Kate Barlow - Abode of Love. Growing Up in a Messianic Cult

ABODE OF LOVE

KATE BARLOW

Published in 2006 by Goose Lane Editions.
First published in 2006 by Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd.

Copyright Kate Barlow, 2006.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Cover design by Julie Scriver.
Interior page design courtesy Mainstream Publishing.
Images courtesy Kate Barlow.
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Barlow, Kate, 1941
Abode of love: growing up in a messianic cult / Kate Barlow.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-86492-457-7

1. Barlow, Kate, 1941- Childhood and youth.
2. Church ofthe Agapemone Biography.
3. Sex crimes England Spaxton. I. Title.

BX9998.B37 2006 289.9 C2006-903468-0

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.

Goose Lane Editions
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Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com

To

my sons,

Richard and Andrew

I was a new and very homesick immigrant to Canada in 1980 when I met Liz Jackson, who had arrived from England five years before me. Our friendship grew and I began telling her about my strange childhood, a subject I had pushed to the back of my mind for 20 years. You ought to write a book, she said one day.

And so I have eventually. Here it is, Liz, and thank you for your continuing friendship and all the adventures we have already shared!

Liz was the first of a parade of people who have helped me reach this amazing point of publication. Neighbour Ann Pallant typed my first manuscript and later transcribed several tape recordings of survivors of the Abode of Love. Former Covent Garden opera diva Jean Watson, the late Jean Vernon, taught me never to give up and never to split an infinitive, among my many egregious writing errors she spotted. I thank members of our short-lived writing club, who listened kindly to my early attempts; the editors and fellow reporters at the Hamilton Spectator, who taught me more about how to tell a story than I shall probably ever realise; former managing editor John Gibson, who gave me my chance in daily newspapers; and, more recently, Casey Kostanje, former pastor and writer on religion, who waded through my grandfathers printed sermons in an effort to make sense of them for me.

That brings me to Canada, this vast, beautiful land, filled with people with generous hearts. My adopted country allowed me to put distance between myself and my childhood home, giving me the perspective I needed to write my story, and at the same time the opportunity to pursue my dream of becoming a newspaper reporter, ironically the one profession despised by my family with good reason, I have to admit.

I thank the late Captain and Misses Burridge, who ran the long-gone St Hildas School in Otterhampton, Somerset, where I boarded for 13 years the only school I ever attended for their unstinting selflessness in welcoming odd little pupils like me, as well as nurturing our spirits and instilling in us respect for the English language.

Without the help of those former school friends who visited my strange childhood home during the holidays, among them Pam Cooper (ne Sheldrake), Diana Hawkins and Lesley Swinburn (ne Chapman), I would surely not have been able to recall all those adventures we shared and all the mischief we got up to. Thank you all so much, and also Hans and Trudel Lederman, the first outsiders to live within the walls of the Abode of Love, who recalled much that I had almost forgotten.

Thanks must also go to Spaxton historian the late Bert Harris, who not only built my grandfathers astonishingly ornate coffin but also had the good sense to collect memorabilia and memories of my childhood home; to genealogical researcher Andrew Froom of Bristol, who dug deep into my family tree to help sort truth from myth; to my nephew Jonathan Buckley for his help with the photographs and also his wife, Sally, who combed through a years worth of newspapers to find the source of a single quote I needed; and to Reverend Pam Schroder of the Ancient Catholic Church for her notes on the architectural features of the Ark of the Covenant.

I thank the authors of past volumes on the Abode of Love, who filled in many gaps in my knowledge and understanding. A heartfelt thanks also goes to Dr Joshua Schwieso, whose Ph.D. thesis on my childhood home provided a wealth of stunningly accurate background information and contributed wonderfully to my knowledge of those I grew up among.

How glad I am I enlisted Trisha Benesh of Author-Assist of California to help me get my manuscript into saleable shape. And what fun it has been to work under the guidance of the unfailingly helpful staff at Mainstream Publishing of Edinburgh, especially editor Deborah Warner, whose questions always made sense and whose suggestions for improvement have done just that. Thanks to Roger Richards for his help with the picture section and to Tim Goffe for the photographs of the stained-glass windows at the Ark of the Covenant.

Thanks go to the North Somerset Museum, Somerset County Council, UCL Hospitals NHS Trust, the British Library and the University of Nottingham for their assistance also.

And now to my family. My sisters, Ann and Margaret, are owed special mention, not just for the shared experiences binding us together to this day but for the love they have always shown their little sister. I thank Ann for her determination in not letting us drift apart even though separated by an ocean. I also owe her special thanks for her foresight in removing from our childhood home that great trunk of photos and papers that we look through periodically, and especially the Agapemone diary, which forms a framework for my recollections. To Margaret, though we see each other less often, thank you for your ability to recapture that camaraderie from our childhood whenever we are together and dust off those cherished memories. Ive tried my best to recall events accurately and can only plead the intervening 50 years as a defence against any errors.

I thank my two sons, Richard and Andy, for their unwavering belief that I would finally succeed in my ambition to write a book.

And above all, I thank Ivor, my husband of 40 years, for his love and support, not to mention his cheerful acceptance of my strange past.

Perhaps I should end with a thank you to all those extraordinary people who lived, loved and died in the A, especially albeit ambivalently my dangerously charismatic grandfather, without whom there would be no book. I shall never forget the elderly and eccentric women I lived among and who taught me so much about acceptance and loyalty. My childhood may have been peculiar but it was surrounded and buoyed up by love. What more can a child ask?

The true heroine of this book is surely my mother Lavita, who, in her own dogged way, succeeded in achieving for her daughters freedom from a past from which she never managed to escape.

And so, here it is. My story.