Cast the First Stone

By Penny Foster

At the heart of Cast The First Stone is the autobiographical account of transformation and redemption as the author unexpectedly was converted to Christianity. Preconceptions and social restrictions are challenged and willingly altered as she recognises their futilities in the light of understanding and grace. Through the struggles in a loveless marriage there are highlights and holidays, laughter and learning, amazing breakthroughs and tragedies. The reader will learn that God does permit divorce under certain circumstances but that far from ending in failure, this story will bring hope to those facing similar circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467003841

Penny Foster

Born at the outbreak of World War II to English parents living in Iran Penny's early childhood was molded by the turbulent politics of the time whilst enjoying a privileged ex-patriot lifestyle. Sent to boarding school in England at the age of just seven she was educated to a high standard until the age of 20 when she worked in London before marrying and having three children. The family worked overseas before settling in the South of England to a difficult and tragic period. Today Penny lives happily in rural Central England with her artist husband and two cats enjoying her family and friends and keeping in touch with the politics of the Middle East.

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© 2009 Penny Foster. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 5/4/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4389-6471-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-0384-1 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

ENDORSEMENT

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Your statutes have been my songs

In the house of my pilgrimage

Psalm 119:54

This book is dedicated to

Steven, Marcus and Anna

with love

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The Author in 1967

ILLUSTRATIONS 

1. The Author in 1967

2. Amphora handles and mosaics from Jerash, Jordan

3. The only outside space for our children to play – Latiyan

4. Being greeted by the new Spanish Attaché, Teheran 1972

5. Bakhtiari rug bought in the Teheran Bazaar

6. Glass museum copies depicting tear and perfume vases

7. Our first house in Tunbridge Wells

8. Example of Stemming

9. With nephew and children by a canal

10 Shandy and the twins on a narrowboat

FOREWORD 

By David Aikman

Over many years as a reporter for a major newsmagazine and more recently as a writer and college professor, I’ve had my share of manuscripts to read. Some of them have been well-written analyses of important topics; others have been more bedraggled, slow-moving narratives of events that seemed important to the author, but left me – as politely as I could -- stifling a yawn. The range of topic has been broad, as broad as the range of quality demonstrated in the writing.

I have to say, however, that Cast the First Stone is the first manuscript I have read in a very long time from start to finish in one day, with very little interruption. It is a quite enthralling story and an excellently written one. There are many turns of phrase that a seasoned author might covet, yet the narrative keeps you turning the pages from start to finish.

I might, of course, be presumed to look favorably on Cast the First Stone simply because Penny Foster is a beloved cousin, of whom I have wonderful memories stretching back over several decades. But the book represents far more to me than simply a chronicle of one member of my own large family network. It is the story of a Christian pilgrim caught up in the embrace of God’s love even as life around her throws daunting challenges in her pathway. It is both deeply moving and inspiring. Plunged – as I also was – into the excitement and perils of the Charismatic movement of the 1970’s, Penny’s life was intertwined at times with remarkable leadership figures in that movement. There was Ken Burnett, who initiated hundreds of groups around the world to pray faithfully for Israel, Michael and Jeanne Harper, who helped Anglicans all over the world learn about the Holy Spirit, Jean Darnell, who had an amazing gift of teaching. Then there was Derek Prince, a lover of Israel and the Jews, a brilliant teacher and heroic leader among God’s faithful warriors. All of these were giants of Christian living, people whose spiritual fruits are continuing to be reaped even years after some of them have died. The reason Penny met them at all, however, was simple: she wanted everything that the Holy Spirit was willing to give her, and she was willing to sit at the feet of all those who came her way and had drunk deeply of God’s spirit.

She paid a heavy price for this. There were unmistakable incidents of demonic attacks on her and the children. At one point an unseen force lifted her up and threw her down a stairway in her own home. For many years there was the struggle of living in a marriage tormented by lack of communication and, indeed, love itself. She lost her mother and a dear aunt to an epic battle with cancer. Her own father at one point began to rage at her in a foreign city because, evidently, the presence of the Holy Spirit in her life began to provoke spiritual influences that had dominated his life. Yet Penny felt called to a life of intercession and she was faithful to that calling. The fruits of her earnest prayer sessions with others, pleading for God to send spiritual life into dead churches, for the pall of unbelief to be lifted from towns and villages near her home in England, for the Berlin Wall to come down and the Soviet Union to collapse, for Israel to be kept safe, for the Palestinians to be treated by Israel with justice, will not be fully known to all of us until we are in heaven. I believe Penny is one of God’s giants.

I am deeply honored to be asked to write the Foreword to this book. It is riveting and immensely encouraging. I pray it will touch the lives of countless Christians. I think, also, it could well become a classic. Read Cast the First Stone and let God bless your socks off.

David Aikman

Virginia

David Aikman

Dr. David Aikman is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, a best-selling author, and a foreign affairs commentator based in the Washington D.C. area. His wide-ranging professional achievements include a twenty-three-year career at Time magazine, serving for several years as bureau chief in Eastern Europe, Beijing, and Jerusalem. His reporting has spanned the globe and he has covered all the major historical events of the time.

ENDORSEMENT

Jennifer Rees-Larcombe endorses Cast the First Stone and has known the author since the early 1970s.

‘I love books about real people – not the long sweep of their memories but the tiny details that introduce us to them as living people and connect us to their thoughts and feelings. I re-lived a lot of my own memories as I shared Penny’s and reconnected with many old friends. Thank you Penny, for such a beautifully written book.

Jen’

Jennifer Rees-Larcombe

is a well-known Christian author. She and her team run a fruitful and long-established prayer, healing, speaking and writing ministry based in Kent, England. After becoming seriously ill in 1982 with a virus that confined her with constant pain to a wheelchair for eight years, Jennifer was healed through the prayer of a new Christian at a meeting at which she was speaking. She has also experienced a broken marriage. Since then the Lord has focused her ministry on helping people adjust to pain, loss and trauma. Part of the sales from this book will go to help Beauty From Ashes, the charity supporting Jennifer’s ministry

www.beautyfromashes.co.uk

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Amphora handles and mosaics from Jerash, Jordan

CHAPTER 1 

Latiyan

Such are the ways of fate in this harsh world:

Today you are lifted gently into the saddle,

and tomorrow the saddle is placed on your shoulders.

~ FIRDAUSI

Over an hour’s hairpin drive towards Damavand from Teheran, we approached Latiyan Camp sprawled along the terraced side of a steep valley. Gardenless bungalows scattered on the dusty hillside wore their surrounding narrow flower borders as though Polynesian leis had been flung haphazardly around them. During daylight hours, when the heat bounced off the earth in a visible haze, the immature trees offered little shade, and scorpions skulked in the dry stone walls that supported the inhospitable terraces. But now it was cold and quiet – too early to hear the tree frogs or pi-dogs, and too cool to be without a dressing gown. I shivered. The children were still asleep and the driver had already left with my husband for the twice-weekly visit to the Teheran office. It was six thirty on a Tuesday morning; the month was June and the year was 1972.

The opposite slope climbed higher out of the valley causing this side to stay dark for another hour or so. The swift flowing Jaje Rud occupied the bottom of the valley too far below for me to see it. Nor could the dam to the West and up the valley be seen from the village, but if I opened the patio doors I could hear the water roar. There was no vegetation on the lower part of the mountain opposite, but up near the col where the last of the snow was still just visible, there would be grass growing, I imagined, and possibly the king-sized white or purple opium poppies. Perhaps it was warm out there on the open hillside; free and unrestricted.

We had not long arrived in Iran, and it was not at all living up to my expectations.

The year before, as our three-year tour in New Zealand was almost completed, I had been asked where I would like to go next, given the world was my oyster. My enquirer was the London partner we had often entertained to dinner on his visits to inspect the huge hydroelectric Tongiriro Power Development, which had brought us to this side of the world. My husband mentioned Africa. He had spent a summer there whilst still at University. I replied that I had been born in Iran, and had longed to return ever since. The land of one’s birth holds a peculiar place in one’s affections and memories. My parents still had friends and colleagues living there, so I had nothing to worry about concerning the usual acclimatisation hurdles.

Privately, I remembered a social life filled with children’s parties, picnics by the river at the Golf Club, and endless days spent around the oil company swimming pool with scores of other English families. The houses we had occupied had always been grouped spaciously in clusters of twos or threes in compounds with guards at the gate, surrounded by three-foot-thick mud brick walls rising to twelve feet high. The houses were grand, Colonial-style buildings approached up long, shallow steps leading onto the imposing verandas at the front. In the compound gardens there were tennis courts and swimming pools, great chenars and cedars, and irrigation ditches (known as jubes) that constantly watered the flower beds and lawns, fountains, vegetable gardens and well-stocked orchards. We’d kept chickens and turkeys and grown our own fruit. In those post-War days, electricity was generated from our own machine in the ambar (the cellar) below the house; refrigerators were gas-fired; there was no piped water or sewage system. The sweeper drew our daily requirements from deep wells, as well as manually emptying the ‘thunder boxes’ into dry wells elsewhere in the vast garden. Other servants saw to our household needs: there was the cook, who took daily orders from my mother and sometimes accompanied her on shopping trips to the bazaar; the houseman, who waited at table; the cleaners, gardeners, and of course Nanny, who looked after us children. We had schooling for an hour or so each morning, taught by Mummy, and in the afternoons, following the noon rest, our father would teach us sums and reading if he was not away on urgent Bank business. After supper, once we were in our pyjamas, he would read to us on the veranda from After Bath, a children’s compilation of tales including a teddy bear called Mac Alpine and a magic flying hat, or Wahb, about a Canadian grizzly; there was Warrigal, an Australian horse, and equally memorable was of course Winnie the Pooh, The Just So Stories and Edward Lear’s Nonsense Poems.

Just remembering those languid, warm days of my happy childhood caused me to let out an audible sigh of contentment.

Yes, a spell in Iran would suit me very well, I mused. There would be help in the house, help with the children, and a fulfilling social life. Perhaps my husband would be able to relax a little and enjoy his family and I might have the chance to sketch those wonderful Kurdish, Armenian, or Bakhtiari faces.

But, between those last days in Turangi, North Island and this particular morning, nine harrowing months had passed in England. Unexpected, traumatic events had taken their toll on the family and our already strained marriage was now further under pressure by our being isolated out here in Latiyan, away from other European contact and ostracised by the locals. Without help in the house, nor the prospect of getting away on our own, I was tired and fettered by the physical restraints of a lively, bored little boy of four and the unstoppable curiosity of two-year old twins permanently confined to the inside of our allocated residence – a small, open-plan floor-tiled bungalow with three boxy bedrooms, an ill-equipped kitchen, and a minute bathroom. I still have photographs of the children sitting on the two-meter-wide patio beyond the sliding patio doors that also served as our front door. That tiny patio was their only outside play area.

My husband was part of the team supervising the construction of the internal road infrastructure leading further into the mountains from the previously completed dam as part of the modernisation of Iran, The Immortal Kingdom, as H.I.M., the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, attempted to bring his country into the twentieth century.

The Water Board village hadn’t always been this bleak … not always so lonely. Once it had supported many Europeans when the dam was being constructed, the wives and children coming and going at will in their chauffeur-driven limousines; they were frequently taken into Teheran to the supermarkets or to visit the other Company families; sometimes to the embassy for receptions like the Queen’s Birthday Party or to the Caspian beaches on long holiday weekends, or sometimes to Shemshak in the mountains to ski.

As a ten-year-old child, once during the school summer holidays, I had journeyed out to join my family in Jordan where my father had been posted to the Amman office. This was during a potentially volatile period; it was a few days after the assassination in Jerusalem of the Hashemite King Abdullah, the great grandfather of today’s King Abdullah of Jordan. As the daughter of an Englishman living there, I had been given executive treatment, flying on from Beirut in a private jet of the Royal Jordanian flight with one of the Crown Prince’s sons, Prince Ali and Glubb Pasha’s son, Godfrey, both also at boarding school in England. I, of course, knew nothing of their pedigrees, and when the more handsome of the two boys demanded, Girl. You sit in the front beside me, and excitedly pointed out of the window at his ‘house,’ as any returning school boy might, humbly omitting to explain that it was the Royal Palace, the honour went unrewarded. We touched down to the music of the Arab Legion band and were met by its English general, Glubb Pasha, and several armoured cars on the tarmac.

During those holidays I had learned to swim in The Dead Sea during a never-to-be-forgotten visit to Jerusalem, and later in the lovely pool at Zerqa about 40 miles into the desert north of Amman. We would take picnics and spend the whole day out there at the desert oasis with the other ex-pat children and their families. Also, some 30 miles north of Amman towards Syria, lay imposing Jerash known for the ruins of the Greco-Roman city of Gerasa. There are a large number of striking monuments located in Jerash: the Corinthian column, Hadrian’s Arch, a circus/hippodrome, two immense temples (to Zeus and Artemis), the nearly unique oval Forum, which is surrounded by a fine colonnade, a long colonnaded street or cardo with much of its mosaic pictorial pavement still intact, two theatres, baths, a scattering of small temples and an almost complete circuit of city walls. On my memorable visit I had picked up tiny squares of mosaic and had bought two roman pottery amphora handles with my pocket money.

After the early afternoon siesta, when most Europeans stayed within their cool and shuttered houses, my father’s chauffeur, Rushti, would take me out to the stables on the edge of the city where I rode a grey Arabian horse with the riding school galloping along the dry wadis and over the scrubby dunes, the heat visibly bouncing off the dusty earth. Sometimes I was allowed to ride alone with the tutor.

That very first evening of my arrival in Amman, despite the capital’s being in mourning, with black flags flying strategically on every building, including our own house, and my mother’s audience of official foreign condolence with the head Queen the following morning, I remember before I had had a chance to catch my breath, we had driven off in convoy to the desert with other

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The only outside space for our children to play – Latiyan

school children out for the holidays accompanied by parents, drivers, and younger brothers and sisters whom we had not seen for several months.

We children enjoyed a dip in a river whilst the adults arranged a paper chase; meanwhile the drivers built a huge bonfire for the barbecue we would enjoy once the long evening finally grew dark. Afterwards this was followed by the exciting chase itself across wadis, around hills, into a cave, and back to the parked vehicles arranged in a semi-circle around the fire. We could see lurking just beyond the cars several skinny, hungry-looking jackals.

I sighed as I imagined the previous Latiyan incumbents spending similar magical evenings in the nearby Lar Valley. In those days, I supposed, the engineers’ families would have felt more welcomed in this alien place. The Europeans might have complained, felt frustrated, angry even about the slow pace of life, the unconcern and uncooperativeness of the locals, the sabotage and sheer bloody-mindedness of the Iranian officials, but they would have been free to enter and leave the compound at will, to enjoy the camp swimming pool, now barred to us, and receive visitors or telephone out whenever the few lines were open. Now, years later, when we came to live here, the village was run by and for the Iranian Water Board personnel who looked after the dam. Political saboteurs were a constant threat and so the village was vulnerable. Ten-foot high wire surrounded the perimeter, guards patrolled the terraces, and the gatehouse was filled with officious gendarmes who refused to recognise us whenever we wished to leave or return even though it was always with the same Iranian driver and in the same long wheelbase Land Rover. Every single time we were searched and had to show our papers. Sometimes we were kept waiting for days to be put through to Teheran on the telephone. This particular cold early morning I felt frustrated, lonely, and frightened.

My husband had arrived ahead of us and stayed in Teheran for six weeks. He immediately hated the place and had anticipated the potential difficulties of having his family with him. Without us, he could have commuted from the city, done his job efficiently in the minimum of time, and applied for another posting. If we joined him, we would have to live out here. I was frightened because, although I knew it was very much against his wishes, I was wondering whether he actually did not want us with him in order to have a break from me – we were not communicating very well at all during this time. But my insistence that we join him possibly could have driven the wedge further between us – irrevocably perhaps. Meanwhile I was determined to prove that the country of my birth was indeed the Shangri-La I had cherished in my memories all these years; that the perfect place from my childhood – the place where I needed to belong – was here, if only the prejudiced would open their eyes and their hearts in order to understand that. I was also frightened that they were right – that it was, as the expatriates claimed – this was now an alien, suspicious, and threatened world that would never allow us any freedom.

I sat motionless, staring blankly at the sunny side of the mountain, wondering what to do.

Not knowing how long I sat there, I eventually became aware of movement on the hillside opposite. As my eyes began to focus, I realised that the whole of the right side of the slope was moving slowly forward to my left.

What an incredible scene. Brown sheep and black goats – thousands upon thousands of them – were being led up to the summer pastures. Occasionally, other animals moved much faster backwards and forwards – dogs keeping the herd together. Ahead of this great sea of animals walked one man with a long stick. My eyes strained to pick up another man, or perhaps a boy in the rear, without success. Here was the unchanged biblical principle of the shepherd leading his flock. I slid open the picture windows not caring about the cold and watched, riveted. The profound symbolism was not lost on me. Here was a different kind of authority and submission: a peaceful, voluntary following, one that was purposeful, secure, and unhurried.

How I longed to escape my situation and join those sheep on the sunny side of the hill. They were being led, not driven, to new pastures; more importantly, they were contented and well cared for. After a long time, I got up. I was, first of all, a mother and home keeper.

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