CHAPTER TWO
The main buildings of High Easter Offerance form the shape of an H with one end walled off; I went from the enclosed courtyard through the gateway into the open yard beyond, where chickens clucked and jabbed at the ground and the wheeze of the bellows serving Brother Indra's forge sounded from the blacksmith's shop (I looked for Indra but could not see him). Past the animal sheds and barns lay some of our collection of long-immobile vehicles; half a dozen old coaches, one double-decker omnibus, four pantechnicons, a couple of flat-bed lorries, ten vans of varying capacities and one small rusting fire-engine, complete with brass bell. Not one is younger than twenty years old and all are so surrounded, and in some cases invaded, by weeds and plants it would probably take a tractor or a tank to rip them free, even if their tyres and wheels were present and intact and their axles not rusted solid. The vehicles shelter some of the less hardy crops for which there is not sufficient room in the glass houses to the south of the main buildings and provide extra dormitory and living accommodation, or just additional dry storage space. They also make a wonderful place to play when you are a child.
From there the road leads to the fields through the gap in the railway embankment where a single-span bridge used to carry the railway above; I struck off from the track there and ascended the grassy bank.
The raised bed of the old railway line was crossed by swollen bridges of golden mist, slowly moving and changing in the cool morning sunlight and offering glimpses of our cattle, sheep and wheat fields; a group of Saved digging out a ditch in the hazy distance helloed and waved, and I flourished my hat at them.
As I walked, I felt the usual feeling of calmness and dissociation creep over me, perhaps enhanced on this occasion by the shining, intermittently enveloping veils of mist, cutting me off both from the Community and the outer world.
I thought of Grandfather Salvador, and his warning regarding reporters. I wondered how serious he was being. I have never doubted that our Founder is a wise and remarkable man, and possessed of insights that justifiably put him on the same level as the great prophets of old, but as he himself has said, God has a sense of humour (who can look at the work that is Man and deny this?), and my Grandfather is not above reminding us of this by way of taunting our credulity. Still, some of us trust a prophet the more when he admits to teasing us on occasion.
It has to be admitted that my Grandfather suffers from a spasmodic obsession with the media, and has done ever since the founding of our faith. The trouble with the media - and certain government agencies - is that they are liable, on occasion, to refuse to be ignored. Getting away from most aspects of the modern world is simply a matter of avoiding them (for example, if one refuses to enter shops, shopkeepers can generally be relied upon not to come and drag you in off the street) but the media, like the police or social workers, are capable of coming to seek you out if they think they have just cause.
Probably the worst time was during the early eighties, when there were a number of so-called exposés in the press and a couple of television reports on what they were pleased to call our 'Bizarre Love-Cult'. These were usually highly distorted pieces of nonsense about strange sex rituals disseminated by lapsed converts - sad cases to a man - who had found that the farm work in the Order was too hard and gaining access to the female body rather less easy than they had heard, or imagined. The most worrying of these lies hinted at the involvement of Community children in such practices, and threatened the involvement of the authorities.
I was only a child at the time but I am proud that we responded as sensibly as we did. Educational inspectors and health workers confirmed that we primary-age, home-taught children were better educated and healthier than most of our peers, and secondary schoolteachers practically fell over themselves to praise the exemplary work and discipline of the Community children who came to them. We were also able to point out that no under-age girl had ever fallen pregnant while in the care of our Order. Reporters, meanwhile, were offered the chance to stay and work within our Community for as long as they liked, providing they brought a willingness to work for their keep, notebooks rather than tape-recorders, and a sketch pad in place of a camera. Grandfather Salvador himself was the epitome of openness, and - while politely deflecting questions about his upbringing and early history - so concerned with the souls of the few reporters who did turn up that he took it upon himself to devote several extra hours each night to explaining his ideas and philosophy to them. Interest waned almost disappointingly quickly, though one journalist did stay on for half a year; I don't think we ever did trust her, however, and indeed it turned out she was only researching for a book on us. Apparently it was no more accurate than it was successful.(Luckily, none of this prurient interest coincided with our four-yearly Festival of Love, when things are more focusedly carnal and we do tend to behave a little more like the popular image we acquired then… though I can honestly report that despite the fact I was fifteen years old at the time of the last one - and physically sexually mature - far from being involved in any way I was quite firmly excluded from the proceedings precisely because I had not reached the age of consent the outside world deemed appropriate. At the time I felt a degree of annoyance and frustration, although now that the next Festival is almost upon us and I am liable to be as much one of the centres of attention as I desire, I admit my feelings have changed somewhat.)
At any rate, we are always on guard whenever some new seeker after truth appears on our doorstep, and whenever we venture outside the Community.
My thoughts turned to my maternal grandmother, Yolanda. We had been warned to expect one of her annual visits sometime over the next few weeks, before the next Festival of Love. Yolanda is a sun-weathered but leanly fit Texan in her early sixties with no shortage of funds and a sharply colourful turn of phrase ('Nervouser than a rattler in a room full of rockin' chairs' is one expression that has always stuck in my mind). She joined our Order at the same time as her daughter, Alice (my mother), though she has never stayed at the Community for longer than a couple of weeks at a time, save for two three-month periods after first Allan and then I were born.
Perhaps because they are both such strong characters, she has never entirely got on with Salvador, and over the last few years she has taken to staying at Gleneagles Hotel - only twenty minutes from here, the way Yolanda drives - and coming in each day to visit us, when she organises self-help classes, usually for women only; it is to her that I owe whatever skills I possess when it comes to accurate long-range spitting, Texan leg-wrestling and prompt bodily self-defence with special reference to the more vulnerable and sensitive parts of a man. Thanks to her, I am also probably the only person in my neighbourhood to own a combined knuckle duster and bottle opener, even if it does languish forever unused at the bottom of the underwear drawer in my bedroom.
I suspect Yolanda has at least partially lost her faith (she is untypically coy on the subject), but I could not deny that I was looking forward to seeing her, and experienced a pleasant glow of excitement at the prospect.
I thought, too, about Allan, and how he had changed over the past year since Sister Amanda had borne him Mabon, a son. It was as though he had refined himself in his dealings with the rest of us and with me in particular, treating us all somehow more formally, less warmly, as if his reserve of care and love was too drained by the demands made on it by Amanda and the baby to spare us what we had come to think of as our due portion. He seemed also to have developed a habit of asking me to deliver any bad news to our Grandfather, claiming - as he had that morning - that my elect status, and perhaps my gender, made Salvador look more kindly upon me than him, so increasing the chances he might accept ill-tidings with less equanimity - (and health-) threatening distress.