if I was) and that I had had an affair with a married woman! (I had told him about the teacher when it was all over although he had suspected but along with everyone else never helped). I suppose in their eyes it wasn’t abuse because I didn’t shout out no and resist with