by Fleur Beale
Israel tried to reassure himself but when he saw that she was crying and he saw the look on his dad’s face, he worked out that this time she wasn’t coming back. He didn’t cry; his dad had always impressed on him that he must be brave for the little ones and he didn’t want to start them crying. He remembers his mother telling him as she said goodbye, ‘Now Israel, be good to your brother and sisters and really look after them.’ He told her he would but he didn’t ask her why she was going. He thinks now that he probably knew because he had enough knowledge of Neville’s community which would have been telling her, It’s God testing you. You have to give up your children but you’ll be reunited in the end.
They would have used biblical examples: Isaac was ready to kill his son, and you just have to give your children up for a time.
The children have seen her since, but that was the last day she was their mother. That day feels sadder to them now than it did then.
She left them a card in which she’d written a short letter. It must have been almost impossible to write and there’s a sense in it of her powerlessness. She is powerless to stay with them, and because they are so young she can’t give them true understanding of why she is forced to leave them. It’s a loving letter and the only way she knew to make sure they would survive without her.
I know there is so much you don’t understand and I cannot explain, but please believe that I want to be with you to wipe away your precious tears.
She writes personal messages to each of them:
Israel, love and care for your sisters and brother, be someone they can look up to.
Dawn, be a loving, caring big sister and remember I love you.
Justine and Tender-Joy, love and share with one another and do what the older ones tell you.
There were messages, too, for Crystal and baby Andreas.
Seven months after their arrival in America, Phil drove Sandy back to the airport. They barely spoke during the two-hour trip. There was nothing to say, and there was too much to say. He went with her to the check-in counter, all the time hoping she would change her mind. After she’d collected her ticket he helped her find the departure area where he would have to leave her. She hugged him, holding him tight before she said goodbye. He stood watching her walk away down the long corridor. She was torn, he knew that – but the tragedy of it was that they both wanted the same thing. They loved each other and they loved their kids. It should have been simple enough to be together as a family. She turned around three times to wave to him. He felt he must wake soon out of this dream and she’d be there, hugging him. Each time she turned around to wave, he was certain she was going to come back, but she didn’t. She vanished around the corner and he stood where he was, crying.
CHAPTER TEN: SOME ANSWERS
The Hutterites were amazing and I don’t think my dad or any of us could have got through that time without them and the support they gave us. ISRAEL
The family were shattered, but the decision Sandy felt she had to make almost cost her her life. When she got back home to Neville’s community, she was so emotionally distraught that she was unable to eat, and finally they had to seek medical intervention to save her life.
It turned out that Neville had managed to discover that Phil had taken his family to North America and would have known they’d need to cross the US/Canadian border when their visas needed renewing. He ordered Sandy’s mother Naomi to contact the Canadian police to tell them her daughter had been abducted from New Zealand against her will. Neville knew the strength of Sandy’s love for her children, so his hope was that the decision to return would be taken out of her hands by the authorities.
Naomi had done as the hierarchy told her, also phoning Sandy constantly to persuade her to return. She was happy enough to do so, believing that Phil would come back, too. Later, she had a hard time forgiving herself for the devastation she’d helped cause.
Naomi would later tell Phil of a phone conversation where Sandy said she wasn’t sure she wanted to return. He reckons the fact that she didn’t ever alert the border authorities shows her ambivalence. Each time they had to cross between countries he was on edge, knowing she could tell them at any point, but he realised, too, that she was in an invidious position. How could she tell them she wanted to leave the country and leave her children behind?
But now Sandy had left her family behind forever, and the Hutterites surrounded them with love, involving them in activities to keep them distracted and busy. A couple from the Catskills community in upper state New York offered to become their surrogate parents. Phil accepted gratefully, even though it meant moving from Woodcrest. The Catskills couple more or less adopted them, helped Phil with the children, and provided them all with a loving, stable environment. Israel describes them as a blessing and the security they provided freed him from the stomach pains that came whenever he was stressed.
In the months after Sandy’s departure, Phil concentrated on being the best dad he could be. He still hoped against hope that Sandy would come back, but in any case he didn’t want the children to forget her. Every day after they’d finished their homework, he got them to write her letters or draw a picture. He posted them off regularly, including work they’d done at school. To keep her in touch with Andreas, he made hand and foot prints by standing him in paint when he was eighteen months old. He cut off a lock of Andreas’s hair, so white it barely showed up on the paper, and sent that with the children’s letters. Crystal’s bedtime stories every night were those he told her about her mother. They’d sit together in her bed, looking at photograph albums while he told her the stories.
He stood Sandy’s photo on a wooden plaque in the shape of praying hands, with a message on its base: Dear God, please bring Mummy back. That photo and the message accompanied them to house after house in the years to come. Every day he got the children to write to their mother and pray to God to bring her back. He wanted to give them something to believe in, to give them hope, but also to make sure they didn’t ever feel bitter at her for leaving them.
Not long after Sandy left, Andreas who was six months old developed a bad case of reflux that deteriorated over the following year to the stage where he had trouble breathing and wasn’t able to eat. He had surgery at 18 months old and had to be fed through a tube directly into his stomach. Israel had taken him under his wing, looking after his young brother as his mother had asked him to, and any anger he felt over her leaving was on his brother’s behalf: ‘He was only eighteen months old and he had to go into major surgery and it had to have resulted from the stress of Mum leaving like that – just gone.’
The loving support of the Hutterite community made the blow of their mother’s departure bearable for the older children. Life was good, there was plenty to do, lots of friends to play with, and always an ‘aunt’ or their surrogate mother to go to when they wanted a motherly presence. It was ideal for Phil, too; he had the support of the whole community, but he was more responsible for his children’s daily care than he’d been able to be in New Zealand. His family had their own accommodation; help was available if he needed it, and he was living in a community structured around the care of its families. It was his learning time in how to be a parent.
In June 1993 Phil flew home to New Zealand to prepare for the fraud trial Clive Bilbie had brought against the community. While over there, he went down to Christchurch to visit family and talk to Faith who had been growing increasingly worried about the abuse going on in the community. She had taken in too many people Neville had abused, and wanted it to stop.
Neville’s leadership of his community gave him total power in any situation regarding his followers. He was free to manipulate, abuse and control anyone as he chose. There was no redress inside the community, nowhere to turn and nobody who could help. His demand for silence from his victims meant that they couldn’t begin to try to find an advocate. The mind-control was all pervasive and all but impossible to withstand, especially by young women who had been children when the
ir parents joined Neville’s Church at Springbank.
Faith and Phil abhorred the sexual abuse, the mind control, and the way their father had of breaking families apart. They gathered together a group of those affected. The group talked it over and decided to go out to the community, talk to Neville, and ask him for an apology. All they wanted was for him to say yes, he’d done wrong and he was sorry. They hoped to make him aware that the outside world would never condone his actions, and that he would choose to desist from further abuse. This would also give some peace of mind to those struggling as a result of his actions.
There were other abusers besides Neville in the community, and Phil tried to persuade a young man who had suffered badly at the hands of one of the men to join the group. The young man refused; he couldn’t bear to think about it, let alone expose to the world what he saw as his own shame. He couldn’t believe in Phil’s assurances that the shame wasn’t his, but the other man’s.
Phil and ten former members drove to the community to talk to Neville. He refused to have anything to do with them. They had betrayed him by leaving and he was adamant that he himself had done nothing he needed to apologise for. He would not speak to them.
This wasn’t the result any of them had hoped for and it left them with the problem of what to do next. After much thought, they decided to go to the police and lay charges.
The Christchurch police began an investigation at the end of June 1993. In July Phil went back to Wellington for the fraud trial, to be met at Wellington Airport by a barrage of media because two days previously, on July 20, police had conducted simultaneous dawn raids on the community premises at Springbank and at their new location on the West Coast. Neville had been arrested. The two raids were necessary because some of Neville’s community were now living on the West Coast while others remained to wind up affairs at Springbank. The new property, inland from Greymouth in the South Island of New Zealand, was bigger and much more isolated. The community had bought 917 hectares of land, possibly using money from inheritances to do so (and later would buy an adjoining block so that they currently own a total of 1700 hectares). Since 1991 when they bought the land they had been preparing it to be their headquarters, building the milking sheds first and then the accommodation blocks for the people. Gloria had died in March 1991 during the setting up phase of the new community and Neville named it Gloriavale in her honour.
The raids shook the community to its foundations. The arrest of the leader of the Cooperite sect (as they were popularly known) for sexual violation made headline news around the country, hence the media interest in Phil’s presence in Wellington.
The fraud trial went ahead. Phil enjoyed the judge’s questioning of Neville who now went by the name of Hopeful Christian:
‘Is there a Fervent Stedfast in the community?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there a Hopeful Christian in the community?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there an honest Christian in the community?’
‘No.’
The community was found guilty and ordered to pay reparation of $140,000.
Phil flew back to America and made the decision to leave the shelter of the Hutterite communities in order to strike out on his own. The children would have been happy to stay forever, but he was wanting a wider world once again, where he could do things his way. This community was a loving and truly Godly one, but Phil wanted to be fully in charge of his own life. At the end of September 1993, not quite three years after they’d arrived, he packed up his family for another adventure.
He decided not to return to New Zealand. He was an Australian citizen so he would take his children there, find a small town by the sea, and make a life for them all. He chose Coffs Harbour, remembering it from the holiday Neville had taken him on when he was a teenager.
He told the children they were going to leave America, but it would be a huge adventure because they were going to live in Australia. They were excited because Sandy had told them stories about the kangaroo that used to steal the bread when she was a child there, and now they would see a real kangaroo. Israel was torn: he was excited about the adventure but he hated the thought of leaving all their friends. The stomach pains hit again, and again he kept them to himself.
The Hutterites bought their tickets, farewelled the family, and gave Phil about $4,000 to tide him over. Although Phil had willingly contributed his labour and expertise to their workforce, he was still humbled by their generosity. Their attitude and assistance were so different from anything he’d experienced from his own father.
The departure wasn’t straightforward because Andreas was an American citizen and needed his mother’s signature on his visa to get into Australia. Phil decided to chance his luck. At the airport in New York, he put their seven passports together, with Andreas’s at the bottom, took them up to the check-in counter, waited till the woman was about to check Andreas’s, then made a comment to one of the kids which was enough to distract her. She smiled at them all, handed back the passports, and they were through.
The hearts of fellow passengers must have sunk when they saw this man with his six young children board the plane for the long flights, but at the end of each leg people came up to him and told him how wonderful the children had been and congratulated him on his family.
Immigration in Sydney detained Phil because of Andreas’s status, but he’d been right in gambling on the fact that they wouldn’t send a toddler back by himself. They let him in and gave Phil 24 days to sort it out. He would immediately apply for Andreas’s Australian citizenship.
Once they got through immigration, Israel took charge, telling his dad that he’d look after the others while Phil went to buy bus tickets to Coffs Harbour. Phil had arranged for the friend they’d stayed with in Coffs when he was a teenager to meet them. He hoped the friend would have found accommodation for them – somewhere they could live, where their lack of possessions wouldn’t be too much of a handicap. Their only belongings were those they carried in their ten pieces of luggage.
The friend picked them up from the bus station, took them to a one-roomed flat attached to a church, where they could stay, then he took Phil to the welfare office to see what government support he might be entitled to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: LIFE IN A NEW COUNTRY
So we picked up and moved to Australia and started afresh. It was there that the reality hit that Mum wasn’t coming back. There was a huge void. I really felt it and that’s when I missed her. I remember Dawn and Tendy crying. That’s the first time I cried because I missed my mum. ISRAEL
In Australia the full impact of Sandy’s departure hit the family. Now that they were alone in the outside world they felt her absence sharply. The worst thing was having to accept that she was gone forever. Phil had to acknowledge that his father had won; there would be no more attempts to take her out. He threw his energies into proving to Neville that he could make it on the outside, that he could create a good life for his children – and he was utterly determined to be a far better father than Neville was.
They struggled financially and emotionally. Until now there had always been a community or family to help but suddenly they were on their own. Phil didn’t have the resources to pay for counselling for the children, had he even thought of it. His father’s community believed sickness to be a weakness, and emotional distress sheer self-indulgence (although they had sought help for Sandy when her distress looked to be endangering her life). Phil had no precedence for seeking emotional help; he didn’t know such a thing was available and didn’t recognise that his children could be helped by outside assistance. In America, the Hutterites had well organised systems for dealing with illness, but they were far away and the children weren’t physically ill.
Phil had to learn how to be a father and a mother to his children, while they had to try and adjust to the loneliness of a life where it was just the six of them and their dad. The parenting skills Phil had learnt from the Hutterites were invaluable, bu
t nothing could have prepared him for coping with children who cried for their mother every night. He felt pulled in two directions; his kids needed him but he also needed to earn money which he couldn’t do if he stayed at home with them. The hardest thing, though, was not being able to tell them he’d get their mother back. She was gone and she’d left them of her own accord.
For several weeks after they arrived, the children couldn’t sleep alone and would squash together into Phil’s double bed and cry for their mother. Without the happy distractions of community life, they keenly felt the reality that she wasn’t just across town; she was in another country and another world. Their dad couldn’t drive off in the night and get her. When Phil found a house to rent, they still climbed into each other’s beds to alleviate the loneliness. One or other of them would wake in the night, crying because they’d wet the bed. Phil would take them into his bed and sometimes they would wet that as well. It was several years before they could all sleep by themselves in their own beds.
Dawn, especially, missed her mother, and for a long time, she would cry at night. Justine and Tendy, who shared a room with her, didn’t entirely understand why she was crying but they would join in. Phil did his best to comfort and distract them. During daylight, things were better although it was months before Dawn was happy again and even then her dad would glimpse the sadness that was never far from the surface.
Israel’s stomach pains were bad, but he still didn’t tell his father.
For the first few weeks Phil didn’t attempt to send the children to school. Eleven-year-old Israel looked after Andreas and his sisters while their dad worked at anything he could find. Sandy had always impressed on her son that the most important thing for an older brother was to look after his brother and sisters and he saw it as natural to step up and take care of them. He expanded his cooking repertoire and taught himself to make proper meals. He taught himself and his siblings to do the washing and the cleaning. All the children pitched in with their chores, but Israel was the one who took on the responsibility for running the house and looking after the others. He was a fastidious cook and housekeeper and taught the others the right way of doing things. He believes now that Sandy knew she wasn’t going to be with her children and that she was doing her best to protect them as much as she could when she told Israel to look after them.
