I don’t recall discussing the great disappointment of 1975 as a family. I was only 5 and my older and wiser brother was 8. What I can remember was the muted sense of excitement we both felt in 1977. Shortly after Elvis died my Dad announced we were moving off the island back to the Scottish mainland. I didn’t connect the death of Elvis with our big move, and rightly so. Mum and Dad were true believers and had moved the family in 1972 to the most remote part of a small country. They must have had some expectation around 1975, and yet the reality of bringing up two boys on a small island kicked in some years later. It can take a few years for a major reverse to be internalized – think how long it is before a person accepts their home is worth less than it was after a house price crash.
And so Dad set off on a job and house finding mission in advance of the whole family moving. He settled on Perth, a small market town in the middle of Scotland. They had some old friends – Wille and Helen Stewart and their daughter Fiona - who were in a position to help Dad find work. The job he found was caretaker in a block of flats owned by the local authority. And there was a 2 bed apartment assigned with the job! The idea of moving to a town with traffic lights, road markings, more than 2 shops in a row and newspapers available the same day as publication seemed indivisible from pure magic. Throw in a house with a bathroom, a telephone and maybe…just maybe a small black and white TV and we were in heaven already.
And so we moved off the island lock stock and barrel. All our possessions + us in a small van for the 16 hour journey. The only fly in the ointment was the job and apartment weren’t ready yet when we arrived. So we ended up in a hostel for homeless people. I think we had 4 big iron beds in a room with a number on the door. And I remember rows of cookers with numbers on the front. Each cooker had a correspondingly numbered fridge opposite. And many tables, with numbers on each. It was a white goods showroom nightmare. Of course starting at the new school as the new boy in the class presented its own challenges. Different accent, smallest in the class and rapidly ‘outed’ as living in the homeless hostel led to a bit of grief. Some unlucky kid pushed me too far and…let’s just say there was no more teasing after that. On the upside I was fast in the playground and well in front academically, so made friends quite quickly. The homeless situation was over in 4 weeks and we were in our new apartment on the ground floor of an 8 storey block. Luxury. Of course the temptations of the big city soon arrived. How humiliating for me to hear my Dad tell the little boys who knocked our door that Paul wasn’t coming out to play with them – Worldlings.
The new congregation was a revelation. At that time Perth had one congregation with over 100 publishers. It was well established with a lot of old school elders – even one of the genuine anointed – perhaps 14 elders and as many servants. Dad was in heaven. He was always a gregarious person – full of chat and always ready to meet new people, make instant friends and invite them over for dinner like long lost family. In those days Mum was quieter, more reserved and a listener – a quality I admired in her. She could make anybody talk and no doubt feel good about themselves and her. Dad was knocking himself out meeting new people and I was predictably ‘badly behaved’ after the 2 hour periods of motionless boredom. We still didn’t have a car and the Kingdom Hall was a 45 minute stride away – 2.75 miles to be precise. Sunday morning leave at 9.15am and Thursday evening leave at 6pm. Like clockwork. Also, field service Saturday morning and Sunday after the meeting – no exceptions. We knew the territory like the back of our little hands. We were much admired by the people in the apartment block for being a family that did things together. And of course the winter offered its own challenges with rain, wind and sometimes snow. No matter – we always set off and always made the meeting. Always.
Now here was the thing with my Dad. He loved getting on the platform. And he loved the idea of being an Elder. But – his mental condition as yet undiagnosed - made him eminently unsuitable for a leadership position. And I think the elders in the congregation correctly appraised the situation. Having said that, what he lacked in slickness he more than made up for in effort, genuine affection for people and a love of what he perceived to be the right thing to do. And he was on a religious conveyor belt that constantly stressed the importance of moving forward, reaching out, making your progress manifest, doing more, striving for responsibility, taking care of your duties, etc. Throw together a brain-damaged man who knows he needs to do more to be worthy and a high control group and of course you will create mental discomfiture. And some of his aspirational peers were not much better than he in teaching ability, leadership skills or shepherding. But he never made the cut. He was an MS who was constantly reaching out to do more all his life. When that entire body of elders was removed by the Circuit Overseer for infighting and the congregation disbanded over a relatively trivial matter I knew I would never strive for an appointment in the Watchtower Society.
Going back to the early 1980’s after the epic sagas of making the meetings in the islands this was like the New Order had come early, just for us. We had great fun hosting the Circuit Assembly in Perth – marathon vegetable preparation sessions starting at 5am for the hot meals, multiple congregations coming to visit, more people my own age than I could imagine – it was all very heady. The years passed and soon the District Convention relocated from Edinburgh to Perth. Perth truly felt like the centre of the universe. We had even had a quick-build Kingdom Hall - what more evidence did one need of Jehovah’s blessing? Except none of this was that inspiring to me. I felt like where I lived and who I was and who I knew was somehow significant, and yet I wasn’t personally moved.
My teenage years focused on a love of soccer - like I never felt alive if I wasn’t playing. I lived and died for playing. Not that I was that good – well I was usually amongst the first picked and played for a few school teams – but being small for my age was a disadvantage. And I always knew it was going nowhere no matter if I had been Pele. The congregation boys (and men) played every Sunday night. From about age 10 I was allowed to walk down to the park on my own and play with them, weather permitting. Such freedom. Also Mum signed Andrew and I up for the local tennis club. I was pretty good at that too – I entered and progressed in a few tournaments and was offered coaching. Nope. Nada. Not happening. Saturday morning was field service. But I loved playing and enjoyed it for what it was. A problem I ran into was the lack of JW friends my age and gender within a reasonable distance of our house. No car for Daddy to run me from A to B. Most of the JW’s lived in another part of town so although we had moved from extreme isolation my teenage years now had a different sort of isolation – 80% fact – 20% teenage angst.
Now I recognize the dull ache of a paradigm-less life when I see it and that was me – for whatever reason I just didn’t want to pioneer, I wasn’t enthusiastic about getting baptized and yet I knew Jehovah’s Witnesses had the truth. Where else could I go? And so I was yet another minor gently coerced into a baptism made of family and peer pressure, not of faith or even conviction. I’m sure a future society will come to view this as a criminal act, particularly given the immense ramifications a high control group imposes on recalcitrant defectors such as I would become.
My brother Andrew and I had an interesting relationship from as long as I can remember. He and Dad had a major personality clash. Andrew was dominant and aggressive and argumentative. Dad didn’t respond well to that – it was an alpha male clash each and every frightening day for me. So Andrew played the big brother role to an embarrassing degree – even his friends would frequently tell him to let up on me – it was like he was my parent. Dad fell into the trap of comparing us in public – Andrew was intelligent and I was handsome – it’s all in the eye of the beholder but those were our roles. And by God Andrew was intelligent and ‘spiritual’ and most bizarrely he enjoyed the company of older people. What’s up with that? Anyways, Andrew and I became reasonably well known on the Circuit and even District - we had a lot of high profile friends and became part of the ‘in crowd’ – as much as people from such a humble background in a rural town could hope to be. Andrew left high school to pioneer. Educationally, he massively under-achieved at this point. I think the school sent a letter home with him saying “What? – Why is one of our best pupils leaving school at 16 to do what exactly?” But nevertheless, he took a variety of ‘nothing’ jobs to pioneer, and stuck at it for 12 years all in.
As for me, I reached the end of high school and knew that unlike my school friends I would not be going to university. So what to do. I had been enthused with quickbuild fever so I enrolled in the local technical college to gain a diploma in constructions studies. Really it was a gateway qualification to architecture, civil engineering or quantity surveying for those who hadn’t stayed at school a bit longer and gone straight to university. And I knew I wasn’t going to university. This was becoming like a mantra. I could be a perpetual student and never get to university. And I couldn’t envisage myself doing a semi-white collar job on a building site. It didn’t work for me. And I was never going to be a pioneer. Jesus – give me a friggin’ clue here. I’m only 18 years old and I was already out of ideas.
To make a bit more money whilst at college I’d picked up a part time job in a menswear store. Quite a cool one at the time. With a generous staff discount I could dress like the models in the catalog, even if I couldn’t be one of them. One of my best customers was going to change my life – he just visited me here in LA over 20 years later – a good friend indeed. I plucked up the courage to ask him what he did for a living and decided I would do whatever he was doing….
My Story - Part III – Leaving Home and Losing My Religion (to follow when I write it)