The Church With No Name

This story contains non-descriptive references to child abuse

Alys Morgan was always a Pembrokeshire girl. She was born with her face to the Irish Sea. Poppit Beach was her playground when she was allowed to play. The nearby town of Aberystwyth was always out of bounds, and so she found shells and wore bracelets of kelp when other children were licking ice-creams and playing the arcades in flip-flops and shorts. 

She had a brother, but he left when he was fifteen. His last words to her were ‘This is shit, Alys. This is total shit. You need to get out of it.’ But unlike the romance of novels and films, he didn’t promise to come back and get her. Alys had been eleven then, and having been denied movies and novels, she had no reason to hope for it. There was no alternative scenario, no notion of having a dream and praying that it might come true.  

Alys was only allowed to speak Welsh at home, and after a few unhappy years at the local school she was left to be taught by her mother. She was not bullied due to her language. Most inhabitants in that part of Wales spoke it too, and would skip between English and Welsh in the same way that Pakistanis skip between Urdu and broad English dialects without thought. She was humiliated because of her parents’ religious beliefs and the rules laid down on her. Her hair, never cut, was tied into a simple pony tail which hung down to her waist. Her centre-parting was severe, lacking the spontaneity of youth, and her skirts, (because she was not allowed trousers), were always shapeless and worn long below the knee.  

Their faith had no name. It had no churches or temples, no leaflets, literature or scripture beyond those written in the King James Bible and most specifically, the Gospel of Matthew. It was comprised of workers and friends. Workers were the elders, who travelled in twos, and under the guise of itinerancy they lived their lives under the roofs of others. These others were called ‘friends’. People like her parents. These frequent visitors had turned their backs on worldly wealth. Apparently.  

When Alys was seventeen she also left home. Of course, her emerging womanhood coincided with her father becoming a worker himself. The regular men no longer visited their home, and so duly promoted, he was free to visit the homes of others, of friends. Who had daughters and sons of their own. Payback.  

She didn’t go far, just to Aberystwyth, where she wore shorts and flip-flops and shared a bed-sit with a girl called Emily. She worked in a shop, paid her rent, cut her hair and pretended to be someone else.  Her mother would sometimes try to visit her, but Alys would tell her to fuck off - in English, for there is no Welsh equivalent. She went away, the last time, leaving a King James Bible on the welcome mat.  

Alys began a journey, most of which, at the beginning, was an internal voyage. She realised that all of her childhood thoughts had been in Welsh, and beautiful, ancient and poetic as that language is, it is limited in its descriptive scope. It must borrow other words, and blunts the ability to always differentiate between that which is insufferable and that which is merely an annoyance. And so she began to write poems, because the rhythm and the rhyme could all be exploited to express the disgust she felt. The dah-di-dah of outrage.  And with this expansion of vocabulary came a desire to leave the Irish Sea behind.  

And there are times in life when the door opens just when you need it to. Scrolling through the internet one night, she read about an investigation in the US. The FBI were questioning members of this church with no name. She knew it was the same one; it went by various descriptions, but it was them. And there were groups, people in the UK, in Ireland, Canada, Australia, and all countries between the poles, who were coming together demanding redress. And so she got to work, tapping away into the small hours, making friends - but not of the kind she was used to.  

*****

The wheels of justice roll slower than a square stone. It took two years of sworn affidavits, updates, clarifications and evidence gathering before it got close to the steps of the Old Bailey. There could be no class action lawsuit because it was a church with no name. Alys had been interested, (although not surprised), to read that in the UK they had only registered a name twice - and both times to avoid conscription in the world wars. They knew where their conscientious objections were when they needed them.  

But Alys had an ace up her sleeve. Although television was forbidden in her home, reading the papers was not. And so she knew what DNA was. On the penultimate visit from the workers, she kept her nightdress. She didn’t wash it, and wore it again on their ultimate visit. It was enough to nail both of them. The workers who came before them, and the ‘friends’ who attended meetings at her home on certain Sundays and Wednesdays, they were nailed elsewhere. Not all of them, but enough to convince the rest to start saying their prayers in earnest.  

*****

The first time she had ever ventured out of her county was the day before she was called to testify. She needed help with buying the tickets and planning her stay, but when her flatmate offered to go with her, Alys declined. It was a journey she needed to take alone.  

The view from a train window is not always the best view on offer, but it was enough to give her a sense of other biographies. Her life was not the only one on the table, and she knew that part of her journey was to come to terms with people who had been offered a better menu. She would not resent the wailing brat or the entitled teenager just because they had not been born into a cult. It was not their fault any more than it was hers. It was just dumb luck, who your parents were.  

At Bristol, where she had to change trains, she’d had to lean against the tiled walls of an underground walkway where steps led up to various platforms. They were clearly numbered, and there was nothing difficult about the simple instruction to Keep Left For Up. But her brain couldn’t see it, and so she shut down, right there, rocking and whimpering, and then jumping at the kind woman who asked if she was OK. ‘You’re having a panic attack,’ she said, and Alys said, ‘No, I’m having a coping attack.’  

It was so damned busy. She thought she could get a seat but she couldn’t, so found herself standing in the gangway, hemmed in by haversacks and small luggage. And people. At Swindon an exodus occurred and she eased her way into a window seat where she was forced to consider the merits of graffiti. She couldn’t think of any. Along came a man pushing a trolley: ‘drinks?’ snacks?’ and most people said no, but Alys bought a little bottle of wine which came with a plastic tumbler. Alcohol had been forbidden in her house, but she had developed a liking for it since.  

And she was sipping the wine, and asked for more when the trolley came back, and looked out the window when everyone else was looking at their phones. This is not new to them, but everything is new to her. She had imagined an endless urban sprawl before arriving in the centre of London, but there wasn’t. One minute there were green fields, and the next were suburbs where suddenly the buildings got taller. And she felt apprehensive, because this capital city was not Cardigan Bay.  

She was an important witness for the prosecution, and so she was met at Paddington Station by a representative of the court, who was friendly and accommodating because London is one hell of a confusing mess. By the time she was booked into her hotel, her head was thumping and her heart was racing, but she knew that she was never going home again. London wasn’t the answer, but she would find a way to live without those memories, and the sidelong glances she would always receive if she stayed. A market town, she thought. Like Cardigan, but somewhere else. It wasn’t the place she hated: what had happened to her happens everywhere, but that didn’t mean she had to face it every day. You don’t heal a burn by holding your hand to the flame.   

*****

The Old Bailey. The history, the notorious villains, the Silks, the wigs, the lofty, waxy, dusty gravitas of it. But Alys was undaunted. The streets distressed her, but not this place. This place would give her what she wanted the most. When she was called to the witness box, and solemnly declared that she would give the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, she had no reason to doubt herself. She was without hyperbole. The workers didn’t look at her, but she looked at them, each in turn, throughout her testimony.  

‘Would you say this … church is a cover for child abuse?’ the Prosecution asked.

‘Objection!’ The Defence said.

‘Overruled,’ the Judge said.  

‘What else could it possibly be?’ Alys said.   

‘Why do you think the Defendants in the dock stopped staying under your roof?’

‘Leading the witness!’ The Defence said.

‘Overruled,’ the Judge said.  

‘Why do you think?’ Alys replied. ‘They weren’t interested in teenagers.’

That was the measure of it, leisurely dispensed. The DNA evidence was damning. In his summing-up to the jury, the Judge expressed disapproval that the defendants had pleaded not guilty, and he formally directed them towards a guilty verdict, having considered all the evidence. It took them twenty-three minutes to return. Anticipating this swift decision, Alys had been advised beforehand to write a victim impact statement, and that is what she had done the night before, in her hotel room, drinking from the minibar and watching TV. The press pack in the gallery leant forward as she addressed the defendants.  

‘I have made a journey,’ she began. ‘Yesterday, I left my home for the first time. I had never been on a train before. Never been further than Aberystwyth. There are so many things I have never done. My childhood was spent in obedience to you and my parents, and when you abused me, they looked away. I will never forgive them. You have no faith, you have no belief in God. Your rules were not handed down from the Bible, but were written by yourselves and for yourselves. Women and children paid the price. You tell us that the only way to salvation is to follow your rules, but that is not true. You’ll find that out in prison, where other rules apply.  

You are child abusers operating under the guise of faith. That is all you are. And I have made this journey to retrieve something you took from me. You might imagine that I will say, hope, innocence, trust, and the reasonable expectation of a normal childhood - and you would be right. You took those things from me. But this thing, this very real thing that I want back, is my sanity. That is what I have come here for, because I know I was born with it, but it got lost along the way. It may not have been a long journey, or a dangerous one, but it feels like it to me. And I want you to go down for the longest possible time the law will allow. Then I will know I am not crazy because there have been so many times in the past when I have believed I must be.’

*****

Alys made quite a bit of money over the following months. She went on talk shows, she wrote articles, and she corresponded with other people like her. She moved to a market town in the English Midlands, and enrolled at university. She has a part-time job, she has friends, and a full wardrobe of fashionable clothes.  

In her spare time she looks for her brother, but there is no trace of him. Maybe there never will be. Her father was sent down and her mother still lives in the house overlooking Poppit Beach, shunned by the neighbours. She watches the basking sharks in the bay through binoculars. She doesn’t think about anything at all. Just feeds the chickens and sometimes has an egg for breakfast.  

Gradually losing her sanity.