The van smelled of antiseptic.  I found myself breathing quickly and shallowly.  There was a queasiness in my stomach.

I flexed my wrists and scowled at the officer, then closed my eyes and arranged my limbs as comfortably as I could.  I attempted to do some deep breathing, and might have succeeded had we not shortly been joined by some loudly protesting youths who were bundled into the van by a clutch of overalled, crash-helmeted policemen.

Shortly thereafter we were driven off at high speed.

The True Church of Luskentyre underwent something of a schism - albeit an amicable one - in 1954, when we were gifted the estate at High Easter Offerance on the flood-plain of the river Forth by Mrs Woodbean, who had become a convert three years earlier.  Mrs W was about the dozenth full convert, lured to the now quietly flourishing farm/community at Luskentyre by my Grandfather's reputation for holiness and lack of interest in taking money off even the richest of his followers (an aspect of his renown which he had realised early on only made people all the more generous; another example of the Contrariness of life).

It was, sadly, a tragedy which spurred Mrs W to act.  The Woodbeans had a son called David, their only child.  Mrs W had been told after his birth that she could not bear another baby, and so the boy was all the more precious to them, and was kept cosseted and pampered.  In 1954, when he was seven, he walked through a glass door in a shop in Stirling.  He wasn't mortally wounded but he lost a lot of blood and an ambulance was called to take him to hospital; it crashed en route and the boy was killed.  Mrs Woodbean took this as a sign that the modern world was too saturated with technology and cleverness for its - or her family's - own good, and decided to renounce the majority of her worldly goods and devote her life to Faith (and allegedly to having another child at all costs, an ambition which was fulfilled years later, when she gave birth to Sophi at the age of forty-three, though at the cost of her own life).

Mrs Ws extraordinary act of charity was unique in its scale, but converts were bountiful in smaller ways all the time, though by all accounts Salvador produced a great show of grumpy reluctance when accepting a gift, and made sure the donor always knew that he was doing it for the good of their soul (on the grounds that it was indeed more blessed to give than to receive, and Salvador's soul was already doing quite well, thank you, and so could afford to be generous when it came to accepting tribute).

People heard about our Order through the media (very occasionally), sometimes through the warnings of sincere but misguided priests and ministers who had not heard the adage concerning the non-existence of bad publicity, but most often just by word of mouth (it has to be admitted that no attempt to spread the word through the commercial distribution of the Orthography has ever been successful).  As I have said, there is a sense in which we were the first Hippies, the first Greens, the first New Agers, and so a few brave souls who were in the vanguard of social change, and at least twenty years ahead of their time, were sure to be attracted to a cause that would shake the world in various guises a few decades later.

In the years following the establishment of our Order, my Grandfather gradually stopped looking for the - by now almost mythic - canvas bag, and settled down to the life of what we now call a guru, dispensing wisdom, experiencing visions which helped guide our Faith and providing a living example of peaceful holiness.  The sisters continued to share my Grandfather and have his children - most notably and wonderfully my father, born on the 29th of February 1952 - and, with gaps for pregnancies, continued with their mobile shop business until the year of the schism.

Mr McIlone elected to remain at Luskentyre, which was, after all, his, though he insisted that Salvador accept his entire library as his parting gift.  By this time there were five full converts, that is, people who had come to stay at Luskentyre, to work the land and fish the sea and be on hand to listen to our Founder's teachings.  There were perhaps another dozen followers like the Fossils, who would come to stay (usually providing their own keep in some form or another) for a few weeks or months at a time.  Two of the more ascetic full converts - apostles, as they called themselves by now - decided to stay at the farm on Harris after the gifting of High Easter Offerance and Grandfather, doubtless wisely, put no pressure on anybody to go or to stay.

Grandfather and the sisters had seen many photographs of High Easter Offerance and some silent ciné film too, projected onto a sheet in the parlour of our only other sympathiser local to Harris, whose house happened to have electric power.  Still, it must have been an adventure for them when, in the spring of 1954, they finally packed all their belongings in the ex-mobile library - now ex-mobile shop - and drove to Stornoway, where the van was driven onto a huge net on the quay side and then winched aboard the ferry for the long, rolling journey to Kyle of Lochalsh.  From there they headed slowly south on the narrow, winding roads of the day, away from the fractured geometries of the storm-flayed western isles to the comparatively balmy climes of central Scotland, and the abundant expanses of smooth-sloped hills, coiled river, breeze-rustled forests and sunny pastures of the Forth's broad run.

Mr and Mrs Woodbean had already moved out to the little turreted house over the iron bridge from the main farm.  My Grandfather, the sisters, their children and assorted followers - including the Fossils, who had come along to help with the move - held a service and then a party to celebrate the relocation, installed themselves and their modest possessions in the mansion house and old farm, added Mr McIlone's library to the already impressive if under-used one which existed in the mansion house and in the weeks, months and years that followed, got down to the business of renovating the farm buildings and restoring the neglected fields to productivity.

Mrs Woodbean's brother had made a fortune after the War dealing in scrap and army surplus; he toyed with the idea of becoming a convert for a while and during this period either generously donated to the Order several pieces of potentially valuable ex-service equipment which would in many cases later be pressed into previously unthought-of practical applications, or used the farm as a dump for useless junk on which there was no quick profit to be made (depending who you listen to).

The only things he did provide which really were useful - I suppose the Deivoxiphone doesn't count - were a couple of short-wave radio sets mounted on sturdy, if wheel-less, army trailers.  Mr McIlone was persuaded to accept one, and both were eventually persuaded to work, powered by wind generators.  The radios provided a link between the two outposts of our Faith which was both fairly reliable and relatively secure (my Grandfather was starting to worry about the attentions of the government, and at one stage appeared to be convinced there was an entire Whitehall agency called the Department Of Religious Affairs, or DORA for short, which had been set up specifically to spy upon us and disrupt our every dealing, though he laughingly dismisses this as an exaggeration nowadays; a parable taken literally).

Of course, the radios had a very definite air of clutter and newfanglehood about them, but - perhaps because the radio provided such a perfect image of the human soul - Grandfather had always had a soft spot for the device, and was more inclined to suffer the presence of one of them than any other symptom of the material age.

The radio also provided a new aspect of - one might even say weapon for - our Faith when Grandfather awoke one morning from an obviously Divinely inspired dream with the idea of Radiomancy, whereby one tunes the radio at random, then turns it on, and uses the first words one hears - either immediately or as a result of sweeping gradually further and further along the frequencies to either side - as a means of prediction and divination.