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Philip Pullman: About ten years ago I got very interested in the growth of these sort of home-based Christian groups. I wanted to find out how they worked, what they did, what motivated them and so on. I discovered a group that was holding regular meetings in one of the Oxford cinemas, and they’ve got an office in The Cornmarket in Oxford above a betting shop. So I went and knocked on the door and said I was interested. And it was very curious to talk to them, to talk to the chap in charge. But even more curious to go to this meeting on a Sunday in this big cinema in Broad Street, because here was quite a large group of people, all of whom were intensely bound together in sort of networks of fellowship and mutual aid: ‘So and so’s just had a baby – what can we do to help?’ That sort of thing. ‘So and so’s volunteered for baby sitting.’ All this sort of stuff. Everything was done by couples: Bob and Shirley, Tom and Mary, as if they didn’t have an individual existence but only a joint existence. And of course they had their own school, the King’s School, they call it.
It seemed to me that, invisible to the general population, certainly invisible to me before then, was a sort of secret welfare state, in effect. It was a strange thing because if you were in trouble there was instantly a dozen, two dozen, scores of people ready to help, keen and eager to help. You know, anything from babysitting to help with looking after a relative who was dying. All these people were there and ready to pitch in and help and so on. Which was fine and jolly good. But at the same time they went in for speaking in tongues in a rather self-conscious way. It was very odd, because they had this well-organised service, lasting about three hours, It was well organised because it seemed to be very casual and informal, and if the Spirit moved you, you went to the front and said something: ‘I’ve got a happy announcement – so and so’s had a baby. Isn’t it wonderful? Well done everybody.’ But you could see that it was very controlled and there were moments of excitement and emotional intensity, then again some friendly announcements, and so on.
There was a sort of controlling intelligence behind all this. At one point, during one of the moments of intensity, there were three or four chaps at the front, sort of praying. And one of them started going ‘gobbledygobbledy gobbledygobbledy’ and I thought, ‘Blimey, he’s gone mad. Oh no, he’s speaking in tongues.’ But the interesting thing was — because I’d never seen this before, as far as I was concerned it’s a lot of old fraud — as soon as the others saw him, you could see them [looking sideways at him] and then speaking in tongues themselves, or pretending to, because whether he was being moved in some strange way – maybe he was – they weren’t. They were doing what he was doing in order to join in. So it was a curious thing: here were these people doing all sorts of good things in a sort of social way, yet behaving entirely (it seemed to me) fraudulently when it came to that. I couldn’t get to grips with it. I was interested because I wanted to do a story, a novel against that sort of background but nothing came of it. It’s an experience which is just sort of there and hasn’t been used.
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