When I was very young, I literally thought Jonathan Wace was my father. We all called him ‘Papa J’ and I knew about family relationships because they appeared in the Bible and other holy books we studied. It was only gradually I realised I wasn’t actually related to Papa J. It was really confusing for a small kid but you just went with it, because everyone else did.
Mazu Wace, Papa J’s wife, grew up at Chapman Farm. She was there in the Aylmerton Community days—
Strike stopped reading, staring at the last four words.
The rundown barns, the children running riot, the Crowther brothers striding across the yard, the strange round tower standing alone on the horizon like a giant chess piece: he saw it all again. His stoned mother trying to make daisy chains for little girls; nights in ramshackle dormitories with no locks on the door; a constant sense that everything was out of control, and a childish instinct that something was wrong, and that an undefinable danger lurked close by, just out of sight.
Until this moment, Strike had had no idea that Chapman Farm was the same place: it had been called Forgeman Farm when he’d lived there, with a motley collection of families who were working the land, housed in a cluster of rundown buildings, their activities directed by the Crowther brothers. Even though there’d been no hint of religion at the Aylmerton commune, Strike’s disdain for cults sprang directly from the six months at Forgeman Farm, which had constituted the unhappiest period of his unstable and fragmented childhood. The commune had been dominated by the powerful personality of the elder Crowther brother, a rangy, round-shouldered, greasy-haired man with long black sideburns and a handlebar moustache. Strike could still visualise his mother’s rapt face as Malcolm Crowther lectured the group by firelight, outlining his radical beliefs and personal philosophies. He remembered, too, his own ineradicable dislike of the man, which had amounted to a visceral revulsion.
By the time the police raided the farm, Leda had already moved her family on. Six months was the longest Leda could ever bear to remain in one place. Reading about the police action in the papers once back in London, she’d refused to believe that the community wasn’t being persecuted for their pacifism, the soft drugs and their back-to-the earth philosophy. For a long time she’d insisted the Crowthers couldn’t possibly have done the things for which they were eventually charged, not least because her own children told her they’d escaped unscathed. Only after reading accounts of the trial had Leda reluctantly come to accept that this had been more luck than judgement; that her pastoral fantasy had indeed been a hotbed of paedophilia. Characteristically, she’d shrugged off the whole episode as an anomaly, then continued the restless existence that meant her son and daughter, when not dumped on their aunt and uncle in Cornwall, moved constantly between different kinds of insecure housing and volatile situations of her choosing.
Strike drank a third of his fresh pint before focusing his attention once more on the page in front of him.
