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Clara Salaman: ‘As a child all I ever wanted to be was normal’ |
Loveless childhood in the Organisation
Actress Clara Salaman tells Peter Gruner of her extraordinary early years as the daughter of loyal members of a strange cult
SHAME ON YOU
By Clara Salaman
Published by Penguin
WHEN a well known TV actress writes a book my first thought is,‘Please, not another celebrity novel’.
But Clara Salaman – who played police Detective Sergeant Claire Stanton in the ITV drama The Bill – not only writes well, but has a disturbing and at times bizarre story to tell.
Her book Shame on You is the tale of a young girl from Archway growing up in a mysterious and authoritarian London-based religious cult called The Organisation, to which her parents are converts.
While being strictly a work of fiction, the background to the book is that Clara as a child did actually grow up in a religious sect, and attended its school, the names of which cannot be revealed because of legal issues.
She writes vividly about her main character Caroline, who is desperate to escape and be like a normal child, but is not allowed to watch TV, listen to pop music, or even read books unless they are holy ones. For a 13th birthday treat, for example, she is told to go and observe trees.
“I write about a self-styled, truth seeking, spiritual society which often ruled its members out of fear,” Clara told me. “As a child, all I ever wanted was to be normal, like our neighbours in our street off Junction Road.”
The Organisation’s ideas, a combination of Christian and Indian mystic influences, with emphasis on study and meditation, sound almost endearingly 1960s hippie – except there is a dark side.
The group has a totally controlling influence and children who disobey are punished. In one particularly nasty scene a girl accused of lying is beaten with a strap by her convert father.
“I was taught to meditate from the age of six,” Clara said. “We were encouraged to step back and observe ourselves. We were told we had a choice to react in every situation. This was great. It was a shame that at the same time while I was growing up there was this other more despotic side.”
As a child she remembers wanting to live a normal life like her fictional next-door neighbours Carol and Terry and do what other children did. “Freedom for me was getting the Tube at Archway to get to my school in west London. I travelled on my own from the age of eight.”
In the book her free-thinking character Caroline rebels against her parents. She has a difficult relationship with her mother, who she describes as “looking a mess” in a shapeless purple corduroy skirt, filthy glasses and wiry hair.
Her mother, who believes in reincarnation, scolds: “Why do you have to be like this? I must have done something very bad in my last life to deserve all this.”
The children in the novel must all help out on weekend retreats. “If you were a girl,” writes Clara, “you’d be up at five o’clock in the morning for a day full of preparing food, serving, washing up, and washing the male teachers’ clothes, scrubbing flagstone floors with milk, cleaning, tidying, prayers, meditation and Sanskrit. We wouldn’t get to bed until 11pm.”
The women didn’t have it any better. Clara describes a kitchen “full of our mothers swooping about in their long dresses, their hair pulled back into neat, identical buns, as if they were competing for drabness.
“No make-up, no flesh, no jewellery, no bright colours, no loud voices, nothing that might draw attention. They had been designed to deflect interest, to be invisibly servile. They glided about the place in their sensible shoes, knees slightly bent for that creeping, efficient, invisible ease.”
Caroline contemplates committing suicide on Archway station and walks to the edge of the platform as the roar gets louder. But she is spotted by a teacher from her school who calls out cheerfully: “Caroline, I always thought you took the Piccadilly.”
Caroline is forced to wear a severe school uniform, with purple cape and bowler hat, which draws stares.
Clara writes: “There was a lot more love in the outside world. Everyone called me ‘darling’ or ‘love’ or ‘petal’. In the Organisation you have to use people’s proper names.”
One day Caroline is locked out of her home and invited in by Carol next door. She had never been inside a normal family’s home before. “I sat on the big armchair and Carol brought me in a plate of food. It was the best and most beautiful meal of my life: a mountain of mashed potato with masses of baked beans all around the edge like the moat of a castle and four enormous sausages that stuck up out of the mash like a space ship. It was enough food for about six people.”
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Your comments:
Enjoyed reading the book it seemed to come to a abrupt end is there a follow up book to it?
J. Rushton
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