What if you went missing for five years?

There has been a widely reported story about a young boy who was taken to Spain on holiday...and then disappeared. Apparently the police believed he was alive, knew his mother and grandfather had taken him although they were not his legal guardians, and they could do almost nothing about it. They couldn't find him. 

This boy has apparently spent the last five or six years living in a "commune". Now he has walked out. He was picked up trying to walk back to England.

If the story is true I wonder how he will get on. Leaving a "religious commune" or a "cult" is not easy. I know someone who left a very strict group, a group which calls itself "Christian" but is unrecognisable as such. 

J.... was over here briefly. He came to pick up something I had saved for him from years back. We just had not coincided in all that time. When I first knew him he was in his last year at high school. In that year, the toughest year of all for most students, things were even harder for him. His father had made the decision J... would leave school part way through the year. J... would not do his final exams. He would not be permitted to go to university. He would be apprenticed to one of the "brethren". The expectation was that he would work for this man and, if the work was there, one day own his own business. He would marry the girl the church elders chose and lead the sort of narrow life to which the church members adhere.

J... wanted more than that, much more. I met him because he was struggling with English. He needed English. Creative writing of any sort was letting him down. He had not been permitted to read novels of any sort and the idea of actually writing something alarmed him. One of his fellow students introduced me and we worked on it until the day his father told him he was leaving school. 

I remember meeting him in the library that day. He was distraught. All the work he had put in looked as if it was for nothing. 

"I want to leave but if I leave I have to leave Mum and my sisters. They want to get out as well but there is no way of doing it!" he told me. I had no idea what to suggest. All the usual "Sometime in the future" remarks were not going to help. I knew exactly what he meant. If he left that would be it. He could have no contact with his family. He would be "shunned". They would not even recognise him if they passed him in the street. It would be a huge step to take. What is more he had no way of supporting himself in order to finish school, let alone go to university.

In the end things did work out. The boy who had introduced him was only here for his final year at school. He was farm boy and he was planning on going back on the farm but intelligent enough to know he would need to do some further study. His family stepped in and took J.... on as well. J...could live with them in return for some help over the busy summer period. Was he interested? 

I talked to his school. The head and I talked to the university J... wanted to enter. It was in another state. We explained the situation, mentioned the disruption might mean his results were not quite good enough. No, go ahead. Tell him to keep working, to do the best he can and we will take it into consideration. 

He did it. He came within a mark of the cut off point, a very high cut off point. They accepted him. It wasn't easy. It took him five years to do a double degree but he did well. All that time he wrote to his mother by sending the letters to the next door neighbour. He would include a self-addressed envelope with a stamp for his mother to reply. 

"But I felt as if I had gone missing for five years" he told me when he was talking about it, "It was the hardest thing of all. I wanted Mum and the girls to be safe. Every time I wrote I worried Mum would get caught with my letters. She had to burn them before Dad got home."

He eventually did get his mother and sisters out of the group. Both his sisters are nurses and his mother works in community aged care. It has worked, despite all the reasons it might not have worked but it has not been easy.  I can still hear J... saying he felt as if he had gone missing for five years.  

Most of us will never know what it is like to leave a group like that. I hope the boy in the story is given the support he needs. He is going to need it.