‘I’ve told you to stop doing that, Dad. These modern cars aren’t like the old Humber you used to drive, you need to keep t’engine on for t’ power steering and servo brakes!’
‘Pah, rubbish! When is t’ service going to start?’
‘It’s an hour of silent prayer, Dad – I’ve told you already.’
‘Are we going to the doctor’s when t’ service has ended?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘I’m not seeing that woman doctor.’
‘She’s better than the men, Dad.’
‘I don’t care, I’m not seeing a woman. It’s not right.’
‘But she’s lovely, Dad.’
‘I’m not seeing her, and that’s that. I’ve got my dignity. There are parts of me that only my mother and your mother have seen, and I want to keep it that way. I’m not showing myself to a woman doctor.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Dad, give it a rest. All we want her to do is to sign your repeat prescription. She’ll let you keep your trousers on!’
And so they prattled on, father competing with daughter, baying hounds competing with howling spaniels as the hour ticked by. To distract myself I gazed at the church’s east window, depicting Mary Magdalene, its patron saint. The Gospel’s ultimate shady lady, sporting a revealing bright-red dress, was stooping beneath Christ’s cross and holding up a chalice to catch his blood. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Da Vinci Code all combined in this one stained-glass window at the end of the earth. It set me thinking, why dedicate the place to Mary Magdalene when the other churches preferred more local saints? This church was set in a garden, just like Mary Magdalene’s chief work was set in a garden where she met the risen Christ on the first Easter Day. But was that all, or was the long sought-after Holy Grail buried beneath it? Or was Mary Magdalene herself buried here, making her a wee bit more local than I first thought?
‘He seems a nice enough fellow. I’m sure he’ll be all right once he starts a service,’ the old guy blurted out, jolting me back from fantasy to an albeit strange reality.
My hour up, I had a word or two with the father and his long-suffering daughter. ‘Nice weather for September,’ I said, stating the obvious.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘it’ll make for a good harvest.’
‘Why didn’t you have a service, young man?’ her father blurted out. I just smiled; his daughter smiled back with a twinkle in her eye.
After they had departed, I walked around the outside of the church as I munched a couple of gammon sandwiches. At the church’s east end was a tiny school house, with kennels in the garden housing about thirty hounds, all of them pushing at the wire netting, snarling and barking at me – the mystery of the baying was solved, at least. In my mind I went back half a century, and where the hounds now bayed, I imagined the shrill voices of children at play, ducking in and out of the rhododendron forest.
My mind also went back thirty years to my boyhood days in Aughton, which, like East Moors, had seemed like the end of the earth. We moved into Aughton’s elegant Georgian vicarage during a torrential downpour at the end of September, 1965. The removal van sank down to its axles on our waterlogged drive and the removal men had to use four sacks of our precious coal to give the wheels purchase. The wheels spun and the men dived for cover as our coal shot everywhere, peppering our new home’s white facade with black specks.
The next day dawned bright and clear, and I remember a glorious sense of freedom as I ran across soggy field after soggy field with Susie, my Welsh collie. The River Derwent, into which Helmsley’s River Rye flows, had burst its banks yet again, and the flood water lapped against the ancient church walls, the autumn sun reflecting on the shimmering water, turning it into a field of gold. At the bunfight following his official licensing as vicar, my dad had joked about needing a motor boat rather than his Vespa 90 to get around his new parish.
Moving to be a vicar was a promotion for my dad, with his salary increased to £1000 per year. But when his first monthly pay cheque arrived from the Church Commissioners, it amounted to the princely sum of £29.
‘Surely there has been some mistake,’ my dad complained to the Commissioners. ‘It should be eighty-four pounds rather than twenty-nine pounds.’
‘No,’ they replied, ‘twenty-nine pounds is our contribution. The rest is paid from glebe rent, which you have to gather from your tenant farmers.’
For our five years in Aughton, my dad had to employ an agent to collect the rent, paid six months in arrears, sometimes gladly, mostly grudgingly, often only in part or not at all. Some farmers paid in kind; a sack of blighted potatoes, the odd brace of pheasants riddled with shot, a rooster or two which had died of old age.
A gazetteer described Aughton as ‘forlorn and faraway’, and in many ways it was still 1865 rather than the swinging sixties. Never mind Harold Wilson’s white heat of technology – some farms had resisted the advent of electricity, which had reached the village in 1947: ‘We’re not having them cables near our cattle, they’ll sour t’ milk.’ Instead they milked by hand in shady barns lit by oil-light, more likely to fry the cattle than any electric cable. My dad visited one un-electrified farm where the old grandma sat by the Yorkshire range, (a fire, cooker, warming cupboard and hob, all contained in a black-leaded cast-iron case) stirring a stew on its red-hot top. In one hand she held a spoon and in the other a thick candle, which dripped globs of wax into the gravy below.
It was all more than a bit crazy. My dad was quite go-ahead and installed a phone in the vicarage; prior to that I think the vicar had been summoned by carrier pigeon when auntie took a turn for the worse. Our number was Bubwith 243. The churchwarden, who had a party-line with us, was Bubwith 242, the other churchwarden was Bubwith 241 and the vicar of Bubwith was Bubwith 240. There was an ancient phone box in our tiny village, much like the tilting phone box at East Moors; it served as the only place of entertainment other than the ill-attended, freezing church. I think its number was Bubwith 239 – a wild departure from the 240s. The problem was that every phone line went through the phone box, so by picking up the receiver you could listen in on any conversation going on. Many village folk whiled away the long, cold wintry nights by cramming into the dimly lit phone box to eavesdrop on vicar talking to vicar, warden talking to warden, or warden talking to vicar.
One warden, Norman, was a farmer who mostly grew sugar beet and potatoes – just one harvest a year followed by liming the furrows with thick white dust. After a hard day of such liming he went wearily to bed. He got up the next morning and drew his curtains, ‘Ee heck, Olive!’ he exclaimed to his wife as he surveyed his fields, ‘There’s been one hell of a heavy frost.’
The once-a-day bus service to York used exactly the same timetable deployed in 1865, even though a motor coach had long since replaced coach and horses. The bus, straight out of The Titchfield Thunderbolt, inched along the country lanes, growling in second gear. Few people had cars in those days, so the slow bus was the only form of transport, making York seem far more than fifteen miles away and the rest of the world positively light years away. Though my parents hated the isolation, I absolutely adored it; playing with the local urchins on the farms and in the fields, re-enacting ancient battles as we scaled the mount on which the Norman keep had been sited, using stout branches freshly torn from trees to put the keep’s infant defenders to rout.
I regularly walked through the fields with my collie, and watched her chase hare after hare. In our five years there she never actually caught a single one, even though she was fast enough to keep pace with the hare’s top speed of 35 mph. They were always more nimble than Susie; changing direction and even doing u-turns in an instant to outflank her. I adored Susie and I adored the hares: both wonderfully made. Though the hounds billeted at East Moors’ old school house were wonderfully made too, I hoped they had no better luck than my faithful pet, and that all the beautiful hares and foxes they chased managed to outrun them.
Chapter Ten
Biddi
ng East Moors and all my Aughton memories goodbye, I scissored my legs once again as I cycled through the ford, and then zigzagged from left verge to right verge as I lumbered up the punishing hill. At the peak I turned right onto a track that followed the ridge, with Bransdale and then Bilsdale a glorious panorama spread out to my right. The track rose out of the forest onto the open grouse moor, with the birds taking flight as I approached, shrieking their protest with their distinctive rattling cry. I had to resist looking at the view and instead held onto the handlebars for dear life as I pedalled through pool after pool of standing black water, deep and peaty. It was slow progress, and several times I was forced to put my foot down in the middle of a pool to steady myself, drenching my socks and trouser turn-ups.
I blame my tiny school at Bubwith (village of the infamous telephone exchange, three miles from Aughton) for sowing deep within me a lifetime’s obsession with lonely, cold and wet journeys through wild places. We had the most fantastic, inspiring head teacher – a guy called Roy Nixon. He was a polymath who seemed to have all the time in the world to explain stuff to you and stretch your infant knowledge. He was particularly kind to me; I was a painfully shy child who could hardly string two words together, and he really drew me out of my shell and taught me to speak in sentences.
One assembly he staged a real coup. Even though we were only ninety-six strong, and Bubwith was miles away from anywhere, our innovative head managed to host a visit from a man called Green – the last surviving member of Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17. This Ancient of Days, well into his eighties, decked in a moth-eaten woolly jumper which smelt strongly of fish, showed us his glass slides on his magic lantern: their ship the Endurance crushed by pack ice and sinking; the bleak Polar landscape where they sheltered beneath upturned lifeboats for five months, surviving on a diet of penguin and seaweed; the inhospitable cliffs of South Georgia, which Shackleton and five others had to scale before they could summon rescue. But more than those pictures, I recall his haunting tale of how every time they did a head count, they always felt there was one more member in addition to their crew of twenty-nine. I guess it primed me for a lifetime feeling there was an extra person walking beside me.
After Mr Green had gone, Mr Nixon seemed more concerned about his journey to us rather than his epic crossing of the Antarctic fifty years previously.
‘He absolutely insisted on coming all the way from Hull on public transport, struggling with his magic lantern and heavy glass slides,’ he confided to me afterwards. ‘I’d offered to pick him up, but he’d have none of it. Absolutely incredible!’
Although I said nothing at the time, I did wonder that if someone had rowed 800 miles across the frozen Southern Ocean, then perhaps even a thirty-mile bus journey from darkest Hull would hold no fears.
After thirty gruelling minutes chancing it as an amphibian vehicle – Shackleton would have been proud of me – I reached the Surprise View I’d visited with Father Bert the day before. I then sped southwards down the welcome tarmac of the B road for a couple of miles before taking a sharp right to shoot down Rievaulx Bank. Clinging to the side of the dark wooded hill was my final destination of the day; a tiny little church which in medieval times had served as a slipper chapel for Rievaulx Abbey – the place where pilgrims would remove their shoes before walking the final hundred yards barefoot.
The church had a steep, stone-tiled roof. As I walked towards the door, there was a loud rumbling as one large tile noisily slid off and impaled itself into the ground, just feet away from me. I felt a bit queasy as I realized that this instant gravestone could have been mine.
‘They’re always doing that!’ an old chap, who had followed me up the path with his wife, calmly explained, as if it were nothing more lethal than a falling conker, rather than ten kilos of sharpened stone. ‘When they restored the place in 1907, they attached the tiles to the rafters with oak pegs, which have rotted long since. It’s only moss and friction which keeps ’em in place now.’
Frank chatted on for the entire hour – I had long since abandoned hope of any silence. He had a large grey and chrome-yellow moustache, and a set of false teeth which seemed to have a life of their own, moving on a horizontal plane whilst his lips moved on a vertical one. His lean frame was covered by a thin gabardine coat, the colour long since faded, with a piece of twine serving as a belt. His wife, whom he strangely addressed throughout as ‘mother’, was portly and flushed-face, and was heavily cardiganed – a wise precaution in this chilly church on a chilly autumn afternoon. They lived in an old cottage in the abbey’s shadow, and all his life Frank had worked as a shepherd. When the monks arrived in the twelfth century, they’d used sheep to civilize the wilderness and the subsequent wool trade made the abbey prosperous. The monks had long since gone, but the sheep and shepherds remained.
Frank walked the hills in his thin gabardine in all seasons, literally watching his flocks by night.
‘Ee, Vicar, spring is the sharpest time – those east winds blowing in from t’ North Sea cut through you like ice. You have to be out and about though, cos it’s lambing time, and there’s always some ewe who’ll bed down on top o’ moors, but then can’t get her lamb out. Then’s when I have to spring into action.’
Frank must have been knocking eighty, so the prospect of him springing into action seemed quite something. ‘Most of the time, I’m just walking the hills, watching and waiting, singing the psalms the nuns taught us at school.’
He immediately piped up with the Twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, occasionally hitting the right note in the midst of a fair few sharps and flats. I wondered if David, the shepherd boy who became king, ever imagined his psalms being sung in these far-away hills three thousand years on.
Frank’s other big thing was a prisoner of war from Bavaria named Max. Like many POWs, Max had opted to work on the land, and had helped Frank with his shepherding. For three years of his life Frank had not walked the hills alone, but had had a companion by his side, learning each other’s language, singing each other’s songs. Frank suddenly launched into song again, a famous German tongue-twister:
Heut kommt der Hans zu mir,
Freut sich die Lies.
Ob er aber über Oberammergau,
Oder aber über Unterammergau,
Oder aber überhaupt nicht kommt,
Ist nicht ge wiss.
Again, his elderly voice strained to reach the right notes. There were tears in his eyes.
‘He was a fine fellow, very artistic, such delicate hands. He was brilliant with the difficult births; gentle, able to get in to places I couldn’t reach with my clumsy hands, ease the lamb out. I’ve lost a fair few lambs since.’
‘Don’t take on, dad,’ his wife chimed in, putting her arm around him. ‘They were so close, Vicar, him and Max, but they’ve kept in touch. We holiday every year on his farm in Bavaria, then he returns t’ compliment and stays with us. You must visit us and have a look at all the delicate tapestries he’s done for us; the Alps, Bavarian villages, Oberammergau . . .’
Frank sang the refrain again and then broke off. ‘Max took us to the Passion plays there one year, the day they staged the crucifixion. It was done very simply, with no fuss. The cross was lying flat out on t’ stage and the villager playing Jesus just laid down on top of it. Then you heard the sound of nails being hammered in. Imagine hearing that sound ringing out from every speaker. There was absolute silence in the auditorium except for some of the women sobbing. Ee, the men weren’t far off crying either.’
I cycled back up Rievaulx Bank, so steep that I had to breathe in frantic gulp after frantic gulp of air to provide enough oxygen for my pounding heart. The day hadn’t quite gone to plan, with silent cycle rides rather than silent churches; even so, there was a definite holiness in chatter such as Frank’s, a David making lonely hills alive with the sound of his psalms, and finding his Jonathan.
After a rapid and bracing descent into Helmsley, I parked my bike outside C
anons Garth, popping in to church to end the day, as I ended every day, with Evening Prayer, before locking the place up for the night, just in case those buried in its vaults made a bid for freedom. Just one person joined me, Derek, who was profoundly deaf. He was clearly a jack-of-all-trades, preparing the place for worship, clearing up afterwards; a caretaker-cum-odd-job-man who made sure things were decent and spic and span. Well into his sixties, he had a muscular build, yet his movements were graceful, his voice soft, asking me about my day, gazing at me intently and carefully reading my lips as I made reply, quite a normal conversation. He laughed when I told him about Eva’s grandstand performance at Carlton.
‘Before the deafness set in, I was the local postie, walking just about the same route you’ve cycled today. In those days Eva had the farm close to East Moors Church – there was always a kettle singing on the range, a cuppa and a piece of cake to set me on my way. There was this one time when I was shadowed on my route by a time-and-motion wallah from York. He raised his eyebrows at stopping for a cuppa. But after another six miles tramping the moors from Bransdale to Bilsdale, he’d changed his tune. I reckon he wished he’d lingered for a second cup!’
Derek was a mine of information. Eva had been educated at the little school house at East Moors; a bright pupil at a bright school. With only a handful of pupils drawn from the dwindling population of the moors, its roll was boosted in wartime by a couple of dozen evacuees from Middlesbrough, initially billeted in the church. But the children’s new surroundings didn’t quite give them the peace they’d hoped for, as Derek explained: ‘The Luftwaffe had been bombing the yards and steelworks on the Tees every night, so the children came to escape it, but the very day they arrived, the RAF had had target practice on the moor and had set the heather alight. That night the Luftwaffe mistook the heather fires for the Middlesbrough furnaces, and dropped their bombs over East Moors. No one was hurt, just the odd sheep was fried, but the Middlesbrough kids were in a right state, with Eva and the other older girls doing their best to calm them.’
Shepherd of Another Flock Page 7