Most people know that Jehovah’s Witnesses are obliged to spend their free time handing out a magazine called the Watchtower, that they don’t celebrate Christmas and they believe the apocalypse to be imminent, even if the precise date of the second coming does have a tendency somewhat to slip and slide. From time to time, newspapers are also apt to remind us of the fact that even in a medical emergency, members are forbidden to accept a blood transfusion from doctors, a doctrine followed on the grounds that it is God’s job, and his alone, to sustain life. But all this stuff, it seems, is just the half of it. Thanks to Ali Millar and her first book, I now know there are many other arcane rules by which a Witness must live if he or she is not to be “disfellowshipped” (translation: shunned) by the elders down at the Kingdom Hall.
Early on in The Last Days, her memoir of growing up as a Witness in a town in the Scottish Borders, Millar describes a lunch at the house of her maternal grandparents, a couple who do not share their daughter’s beliefs. For Millar, such occasions are usually a huge treat: her mother, a former teacher, has been impoverished by her faith – female Witnesses are discouraged from working – and even the smallest luxuries are scarce at home. On this day in 1986, however, something goes wrong. When her grandfather finds a piece of shot in his pheasant, her mother goes mad, shouting that the bird has not been “bled” as Jehovah said all meat should be when his people were in the wilderness and that she must now leave the table to ring the elders to confess. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Millar hears her saying as absolution is telephonically granted on the grounds that she was tricked and her “sin” therefore only inadvertent.
