For about six months after Matthew Hart left I continued to work more or less alone. A girl called Gail Decker, who came from Zimbabwe and was a friend of someone I knew from the church worked with me for a while. After a few months she left and a lady from the old church called Sue Jackson worked with me for a while, about two years. I learned recently that Gail was tragically killed by a wild animal whilst on honeymoon in Africa.
Beware of Recruitment consultants bearing gifts...
Some time previously I had met a lady who was a recruitment consultant and in mid-1997 she mentioned to me a guy called Mike Pellatt who was working for Intel at the time. He wanted, so she said, to move on and he was a Christian. She knew I was (then) and maybe we should get together. So Mike Pellatt joined in mid-1997. However he insisted on "working" from home most of the time and this was to prove a disaster, because he did no work. Naively I trusted the guy. I had met his friends and people from his church, associated with Gerald Coates, a well-known Charismatic leader given to making prophecies, few of which come true.
Bank of Collins
Sometime after this, about the middle of 1988, I received a visit from a guy from the Bedmond/Garston setup, now called "The West Herts Christian fellowship". I hadn't known him very well. There had been a huge row when his son had had a relationship with a girl from the church and she became pregnant. They were suspended from membership for a while until they got married. The father was treated as one wronged. Now I had never once been in his house. I had never eaten with him or done more than exchange the time of day with him. He was however noted for his hospitality to attractive young women. Anyhow, this guy whom I'd not seen at all for a year and a half turned up in the middle of the afternoon at my house (where I worked at the time) completely unexpectedly. I did more than suspect that I knew what he wanted. After a long rambling discussion about Alan Vincent (with whom he'd fallen out) and his misdeeds. He came to his inevitable point. He wanted to borrow money, some £5,000. have to admit that, even though I rather anticipated the request, I was amazed by the cheek and muttered something which he took to be an agreement and left shortly afterward. Later that day I sat down and wrote him a letter in which I said how offended I was that he had virtually ignored me for six years and then on the one and only occasion he had troubled himself to come to my house, had treated me as a bank. I think that shocked him, for, after dropping the demand and apologising, he kept inviting me to come round for the evening several times. However something prevented me accepting this.
Janice
After the experience with Jane Small I more or less gave up the idea of any kind of relationship. However I vaguely stuck with the crowd of people from Welwyn Garden City who had left Maple Church at the time of the departure of Pete Byers, going to their meetings in a hall there. One occasional visitor was a lady called Janice, who was a neighbour of one of the leaders there. She had recently been widowed, and had two youngish children. She was a very different person than anyone I had been used to. She wasn't a Christian although she was friendly with people who were. There started a fairly happy relationship, although her daughter Carol was a real handful. I learned a lot during my time with her. People have asked whether that included one particular kind of education, and yes, well it did. This wasn't an entirely irrelevant point to what followed.
A minor interlude and weird prejudice
Round about this time I had a party and barbecue at my house and a number of people from the Welwyn Garden City "split off" church came. Rather than annoy the neighbours, I thought I'd invite them, but in the end only two came, two women who lived opposite, Chris and Ros. A couple of the ladies from the church saw fit to "witness" to them without much success. After the neighbours had gone, the ladies who had "witnessed" to them expressed the view that they were lesbians. This was apparently why they were unimpressed by their message. A few weeks later Chris and Ros invited me to dinner, and they cooked an excellent Chinese meal. They made a point of showing me all round the house. Whilst I wasn't any expert and I'm still not, it really didn't seem to me that they were, for example, sleeping together and I didn't think there was anything in it. It was then that they told me about what had happened three or four years ago about Jane Small "entertaining" at my house whilst I was out. They didn't tell me so much as ask me "Who was that man, he looked like an airline pilot?" and were astonished when I didn't know anything about him. A day or so later, I told one of the ladies who had "witnessed" at the barbecue at my house about this as she had known Jane Small quite well, but she said emphatically that they must be lying, repeated that she was sure they were lesbians and I should discount whatever I heard from people "living in an immoral relationship". This has always struck me as so strange. Would they not accept that 2+2=4 if a lesbian said it? Would they not have their car repaired by a gay man, or a divorcee?
Office Move
In November 1988 we moved office. All the computer kit in my house was filling it to overflowing and it was a relief to live in the place rather than sleep in a hole pushed in all the kit. This was a huge investment, we bought the office freehold with a large mortgage and a second mortgage on my house. We had a nasty run-in, wasting a lot of time and money in the course of arranging the mortgage, with a firm called Allied Dunbar, who seriously misled me as to their charges. Allied Dunbar are a pushy insurance company and that was part of the problem, because when I tried to complain to the Insurance supervisory body they said it was a mortgage matter and when I tried to complain to mortgage people it was supposed to be invalid because i was complaining about an insurance company. The "Insurance Ombudsman" people wouldn't help because it was "A commercial matter". Anyhow, take a tip from me, avoid "Dial a blunder" (anag) like the plague! Anyhow, when we'd got rid of those people we finally moved in, in November 1988.
Byebye to the Welwyn Church
It was after then that I left the Welwyn Church. I really wasn't at all happy with the way things were going. They were getting incredibly emotional, with "gifts of the spirit" and falling over, mostly at the behest of a guy who professed to be a full-time evangelist, despite his children being out of order and on probation. I also felt I was leading a bit of a double life due to the "education" I had acquired at the hands of Janice. It all came to a head on 15th December 1988 (my 37th birthday) when two of the leaders had a go at me. The gist of what they said was that "something is wrong". I insisted that nothing was, but they wouldn't accept it. I made up my mind not to return.
And then the heat gets turned on
The following year after we moved in was the year I very nearly went bankrupt. Alas Mike Pellatt, who'd been with me for a couple of years, insisted on "working" at home. However in the event, he did nothing at all and sat there absorbing salary for it. After challenging him, he left towards the end of 1989. We had the most dreadful time, nearly losing the business, and I went about 5 months with no salary, which with two mortgages was not fun. It wouldn't have been so bad if the guy hadn't lied so much. I had taken on a guy called Dave Lukes, whom I'd known from back in the days of working down in London for the really dishonest person there who I'd known. However he had to go, as we were broke. That was sad for me, as Dave was the best employee and colleague I'd ever had. Fortunately just after he left we got a large contract from a company supplying the Inland Revenue (UK tax people), which really pulled us through by about mid-1990. You'd think I'd have learned better by now. The only decent employee we'd ever had, Dave Lukes, wasn't a Christian, and all the other people I'd worked with who were, were dishonest, lazy or both. Sue Jackson, who'd been working part-time for two or three years, left me at that point too. She said I should have sold the office rather than let Dave go. I gather she has said that ever since. Not that it would have worked. The recession had kicked in, and I'd have had negative equity on both properties.
Peter Theobald
A couple of months after Dave Lukes left, Peter Theobald came to see me. He said he'd been made redundant at his employers, and would like to work with me. Like a fool I let him, and he was there for just over two years. Alas that was a near disaster, as he never took any trouble to learn anything about the products, he annoyed a French potential distributor within a month to the point that we nearly went to court. He was nearly 20 years older than me, and every attempt to confront him about his laziness resulting in the conversation being turned to my misdeeds. Eventually,, as we'll come to later, he was to go, but in the process he bad-mouthed me to so many people that I lost nearly all the friends I'd had back in University days, for example, in particular the people I'd been in the boat trip with back in 1983. He was to be the last Christian I'd work with. Not long after he left, Gordon Hickson, Alan Vincent's son-in-law, called me to attempt to have a meeting to "reconcile us", but I refused.
Churches
By that time, after the events in December 1988, I'd more or less stopped going regularly to any church. I still, for some reason, believed it, but everywhere I'd been had gone to bad. No doubt people will make the comment that it might be with me, and it might indeed. However to those who'd say that, perhaps they could explain why Christians at work seem to be justified in their dishonesty and laziness. For some while I'd go to visit some people in Watford whom I knew. One of them was called Jeremy Marks, who ran, at the time of writing still does run, an advice and counselling service for Gay Christians. He went to a church in South Oxhey, and for many weekends I would join them there in the morning and for lunch. I did vaguely toy with becoming a member of a church, but St Albans, where I was still living offered nothing to me. Most of the people from Maple church who still went to church went to the Elim Church, now called City Church, where Pete Byers, the elder who'd been thrown out back in 1986, was now a leader, to be joined by others. Having been thrown out once, I didn't want to show my face again! I did remember a small Anglican church near St Albans, St Mark's Church, Colney Heath http://www.stmarks.info, One of Jane Small's friends (not much of a recommendation) had gone there, and for a few years I went sporadically but never "signed up" as a member. I did get to know some of the people in one of the fortnightly homegroups. But there was more turmoil of a different kind to come.