Rising from the Ashes of Jehovah’s Witnesses

By Isis Allthings

Are you a slave to religion or your pay packet or are you a free spirit? If you would like to explore these questions, follow Isis Allthing's story. She tells how she catapulted herself and her four-year-old daughter into the unknown, away from the fundamentalist Christian religion she was raised in, her five-year marriage, and the country she had settled in, Bavaria. At age thirty-two, Isis was on a courageous journey to begin a new life in her native country, England, where she rebelled against every belief and lie she had been taught since childhood.

In a compelling true story, Isis leads others into her past as she analyses the vulnerability that led to her mother’s recruitment into the Jehovah’s Witnesses. After describing her own absorption into this secretive organization at the age of ten and subsequent life as a full-time minister, she divulges how personal sacrifices eventually led to her hard-won freedom as a free spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781483492261

Book preview

2/19/2019

Chapter 1

Rebel, rebel

I felt numb as I gripped the arms of my airline seat. I don’t have a fear of flying or get travel sick, but I was feeling queasy and light headed. I had been sick to the stomach of the control and disempowerment that had propelled me into taking control of my life. Moving away from everything I knew, I was catapulting myself and my daughter into the unknown. The feeling of leaving my stomach behind now melted into relief and a huge Cheshire cat grin grew over my face. I giggled at my four-year-old Amelia, when she tried the airline yogurt and spat it out again. I admit it did leave something to be desired, but it was the least thing I was focused on in the grand scheme of things. Things that would normally irritate me, suddenly seemed hilarious. Paradigm shifts do give you a much broader sense of what is important in life.

Finally, I was free and abandoning the religion I had been raised in since the age of ten. I was also deserting my five-year marriage and the country where Amelia had been born: Bavaria. At thirty-two I was on a journey back to my land of birth, England, to start a new life. It was a rebellion against every belief system and lie that I had been taught since childhood. About what my place as a woman in society was, who I really am and what I was capable of. I was slowly getting to know what I wanted, making my own decisions for the first time. My life felt like the view we could see out of the little window to the sky next to us; a horizon extending as far as the eye could see, seemingly limitless freedom.

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Flying to freedom

Gazing at the warmth of the setting sun I said to Amelia that we were like the birds, free to fly through the sky, while the earth lay beneath us like a mother, waiting to take us back when we had run out of steam and needed a safe place to nest. That would no longer be with my own mother, Elizabeth in my childhood home in new town Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire. The rules of the Jehovah’s Witnesses required that she and my step father Ron were to shun me for sinning against the religion and unrepentantly walking away from their belief system. Home would instead be near my newly found birth father Robert, who would meet us and take us to our new abode in Kettering, Northants. That was twenty-three years ago and so much history has been woven between those first exhilarating moments and the dawning realisation that freedom brings many choices, possibilities and responsibilities.

The year is currently 2018 and I am now fifty-six and living in the beautiful medieval City of York. During the twelve years since I started writing this account I have asked myself a number of general questions:

• How does nature play out versus nurture with growing children?

• What factors, such as religion, play a role in the direction you will take in life?

• Are there mysterious ways of the universe at play to help or hinder us along the way, or are we just on our own or worse, under the control of others?

• As we struggle to grow and make sense of our perception of our life and its events, twists and turns is there any point to learning and growth?

• Are we just subjected to random chance, to simply survive the best we can in a dog eat dog or survival of the fittest, kind of way?

Sojourning though my discoveries I have learnt to read between the lines and form a vision for myself, not the religious utopian hope for the future I was once programmed with. I suppose I see myself as a rebel and that’s a good thing.

With the above questions in mind, how did my Mother become involved with Jehovah’s Witnesses?

Chapter 2

Dealt a bad hand (my mother’s early life)

How did my mother become involved in a seemingly harmless Christian religion that turned out to be a controlling cult? The definitions of a cult and whether Jehovah’s Witnesses fall into this category, I will discuss in the second half of this book, but for now what was her personal story?

I was ten and my sister eight when my mother Elizabeth radically changed religious persuasion from being a devout member of the Church of England. She converted to the Jehovah’s Witness world-wide movement of The Watchtower Society now known as JW.org. In her innocence, she didn’t perceive the controlling aspects of this group at the time, but I will give the background that I feel lead her to that fated decision in the hopes that it will serve as a preventative warning to all who seek black and white answers to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. In my subsequent experience, I have come to understand that there is no one truth and that gravitating towards any group that can promise you utopia is probably going to land you in hot water.

My mother Elizabeth was born in South Africa being eighteen months younger than her sister, Beatrice. She has many fond memories of her life there, especially of the beautiful fruit trees in the garden and the grape vine and peaches that grew around her window. In those days there were no fridges and she recounted how sometimes they would find cockroaches in the sacking covering the large block of ice that was delivered regularly to keep the milk and perishables cool. They also had to be careful to shake out their shoes and slippers lest a scorpion had made its cosy home inside overnight. Mum remembered the beautiful rhythmic native songs which the housemaid and washer woman sang, as they went about their daily duties. There was a bell used to summon the maid to bring the next course to the dinner table.

Initially Mum and Beatrice attended their boarding school in the early fifties. Tragically their father David Stuart died in his mid-fifties of a coronary thrombosis, as a result of pneumonia. They stayed on as boarders in order for Beatrice to complete her Matric. My mother did not adjust as well as her elder sister and was lagging behind, not making friends or participating in sports. Her sister became a prefect and the divide between them widened, with my aunt taking her studies more seriously, as older siblings quite often do. I remember she and my uncle coming to visit me when I was married and living in Bavaria and explaining all these details to me. I listened captivated, to stories of a bygone colonial age, still in the grips of Apartheid. I was twenty-eight years old and hearing another family perspective of our ancestral history for the first time. Beatrice said Mum always seemed much more intent about their religion, Church of England. She would bury birds that died and conduct a funeral ceremony, laying a little cross over the grave at the bottom of the garden. Even her own mother teased her about this.

My maternal grandmother Alice Stuart was a twin-set and pearls English teacher. Bespectacled, well-educated and bookish she had a huge home library. Unlike her Celtic, spirited, late husband David, she was of a cooler more intellectual nature and didn’t find it easy to understand her emotionally volatile younger daughter, my mother. In those days of Apartheid, it was thought to be dangerous being a lone and widowed white woman with two teenage daughters. The difficult decision was made to bring her two girls to safety in England once my aunt had completed her Matric in 1953.

The only silver lining at the end of the long ocean bound journey, on a huge ship to a strange new land, was the welcoming party. Three of their spinster aunts, Pauline a secretary, Katy a teacher and top-class pianist and Amanda a seamstress to the elite in London, were there to meet them. These were Grannie’s sisters. Two of them had a home in Coulsdon, Surrey which was as spick and span as a new pin. They all had careers because men were short on the ground after the World Wars. I remember the dark wood furniture was polished to a turn and I thought how lovely the back garden was. I particularly loved the huge clam shell next to the little pond and the little stream at the bottom of the lawn. We were always bidden to be on our very best behaviour when afternoon tea and scones were served, using the best china placed on a crisp white linen tablecloth.

This small arm of the family, although a bulwark at this time, could never compensate for the tragic and sudden death of a father and a move across continents to a totally different world. It was catastrophic emotionally and there was no counselling in those days. My mother remembers feeling so angry with her father for dying and leaving them, a normal stage of her grief. England was a huge culture shock, no black maids but shockingly, surrounded by blacks living in freedom in South London! How she used to love listening to the rotund washerwoman heartily sing her African ubuntu songs while she scrubbed the clothes in a huge tub of steaming suds. The scrubbing board had doubled as a musical instrument. In England, there was strange new music, miserable weather and crowds of people.

Some years later my mother was courted by and subsequently married Robert Grey, a tender 21-year-old and her junior by 18 months. This seemed to be the kind of stability and security she needed at the time. Once my parents had married in early 1961, I came along very quickly after. I understand my mother became pregnant with me on their honeymoon, so it was all stations go for a while. Previous to meeting her, Dad had been employed in his father’s business with his unspoken understanding that he would one day inherit the business, but during this time his father Stewart, lost patience and enrolled him for National Service in the RAF. From the little I remember of Dad’s mother Suki before the age of ten and the snippets I have learnt about her from my father, I seem to have inherited her liking for social events with the excuse to get out the glad rags and jewellery. My father looks at me at times and says that expression on your face and some of your gestures really remind me of my mother. I know her memory lives on through me in some way, which I like. I am sad that although she died decades later, I was never able to see either of my grandparents before they died. I was only re-united with my father long after both of their deaths due to my mother’s insistence on barring my father access to us permanently, including his parents, once the divorce was served.

By the time he had met my mother, Dad was in the RAF and then joined an electronics company up on the coast of Lincolnshire. I was born not long afterwards, on 25th November 1961. They lived near Lincoln in a small flat and then because of their new bundle, we all moved to a larger home in Lincoln. This was to be the first of many home moves over my lifetime.

It was to be a short encounter with Lincolnshire which lasted only six months, before Dad left the RAF and joined an early warning station, further up the east coast of England. We alighted in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire. At this point, with so much upheaval, the cracks in my parents’ relationship were already starting to show. My mother became pregnant again rapidly and my sister was born eighteen months after me. Despite similar backgrounds, things were growing slowly rocky between them. Even having music as a common interest and starting a folk circle, things didn’t improve. Looking back at photos of my mother holding the new baby, she looked pinched, drawn and very thin. There were no established friends and her family were scattered geographically. Grannie Alice lived in Coulsdon, Surrey and my aunt Beatrice was further in the north due to uncle Bertrand’s work. They had a burgeoning family of their own, with eventually five children.

When I was around four, my father decided to leave his job and was looking for IT work. There seemed to be more opportunities in the South, so he applied and secured a position in a firm in Milton Keynes, Buckinhamshire. Dad went ahead of the family to stay at first his parents and then a friend’s home in Milton Keynes. During this six months, he sought a suitable home for us all. In those days, one could sign on for a council or commission house and not be on the waiting list for decades. In fact, a temporary house was found in a village nearby and he drove back to Middlesbrough for the last time to pack up and move us all down South.

Despite enjoying his new work in new town Milton Keynes, Dad wasn’t particularly happy. He didn’t seem to be able to please my mother at all. The rift that was now opening up in my parents’ marriage at this time was heightened by Mum’s exploration of evangelising religions. He came home once to a pair of navy suited young Mormon men waiting to talk with him about their particular addition to the bible, The Book of Mormon. He sent them away with a flea in their ear. As an atheist he wouldn’t countenance any talk of God or prophesy in his home. Unbeknown to him, mother went underground and took us along to the Mormon church when he wasn’t around.

During this time, whilst working in IT, he met a bright and attractive woman at work. It was one of those moments where he had caught eye contact with her over the water cooler in the office and that gave him the courage to start chatting. Iris was from Derbyshire and had a great sense of humour and sanguine personality. She was logical and down to earth, also in computing and was just the kind of stability my Dad needed in these rocky and changing times in his life. She became infinitely more attractive to him as the weeks turned into months. Her IT training had been in Australia, on one of the very first computer training courses of the time in 1968. So here we all were in yet another strange town with my parents’ marriage now on shaky foundations.

I had started primary school and my sister was in private nursery for a couple of days a week. I know she hated it and used to cry every time she was left there, but my mother was trying her best to cope with a marriage that was gradually falling apart and needed some time alone, to think. Eventually my father had to explain to her that he had met someone at work that he had fallen in love with. Despite her lack of connection to my father, she was devastated. Her whole world was now crumbling around her and she would have to look after the children on her own, in a new town far away from her mother, sister and aunties. We didn’t have a landline in those days, people simply wrote letters. She had joined the Church of England in our local community and made a couple of friends but even her belief system was under self-scrutiny. She didn’t feel her soul-searching questions were being answered by the clergyman and many of her emotional needs were now not being addressed in her new situation. In short, she was on the point of melt down.

It was during this time that the Jehovah’s Witnesses would come and knock on the door and she started to listen to what they had to say. There were two particular ladies that she liked, Kara a French woman, and Jo, a larger than life redhead. They had the Watchtower and Awake magazines and literature which they left with her, illustrating a paradise on earth as the only hope for the future. The images used showed happy families playing and eating together alongside lions and tigers so tame they could have passed for family pets. These were based on scriptures from the bible. The surroundings were depicted as beautiful with lush fruit hanging abundantly from the trees, just like in South Africa, with baskets of ripe vegetables harvested by this happy crowd of mixed races. She certainly hadn’t experienced that in her childhood.

These must all have been triggers for my mother considering her background and all she had been though. It seemed wonderful and the people that studied the bible with her in her home were so gracious and kind, welcoming her with open arms and eventually inviting her along to the Kingdom Hall where they held their services. This seemed like the big happy family that she had never had and they were all working in harmony towards a shared goal. They would help God make the earth a better place, to return peace and prosperity to each and every person that believed. What a vision, how appealing in comparison to the dry rhetoric of the church, which had nothing more to offer than platitudes of returning to heaven to meet loved ones in the afterlife.

What about her life now? Didn’t she deserve to be happy and accepted unconditionally for who she was she reasoned? It seemed as if the Jehovah’s Witnesses brought the Promised Land right to her doorstep. All she had to do was say yes and she could join the happy throngs of preachers, bringing the Good News to those who so desperately needed it outside of the Organisation, like her.

To give her credit, my mother did also look at eastern religions and Buddhism in earlier college years and had even studied briefly with the Mormons as mentioned. She wanted to feel she had the right fit, that she had shopped around and not just fallen for the first solution that came along. The Mormons were very similar in their Christian values, with a strong family ethic and support system (we won’t mention the polygamy in Utah USA, they certainly didn’t). They had an additional holy book though, the Book of Mormon, which mum wasn’t too sure about. Surely the Bible was complete in itself as the Word of God?

We had already attended the Mormon services and now compared them to the Witness ones. My sister and I favoured the Mormons as we were seven and nine years old and the way these tall, suited young Americans spoke, proffering popcorn and a mini movie from their briefcase, seemed more fun than the Witnesses. The Mormons also had separate chambers at church for children’s bible classes. We were allowed to partake of the bread and wine during the church services, which was quite exciting and didn’t happen at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Church of England.

At the Kingdom Hall, there were no separate classes for children, so everyone had to sit and listen to the adults talk for one or two hours, three times a week. It was a bit boring at that age, so we were allowed to draw pictures of the biblical events that were being discussed at the time. Nice things like Eve tempting Adam to eat the apple, by Satan the Snake. The pair of them being cast out of the Garden of Eden, far from the Tree of Life, prevented from returning by a fierce looking angel with a burning sword. People were depicted falling and burning into ravines when God brings his war of Armageddon! The lessons were being impressed on our minds from an early age, not to be disobedient, to believe your inherent nature is that of a sinner and also a temptress if you are a woman. It was impressed upon us that we definitely needed saving, by Jesus Christ or Jehovah or both - as we were all imperfect sinners!

At this time Dad also remembers the Jehovah’s Witnesses waiting for him to return from work. It was an elder from the congregation and he started trying to explain the intricacies of biblical timelines and prophesies, pointing to the last days. Needless to say, Dad was not at all impressed and was on a very short fuse after the last time Mum had surprised him like this with the Mormon visit. He takes the scientific approach, once you are dead you are gone. You don’t come back in the resurrection. He was raised in the church and as a child he sang in the choir but for various reasons he outgrew these beliefs as a teenager,