Shepherd of Another Flock

by David Wilbourne

  The Head and I popped into one or two lessons. The first was a German lesson led by the young teacher who had complimented me on my assembly, who seemed a bit nervy after the Head and I invaded her class. I had done German O Level, so could just about remember how to pronounce things. I mentioned the Oberammergau tongue-twister Frank had sung to me the day before; the class knew it, and sang it to me, a sea of treble voices more in tune than Frank’s. Then on to a geography lesson led by Fraser, who wasn’t in the least fazed by our presence. He was talking to the class about the flock of sheep he kept in his spare time, getting up early in the morning to feed them before he sauntered into school.

  ‘You see, they don’t take much looking after, cos they’re ’efted, ’efted to local hills.’

  ‘What does hefted mean, sir?’ a pupil asked, less Yorkshire than his teacher.

  ‘Well, they’re ’ardwired with knowledge of t’ local terrain. It passes through the genes, from ewe to lamb. Intuitively, they know every nook and cranny, good pasture and barren ground, safe shelter and treacherous spots. It only works in a small area, take ’em to another hill, another valley, and they’re totally lost. But keep them in t’ place they’re ’efted to, and they virtually look after themselves. Frees me to come teach you lot!’

  The class was focused and attentive; not a single child was playing up. Most of the kids’ families would be involved with work on the land in one way or another, and clearly Fraser addressed their condition, deep speaking unto deep. A hefted teacher. As I cycled back home I wondered how long it would take for me to become a hefted vicar.

  Chapter Twelve

  Though Helmsley had been on my horizon for pretty well all of my life, and was gorgeous in every compass direction, such faraway places can take a bit of settling into. The ancient vicarage needed a lot of sorting, and though I enjoyed practical jobs, I was primarily a priest rather than a builder or a carpenter. And most of the folk were so old – certainly old enough to be my parents, if not my grandparents – and were pretty set in their tried and tested ways. I could see from the look in their eyes they were thinking, ‘Who does this youngster think he is?’. When Goliath saw David, the ruddy-faced young shepherd, running towards him whirling his sling, the First Book of Samuel tells us that Goliath despised him for he was but a youth. Call me paranoid, but I feared Helmsley’s Goliaths despised me, another youthful David, for similar reasons. I took comfort that one day my stone would come . . .

  In theory, cycling back to Helmsley along the former railway line should have made me feel a bit hefted, tracing the path of ancient steam trains that had daily supplied this part of the world before the advent of motor transport. In the event, I didn’t do much cycling, because the line was blocked with farm gates and fences and overgrown with briars and thickets which tore my skin as I battled through, my heavy bike across my shoulder. The line was laid on the bed of an ice-age lake; Lake Pickering. In prehistoric times it would have been Yorkshire’s own Lake Windermere; its waters lapping against the moors to the north and the wolds to the south, with an ice sheet to the east neatly delaying the waters’ escape to the North Sea. Lake Pickering had long since dried up, but it formed a flat respite for settlements like Pickering, Kirkbymoorside, Helmsley and numerous villages to flourish without having to cling to too many hillsides. When I wasn’t wrestling with thorns, the views to the right and left were fantastic. The railway bridges over the River Riccall and beneath various country lanes were fantastic too; beautifully fashioned arches of stone waiting for the moment the odd vicar passed by, now the trains were long since gone.

  The former track led into the eastern side of Helmsley, which boasted a newly built development of affordable and luxury housing. Local stalwarts, whose pinnacle of daily pleasure amounted to watching Countdown, fantasized that east Helmsley was a den of vice, pedalling prostitution and drugs. Actually, it looked quite smart, and it was me who lowered the tone; muddy and scratched and with more than the odd bit of bramble hanging in my hair and clothing.

  But I suppose dens of vice don’t really get going until later in the day, and often retain a respectable front. I recalled my one and only visit to a brothel, in the early days of my ministry in Middlesbrough. I was visiting families who’d put in a request to have their baby christened, with one visit in an overspill estate. The inhabitants of downtown Middlesbrough had been transported out there in the 1970s when their homes were demolished to make way for a shopping centre. They were none too thrilled to be uprooted from what had been a very close and thriving community and their understandable ire fuelled the estate’s already very rough reputation. I knocked on the door of an ordinary-looking house, which was answered by an elegant young girl in a dressing gown who giggled when she saw my clerical collar.

  ‘I’ve come to see Maria about her baby’s baptism,’ I stuttered, and was shown into a very exotic lounge; the walls festooned with some very strange pictures. I waited and waited and waited for the mother, whom I realize now was otherwise engaged (at the time, as a naive young curate I hadn’t a clue what was going on there). Eventually, Maria appeared, looking very flushed, and we talked about the baptism, the water symbolizing that God is for life and that God loves her baby from day one.

  We used to have baptisms during the parish Eucharist, and she came along with her baby and the other scantily clad girls and cheerily filled a pew. The rest of the rather posh congregation looked down their noses at them, not used to young women entering their hallowed confines and liberally displaying their charms. I did the usual follow-up visit, taking a baptism card and a bible as a gift from the church, but for obvious reasons didn’t visit the address again. As I cycled around the estate in the months to come, I used to see her pushing her baby in a pram and the other girls pushing other things, and there would be a friendly wave, a friendly conversation. Given the congregation’s distinctly cool reception, I felt they deserved a medal for having anything whatsoever to do with us.

  Cycling down Bondgate, I was jolted out of my latest wander down memory lane by a stocky old chap, with a full head of greying hair, standing smack in the middle of the busy road, tottering from side to side as he waved his stick at passing vehicles. He spat out expletives in what I guessed was some Eastern European language – either that, or I really had had a very sheltered upbringing. I veered towards him, got off my bike and walked him to the kerb, the traffic hooting at us impatiently. He waved his stick at them again, ‘You are vorse than the Nazis, trying to run Tadeusz Dzierzek down!’

  ‘Where do you live, sir?’ I gently asked, trying to calm him down.

  ‘Elmslac Road, number forty-two,’ he replied.

  I roughly knew where it was; a post-war estate of nicely built houses to the north of Helmlsey, about half a mile away. ‘I was going that way myself,’ I lied. ‘Let me walk with you.’

  We walked up Black Swan Lane, a narrow street squeezed between the Black Swan and Crown hotels. As we walked, boy did Ted talk. ‘I realize from your accent that, like me, you don’t come from round here,’ was my conversation starter, which opened the floodgates, as he poured out his life story. He was very fluent and his words had a well-rehearsed air; I guess this was by no means the first time he had told his story, and that I was the latest victim of this moorland Ancient Mariner’s tale. He had grown up somewhere in Poland – I’d asked him to repeat the name three times, but I couldn’t get my tongue around it. I didn’t risk asking him a fourth time – his eyes had blazed with fire at my interrupting his monologue at all, and the stout stick he had waved so threateningly at passing motorists was a bit too close for comfort. At the tender age of fifteen he’d joined the Free Polish Army, trained as a cook, been captured by the Nazis and had been harshly treated along with other Slavs, imprisoned deep in the heart of Germany. Eventually they were liberated when American bombs breached the prison walls, enabling Ted and his Polish comrades to swim across the Rhine to freedom.

  ‘Ve ver down to skin and bone, nearly done for,�
� he said. ‘Ve slept for two whole days in an American field hospital, where they nursed us back to health, inch by inch. I picked up the lingo pretty quick, so the Americans appointed me shop steward of my fellow Poles; a kind ov between-go.’

  ‘Go-between,’ I corrected.

  ‘Yes, that’s vot I said,’ he snapped.

  ‘The Ruskies had taken over my country by then, so I had no vish to return.’ He stopped and spat as he said the word Ruskies. In fact, he was doing a lot of stopping as he told his tale. I realized this was going to be a very long walk. ‘The Americans liked me,’ he continued, ‘gave me the option of repatriation either in the USA or the UK. I opted for the UK, because it vos a lot nearer my homeland, and also because you had stood vith us vhen the rest of the vorld turned a blind eye.’

  He had found work on the Isle of Skye, of all places, working in forestry, as well as keeping his hand in as a chef. Work brought him south to Helmsley, where there were saw mills galore. Here he’d found Annie, driving tractors around Duncombe Park’s Waterloo Forestry Plantation. ‘She started doing that in the Var, and carried on. It vas love at first sight, but I never thought I’d end up marrying a tractor driver!’ Ted informed me, with a merry twinkle in his eye. They’d settled down, initially living on her parents’ farm by the very same ford at East Moors I had splashed the day before.

  ‘Vhen the children came along I gathered rushes by the ford and made them hats, the Polish way. Then ve moved to Helmsley, but we kept returning, for picnics and rush hats too!’ He smiled.

  He was very proud that he’d worked as chef at the prestigious Black Swan for thirty-three years. His culinary skills were ahead of his time, ‘My smoked garlic sausage vos legendary,’ he proclaimed. Apparently he had smoked it in his back garden, oblivious to his neighbours’ complaints about the continuous blue plume of smoke which hovered over their gardens and soaked into the walls of their homes. His life’s high point had clearly been when Prince Stash Radziwiłł – ‘the best king Poland never had’ – had stayed at the Black Swan and had come to Elmslac Road to have tea with his compatriot, his chauffeur-driven Rolls turning every head in Helmsley. Walking with a bramble-scarred vicar pushing his bike, albeit at a stately pace, didn’t have quite the same effect.

  His wife, Annie, spotted us approaching their home and rushed out to check all was well. She looked a bit like Beatrix Potter’s Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, without the prickles. Though she was bell-shaped and carrying a bit of weight, her quick movements exuded a sense of busy-ness. She was wearing the loveliest cotton summer dress, with a large floral print that blended nicely with the Michaelmas daisies that festooned their immaculate little garden. Her face was round and full; flushed cheeks, a broad, friendly welcoming smile. But there were worry-lines around her eyes, betraying her relief that soldier Ted had returned home safely from his wanderings.

  ‘Don’t fuss, voman,’ Ted teased, warmly embracing her. ‘I just thought I’d bring Father David home and treat him to the same tea I gave Prince Stash!’

  I sat in Annie and Ted’s kitchen and drank a glass of weak black tea, to which Ted had added a generous slug of vodka. Annie had already started rustling up some lunch, and Ted the chef took over. Annie told me how, when he was working, Ted raced between The Black Swan and home, cooking at both places every day, even on Christmas Day.

  ‘None of this convenience muck, mind,’ she added. ‘He can make the most delicious stew with the broken pheasants the shooters don’t want to take home to their fine ladies.’

  Incredibly, they had raised eight children in this small house, never resorting to ‘convenience muck’, with fish fingers and even Heinz tomato ketchup strictly forbidden.

  As I left I admired an ancient bull-nosed Morris Oxford parked up in the drive. ‘That’s served us vell,’ Ted said, stroking the bonnet. He told me of a trip to Poland in 1963, crossing the Iron Curtain, with tins of food and tin-openers and LPs and stuff hidden in the boot beneath blankets. Essentials to us; luxuries for his deprived countrymen.

  ‘Ve came back with gorgeous glassware, and goose feathers so Annie could make eiderdowns to keep us varm in your terrible vinters, like the von ve had in ’63.’ Ted showed me the passenger door, badly pock-marked. ‘Look at that, they shot at us, my own countrymen, as ve vere crossing the border, they couldn’t even bear goose feathers being smuggled out to the West. Pah!’ He spat on the ground, showing his utter contempt for those who had become communist lackeys.

  ‘Ah, ve had such sad times, such happy times vith this car,’ he continued, his mood brightening. ‘Vhen the kids had their summer holidays, we used to rise at four a.m. and Annie and our eight children sqveezed into this little car. Ve reached Scarborough by dawn, with the red sun rising over the sea ahead of us. Ve had our pick of the freshest seafood from the fish market by the harbour. So much more succulent than fish fingers! Mark my words, David, keep clear of all this processed food – absolute muck and so very bad for you.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rachel had cooked fish fingers, oven chips and frozen peas for lunch. As I munched my meal rather shamefacedly, I told Rachel Ted’s story. By coincidence, that morning she’d had a ‘welcome to your new home’ card from Pessy, her former neighbour in Sheffield who now lived in Israel. Pessy’s story was as remarkable as Ted’s.

  ‘So remind me, where was she living to start with?’ I asked Rachel, as I dipped my third fish finger in a pool of Heinz tomato ketchup, trying not to think about what Ted would say.

  ‘They lived in Leipzig, but they got out sharpish when Nazi stormtroopers started rampaging through the town on Kristallnacht in 1938,’ Rachel replied, with all the precision of a history teacher. ‘Pessy must have been only two or three at the time, but she has very strong memories of hiding with her mother and father in a neighbour’s cupboard, with the stormtroopers banging on the door, wanting to know where the Markiewiczes were. The neighbour risked her own life sheltering them, and then bravely squared up to the stormtroopers: “Oh, the Markiewiczes left here ages ago. Gute Nacht, meine Herren.” I think the neighbour couldn’t bear the thought of the little girl being taken. Whilst all this was going on, Pessy remembers her mother quietening her and whispering in her ear, “Shh, shh, mein Liebling!”’

  It sounded like something from The Sound of Music, with Maria shushing little Martha when they were playing hide and seek with the Nazis in the nunnery. ‘So how did they get out?’ I asked, crunching my fourth fish finger.

  ‘Pessy’s mother wrapped her in a shawl, sat on the front of a hay wagon, and they pretended they were the waggoner’s wife and daughter. The waggoner had been well-paid by Pessy’s father, and he took them all the way across Germany and they even managed to fool the border guards and crossed over into Belgium. They lived in Antwerp for a while – Pessy’s dad was an international fur trader, so easily found work. But then, when invasion threatened, they had to flee again.’

  Rachel told me how Pessy had been set on her dad’s shoulders, walking tall, remembering for the rest of her life the sorry stream of refugees. They slept where they could. One night they were sleeping in a barn by an airfield, when her father woke up his wife and daughter. ‘We must go,’ he had ordered.

  ‘Not so fast, not so fast, the child is sleeping,’ Pessy’s mother had protested.

  ‘No, we have to go now,’ her father had insisted.

  ‘I think he’d had some sort of premonition, maybe a dream from God,’ Rachel explained. ‘As they looked back to the barn they’d left only minutes before, they saw it blown to smithereens by Nazi Stukas.’

  The next part of their story revealed how their flight continued, following the direction of the arrows in the opening sequence of Dad’s Army. They ended up stranded on the Dunkirk beaches, where the British Expeditionary Force was making a hasty retreat. Pessy’s mother approached a British captain. ‘Take us with you,’ she had begged.

  ‘Madam, it is simply not possible,’ he had replied, ‘we have to give priority to our B
ritish soldiers.’

  The troops were already packed like sardines onto the boats; there was hardly any room for them, let alone civilians. But quick as a flash Pessy’s mother had snatched the gun from his belt and held it desperately to her little girl’s head.

  ‘If you don’t take us, I’ll shoot my daughter, my husband and myself. We’d be better off dead than butchered by the Nazis.’

  The captain had taken fright and said, ‘Come on then, madam, come quickly,’ pushing the three of them into a tiny boat. Pessy and her parents had squeezed into the boat’s engine room, where Pessy was fascinated by the short, blondhaired mechanic; with bright blue eyes and weather-beaten skin, his face smeared with machine oil as he desperately tried to keep the engine ticking over.

  Their troubles were far from over when they landed in England. German-speaking with no papers, they were classed as enemy aliens and interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. But somehow Pessy’s uncle, who’d escaped to the USA, was contacted. He vouched for them and they were released. The family eventually ended up in Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, where they trudged around, knocking on door after door looking for lodgings, only to be turned away time after time: ‘No Jews here.’ And then one Gentile family took them in, renting them an attic room. Amazingly Pessy’s father found work, dealing in furs in London. With his first wage he bought a pair of candlesticks so that his little family, with nothing except their precious freedom, could keep their Sabbath in the presence of the Holy One of Israel.

  Having polished off the fish fingers, I tucked into a generous slice of moist chocolate cake that Rachel had baked freshly that morning. ‘You’ve got Pessy to thank for this recipe,’ she reminded me. Rachel’s mother had died when she was just sixteen, her brothers fifteen and eleven, with the whole family cast into utter grief. The first to visit them was Pessy, their Jewish neighbour, bringing the most delicious chocolate cake: ‘A little something to sweeten your terrible bitterness.’