As we wended our dyspeptic way back to Helmsley, I thought about my own courtship fifteen years earlier when I was a curate in Middlesbrough. Our local bishop was a rather wonderful raconteur but as a preacher he was deadly dull – a devotee of that school of ministry where you avoided any emotion in the pulpit. In 1982, I attended a Lent course he addressed, at Swainby, another quaint village on the edge of the Cleveland Hills. At the bunfight in the church hall afterwards, I spotted this blue-eyed and fair-haired young woman; a rare beauty in a group of blue-rinsed geriatrics. ‘Wasn’t that bishop boring!’ was my unconventional chat-up line.
Fortunately, the young woman wasn’t the bishop’s daughter, otherwise our relationship would have ended before it began. Instead, Rachel and I got on like a house on fire. She was a history teacher at the local comprehensive in Stokesley. Her father had been a churchwarden at a leading church in Sheffield, her mother, before her untimely death at the age of forty-six, had been the best priest the Church of England never had. After being thrown together by boredom at the Lent course, we saw each other nearly every day. On our first day out we visited Helmsley and walked around the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. On our hundredth day out we visited Helmsley again, I proposed, and we married at the end of July the following year, two years to the day plus one after Charles and Diana’s wedding had captivated the world. Our wedding was more low key, at Rachel’s home church in Sheffield. Rachel’s lovely father was shaking with emotion as he led her up the aisle. The service was taken by my father, whose hands were trembling as he joined our hands together and pronounced us man and wife.
It was the best day of my life, by far. If there was anything going on between Father Bert and Margaret, then God bless them. In Tudor times, allowing its priests to marry was the best step the then fledgling Church of England ever made, enabling its clergy not to theorize about the love of God, but to root it in reality. And for the four subsequent centuries, parishes have benefitted immensely from having the Brontës and Austens and sundry other clerical families in their midst, with Mrs Vicar often proving a far more effective and matter-of-fact pastor than her ordained husband.
Chapter Eight
Fortunately, I had planned a cycle marathon for the next day, which proved a chance to burn off all the calories I’d enjoyed at Margaret’s. It was also a prayer marathon – I’d spend an hour in silent prayer at each of my five churches to set my new ministry. The day was tightly timetabled so that I could cycle between each church, with people invited to join me whenever, wherever. After all the incessant DIY at Canons Garth, I was rather looking forward to a day filled with cycling and at least five hours’ silence.
My first hour began at 7 a.m. in the parish church in Helmsley, a stone’s throw from our home. The sun was just rising as I walked through the churchyard with its ancient tombstones, most leaning at dangerous angles with their inscriptions badly eroded. Helmsley, surrounded by hills on all sides, was in a bit of a dip, and proved a toxic sink for carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide emitted by countless coal fires, as well as the steam engines of a former age, which eroded limestone and people’s lungs. It seemed ironic that this toxic sink had not only condemned people to an early grave, but then had the audacity to erode the inscriptions on their tombstones, like a murderer trying to do away with the evidence.
This graveyard is full of indispensable men and women! I thought, as I often did whenever I wandered through a churchyard. I opened up the church and sat in the dawning light beneath the twenty-foot long dragon I had first encountered thirty years before, and tried to still myself. Three people noisily shuffled in; loudly wishing each other good morning; asking whether sundry ailing relatives had survived yet another night; checking on whether they had already eaten breakfast or whether that thrill awaited them; bemoaning the demise of the cooked breakfast in favour of the current fashion of sawdust with watered-down milk. The dragon winked at me. Eventually the silence surged softly backwards and they sort-of settled down, limiting their noise to the odd shuffle on the hard pews or the protesting rumble of an empty tummy.
The clock struck eight, the hour was up and the chit-chat immediately resumed. My three companions, faithful stalwarts who’d shown me around the parish when I was considering taking up the job, cooed over me like mother hens, questioning whether I was up to cycling twenty or so miles in such rugged terrain. I kept quiet about my secret weapon; a host of gammon sandwiches I had made the night before which I was going to use whenever my flagging energy cells needed a top-up.
My next port of call was St Chad’s, Sproxton, an easy mile’s climb up the A170. In the seventh century Chad was the abbot of the ancient Celtic abbey at Lastingham, nestling in the moors a dozen miles east of Helmsley. He became the second Archbishop of York, but there were mutterings about whether his appointment was valid. He demurely gave way and returned to Lastingham, but was then appointed Bishop of Lichfield as a consolation prize. The church named in his memory at Sproxton had been built during Oliver Cromwell’s reign, and reflected the puritanism of a period when Christmas had been banned for being too joyous. It was just a small square meeting house with a gallery accessed by a dodgy narrow staircase. The modest altar was flanked by a set of scantily clad alabaster figures, looking more like a bunch of Grecian youths whose frolics were about to get a bit physical rather than a band of chaste disciples. I closed my eyes to stop them distracting me.
The church had originally been built two miles away, at West Newton Grange, but the village had fallen into decline and the church had degenerated into a barn, so in 1889 Lord Feversham had had it moved, stone by stone, to Sproxton; a bustling metropolis of fifty homesteads flanking the top gate into his estate. Maybe the incongruous Grecian figures had crept in then, covertly sexing up the church’s Roundhead austerity. It’s funny the things you think about when you are supposed to be praying.
Two women had joined me for my hour. One, a white-haired octogenarian called Lina, had been on her knees in the graveyard, weeding the steeply banked flower beds. When I arrived she followed me into church and then spent an hour on her knees inside, totally still.
‘What were you praying?’ I asked her later. Normally people are fazed by this question, but she answered naturally, with a timid smile, ‘Oh, I just tracked through all my eighty years and thanked God for all his blessings.’
She had been born in Sproxton, and amongst other things had served as cook in various surrounding farms. She had married a farmhand and reared a family, had housed evacuees from bombed-out Middlesbrough during the war, and had torn strips off an American tank commander when the turret of his tank had dislodged the stone ball on the church gates. An unconventional but settled life, with its bitter joys and sweet sorrows, fast-forwarded through in an hour.
The other woman, Yvonne, was in her early sixties, with blazing eyes.
‘What did you pray about?’ I asked her.
‘Actually, I was working out Pythagorean Triples.’ She smiled. ‘I tried to pray but I used to be a Maths teacher, and whenever I pause, it all comes flooding back.’
I came out of the church into bright sunshine, but below me in Helmsley a mist had formed, engulfing the town. I free-wheeled into the mist, speeding down the steep hill, reaching nearly 40 mph. I recalled my Monk Fryston days, when I had once managed 35 mph on my bike and was ticked off by a humourless policeman with a speed camera, who didn’t take kindly to my asking for the photo as a trophy. A sharp bend suddenly sprang out of the mist, forcing me back into the present as I braked hard before crossing the stone bridge into Helmsley, the fog amplifying the sound of the River Rye tumbling below me. I had a quick cup of tea and a gammon sandwich at Canons Garth, where plasterers were at work repairing our fallen ceiling. I kissed Rachel goodbye, her lips smacking of lime dust. The minor road to Carlton was a long 1:3 climb out of Helmsley which made my thigh muscles ache, although I found that thinking about Yvonne’s Pythagorean Triples distracted me from the pain. Or it could be that the pain of doing
Maths kicks all other pain into touch.
Carlton’s church was dedicated to Aidan; another local lad and seventh-century bishop who had had the heady ambition of converting the violent north. Rather than basing himself at the intersection of the A1, M1 and M62, which would have made for speedier communications, albeit with the slight snag that it would be another sixteen centuries before they were built, he chose Lindisfarne for his HQ. An island linked to the barren and remote Northumbrian coast by a causeway, cut off twice a day by the tides, is hardly at the hub of civilization. However, it was close to Bamburgh Castle, where King Oswald of Northumbria had his palace, so Aidan was probably cannier than he seemed: get the king on side, and, surprise, surprise, all his subjects come on side too. There’s a tale of Oswald and Aidan enjoying a sumptuous Easter feast, only to be disturbed by the cries of the starving poor outside the castle walls. The pair of them halted the feast, went outside and gave all their food to the poor, along with all the silver and gold plate. The poor found the roast capons, geese and sides of beef quite tasty, but broke their teeth when they bit into the silver and gold, so threw these worthless items into the sea.
Carlton Church hadn’t been used for worship for decades, but a kind shepherd’s wife had been in the day before to clear away all the massive cobwebs and dust the pews. Carlton was tiny, with just a few ancient farms straddling its one street. The tiny church was rather sweet; it had been built in Victorian times but had the air of a traditional Norman church with its nave, chancel and tower. Before moving to Helmsley, I had written to every parishioner advertising my day of prayer. Obviously the word had got around, and folk who had been baptized or married in Carlton Church ages back, before being scattered to the four corners of Yorkshire, all returned to base. The little church was packed with about thirty folk, who chatted to each other as I sat in silence in their midst. Looking at the state of some of them, never mind being baptised or married there, I wondered whether they hadn’t been buried there too, and had come back to haunt me. I closed my eyes but could still hear them.
‘I met Colin at a dance in t’ village hall. He took me home on his motorbike, but he was too busy fondling me legs rather than steering the thing. We skidded on some gravel, I came off and I grazed my hands somert terrible.’
‘Eee, Eva, poor old you,’ her audience chimed, oblivious to me.
‘I managed to get back on t’ bike, wrapped me hands around him and we went and knocked up the doctor’s. She wasn’t best pleased, but then when she saw Colin, with his white shirt absolutely saturated in blood where I had clung on to him for dear life, she went into doctor-mode. “You need the hospital, not me, young man,” she said.
‘ “No, I’m fine, doctor, it’s me girl, she’s badly grazed her hands, can you sort her out?”’
It transpired that the good doctor didn’t just patch her up. She was so taken with Eva’s sunny personality, as well as noticing that her grazed hands were the hands of a hardworking young woman, that she engaged her on the spot to be her housekeeper.
‘She wasn’t an easy woman, mind, but she twisted the old earl’s arm to let me and Colin have cottage opposite t’ church when we eventually got married. One of his hounds had got a bit carried away and had taken a chunk out of his leg, and so he’d come to the doctor for a tetanus jab. I think she was holding a huge hypodermic above his quivering backside when she asked him about giving Colin and me a house, so he didn’t have much option but to agree!’
Her audience guffawed. ‘Are you sure it was his arm she twisted, Eva, or his arse?’ someone jested.
‘Shh, new vicar might be listening,’ Eva replied. Actually, the new vicar was trying to pray. ‘It was a grand little cottage,’ Eva continued. ‘Luxury, with an outside cold tap. It was a bit of a temperamental old thing, but it saved me having to fetch all our water from the village pump like rest o’ t’ folk in Carlton.’
It was all fascinating stuff, akin to listening to a radio broadcast, so I gave in and let it fill my allotted hour. I duly learnt that Eva had only ever had one holiday; her honeymoon in an overcast Morecambe, which had proved more than enough for a lifetime. More guffaws from her audience. She was a true country woman; tattie-picking, pea and bean harvesting, drawing and dressing pheasants, gutting pigs, giving tips along the way on where to gather the best blackberries, bilberries, wild raspberries, strawberries and apples. Even where to find lost rings. It seemed that years back, the good Eva had lost her engagement ring, and though she searched the highways and byways she failed to find it, and finally Colin bought her a replacement. Even so, she still grieved for the original. Then one day she chanced upon it in a box of rags she used for making clippy mats, whatever they might be. It seems that her joy knew no bounds, spurring her on to gather her friends and host a party of Gospel proportions: ‘Rejoice with me for I have found the ring I have lost . . .’
My hour had come, I had to move on, but clearly Eva had only just got started. As I left I saw her face for the first time – settled in its skin, beatific, radiating joy.
Eva’s tenacity took me back to my teenage years in west Hull, which was as urban as Helmsley was rural; a vibrant place with an open-all-hours shop on every corner, their lights blazing out and cheering the dark streets. It was a friendly, close and caring community, united by a common bond of grief when any Hull trawler failed to return from fierce and freezing Icelandic waters. When the trawler Gaul sank in 1974, with the loss of all thirty-six hands, a fisherman’s wife called Lil Bilocca took on the authorities, demanding an inquiry. The official explanation was that a thirty-foot freak wave had sunk the trawler in the Barents Sea north of Norway. But there were rumours that a Russian submarine had either caught in the Gaul’s nets and dragged her down, or had deliberately fired on her and sunk her. Big Lil wouldn’t take no for an answer; she had been a doughty defender of fishermen’s rights and their right to basic safety ever since January 1968, when three trawlers had sunk within weeks of each other. To be honest, had she taken on a Russian sub, I wouldn’t have rated its chances very highly! West Hull was full of women like her; no-nonsense, fiercely loyal people who told it straight, no matter how important and powerful their audience. Eva struck me as another Mrs Bilocca, not afraid to bring down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and meek, singing a latter-day Magnificat with their lives.
Chapter Nine
It was a long pull out of Carlton further up into the moors, but then all of a sudden I reached the top, Cow House Bank, and beheld a similar glorious view to that of the day before, only shifted a couple of miles to the right, with the North Sea a hazy blue line on the eastern horizon. The road dropped down the cliff through a forest of pine trees and as I sped down on my bike I took in great gulps of clean and ice-fresh pine vapour; not so much a cycle-ride as aromatherapy. By the bottom of the cliff I must have been doing about 30 mph before I realized there was a deep ford ahead. It was too late to brake, so I scissored my legs as my bike divided the water. Fortunately, there were no rocks on the river bed to catapult me over the handlebars and I passed through the waters unscathed. Indeed, I had enough momentum to get halfway up the hill at the other side, before my aching legs had to take over.
When it wasn’t pine forest, the terrain flanking the road was bracken; lush and green and very tall. I wasn’t entirely sure where my next port of call was – my only direction was to look for a church by a tilting red phone box in the middle of nowhere. In the midst of the green, I suddenly saw post-office red to my right, but where was the church? Leaving my bike propped up against the phone box, I walked down a sheep track, the grass cropped close like velvet. To my left was not so much a rhododendron bush as a rhododendron forest, and, peering through the thicket, I spied a tiny church with a tiny spire. I opened the stiff oak doors and found myself in a magical interior; a simple building with whitewashed walls but a kaleidoscope of a roof, the rafters painted the brightest red, blue and green, with the interior doors and surrounding mouldings the same hue. The
re was a tiny nave and even a tiny south aisle, with coloured shutters to isolate it and turn it into a schoolroom.
John Betjeman, the poet laureate, had written a poem celebrating East Moors – ‘Perp. Revival i’ the North’ – after he had chanced upon it while visiting Lord Feversham. He described seeing ‘something in the painted roof / and the mouldings round the door’.1 The line had to end with ‘door’ to enable the next stanza to rhyme with the name of the architect, Temple Moor.
I sat on one of the bench pews, alone and silent for a couple of minutes before the doors burst open and an old man and a younger woman came in, complete with four springer spaniels straining at the leash. I smiled, re-closed my eyes and returned to silence. Or rather, I didn’t.
‘When’s t’ service going to start?’
‘I’ve told you, Dad, it’s not a service, it’s an hour of silent prayer with new vicar.’
‘Where is he, then?’
‘He’s over there, Dad.’
‘When is he going to start t’ service?’
Suddenly the sound of hounds baying filled the church, which set the four spaniels off howling.
‘Quieten down, you little buggers, behave yourselves in church,’ the old man shouted, sending a kick or two in their direction. ‘Where’s the new vicar going to live, then?’ he asked his daughter.
‘In Canons Garth, Dad.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I drove past when the removal van was there and I saw him lending a hand.’
‘When am I getting my car back?’
‘When the garage has fitted a new battery, Dad.’
‘What was wrong with the old one? I know these roads around here like the back of my hand – I hardly ever switch the headlamps on. And once I’ve climbed Cow House Bank I always turn ignition off and freewheel down to Helmsley.’
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 6