The siege didn’t make much difference to 9 year old Alton.

Firstly, his daily life had been roughly unchanged.

His mother still had made and repaired the loose white robes for the community on the sewing machine she had brought from England with a few other treasured possessions.

He still had potato waffles for most meals.

He still felt lonely.

He still admonished himself for his selfishness in feeling this given his glorious role in God’s plan.

Nevertheless there was occasional gunfire and David’s speeches were getting more and more rambly. At times David, who was God’s messenger on Earth, “Kinda”, looked visibly scared.

Alton had never really understood the speeches but his Mum had said to trust.

To have faith.

And his Auntie Deneice had said the same.

Uncle Tony had left the building before the siege had started, he had joined Satan’s Army and that had brought shame on Alton’s whole family. Alton despised him for it.

Occasionally Alton dreamed of England. It was already mostly just a jumbled memory despite the years he’d been there. The cold and the rain and the conkers and that scary man shouting Ebeneezer Goode on telly, or was it Ebeneezer Scrooge?

Scary cold England had been replaced by Mount Carmel, which was a thunderously hot building somewhere in America. He barely remembered his friends, Michael and Patrick or the fearsome Miss Prenderghast. Time passed so slowly now.

“It is normal to have doubts, but weak to allow them to flourish” David had said, and he had clung to that, had tried to have the bravery, a true God’s soldier.

He had not even thought about leaving right up to the moment when Satan cast his hands upon him and compelled him to bolt through the temporarily opened front door.

As though it were an instinct.

The Federal Agents could have shot him and if it hadn’t all been so sudden they would certainly have but instead they gathered him in their arms.

He heard his Mum cry out. He immediately wanted to return but they wouldn’t let him.

They stripped him and they searched him.

And then he was under 24 hour police guard, In Waco General Hospital, answering the same questions again and again. Someone came with him when he needed the toilet.

He did not know at first that the “massive fire” everyone was talking about had killed his family.

Or that judgement day wasn’t coming to free him.

Or that he had been “traumatised” by his experiences.

A few weeks later, His Grandfather, looking much older than Alton had remembered him, came to return him to England and look after him.

In the years that followed he wondered why God had decided to cast him out from his Kingdom and what it was that Satan had wanted of him, the wondering made his head hurt.

He wondered how his mother and Auntie Deneice were doing in The Kingdom of Heaven. He hoped that it made them happy.