DING DONG!
“Doorbell, daddy!”
“Yes, I’m getting it.”
I lifted my four year old son off my lap and went to see who was at the door. I wasn’t particularly expecting anyone, but my mum and dad had a year or two previously moved to another English town two hundred miles away, and were in the habit of just arriving on a visit with no notice. Could be…. But, as I approached my front door, I could see through the frosted glass that it was, in fact, just one person, a man dressed in black.
I opened the door to Hillary Step. We hadn’t seen each other, or spoken, for probably eight years. And a lot had happened in that time.
I was married, and had two kids. We had recently moved into a newly-built house in a newly-built council estate – coincidentally enough, very near where Hillary’s folks’ house was. It was, in fact, this very estate he had so deplored as the beginnings of it started to tear up the meadows and woods near his family home.
I had grown into what must have seemed to Hillary a very different individual to the one he knew from years earlier. No longer a faithful Witness, I had in that interval (in the order that I remember): stopped pioneering, stopped giving public talks, become irregular in field service, and consequently been removed as a Ministerial Servant, faded from the ministry school, stopped going out in field service altogether, stopped reading any Watchtower material, stopped attending meetings, had attended and partaken in a church service (christening of my nephew), and partly as a consequence had attended a judicial committee on a charge of apostasy, which, miraculously enough, I managed to survive.
Our family was now celebrating Christmas and birthdays, and – for good measure - I had become a regular blood donor (the Blood Transfusion Service was always turning up at work, and it seemed like the right thing to do) .
Looking back on that time now, twenty years later, I am surprised and proud in equal measure at how quickly and completely I had managed to throw off the from-birth conditioning of the Watchtower. Like I said in one of the earlier posts, at fifteen I really, really believed it all. At twenty-two I had seen through it utterly, and was completely beyond all hope of redemption.
The agonies and tortured uncertainties of my teenage years, with which I had consumed so much of Hillary’s time and endless patience, were all behind me now.
As we sat talking to each other over drinks, I had no idea how much of this he knew about me, but I certainly wasn’t going to hold back from telling him. He was getting both barrels.
Being as forthright as I was with him that night was actually an extremely stupid thing to do on my part. I had, as I said, only recently just avoided being disfellowshipped for being an apostate. At the JC hearing I had taken the line that I was “weak” and “needed time” and all that nonsense, and had worked really hard on the elders to spare me (I never had any intention of going back, but didn’t want all the complications of being disfellowshipped with my folks and believing siblings). I’m sure one of the factors in them letting me off, was that they were satisfied I was not promoting my apostate filth among the congregation. Yet here I was, in the pub with Hillary, telling him exactly where you could put the Watchtower Society.
I guess I felt a kind of power talking this way. No longer the unhappy, confused, anguished, whining young teenager, now! Not any longer! I was Powerful! Confident! Everything had changed, oh yes!
Looking back now, I can see that one thing at least had not changed with me and Hillary. What had not changed was the Agenda. What we discussed. It was Me.
Me, me, me. What I thought about things, how I was.
Afterwards, in recalling the conversation, I was thinking – now wait a minute, did he tell me at one point that he now was an Elder? – did I notice what he said at the time? - did I even answer him? – oh well…
We parted on good terms, and Hillary never did shop me to the Elders, but that was the last time I ever saw him.
I was, at that time, right in the middle of constructing the life I now inhabit. I had left my clerks job at a local small building firm and joined the town’s major employer in their huge accounts office. I figured that in the larger company there would be chances of promotion and advancement. I took out membership of one of the UK Chartered Accountancy bodies and began studying for a qualification and started taking the exams.
Eventually, I got my accounting qualification, and I got a better job. Then a better one and so on. These days, I’m not the richest, hottest Bigshot in the City, but I’m happy with what I’ve done. I do an interesting job that takes me to interesting places, and the years of night school have made up somewhat for what I so stupidly threw away all those years ago.
It was a delight to rediscover Hillary on this website (even if it is a bit strange to keep remembering to call him Hillary). So - here’s to you Hillary! I, for one, am not surprised at your success in rising in the Organisation – seems only natural to me. After having met you, who in their right mind would not want to put you in charge of everything? I’ll bet your caring, Christian nature and perceptive intelligence has helped many a troubled Witness down the years. The Organisation needs people like you, but seems determined to drive them away. Best wishes to you in your life’s journey.
Your old friend Duncan
(who, in writing this little series came to appreciate that, over the years, one of us did all the giving, and the other did all the taking. I’ll let the readers make up their mind which was which.)
