So we were not so remote from our original home, but more importantly, with our relocation to this leafy arable alcove just off the central industrial belt, it was easier for potential converts to visit and make up their minds whether they wanted to Believe, or even to come and stay and Work and Believe.  A slow trickle of people, young and old, mostly British but with the occasional foreigner, paid court to my Grandfather, listened to his teachings, read his Orthography, conversed with him and thought about their own lives, and - in some cases - decided that he had found the Truth, and so became Saved.

Grandfather thought up the Festival of Love in 1955.  It occurred to him that it might not be wise to rely entirely on providence to provide Leapyearians, who were now seen very much as prophets and perhaps potential Messiahs.  Indeed it might even be seen as impious to expect the Creator to ensure a child was born on any given 29th of February; it could be thought of as taking God for granted, which did not sound like a good idea.

Grandfather's Faith had embraced something very like the idea of free love from the start, thanks to Aasni and Zhobelia's generosity, and he had had revelations which certainly appeared to sanction the extension of his physical communing beyond the two sisters, and to allow his followers the same leeway with their partners, providing those concerned were agreeable and sufficiently enlightened to reject possessiveness and unreasoning, unholy jealousy (which had been Revealed to be a sin against God's bountiful and forgiving nature).

So, if the Order was to give nature a gentle helping hand with producing a child at the end of February in a leap year, it obviously made sense to encourage those ready, willing and able to assist in this matter to enjoy themselves as much as possible nine months earlier.  Our Founder therefore decreed that the end of May before a leap year should be the time for a Festival; a Festival of Love in all its forms, including the holy communing of souls through the blessed glory of sexual congress.  The month before should be a time of abstinence, when the Believers ought to deny themselves the most intense of pleasures in order to prepare for - and fully appreciate the advent of - the Festival itself.

Of course, the cynics, apostates and heretics - and those sad souls who hold it an article of their own perverted faiths that everybody else's motives can never be any better than their own - will point to the presence of several attractive young women amongst Grandfather's followers at this time as some sort of reason for our Founder's idea concerning the Festival.  Well, we have grown to expect such shameful drivel from the ranks of the profoundly Unsaved, but it has been pointed out by no less than Salvador himself that even if the beauty he saw around him at that time did somehow lead his thoughts towards such a happy and Festive conclusion, what was that but an example of God using the Fair to inspire the Wise?

Not coincidentally, I think the first real attempt by the press to sabotage our cause occurred around this time, and confirmed to our OverSeer that he was right to shun publicity and refuse cameras access to the estate.

Aasni and Zhobelia seem not to have been discomfited by the concept of the Festival; they apparently felt secure in their joint relationship with Salvador and had devoted themselves both to the upbringing of their children and the upgrading of their home.  They had, also, made friends with Mr and Mrs Woodbean and seemed to draw comfort from that as well.  The sisters had not ceased to develop their culinary and condimentary skills; now that they were free of the need to travel the islands peddling their wares in the ancient van, they could devote even more time to the expansion and refinement of their range of sauces, pickles and chutneys.

At about this time, too, they began to experiment with other more substantial dishes, and made their first tentative excursions into the strange and exciting new world of cross-cultural cuisine-combining, as though through such provisional promiscuity and the amalgamation of the Scottish and the sub-continental, they could participate in their own terms in the freshly formulated Festivities.  It was then that the process really began that would lead to such dishes as lorne sausage shami kebab, rabbit masala, fruit pudding chaat, skink aloo, porridge tarka, shell pie aloo gobi, kipper bhoona, chips pea pulao, whelk poori and marmalade kulfi, and I think the world is a better place for all of them.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Briefly I spent the night in the cells, in a police station in Bristol.  The police seemed suspicious that I had no way of proving my identity, but amused at my name and my protestations of innocence and outrage, at least until they got upset with my persistence and told me - very rudely, I thought - to shut up.

The following morning I was told I was free to go, and that there was somebody to see me.

I was too surprised to say anything; I was led down a corridor between the cell doors towards the desk at the front of the station, trying to work out who could possibly be waiting there for me.  Not just that; how could they have found me?

It must, I supposed, be Morag.  My heart lifted at the thought, but somehow, nevertheless, I suspected I was wrong.

A few steps before I entered the office, I knew I was.

'Goddammit!' a strident female voice rang out ahead of me. 'Call yourselves policemen; you haven't even got any goddamn guns!'

I felt my eyes widen.

'Grandmother?' I said, incredulous.

My maternal grandmother, Mrs Yolanda Cristofiori, five foot nothing of bleached blonde, leather-skinned Texan, flanked by two tall but cowed-looking men in suits carrying briefcases, turned from berating the duty sergeant and fixed a dramatic smile on me.

'Isis, honey!' she exclaimed.  She strode over. 'Oh, my, look at you!' she squealed.  She threw her arms around me, lifting me off my feet as I struggled to respond, hugging her in return.

'Grandmother…' I said, feeling dizzy, almost overcome by surprise and Yolanda's perfume.  I was so astonished I hadn't even remembered to make the Sign.

'Oh, it's so good to see you!  How you doin'?  Are you okay?  I mean have these bozos treated you good?' She waved at the two men in suits she'd been standing between at the counter.  'I brought some lawyers.  Do you want to file a complaint or anything?' She put me down.

'I - well, no; I'm, ah-' I said, somewhat lost for words.  My grandmother Yolanda's face was less lined than I remembered; it as still painted with make-up.  Her hair looked like spun gold, except harder.  She was dressed in highly decorated alligator-hide cowboy boots, embroidered jeans, a silk shirt in what looked like bar-code tartan and a little suede waistcoat studded with pearls.  Yolanda's two lawyers looked on, smiling insincerely; the duty sergeant she'd been talking to seemed exasperated.

'Right,' he said. 'You two belong to each other?' He didn't wait for an answer.  He pointed to the door with one hand and with the other reached down, produced my kit-bag and plonked it on the counter. 'Out,' he said.

Yolanda took my hand firmly in hers. 'Come on, honey; we'll discuss filing a suit against these jerks over a margarita or two.  They fed you yet?  You had breakfast?  We'll go to my hotel; get them to fix you something.' She marched me to the door, glancing back at the lawyers. 'Get the child's bag, would you, George?'

Grandmother Yolanda originally came to High Easter Offerance in the summer of 1954 with her first husband, Jerome.  She was eighteen; he was sixty-two and suffering from cancer.  He had just sold some sort of oil company (mud logging, whatever that is), and had decided to spend some of his millions travelling the world, investigating cancer clinics and indulging a recently developed interest in sects and cults in general (I suppose technically we're a cult, though at the time some people still considered us to be a Christian sect; it took a while to get that misunderstanding cleared up).  When Yolanda and Jerome left after a few weeks, Yolanda was pregnant.  She came back to the Community with another husband, Francis, and her first child, Alice, in 1959, for the second Festival of Love (the first had failed to produce any Leapyearians, but had otherwise been acclaimed a success by all concerned) and continued to visit us every few years, often in May, for the Festival when there was one and in any event usually with a new husband in tow.