In the Days of Rain

WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD

Preview

Failed to add items

Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.

Add to basket failed.

Please try again later

Add to wishlist failed.

Please try again later

Remove from wishlist failed.

Please try again later

Adding to library failed

Please try again

Follow podcast failed

Unfollow podcast failed

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.

Try for £0.00

More purchase options

In the Days of Rain

By: Rebecca Stott

Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £15.50

Summary

WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD

In the vein of Bad Blood and Why be Happy when you can be Normal?: an enthralling, at times shocking, and deeply personal family memoir of growing up in, and breaking away from, a fundamentalist Christian cult.

As heard on Jeremey Vine

‘At university when I made new friends and confidantes, I couldn’t explain how I’d become a teenage mother, or shoplifted books for years, or why I was afraid of the dark and had a compulsion to rescue people, without explaining about the Brethren or the God they made for us, and the Rapture they told us was coming. But then I couldn’t really begin to talk about the Brethren without explaining about my father…’

As Rebecca Stott’s father lay dying he begged her to help him write the memoir he had been struggling with for years. He wanted to tell the story of their family, who, for generations had all been members of a fundamentalist Christian sect. Yet, each time he reached a certain point, he became tangled in a thicket of painful memories and could not go on.

The sect were a closed community who believed the world is ruled by Satan: non-sect books were banned, women were made to wear headscarves and those who disobeyed the rules were punished.

Rebecca was born into the sect, yet, as an intelligent, inquiring child she was always asking dangerous questions. She would discover that her father, an influential preacher, had been asking them too, and that the fault-line between faith and doubt had almost engulfed him.

In In the Days of Rain Rebecca gathers the broken threads of her father’s story, and her own, and follows him into the thicket to tell of her family’s experiences within the sect, and the decades-long aftermath of their breaking away.

Christianity

Women

Inspiring

Memoir

Christianity Women Inspiring Memoir

Critic reviews

'Beautiful, dizzying, terrifying, Stott's memoir maps the unnerving hinterland where faith becomes cruelty and devotion turns into disaster. A brave, frightening and strangely hopeful book' Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

‘A marvellous, strange, terrifying book’ Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill

‘Truly magnificent: a big, beautiful, brutal, and tender masterpiece. A deeply affecting human story that also goes to the dark heart of who we are and how the world works’ Mark Mills, author of The Savage Garden

‘Stott is masterly as both a storyteller and a historian’ TLS

‘By rights Rebecca Stott's memoir ought to be a horror story. But while the historian in her is merciless in exposing cruelties and corruption, Rebecca the child also lights up the book, so passionate and imaginative that it helps explain how she survived, and – even more miraculous – found the compassion and understanding to do justice to the story of her father and the painful family life he created’ Sarah Dunant, author of The Birth of Venus

‘She’s a beautiful writer and there is a powerful almost luminous quality to the book’ Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love

‘This book is important; … there isn’t an uninteresting paragraph in this furious and compassionate book’ The Times

‘An intense accomplishment’ Sunday Times

‘In the Days of Rain is a double memoir: it describes both Rebecca’s own childhood and her father Roger’s life. It is not, though, in any way a misery memoir and that’s what makes it such an attractive and interesting book’ Spectator

‘Stott deploys her multiplicity of skills to good effect: as a historian, she delves into newspaper clippings, tape recordings, archive materials, a host of memoirs and books on doctrine, theology and the Exclusive Brethren. As a novelist, she makes the tale dramatic … As an essayist, Stott weaves ideas together with ease and economy’ Guardian

Most relevant

I have just finished listening to this audio book after leaving a considerable gap after starting this book and enjoyed it immensely. I should perhaps say that I am from the same background as Rebecca Stott though I was born in 1969 and did not really experience the Taylor "system" at all. I am also from the same area of the world and grew up in Haywards Heath in Sussex. I grew up in the meeting there and had a most happy childhood in that fellowship not without its griefs and pains but I could always trace the rainbow through the rain.

I don't normally write reviews of books online or elsewhere, not because I am a rubbish writer and apt to go off at tangents but because I am a mild-mannered sort of chap who isn't generally bestirred to wade into controversy. I did however know Roger Stott - very slightly. I met him occasionally at my aunt and uncle's rather grand house on Muster Green but my memories of him on the internet are somewhat clearer. We crossed swords several times and it is because those same issues arise again, that I have put electronic pen to virtual paper. Mainly we argued on the priniciples of Textual Criticism of which he knew next to nothing though hugely widely read in literature, the arts and the brethren's minisitry not to mention the Bible. He was larger than life even in an online debate and was an intimidating though not unfriendly opponent.

The book is delightfully read by Rebecca Stott herself. If we have met, it would be in the mists of time. I am conscious that relatives of mine are also her kith and kin and that some of the things she narrates will have caused some embarrassment and shame (that might be an unavoidable side effect of uncovering the truth) There are various issues arising which trouble me - they are not necessarily the fruit of mature reflection though they have puzzled me for some time.

Some years ago, Ann Thwaite brought out her work "Glimpses of the Wonderful" on Henry Gosse, the brilliant and somewhat underrated father of Edmund Gosse, the author of Father and Son of whom she was also the biographer. It is a long time since I read either but I recall feeling that Edmund Gosse (though an affectionate son) seems to have erred on the side of literary creativeness when describing his father's strictness. Henry Gosse was a Plymouth Brother and by all accounts quite a strict one but an unconventional and brilliant person who could hardly be described as a run of the mill PB. Gosse Jnr makes a lot of the unconventionality of his upbringing even by Victorian standards and that is fine as far as a novel might go but what are we to do when the historicity of an account is assumed and a certain credibility is asked for? This is always a problem. And it was a problem listening to this delightful work. As I listened to it on the long and beautiful commute to work, I kept hearing things which didn't quite ring true - anachronisms - just little things sometimes which made me wonder. If I had been reading, I would have marked the place with a pencil and pondered the issue later: when you are trying to avoid mad lorry drivers fleeing at top speed from Holyhead to the border, you don't always have time to rewind and listen again. These slight errors are distracting and in themselves not especially important but they do raise issues about the credibility of the witness in historical terms, though the uninformed listener to the novel would not be perturbed at all by them.

There is for example, the tendency to say, Brethren were not allowed to do this or that or the other and to generalise from one's own particular experience. Here again there is a discrepancy which is very interesting. I asked my father (who is mentioned unnamed, I think) whether the Morrises had newspapers and novels etc throughout the 1960s and it is clear that they did. My grandmother Morris would not have been so docile in giving up reading yet alone throwing away precious gems of English Literature. Indeed she kept up a correspondence with her uncle, Richard Kelland (a very eccentric relative who remained with the Taylor Brethren after 1970) a wide ranging correspondence which encompassed even modern literature in its scope. I would have to check again but my impression of scanning these letters is that they both took and read the Spectator and read the literary reviews. Fortunately, Grandma kept diaries which give through the 1960s a record of her own attendance at meetings, the scriptures read, those who ministered etc with not infrequent commentary on the quality of the ministry. She frequently notes the times that Roger Stott and others came to Haywards Heath to show the dear brethren there the way more exactly. It is clear to me that he was sent as an enforcer of the system seeking to impose it on people who consistently objected to it. It is not always clear to be sure, whether RS is Roger or Robert Stott but despite the frequent approvals of RS's ministry in terms of exposition, the gulf between these people is clear. Indeed just about the whole of the Haywards Heath meeting left the Taylorite fellowship in 1970 after the Aberdeen incident and with every subsequent division sought a return to classic EB doctrines in so far as they could be shown to be scriptural. My grandmother records a terrible meeting with Philip Cowley in Brighton where the scripture was Jael and Sisera. Underneath she wrote very clearly "Could have done with a tent peg myself".

I was told by the blessed Margaretta Siderfin that she had always seen my grandparent's house, Crowhurst, as a sanctuary where she could say just exactly what she thought about what was going on and no one would blab about it. So while Roger Stott was busy seeking to power build, there were those who just got on with their lives in the fellowship regardless and despite his efforts to subdue them. Not that there weren't stormy seas for those keeping their heads below the parapet but many were (forgive the mixed metaphor) securely anchored and there was (again witnessed by my grandmother Morris's diary) a great deal of excellent spiritual food: there is corn to be had even in Egypt. It doesn't make such a dramatic story but when the whole thing collapsed, you find that those that held more lightly to the system were perhaps not so violently set off course spiritually. They hadn't invested so much in the outward forms but had clung to the inward certainties of the faith. They didn't all blame the whole of their subsequent misfortunes on the brethren since they had never really joined the thing or bought into it. One might say, they were waiting for deliverance from it. I do not doubt that fear kept many of them in much longer than they would have ordinarily stayed and I do not want to underestimate the terrible consequences of such cruelty to innocent people as was habitually practised.

It would be most interesting to hear Mrs Stott's side of the story, she is still living but I would hope that her memoirs would encourage an account to be made of the resilience, resourcefulness and courage of so many of these sisters among the brethren - a quality that shines out as a very welcome ray in this account of Roger Stott's life.

Pray to the Lord and not give him rest for the deliverance of those still ensnared in such a terrible system of spiritual slavery, that they may, in the words of one of our Sussex saints, know him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, day by day. Amen.
Gregory Morris