Love saved me from life as a prisoner of a desperate religious sect.

By Barbara Jones - The Mail on Sunday, March 7, 1999 (UK)

When Becky Gray heard her parents’ car draw up outside her boyfriend’s house it was 4am. The slamming of the doors in the quiet Hampshire street was only the beginning of what would become every young girl’s nightmare – to be forced to choose between her lover and her family.

Then the shouting started. For more than an hour, 21-year-old Becky, her boyfriend Simon Peacock and his parents sat stunned in their house as Becky’s parents screamed and hammered on the door, until Simon’s family relented and let them in.

‘I stood at the top of the stairs, watching them fall apart,’ said Becky. ‘I saw my father crying and I felt completely churned up. My father was crying and pleading, "The Lord Jesus loves us. You must leave this evil house. We love you and want you home."

‘I tried to explain to them that I just wanted a different life but they wouldn’t and couldn’t listen. My mother just got so angry. My father would cry, which was worse. And they quoted the Bible all the time. That’s what it’s like living as a Brethren member. Your whole life is built around the sect and its rules. I know they love me but they’re locked into something I just have to be free of. I can’t live like them, especially now I have Simon.’

Becky is one of only a handful of people ever to leave the clutches of the Exclusive Brethren, a strict family-based Christian sect who live, as much as possible, cut off from the outside world.

As she sits in a pub beside Simon, now her fiancée, there is no sign that simply by being there with him, Becky is rebelling against her parents, Peter and Julie Gray, hold dear.

Since she escaped in her night dress, climbing down a drainpipe from her locked bedroom, to be with Simon six months ago, Becky has been cut off by her family – ‘shut up’ as the sect describes it. If she comes across her mother, father, seven sisters or brother in the streets of Andover they look the other way. To them, she is as good as dead.

Her crime was to fall in love with the sort of young man most parents would be pleased to welcome, a steady 30-year old with a good job. Instead, her parents incarcerated her in the family home – and, Becky says, they beat her.

By the rules of their sect, she could only marry within her own community, to the man they chose. Instead, she chose Simon, an outsider or one of the ‘worldly.’

‘Once I had fallen in love with Simon I felt more strongly about him than about anything in my life,’ Becky said.

‘I could see the future the Brethren had mapped for me, and I could see the happiness I could have with Simon. There was little hesitation, although I knew the harsh consequences. I had some sleepless nights over it, but in the end it just felt right to be with him and I knew he would protect me.’

Following her escape, members of the sect, who number 45,000 world-wide and several hundred in Andover, have ignored her. Some, she says, also harass her, driving past the house where she still lives with Simon’s parents, tooting their horns.

The Exclusive Brethren, an extremist offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren founded by a former Anglican clergyman, John Nelson Darby, in 1825, believe they alone have found the road to salvation while all others are damned.

The women in Becky’s local town – unmistakable in dowdy clothes and long square headscarves, the sect’s equivalent of the yashmak – can be seen on their way to nightly prayer meetings or selling eggs door-to-door, the only work a wife is allowed to do.

Members are forbidden to go out to pubs or nightclubs, to watch television, read newspapers or magazines, or listen to pop music, or use any form of modern technology except for cars, and even these are utilitarian. When Simon took Becky to Madame Tussaud’s recently, the only waxworks she recognised were the Royal Family.

For Becky, boyfriends were out of the question, and she even had to eat apart from the other children at her local school.

Ironically, her chance to break free came from her father. When she was 17, he employed Simon as a filing clerk at his haulage company – outsiders have to be used for some jobs because Brethren are not allowed to use new technology such as fax machines and computers.

‘Becky was helping to run her father’s office and I flirted with her,’ said Simon. ‘She seemed to like that but her father spotted it straightaway and gave her a strict warning.’

It was a warning Becky ignored. ‘I fell in love with him,’ she recalled. ‘It was as simple as that. And my feelings cancelled out all the restrictions put on me by the Brethren. I told my father, "If you want to stop Simon seeing me at work, you can sack him, but that won’t make any difference because I love him and I’ll go to him whatever you do."’

After a year of secret romance, Becky realised that her future lay with Simon. This gave her the courage to go against her family.

While Simon’s parents, Maurice and Sandra Peacock, were away last June, he took her to their home. When they returned from holiday, Simon and Becky asked if they could move in for a while and his parents said yes.

But then came that traumatic night when Becky’s mother and father turned up at 4am, hammering on the door, crying and screaming passages from the Bible.

The Peacocks were horrified – they had never seen anything like it. They all decided that Becky should go home to her parents, calm them down and talk things over. But there was no reconciliation and Simon and his mother went to collect her just after dawn.

A few weeks later, however, Becky went round to try to achieve some sort of peace with her family. Instead, she says, her parents beat her and bundled her upstairs, locking her in her bedroom. Later that night, she was driven to Simon’s house where she put his keys through the letterbox. His mother, realising Becky was being held against her will, rang her son, who was away on a trip and he returned immediately. Together they drove to the Grays’ house.

Simon climbed in through Becky’s first-floor bedroom window, but her parents called the police and had him arrested for breaking and entering. At the police station, Simon was able to put across his side of the story. Released with a caution, he went back to the Grays’ house where Becky, in her night dress, climbed down the drainpipe and into Simons’s arms.

Since then, the only contact she has had with her family was a letter on her 21^st birthday from her mother, which she described as ‘the saddest letter I ever read’, saying that she had been cast aside as a daughter.

And, at the back of all their minds is the story of another member of the Brethren, Roger Pains. He had a nervous breakdown in 1974 after being ‘shut up’ and hacked his wife and children to death with an axe then hanged himself from the banisters in their home.

His suicide note, which read, ‘There’s never been such a wicked man in this house…Cry to God for mercy for you all and the dear children. The Lord is coming soon,’ is a chilling reminder of the depths to which man can be sent by religious fanaticism.

Obviously, an act as brave as Becky’s will be traumatic, particularly for a girl who had been kept in a perpetual state of innocence. She finds it difficult to talk about the anguish caused by her elopement and she misses her younger sisters and brother desperately.

Becky and Simon plan to marry and she regards his parents almost as her own but, however strong their love, it is difficult to replace the years of childhood companionship. It is also a heavy responsibility for Simon to uproot a girl from all that she knows and be the cause of ostracism from her old community.

However, despite the strong presence of the Brethren in Andover, both Becky and Simon are refusing to be intimidated.

‘This is my home town and I don’t think we should run from anything,’ said Simon, putting his arm around Becky as she leant her head on his shoulder.

‘We lead a decent life. We’ve done nothing wrong, and we have a wonderful future ahead of us. I’m going to protect Becky from anything the Brethren can do. I don’t want to dismiss their views because I know she still respects them, but I do believe their treatment of women is completely wrong.’

As for Becky, she will just trust in Simon and hope, against all expectation, that one day her family will come round.

‘Even now,’ she says, ‘I know my mother and father love me, and, of course, I love them. ‘But they have set themselves apart from worldly people, and I have climbed over that barrier and escaped.’