by Fleur Beale
It was as if he was driven. He’d escaped from his father physically; he was free to do what he wanted in the world – free to show Neville that he didn’t need him – but for Phil that meant being out in the world, working and making things happen. He had so much energy, so many plans, and here was the chance to live his own life, and to give this wider life to his children. He would stay positive for them and show them that if they wanted something, they could get it. Sure, there were difficulties in the way, but all they had to do was work out ways of overcoming them.
The children loved their father uncritically and unconditionally: he was their leader and their hero.
Phil applied for a state house, and two months after they had moved in with Faith and Alan, one became available in Linwood in Christchurch. He moved his family from his sister’s busy, organised house to one with no furniture and no one else to care for the children.
Now that they were on their own with just their father, the children began to experience the loneliness of life outside the community. For the first time in their lives they had only each other, and their father when he was at home. This new house was tiny, but it felt huge and empty. Here there was no aunt or big cousin to run to for comfort; there was nobody else to play with, and nothing in the house. It was bare, and so quiet. Israel tried not to show how much he was missing his mother. Dawn cried for her constantly, Tender-Joy was bewildered, and intrepid Justine was uncharacteristically quiet. Crystal was too young for anybody to really know how she felt, and she was too young to understand the promises Phil kept repeating: Don’t worry, I’ll get your mum back. We’ll be a family again.
Phil began teaching them more about the outside world. He taught them the names for the days of the weeks and the months of the year. The older ones found it confusing to begin with and would ask him, ‘Dad, what’s second day called?’
He would tell them it was Monday and together they would recite the names of the days, then go on to name the months.
He gave them quizzes. ‘Israel, what month is your birthday?’
‘Sec – no, February!’
‘Dawn, when’s yours?’
‘September. But it used to be ninth month.’
Much more quickly they learnt the denominations of money and what it would buy them. Much of the responsibility for his siblings fell on Israel’s shoulders because the only way Phil could see to care for his children was to make money. Faith and David tried to convince him that he needed to be at home, but he had too much energy to stay confined there. The world was his and he knew he could make things happen, knew he could create the dream life for his children. Leading by example, he would show them that their opportunities were limitless. To do that, though, he had to go out into the world. He settled the older children into school and would take Tendy and Crystal with him in the car when he went out sourcing materials for waterbeds which he would make at home in the evenings. However, sometimes he would leave Israel in charge of the younger ones, occasionally leaving them alone at night.
Israel felt the responsibility keenly. For the first time in his life he discovered that food didn’t automatically appear on the table three times a day, and besides, this house had no table. The five of them had been uplifted from a place of plenty where they were fed and cared for, to a small, dingy house where they were alone with nothing. They had no money; at eight years old Israel had to field callers such as the power company demanding payment. If the kids asked their dad for money to go to the shops, Phil had to tell them that there wasn’t any. Israel could see that his father was busy, that he was trying with all he had to make enough money for them to live on.
Money! It fascinated Israel. Until that first trip to Wellington with his father, he’d never heard of it, and had no idea that you could take these special pieces of paper and metal into shops and exchange them for things you wanted. He pestered his father for answers. How did money work? How did you get it? Where did it come from? Who made it and why couldn’t Dad just invent a machine that would produce money? Why did some people have a lot of money and they didn’t? Where did the people with a lot of money keep it?
He experienced the dark side of not having enough of it, so partly understood why their father left them to go and find ways of earning it. The stress, the worry and responsibility gave Israel sharp stomach pains but he didn’t tell his father who had enough problems. Instead, he looked forward to the time when he’d be able to stop worrying where the next meal for his sisters would come from. Money was the answer. His dad would make sure everything turned out right; he’d get them money and he’d get their mum back. Sometimes Israel dreamed of making enough money to buy the community so that their mother could be with them again. Money was the answer. It would make them all happy again.
CHAPTER SEVEN: ‘I PROMISE WE’LL GET HER OUT.’
That night when Dad took us out of the community was the beginning of the journey of the next six years. From that moment on there was always the sense that we were escaping or fleeing something. ISRAEL
I remember all the moving around and there was always someone with us. Dad used to be constantly on the lookout, thinking someone from the community was going to come and get us, like at night time, the same as he did. TENDY (TENDER-JOY)
Phil was determined to make good his promise of getting Sandy out. He kept reassuring the kids and telling them not to worry, they’d be a proper family again. But he knew how strongly Sandy believed in Neville’s preachings. He knew she believed that the only way to eternal salvation was to live in his community. Getting her out would be easy compared with the difficulty of keeping her out. He reasoned that if he could break Neville’s hold over her, then she would be only too happy to stay with her children and with him. He knew, too, that Sandy wouldn’t listen to his arguments. He needed to find somebody who knew how to deprogramme people who had come out of cults. The nearest person his research turned up was a woman in Australia, and thanks to a friend who paid her expenses, he arranged for her to come to New Zealand in early February to work with Sandy. Phil planned to abduct his wife to coincide with the day the woman arrived in Christchurch.
As a precaution, Phil took the children up to Auckland to stay with friends who had left the community. The distance from Christchurch had several advantages: if Sandy ran away from him, she wouldn’t be able to take the children back to the community with her, but the greatest advantage was that the woman would be able to talk to Sandy while they travelled north in the car. Sandy would have no choice but to listen. With the help of his brother Michael, Phil worked out a plan to abduct Sandy at night. They kept it simple: they would just walk in and escort her out, carrying her if necessary. By now the community had a night watchman so the two men had to be more careful than when Phil had taken the children.
They crept into the accommodation block, slipped into Sandy’s room, and shone the torch on the bed, only to find a different woman asleep in it. They flicked off the torch and backed out, praying that she wouldn’t wake. It would all be over if she gave the alarm. She stirred but didn’t wake as they eased the door shut. What to do now? Sandy could be in any of the dozens of rooms in the two buildings that made up the complex. They had to get her that night. The woman from Australia was waiting at Faith’s house but, more than that, Phil didn’t think he could bear the disappointment of failing to rescue her.
He led the way out of the building and they hid behind a wall till the watchman went past. Phil’s mind was in overdrive, but in the end he knew his only hope of success was to ask his friend inside the community where Sandy was. He went to her room, hoping her quarters hadn’t been changed as well. But she was there and happy to tell him. Neville had taken precautions against another raid by moving Sandy to a different building.
The two men sneaked inside, finding the right room with no further problem. For the second time in as many months, Phil woke his wife in the dead of night. He was expecting her to shout at him, demanding to know where her children we
re.
‘Sandy,’ he whispered, one eye on Naomi still asleep beside his wife, ‘I’ve come to get you.’
She didn’t speak – just got straight up, but the disturbance woke Naomi who ordered her daughter to have nothing to do with Phil and to get back into bed.
Phil tensed, ready to grab his wife and run, but Sandy told her mother to be quiet and she walked out of the room with her husband and brother-in-law, still wearing her pyjamas.
The three of them tiptoed through the complex with Phil not quite believing it had been so easy. He’d been sure she would be angry with him, but she got into the car as if this were an ordinary trip. She wanted to know about the children: were they all right and where were they?
He reassured her that they were doing fine, and yes, he would take her to the friends they were staying with in Auckland and in the meantime they needed to go to Faith’s house to pick up the clothes he’d organised for her. He didn’t tell her about the deprogrammer who was also waiting at Faith’s.
It was well after midnight by the time they’d picked up the clothes and the woman, but Phil wanted to get out of Christchurch, away from Neville’s vicinity. Taking Michael with them for added security, he drove to a motel in a small town a couple of hours north, with the woman talking to Sandy the entire time. They were exhausted when they arrived. Michael slept what was left of the night across the doorway outside Sandy’s room.
In the morning, Phil knocked on her door but there was no answer. He flung the door open to find that she was gone. She would have had to climb over Michael to creep from the motel. He didn’t know if she’d even been to sleep. How long had she been gone? Had she had time to ring the community to ask somebody to come and get her? They leapt in the car, tore all over the town searching for Sandy, and found her eventually in a phone booth. By repeating that he was taking her to the children, Phil persuaded her to get back in the car. The children exerted a stronger pull at that moment than returning to the community.
They continued the drive north to Picton with the woman trying to reason with Sandy; her children needed their mother; she wanted to be their mother and she couldn’t be if she stayed in Neville’s church. The woman’s arguments were eloquent and persuasive, but Sandy’s loyalty to Neville and her belief that she could only serve God in his church were equally strong. Phil drove, listened, and swung between hope and despair.
They took the ferry to Wellington and stayed that night with the Bilbies whose lifestyle must have seemed to Sandy the epitome of worldliness and so helped to confirm for her that she was right to shun the world. Clive, a kindly, benign father-figure, so different from Neville, tried to reason with her, too, but she kept saying, ‘I’ve got to serve God. I’ve got to do what’s right.’
Phil despaired. Sandy was torn between what she wanted to do and what she felt she must do. He could only hope that her love for her children would prove stronger than her belief that the only way she could serve God was to return to Neville.
They left for Auckland the next day, a long drive for a woman who hadn’t been far outside the community since she was 16. Phil couldn’t work out whether or not the deprogrammer was making any impression on Sandy. One moment he thought she was winning but the next moment it seemed that Sandy was rejecting everything she said. As arranged, he dropped the woman off at Auckland Airport.
Always the optimist, Phil talked to Sandy about how much the kids were looking forward to seeing her. Surely when she saw them she would be able to leave Neville behind.
His spirits lifted as he watched her reunion with her children. It was all he had hoped it would be, proving to him how much she loved and wanted to be with them. Tendy, particularly, clung to her and wouldn’t let her out of her sight. Israel, Dawn and Justine had so much to tell her. Phil watched his family and knew he’d done the right thing in reuniting them. Sandy hugged them and told them how they’d grown, they’d changed – and she was so pleased to see them. She held Crystal close as if she was afraid her baby would vanish if she set her down.
Sandy’s attitude towards Phil gave him hope, too. Instead of the reproaches he still half-expected, she was making every effort to be friendly towards him. Later he realised she had believed that they would all return to the community with her.
But the set-up of five small children in a caravan, along with a husband who had to participate in the outside world, was an impossible situation for Sandy. The combination of her extreme loyalty, naïvety and deep religious conviction, made her feel besieged in the outside world where people bombarded her with ideas and information so contrary to Neville’s teachings. It didn’t help when business contacts kept calling Phil, assuming he was still heading the community waterbed business. He had to keep explaining that he now had nothing to do with it. Sandy saw such contacts as influencing him to turn away from the God she believed in. She believed utterly in Neville’s teachings of an evil outside world. Salvation, he taught, was only possible if she lived in his community. Cunningly, his teachings also decreed that children would be saved even if only one of their parents led a true and Godly life with him in the community.
Once Sandy understood that Phil wasn’t going back and wouldn’t let the children return either, she believed that their only hope of salvation was for her to sacrifice herself by giving them up and going back without them. The tug between wanting to be with her children and feeling she had to serve God made her increasingly unhappy. Phil’s own situation was precarious: he could offer her life in the caravan in Auckland or in the bare house in Christchurch. He reluctantly accepted that the only thing to do was to let her return to Neville’s community. He told her to ring them. They paid for her air ticket and she flew back without her children.
As always, Phil refused to accept defeat. The children were upset but not devastated, having complete faith in their father when he said, ‘Don’t worry, kids. We’ll get Mum back. We’ll all be a family again.’ He drove them back to Christchurch, staying cheerful and optimistic so that the children remembered the joy of seeing their mother, rather than grieving because she had chosen to leave them. Their dad was their hero, the one who would never abandon them, the one who would make things right. He gave them hope. He promised he’d get their mum back and they knew he would do it. On the long drive south he kept them occupied by singing to them, stopping at parks to let them play, and playing games with number plates as they drove.
All the time, Phil’s mind was busy. Sandy had gone back because he hadn’t thought things through and so he made a plan for what to do once he’d rescued her a second time. He was determined to learn from that first mistake. Back home in Christchurch, he threw his energy into devising a plan designed to let her live away from Neville and the community. He was determined to get her out again, but this time he would make it work.
He settled the older children into school then worked on the plan. He figured that if they had somewhere remote to live then Sandy wouldn’t be worried about outside influences. There was still no money, either to put towards a plan to get her out, or to support and care adequately for the children who were finding life even harder now that they’d had the few days with their mother. Living conditions in the dingy little house were spartan because it was still completely devoid of furniture.
Phil typically saw the barrenness as a problem to solve. He had no spare money to buy anything, even from second-hand shops, so he scavenged for timber at the city dump. First he made waterbeds for the children. Israel and Crystal slept in one room, Dawn, Justine and Tendy in the second bedroom, while he had the third. Gradually he scavenged more wood plus the odd, battered piece of furniture from the dump, but until he could make a table and find chairs and chests of drawers, the family sat on the floor and kept their clothes in suitcases. The children wore clothes given to them by their aunts, Faith and Mercy, as well as an odd collection from charity shops. They look back now and laugh at photographs of themselves dressed in hideous combinations of colour and style. The community
which they’d come from wasn’t strong on fashion and they had no idea of how to put a look together.
Even with the furniture Phil had made or scavenged, the house was always bare. The cupboards were, too. At first the children lived on bread and sometimes, for a treat, they’d have milk. As their father earned more money they ate things he could prepare easily, such as canned tuna, baked beans, and instant noodles. The one thing always in the cupboard was flour because it was cheap, but Phil was too busy to do anything with it. He didn’t know how to cook and the children got used to the smell of burning whenever he did venture beyond the tins and instant noodles.
Israel had often been with his mother in the kitchen in the community, helping her rub butter into flour, mixing dough, and watching as she put batches of baking into the oven. From this grounding, he taught himself to cook, making pancakes and scones for his sisters, then trying more complicated recipes. All the children relished the variation in their diet, although there were a few disasters. Tendy created the most dramatic one. She wasn’t quite four years old, but Israel’s cooking impressed her. Early one morning she slipped out of bed and headed for the kitchen to make breakfast. It looked easy and she knew that cooking involved getting things out of the cupboards. She took out all the cooking utensils, found a bowl almost as big as she was, and set about copying what she’d seen Israel doing – putting things into the bowl and mixing them up with the big spoon. In went the flour, the dried macaroni, instant noodles, vegemite, bread and milk. She was busy stirring when the family discovered her. She looked up at them, her blond hair tousled and her smile wide. ‘I’m cooking.’
Phil cleaned up the mess. Even his younger children had picked up the ‘you can do anything’ attitude he was intent on instilling in them; all the same, he hoped Tendy wouldn’t try cooking by herself again until she had a few more skills.
