As well as reading about sunshine hours and monthly average rainfall alongside 'days with some rainfall', you can find out about other factors such as tropical storm risk, how to find the right sea temperature and more in our complete weather parameter series. Rebecca was born into the sect, yet, as an intelligent, inquiring child she was always asking dangerous questions. If you were not “in the spirit”, or even doubted certain orthodoxies, you would be shunned, not only by your community, but by your family, who could no longer eat or associate with you.

Many places in the tropics see high levels of rainfall, and therefore a high number of days with some rain. Ask for rain from the LORD at the time of the spring rain— The LORD who makes the storm winds; And He will give them showers of rain, vegetation in the field to each person. Yet Rebecca’s father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking Brethren minister, was a man of contradictions: he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and hid copies of Yeats and Shakespeare behind the Brethren ministries.Because closed, rule-bound, discipline-focused totalist systems like the one we lived through made dissent virtually impossible. The list grew yearly and wasn’t just things like school assemblies but included classes about poetry or fiction, science about the creation story, gym, music, sports and many other things.

Television, movies, music, and any books apart from the bible and the brethren ministries are banned. A father-daughter story as well as a memoir of growing up in a closed-off community and then finding a way out of it, this is an inspiring and beautiful account of the bonds of family The Exclusive Brethren was originally a patriarchal, fundamentalist sect dissenting from the Anglican Church around 1820. Roger worked on a semi-fictionalised autobiography for eight years, never quite managing to knock it into shape.

I grew up in the Exclusive Brethren though my parents left when the ‘eating’ issue came in but we continued in our own ex-Exclusive meeting until I was 14. It was a harsh and restrictive time that she grew up in, trying to adapt at making friends and attend school when she wasn't allowed to have contact with those that weren't Exclusive Brethren. And, incredibly, a local leader in Brighton, when later faced with this information, stated publicly that he would be proud to share his wife with this supposed prophet who spent half his time in a drunken funk and the the other half imposing strict rules on his followers to make them clean for the coming rapture.